"The people of this country will have economic, political and cultural freedom . . . The history of Bengal is the history of the staining of streets with the blood of the people of this country.” So proclaimed the freedom fighter Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, on 7 March 1971, as the province of East Pakistan began its struggle for independence.
To understand this bloody conflict, and all that came after, we must go back to the violent partition of India and Pakistan 24 years earlier, overseen by British colonial rule. As the British left India, it was decided that a homeland would be created for the subcontinent’s Muslim minority, due in part to their fear of persecution by the majority Hindu population. Pakistan would be made up of East and West, with the eastern wing lying at the mouth of the Ganges delta. East and West Pakistan were two Muslim-majority regions, brought together on the basis of religion, despite the fact that they were divided by over a thousand miles of Indian territory.
The country soon became heavily dominated by its western wing, what is today Pakistan. Bengalis living in the eastern wing were ordered to use Urdu as the sole national language, not their native Bengali. West Pakistanis characterised Bengalis as “short, dark, rice-eating peasants”. Although it was a Muslim-majority region, it was seen as less than orthodox in its religious observance – a peripheral, end of the world sort of place, full of people who were somehow not “real Muslims”.
When East Pakistan won its independence after that bloody war, it became known as Bangladesh. This new state was different: a sovereign identity based on linguistic culture, primarily, rather than faith. Sheikh Mujibur became the first president of this new secular state.
Bangladesh is now 50 years old. The half century since its formation has seen the country achieve much, but it has also struggled to fully embed democracy and the inclusive ideals laid out at its founding. Today, authoritarian governance holds sway in the region, along with religious chauvinism.
State-enforced Islamisation
During the Cold War, to keep the Soviets and the political left at bay, Middle Eastern money poured in to the new state of Bangladesh, to fund what scholars have termed “state-enforced Islamisation”. This principally came from Saudi Arabia, flush with oil money after the 1973 oil crisis. “The objective was to bring Islam to the centre of the international scene, to substitute it for the various discredited nationalist movements and to refine the multitude of voices within the religion down to the single creed of the masters of Mecca,” as Gilles Kepel writes in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman, appeared to confirm this view when he said, in a 2018 interview with the Washington Post, that “investments in mosques and madrassas overseas were rooted in the Cold War, when allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union.”
From the mid-1970s, young people like Jasimuddin Rahmani – the preacher who later brought Al Qaeda to Bangladesh – were educated in a burgeoning madrassa system, which grew apace in the post-Cold War era. Religious institutions were given an air of incorruptibility and purity, compared to the politics of liberal democracy that promised much and seemingly delivered only corruption. As a result, both the main political parties and Bangladesh’s military kowtowed to hardline religious movements in order to woo public support. These movements prospered, often for the mere fact of being non-political, even if their leaders often appeared to be wayward mediaeval fantasists.
Then, on 15 August 1975, Sheikh Mujibur was assassinated and a new president installed by the military. After the coup, the new government altered the constitution. The word “secularism”, which had appeared in the Preamble and Article 8 as one of the four fundamental principles, was replaced with “absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah” and a new clause was inserted to emphasise that this trust and faith should be “the basis of all actions”.
There was little response from western nations, or from the “global policeman” America. Within Bangladesh, some suspected American intelligence of having encouraged the rightward coup. Certainly, Cold War binaries coloured foreign policy at the time. In his book The Blood Telegram, about the approach taken by the US towards Bangladesh’s liberation struggle and the post-war dynamic, Gary Bass writes that “international security imperatives trumped the pursuit of justice for the victims of mass atrocities.” The new military government, and its Islamist and right-leaning political allies, was useful to the extent that it took the country into the orbit of the anti-Soviet alliance, permeated with a visceral fear of atheists and socialists.
Democracy returned, however, almost as soon as the Cold War ended. Today, Sheikh Mujibur’s daughter Sheikh Hasina is Prime Minister, leading the party that her father founded, the Awami League. But although it still claims to be a centre-left, secular party of Bengali nationalism – the equivalent of India’s Congress Party – it has imposed ruthless authoritarianism on Bangladesh. Democracy is weak and rights abuses are rampant. Sheikh Hasina has deftly wielded religion to remain in office for a record tenure, after two highly questionable elections.
Bangladesh is often celebrated as a success story. Its people not only apparently earn more than their Indian counterparts, they also have lower fertility rates than most in the region, and perform better on most human development indicators. However, citizens are embracing religious conservatism and extremism at increasing rates. In fact, extremism in Bangladesh does not seem to be directly linked to economic deprivation, as it is in many other countries. Multiple studies and surveys indicate that extremist religious movements in the country are often populated by the middle classes. This is an increasingly educated country, ruled by a supposedly secular party – yet hardline religiosity is being championed.
