Constitutional government was overturned in Bangladesh in August 2024 when Sheikh Hasina was forced into exile in Delhi. What has followed since then is a steep and well-calculated design to push the country into what can safely be referred to as medieval darkness. Mob rule has been a familiar happening in the country, with the interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus determined to upend the historical legacy of the country as it was forged through the War of Liberation in 1971. Among the foundational premises of the country is the Constitution, formulated and adopted by the Constituent Assembly within a year of Bangladesh’s becoming a sovereign state.
That premise is under assault, with threats made about either a wholesale reform of the Constitution or simply doing away with it. Outrageous comments have been made about it, with anti-Liberation elements suggesting that the Constitution, as it was adopted in 1972, was a copy of the Indian Constitution. With a Bangladeshi-American academic imported from the United States given the responsibility to head a Constitution reform commission, questions have arisen as to why constitutional experts in Bangladesh — and there are scores of them — were not approached or consulted on the issue. Dr Kamal Hossain, who as law minister headed the Constitution drafting committee in 1972, has made his criticism of the Yunus regime’s move known.
In simple terms, the move by the unconstitutional Yunus regime to amend or replace the Constitution is simply one more move toward tearing Bangladesh away from its history. Obviously, with the regime tying itself in one knot after another, there are reasons to think that the adventurism the regime has been engaged in regarding the Constitution has little hope of throwing up any positive results. In the first place, any political and constitutional change will need to be discussed and adopted or rejected by an elected Parliament. And Parliament does not exist at this point in time. In the second place, any move toward undermining the secular spirit of the Constitution, despite the amendments brought into it over the years, will draw the ire of the nation’s secular classes, indeed of the broad masses of the country.
There are some very significant reasons why Bangladesh should be going back to the Constitution as it was essentially drafted, deliberated upon and adopted in 1972. It matters little what its detractors happen to be saying about it. There are some who think that Bangladesh will never go back to 1972. You tend to wonder why they should be saying that. Such men have always been vociferous defenders of the infamous Fifth Amendment, a piece of paper that will always be remembered for all the notoriety it brought into Bangladesh’s politics between August 1975 and April 1979 and even beyond that. When you place that amendment in juxtaposition to the 1972 Constitution, you know what your preference ought to be.
The 1972 Constitution is by far the best and most eloquent instance of our self-expression as a nation. And it is because we have within it all those principles that went into the forging of Bengali nationhood, into an espousal of the four ideals which governed our thoughts as we waged war against the state of Pakistan in 1971. For those of us who were witness, either on the fields of battle or in internal exile in occupied Bangladesh, to the villainy that could be committed by an army and by the very state it spoke for in the name of national integrity and in defence of what was clearly fake religiosity, thoughts of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism were patently the new and needed underpinning of our collective life as a nation.
And yet, when one examines the historical parameters of Bengali heritage, one realises only too well that these four principles had always been at work among Bengalis. What occurred in 1947, when the Bengalis of East Bengal decided to be part of Pakistan, was but an aberration. And no matter how some people might peddle the notion that Partition was inevitable, that the two-nation theory was the dominant reality of the time, one knows in one’s heart and in one’s soul that it was anything but the truth. And Bengalis paid grievously for it. As a matter of fact, the communalism that was inaugurated in the 1940s lingers, in diverse ways, all across the subcontinent.
The battle for Bangladesh in 1971 was, from the historical as well as philosophical perspective, a necessity in order for communalism, for an unnatural course of politics, to be set aside. That we were first of all secular Bengalis and not communal East Pakistanis was what increasingly came to be reasserted in the 1950s (think of the Jukto Front and, before that, the language movement) and reinforced through the 1960s. The War of Liberation simply formalized, through the supreme sacrifices of three million Bengalis, that secular Bengali spirit.
The Constitution of 1972 was but a moral and legal adoption of that spirit. In the 1972 Constitution lay embedded the highest ideals of political liberalism. That the state of Bangladesh was the abode of everyone who inhabited it, everyone across the frontiers of faith, was the point the Constitution drove home. Religion, having regularly been an excuse for Pakistan’s rulers to explain away their political misconduct and their racial prejudices (what was done to East Pakistan was political and economic exploitation resting on deep-seated racism on the part of West Pakistan), was restored by the 1972 Constitution to its proper, noble place, away from politics.
That is the good bit in the story. The not-so-good came in with the Fourth Amendment to the 1972 Constitution in January 1975. Those who advised Bangabandhu to go for it did not quite realise the risks the country was being put to, even if a single-party state made sure that the four state principles remained intact. The Fourth Amendment, you can say in hindsight, was the perfect opportunity old Pakistan enthusiasts needed to destabilize Bangladesh. General Ziaur Rahman saw that opportunity through to reality. He had no business tampering with the Constitution. But since it has been the rule with dictators to play God, Zia thought he could do a bit of tinkering with 1972. And the moment he did that, through giving the Constitution a dash of the communal, he opened the floodgates to disaster. Had Bangladesh been a proper democracy constituted of a politically enlightened citizenry, the general and those who humiliated the country thus would have been held guilty of sedition.
If Zia hurled the first blow at the 1972 Constitution, General Hussein Muhammad Ershad followed with the next. He thought, in the infinity of his wisdom, that the state of Bangladesh was in dire need of a religion. People need religion. But Ershad told us Bangladesh needed a religion. And so the republic was burdened with one. The late dictator wanted Bangladesh’s citizens to know that Bismillah and the state religion should not be tampered with. But that is not our concern, is it? Our worry has more to do with the fact that two military dictators have tampered with the 1972 Constitution. It is that Constitution we must go back to if we mean to have secular democracy flourish in our land.
Democracy must touch the lives of all citizens. Which is why the 1972 Constitution, in its restored, retouched and rejuvenated form, must enshrine within it the political and historical rights of all the tribes, all the sub-cultures who have inhabited this territory for ages. They are the Chakmas, Marmas, Mros, Santals and so many others. Do not sacrifice them only because Bengalis happen to constitute the bulk of the population.
Today, when sinister moves are underway to have Bangladesh fall into a communal mould — watch the Jamaat-e-Islami and the other Islamic parties and their politics — and when everything is being done to cast the 1972 Constitution to the winds, it becomes imperative for the country’s liberal classes and civil society to organize resistance to such moves.
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And, yes, it now becomes the moral responsibility of the Awami League, despite the predicament it is in, to come forth once again with the kind of leadership it provided to the Bengali nation in the 1960s and all the way to national liberation in 1971. Let’s face it: all the destruction caused to Bangladesh in the last one year can only be rolled back by an enlightened leadership underpinning the historical role of the Awami League.
