Bangladesh’s lessons for BJP

Members of Bangladesh’s Hindu community block the Shahbagh intersection in Dhaka on August 10 to protest against attacks on Hindu homes, temples and shops after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had resigned and fled the country. Pic/PTI

Whenever Bangladesh erupts, I call up Hindus whom I have come to know because of professional reasons. Ascribe my habit to the empathy religious minorities have for each other in South Asia, where the States have now increasingly become caricatures of their original conceptions. And so, when Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh and Muslim mobs took to targeting the Hindus, I spoke to Rana Dasgupta, general secretary of the Hindu Christian Buddhist Unity Council. To my shock, he said he had shifted to a friend's house for safety. A community leader taking refuge is a telling commentary on the Bangladeshi Hindu's vulnerability.

Next, I rang up a Dhaka-based political activist whom I had last spoken with in 2021, when communal violence scarred the country. He passed away earlier this year, said the lady who answered my call. Are you safe, I asked. She broke down: "We are too traumatised to even sleep." One of her two daughters participated in the student movement, but her idealism was reduced to ashes as Bangladesh burnt in inexplicable hatred against the minorities.

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Idealism dies every generation in Bangladesh. The lady's husband as a 10-year-old witnessed the collaborators of the Pakistan Army kill his father in 1971, when people from all religions fought to create Bangladesh. And now he had to see his daughter traumatised, to have his relatives flee last week their 400-year-old house in Pirojpur district - there couldn't be a greater betrayal of the idea of Bangladesh. History shows the State mauled the idea of Bangladesh and Islamised its society. Therein is a lesson for India as well.

The idea of Bangladesh was conceptualised after it broke away from Pakistan, under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's leadership, as an independent nation. The Bangladeshi Constitution, framed in 1972, said the nation derived its identity from its language and culture, which constituted the basis of "Bengalee nationalism." It made secularism as one of the principles of State policy. Secularism was to be realised, Article 12 of the Constitution promised, by "eliminating" the abuse of religion for political purposes, discrimination against or persecution of persons following a particular religion, and the State's bias towards any faith. Religious parties were banned from participating in politics.

An identity crisis gripped Bangladesh after Gen Ziaur Rahman, in 1977, became the dictator-president. He brought in the Fifth Amendment, through which the avowal of secularism was replaced by a declaration that State policy would be guided by "absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah." Article 12 was annulled, and the ban on religious parties from participating in politics was lifted. Article 9 was amended to substitute Bengalee nationalism with Bangladeshi nationalism. These changes symbolised Bangladesh's shift from lingual to Islamic identity, exemplified by this insertion before the Preamble: "In the Name of Allah, the Beneficial, the Merciful."

General Hussain M Ershad, who became president in 1983, amended the Constitution to make Islam the state religion. Academic Amena A Mohsin writes that Ershad, after giving a call for building a mosque-centred society, began granting funds and seeking foreign assistance for developing mosques.

A belated turnaround was attempted in 2010, after the Supreme Court struck down the deletion of secularism from the Constitution. It was reinserted through the Fifteenth Amendment. Then Prime Minister Hasina, however, did not delete the provision that made Islam the State religion, nor the line, "In the name of Allah…" Perhaps she feared a backlash from the society the State had Islamised.

But Hasina also made compromises, accepting the demand of an obscurantist Islamic group to revise school textbooks. The writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Satyen Sen, Humayun Azad, Sanjib Chattopadhyay and Sarat Chattopadhyay were construed as promoting Hinduism - and dropped.

The inimical consequences of the Islamisation of Bangladesh should come as a warning to us, for even though the sacrosanct principles of our Constitution remain intact, the Indian State's practices are palpably Hinduising our society. The conduct of Bhoomi Puja before the construction of the new Parliament building and the participation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the religious ceremony during the inauguration of Ayodhya's Ram Temple are just two vivid examples of the State consciously adopting Hindu identity.

This is as true of laws governing the ban on cow slaughter and regulation of religious conversion being made more stringent. The Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, made religion the basis of citizenship. The abrogation of Article 370 was projected as a Hindu conquest of Muslim Kashmir. India's political space is suffused with Hindu symbols, rhetoric and chauvinism.

Hindu-Muslim disputes over mosques and temples have been given a fillip because of Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud's observation that the Places of Worship Act, 1991, debars a change in their ownership, not the determination of their original religious character. India, under the Bharatiya Janata Party, seems set to surpass Bangladesh in rewriting textbooks, tossing out lessons Hindutva ideologues do not approve.

Indeed, the violence against the Hindus in Bangladesh foretells the dangers of the BJP Hinduising the State and the society. Not only the minorities but also atheists, liberals, leftists and moderate Islamists are targeted by Islamists in Bangladesh. A Hinduised society will only be at war against itself.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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