Harmony for Diversity and Peace
Rumour travels faster than correction
Communal tension in Bangladesh rarely begins with a considered argument. It begins with a claim — unverified, emotionally charged, shared faster than anyone can check it — that spreads through a neighbourhood or a Facebook feed and hardens into conviction before anyone thinks to ask where it came from. By the time a correction arrives, it has usually already done its work.
In Rangpur, that dynamic bears directly on communities Noboprobhaat Foundation works with every day. Religious and Indigenous minorities, and gender-diverse people, are among the first to feel the consequences when suspicion between communities rises — because a society looking for someone to blame reaches for whoever is already at its margins.
This project took an unusual angle on a familiar problem. Rather than treating religious harmony purely as a matter of goodwill between faiths, it treated it partly as a question of information literacy — teaching people to ask whether a claim is true before acting on it, alongside teaching what freedom of religion and belief actually means. And rather than delivering that message through seminars, it used the forms people in Rangpur already gather around: street theatre, posters in the places they pass daily, and conversation on Facebook.
What the project set out to do
Build resistance to rumour. Teach practical fact-checking — how to question a claim, trace it, and decline to pass on what cannot be verified — as an everyday civic skill.
Explain freedom of religion and belief. Make the principle concrete and locally meaningful, rather than leaving it as an abstraction few could define if asked.
Put youth at the centre. Position young people from different faiths and communities as the ones leading the conversation, rather than as an audience being lectured to.
What the project achieved in numbers
Four ways of starting the same conversation
Poster Campaign
Five hundred posters were placed across Guptapara, Mordan Mor, Sheikhpara, Mithapukur, Kamalpur and Tajpur — carrying two questions rather than slogans: what is fact-checking and how do you do it, and what is freedom of religion and belief and why does it matter. The team that put them up was itself drawn from different faiths, which was part of the message.
“Youth Harmony” Facebook Live Talk Show
A live discussion bringing together Muslim, Indigenous Christian and Indigenous Hindu youth leaders alongside young women leaders — broadcast openly, with viewers able to join the conversation in real time. The point was not to stage agreement but to show young people from different backgrounds talking to each other in public about preventing conflict in their own communities.
Street Drama — “Bodh”
Three public performances by fourteen actors, staged where audiences already gather: at Sri Sri Pareshnath Mandir and Sri Sri Basanti Matha Mandir in Mahiganj, and at Carmichael College’s Annadamohan Hall. Drama carries what a lecture cannot — audiences watched the costs of suspicion and the possibility of coexistence played out, then discussed it among themselves afterwards, and asked for more.
Facebook Campaign
An online campaign inviting community members to contribute their own messages, stories and creative work on religious harmony — moving participants from recipients of a message to authors of one, and carrying the conversation beyond the reach of any single event.
The change it leaves behind
This was a small grant, and it makes no claim to have resolved communal tension in Rangpur. What it did establish is a method. Street theatre outside a temple reaches people who would never attend a workshop on tolerance. A poster asking how to check a fact reaches someone on their way to work. A live conversation between youth of different faiths is watched by people who would not sit in the same room. And audiences asked for more of it — which is the clearest evidence that the form was right.
- ✓Meet people where they already are: temples, college halls, street corners and social feeds reached audiences that no conference room would have.
- ✓Fact-checking is peacebuilding: treating rumour as the mechanism through which communal harm spreads gives communities something practical to do about it, rather than only something to feel.
- ✓Mixed teams carry the message: young people of different faiths delivering the work together demonstrated the point more convincingly than the content itself did.
- ✓A thematic foundation: the project established interfaith dialogue and peacebuilding as a strand of Noboprobhaat Foundation’s work — connecting the protection of gender-diverse communities to the wider question of how societies treat all their minorities.
Street theatre outside a temple reaches people who would never attend a workshop on tolerance.