Do you really see me?

The Chittagong Hill Tracts in the southeastern region of Bangladesh consists of three districts: Rangamati, Khagrachari, and Bandarban, and are home to more than 10 different indigenous communities. Known for its natural beauty and cultural diversity, the people living in this region are often considered inferior 'other' by the state due to their distinct language, culture, physical features, and food habits, which helps Bengalis perceive themselves as morally superior.As a nation state, Bangladesh always constructs a homogenous Bengali identity which forces to disappear the other ethnic identities from the national narrative. The directives to become Bengali by the founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Rangamati and ‘Bangladeshi people shall be known as Bangalees as a Nation’ in the constitution give clear picture of this tendency to eliminate the cultural and political identity of the indigenous peoples of Bangladesh. In this context, the Bangladesh state’s governments never want to acknowledge the cultural and political rights of the CHT people. When the crises revolves around the implementation of the CHT Accord, surveillance of Bangladesh Army’s camps and gun fight between the insurgent groups, the government are taking many developmental projects, mainly focusing on tourism and road development. It is alleged that those development projects are no way helping the local indigenous people. Rather, it is found that, many villages were evicted due to those developmental projects. It is also found that villages were even evicted for construction of military infrastructure. Alongside, these developmental projects are implemented by doing harms to the natural resources which are very fundamental to the living and livelihood of the local indigenous peoples. Thus it seems that those developmental projects are doing harm more than benefitting them. And in most cases, concerns of these local people are not even considered. Not only the local people are unheard, thus, the environment, the natural resources, the material and spiritual world relating to the existence of the local people are completely neglected. The people, the environment, the rituals are asking, through this project, if the state, the army, the administration, the tourists really see them.

 

 

(This ongoing project, supported by an Indigenous grant from the Bangladesh Press Photo Contest, features photos taken between August 2023 and May 2024. It will continue beyond this submission, as it is not yet finished.)