Who are Goyeshwar Chandra Roy and Nitai Roy Chowdhury? Two Hindus elected as MP in Bangladesh

Two Hindu candidates were among four from minority communities to have won in the recent general elections in Bangladesh. All of them were nominees of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is set to form the government on Tuesday.

Goyeshwar Chandra Roy is a member of the BNP's highest policy-making standing committee, while Nitai Roy Chowdhury is one of prominent vice presidents of the party, as well as a senior advisor and strategist for its top leadership.

According to tritiyomatra.com, Nitai Roy Chowdhury, born in January 1949, is a Bangladeshi lawyer, politician, former minister and former Member of Parliament.

Chowdhury served as Youth and Sports Minister in Ershad government. He is a Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Meanwhile, Goyeshwar Chandra Roy was reportedly born in Keraniganj, Dhaka. He is the former state minister. In 2008, Roy was nominated for the first time from Dhaka-3 constituency as a BNP candidate and lost to Nasrul Hamid of Awami League by 6,610 votes.

In the 11th general election in 2018, he was again nominated by the BNP from the same seat, the report added.

New Delhi had reacted strongly to the violence following the lynching of a Hindu garment factory worker, Dipu Chandra Das. He was reportedly tied to a tree and set on fire.

The interim government led by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus had downplayed the violence, attributing many incidents to criminal motives.

A series of attacks was also reported in December last year after the murder of Sharif Osman Hadi, a popular uprising leader and a vocal critic of India.

Houses, places of worship and shops belonging to religious minorities were also attacked across the country in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Hasina uprising, Amnesty International said.

The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council reported more than 500 attacks in 2025, including sexual assault and arson, news agency AFP reported.

The fourth minority candidate, Dipen Dewan, belongs to the Buddhist majority Chakma ethnic minority group, who won from a constituency in southeastern Rangamati hill district.

However, his religious identity is obscure with many describing him as a Hindu.

Dewan defeated an independent Chakma candidate as his nearest rival while Pru defeated a nominee of the student-led National Citizen Party, which was formed last year by the Students Against Discrimination, which led the mass protests against ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024.

While 67 were nominated by 22 political parties, 12 ran as independent candidates.

The Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) fielded the highest number with 17 minority candidates.

It was followed by left-leaning Bangladesh Samyabadi Dal (BSD) with eight minority candidates, little-known Bangladesh Minority Janata Party (BMJP) with eight candidates and left-leaning Bangladesh Samajtantrik Dal (BASOD) with seven candidates.

The BNP fielded six candidates and Jatiya Party nominated four candidates.

The Jamaat-e-Islami nominated a minority Hindu candidate for the first time in its history.

The largest Islamist party fielded veteran businessman Krishna Nandi from a southwestern Khulna constituency who lost but his participation as a Jamaat nominee was widely discussed. He finished as the runner-up in the Khulna-1 constituency conceding defeat to a BNP candidate.

The number of Hindu MPs in the 2024 election was 17 and the same number of Hindus won in the 2018 election with most of them belonging to Hasina's Awami League.

The Jamaat-e-Islami, which was opposed to the country's 1971 independence from Pakistan, registered its best ever performance with 31.76 per cent votes and 68 seats. The National Citizen Party (NCP) secured the third-highest number of seats, six, and 3.05 per cent votes.