Indigenous Children in the Chittagong Hill Tracts: Are We Teaching Peace or Fear?

There is an uncomfortable question we need to ask about Indigenous children in the Chittagong Hill Tracts: while teaching them to be peaceful, are we also teaching some of them to fear speaking, questioning and standing up for themselves?

The Chittagong Hill Tracts in southeastern Bangladesh is home to several Indigenous peoples with distinct languages, cultures and histories. Questions over land, identity, political representation and implementation of the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord remain deeply important to these communities.

For children growing up in such an environment, education cannot be only about passing examinations or becoming obedient and well-behaved. It must also help them understand their history, think independently, make difficult decisions and defend their rights peacefully.

If a child repeatedly hears, “Keep quiet, stay out of trouble, do not do this, do not do that, it is sinful,” those words can gradually become more than moral instruction. The child may become afraid of making mistakes, asking difficult questions or expressing an opinion that others dislike. When silence is praised while questioning is treated as disobedience, a child may eventually learn to remain quiet even when something is clearly wrong.

For Indigenous children in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, this matters greatly. A generation that becomes afraid to question may also hesitate to ask why promises remain unfulfilled, why rights remain disputed or why decisions affecting its future are so often made by others.

The problem is not Buddhism. The problem begins when the enormous intellectual and moral tradition of Buddhism is reduced mainly to prohibition, fear of wrongdoing, detachment and endurance. Buddhism also teaches wisdom, self-discipline, the search for truth, mental strength and persistent effort. The Buddhist concept of viriya emphasizes energy, determination and perseverance—qualities that have little to do with passivity or fear.

So the real question is not whether Buddhism makes children weak. There is no sound basis for such a sweeping claim. The better question is which parts of Buddhist teaching we emphasize when raising children in the hills, and whether courage, independent thought, determination and the ability to stand firmly for what is right receive enough attention.

It is useful to look at other religious traditions, not because one religion is superior to another, but because the stories children hear help shape their imagination. Hindu children may grow up hearing stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata about Rama, Arjuna, Abhimanyu and Hanuman—stories filled with duty, sacrifice, difficult choices, struggle and courage. Christian children encounter stories such as David standing before Goliath or Moses leading his people through extraordinary adversity, offering memorable images of leadership, faith and perseverance.

Of course, hearing these stories does not automatically make Hindu or Christian children braver than Buddhist children. That would be an unfair and unsupported conclusion. But stories matter because they give children examples of what courage looks like. They show people making difficult decisions, confronting powerful forces, suffering setbacks and continuing to move forward.

This should lead Buddhist communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts to ask a serious question: are we giving our own children equally powerful examples of courage, leadership and determination from Buddhist teaching and from our own history? If children mainly hear, “Desire less, tolerate more, avoid trouble and accept what comes,” but hear much less about seeking knowledge, developing confidence, questioning falsehood and standing firmly for truth, then our method of teaching deserves reconsideration.

Detachment can be a great strength when it means refusing to become a slave to greed, anger or material obsession. But something goes wrong if a child interprets detachment to mean, “Do not dream too big, do not try to achieve too much, do not challenge anything and simply accept whatever happens.” That kind of misunderstanding can weaken ambition and confidence, especially among children growing up in a community where questions of land, identity, dignity and political rights remain unresolved.

A child should learn compassion alongside confidence, humility alongside self-respect and peace alongside the courage to say, “This is wrong.” Nonviolence does not mean silence. Peace does not mean surrender. Being a good human being does not require becoming a timid one.

The life of Manabendra Narayan Larma offers a powerful example of how gentleness and courage can exist in the same person. Larma was one of the most influential political figures in modern Jumma history and the founder of the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti.

People who remember Larma often describe him as remarkably simple, disciplined and sensitive toward living things. One story often told about him recalls that he was so gentle that he would avoid unnecessarily plucking even the tender tip of a dheki-shak fern. Whether every detail of such personal recollections can now be independently verified, the story captures how many people remembered him: gentle, restrained and deeply respectful of life.

Yet that gentleness did not make him silent about the rights of his people. Larma spoke in parliament, challenged powerful political ideas of his time, organized his people and demanded recognition of the identity and rights of the peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The political movement he helped build later entered an armed phase, a historical path over which people may still disagree, but today’s generation does not need to repeat that path to understand the larger lesson.

That lesson is simple: compassion and cowardice are not the same thing. A person can have a gentle heart and still possess a straight spine. Larma’s example shows that respect for life need not mean surrendering one’s voice, dignity or political convictions.

That is a lesson worth giving to Indigenous children in the Chittagong Hill Tracts today. They should be taught not to hate anyone, but also not to accept injustice quietly. They should reject violence without becoming afraid to speak about their rights, and they should value peace without believing that peace requires them to surrender their language, culture, land, identity or dignity.

Today’s generation lives in a different world, and its strongest tools should not be guns. Its strength should come from education, science, law, technology, organization, democratic activism, communication and the ability to present a convincing argument to Bangladesh and to the wider world.

Religion can help shape character, but religion alone cannot prepare a child for the twenty-first century. Children should learn history and science, understand how governments and laws work, develop critical thinking, debate ideas, make decisions, build leadership skills and learn from failure rather than fear it. A child who never learns to question may later struggle to question injustice, while a child who is never allowed to make decisions may grow accustomed to letting others decide the future.

This is why education in the hills must produce more than obedient children. It should produce young people who are compassionate but confident, respectful but intellectually independent, peaceful but unwilling to disappear into silence. They should know that asking a question is not a sin, making a mistake is not a disgrace and having ambition does not mean becoming greedy.

Let Buddhist detachment free children from greed, not from ambition. Let humility protect them from arrogance, not destroy their confidence. Let peace make them humane, not helpless. Let religion teach compassion while education teaches them how to question, create, lead and compete in the modern world.

The children of the hills should not grow up hearing only, “Stay quiet and stay out of trouble.” They should also hear, “Ask questions, learn, think, dream big, know your history, know your rights, speak with reason and stand with dignity. Do not hate others, but never allow fear to decide your future.”

This is not a rejection of Buddhism. It is a call to teach Buddhism in a way that produces compassionate people who are also confident, educated, thoughtful and courageous. Peace should remain one of the great strengths of the hills, but peace must never be confused with fear.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts needs peaceful people, but it does not need a silent generation.