Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation struggle ushered in a constitution that enshrined the lofty principles of democracy, nationalism, secularism and socialism. But this putative ‘glorious’ outcome was to the exclusion of Islamists who, in the bloody and cataclysmic events of the last one-and-a-half month, have now exacted their revenge. This has taken 53 years.
An August 21 news report in the Dhaka Tribune underscores the Islamists’ deep involvement in the students-led protests that unseated Sheikh Hasina from power. The opening paragraph is chilling: “Leaders of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami…held a meeting with top Qawmi scholars of the country, where participants voiced optimism about establishing a country based on Islamic rules under the leadership of Jamaat chief Dr Shafiqur Rahman”.
The meeting, held in a Dhaka-located auditorium, was attended by leaders of the Qawmi madrasa-based platform Hefazat-e-Islam, with clergy from different Islamist denominations vowing to “unite” to “establish an Islamic state” in Bangladesh.
Critics will be quick to dismiss this as fear mongering. But what they fail to recognise is that Bangladesh’s recent “people’s upheaval” was a grand finale before the Islamists’ revenge is played out in full. Indeed, Bangladesh has taken a full circle: from the fledgling democratic and secular politics in the immediate wake of the liberation war, to a period of blood-letting involving the military, a bout of martial law, followed by a politics hinged on two competing visions of nationalism, a rather long and tragic period of destruction of democratic and state institutions and now the impending shadow of the crescent, the country has seen it all.
The wiping out of every symbol associated with the Awami League and its tallest leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – till the other day Bangabandhu for generations of freedom-loving Bangladeshis – is deeply disturbing and unsettling. Harnessed on deep hatred for India, the students-led movement that dislodged Hasina has revealed itself for what it was organised to achieve: a hard-to-contain gale force that will pave the way for a speedy swing to the extreme right.
This begs the question – has Bangladesh finally found its raison d’etre or does it continue to flay about to come to grip with its secular Bengali identity?
Till recently, just as Salman Rushdie’s portrayal of Pakistan in Shame, Bangladesh was often characterised as a place “insufficiently imagined.” The torturous struggle among the vast majority of the people was to make up their minds on their Bengali or Muslim identities. Since 1971, Bangladesh was handed down to a disparate range of self-seeking political and military rulers who failed to build a nation state that could be defined by an all-encompassing national identity.
It is generally agreed that nationalism is the starkest political shame of the 20th century because, as a collective choice of nations, it engendered violence and cruelty. On the other hand, nationalism as the “politics of egoistic self-preservation” is a “natural political sentiment for modern states” as it binds and motivates the “ties between membership of a moral community”.
The 1947 Partition was based on the notion of two nations – Hindus and Muslims. East Pakistan, formed on the basis of being part of a sub-continental Muslim nation, contained the anachronistic notion of Bengali and Muslim nationhood. This was the reason why “economic nationalism” and the Bengali language movement resonated deeply with the Bengalis of East Pakistan and formed the rock-solid basis on which Bangladesh was created in 1971.
The first blow to an independent Bangladeshi nation’s aspirations of being Bengali first occurred in 1979 when secularism, one of the four founding pillars of Bangladesh’s liberation, was struck off from the constitution and the divine invocation, Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar-Rahim, was inserted. However, this was nullified by a constitutional amendment in 2005. In 1988, Islam was declared as the “state religion”. Since then, almost all succeeding ruling dispensations, including the Awami League, toyed and flirted in varying degrees with Islam.
As secularism took severe beatings over the years, the “increasing influence of religionists was reflected in other areas as well”, as noted Bangladeshi scholar Ahrar Ahmed observed in 2020. This resurgence found expression in the state-sanctioned construction of mosques and madrassas and the recognition granted to the Dawra degree as equivalent to an MA degree. More such penetration and expansion followed in the form of particular Islamist organisations’ influence on the school curricula.
In 2017, the then Sheikh Hasina regime surreptitiously struck off from school textbooks nine chapters on literature authored by Lalon Fakir, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Sunil Ganguly, Humayun Azad, Satyen Sen and Rabindranath Tagore. In their place, “religious-minded” works were included. This prompted Ahmed to write in December 2020 that the “much greater threat, more insidious and more far-reaching in its consequences, is the creeping advance of religionists in the country through a process that has been deliberate, organised and strategic”.
The July-August students’ movement, marked by extreme levels of violence, is a manifestation of this “creeping advance”; the only difference is that this is no longer a creeping advance but a full-blown expression of a potentially deadly force that could destabilise the sub-continent, which many in Bangladesh are either refusing to recognise or comprehend or perhaps wish to willingly embrace.
Much of this refusal stems from a shame and guilt – at least among the genteel – which in turn springs from a collective abandonment of the constitution’s lofty principles that once formed Bangladesh’s sine qua non. Bangladeshis’ only defence – real or imagined – is a passionate hatred for India.
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There is no doubt that successive Indian official policy to continue backing Sheikh Hasina is at the core of this deep-seated animus which manifested itself in recent pogroms and deadly attacks against the Hindu minority – the nearest ‘Indians’, so to say – across different parts of a ‘new’ Bangladesh. Bangladeshi intellectuals and civil society leaders have largely remained mute, which reflects moral bankruptcy at best or majoritarian sanction at worst.
It is doubtful that these heinous crimes will even be investigated – the due process of law remains crippled and incapable – and the perpetrators will ever be brought to book and severely punished. These attacks – or forced expulsion – will engender waves of minority emigration. Bangladeshis have lived with this shame in the past and may yet find ways to exculpate themselves from this national crime with silence and whataboutry.
As Bangladesh ‘changes its skin’, there are serious doubts even among a miniscule minority of sane Bangladeshis that the Mohammad Yunus-led experiment at interim governance will be able to pull the country out of the post-Hasina woods. Change – especially violent change – has a seductive appeal. But this carries with a destructive capacity which, when unleashed fully, can be potentially disastrous.