So what’s going on here? Bangladesh’s war of independence entrenched deep faultlines. Some within the country favoured independence and an Indian-style secularism. Others, broadly conservative and Islamist, wanted to remain part of Pakistan. Although the secular side ostensibly won, embedding their values into the foundation of the state, these tensions have continued to simmer and, at times, explode. In 2013, the country once again reached boiling point, when the government began to prosecute people accused of helping the Pakistani forces during the war. Rather than drawing a line under the trauma of the past, this process brought out tensions between secular and Islamist voices – ultimately emboldening violent extremism and suppressing free speech.
Back in 1971, the Pakistani military had responded brutally to East Pakistan’s calls for self-determination. It is widely accepted that this crackdown, enacted with the support of pro-Islamist militias within East Pakistan, constituted genocide. Although there is some dispute about the numbers killed, in Bangladesh the most commonly cited figure is 3 million. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped; Pakistan’s religious leaders declared that Bengali women were gonimoter maal (Bengali for “public property”).
Religious minorities suffered particularly acutely. As Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times wrote at the time, Pakistani commanders “admit to a policy of stamping out Bengali culture, both Moslem and Hindu – but particularly Hindu. Although thousands of ‘anti-state’ Bengali Moslems have been killed by the army, the Hindus became particular scapegoats.”
In 2009, Sheikh Hasina’s government set up a domestic war crimes tribunal to investigate and prosecute those suspected of participating in the 1971 genocide. Eleven chief defendants in the trials were accused of actively assisting the Pakistani army to target non-Muslims or apostates. Many of those killed were Hindus, along with intellectuals, unorthodox Muslims or others considered to be “deviants”.
Abdul Quader Mollah was one high-profile figure put on trial. At the time of independence, he had been a member of the Al Badr death squad, a group of local collaborators used by the Pakistani army to kill intellectuals and minorities. He was charged with crimes against humanity and with killing hundreds of people, including secular intellectuals and a well-known poet who was found decapitated, her head hanging from a ceiling fan. On 5 February 2013, he was sentenced to life in jail. Given that Bangladesh has the death penalty, many felt he had got off lightly, considering the serious nature of his crimes.
Murder in Dhaka
Thousands of disgruntled, largely secular Bangladeshis protested, taking to the streets and voicing their anger online. One of these online voices was Ahmed Rajib Haider, a 35-year-old architect from the same neighbourhood that Mollah had once terrorised. Rajib was an outspoken atheist, as were many of his fellow bloggers, which meant that people on the political right labelled the protests an atheist conspiracy. I was at the protest in Dhaka at the time, and the crowds I witnessed did not appear to be particularly atheist, with many dressed in traditional Muslim prayer garb.
One evening, ten days after Mollah’s sentencing, Rajib was leaving the home he shared with his brother. Out of the darkness, he was set upon and attacked by at least two men with machetes: Islamist extremists. The killing of Rajib was the first in a series of similar murders. Just as in 1971, intellectuals, atheists and religious minorities were targeted. The attackers butchered their victims with machetes – a nod to the sword, the weapon of choice to kill infidels in the time of the prophet. The group primarily responsible was mostly made up of affluent students; Rajib’s murderers were students at an elite private university. They would go on to form a local branch of Al Qaeda.
Sheikh Hasina’s government was initially supportive of the protests that Rajib and his comrades had started. But as religious voices continued to proclaim that these protests were an atheist conspiracy, politicians started to distance themselves, blaming the murder victims. As Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed told Reuters, “We are walking a fine line here.” He added: “We don’t want to be seen as atheists. It doesn’t change our core beliefs. We believe in secularism. But given that our opposition party plays that religion card against us relentlessly, we can’t come out strongly for him. It’s about perception, not about reality.”
Rather than challenge the religious right in the face of these brutal murders, the Bangladeshi government violently supressed opposition party gatherings and publications. In 2013, the government set up committees to investigate lists of supposed blasphemers, and a handful of atheist bloggers were jailed. After Al Qaeda murdered bloggers and intellectuals, ministers said things such as “The bloggers, they should control their writing”; “Our country is a secular state”; “I want to say that people should be careful not to hurt anyone by writing anything – hurt any religion, any people’s beliefs, any religious leaders.”
This could be seen as a cynical turn. The 2014 election was approaching, and the government needed to bolster its popularity as it sought a second term in office. Appeasing the religious right was a pragmatic move. The Hefazat Islam movement, a powerful network of madrassas with millions of followers nationwide, had threatened to “siege” government if it did not punish blasphemy and apostasy with death. The Hefazat movement can bring hundreds of thousands of young men onto the street. The government effectively bought the movement off, offering the Hefazat leadership financial sweeteners, and agreeing that it would maintain its autonomy.
Fast-forward to 2018 and the government had beefed up its digital defamation laws with the Digital Security Act. It contains harsh penalties for anyone who publishes “any information that hurts religious values or sentiments”. The law is almost uniquely used to punish those who criticise the religious values of the majority. It is rarely enforced against those who criticise more powerless minority religions, let alone atheism. This has seen dozens of journalists and cartoonists imprisoned, while government-backed hackers police social media. This year a leading investigative journalist, Rozina Islam, who had exposed corruption in the health sector, was jailed and allegedly tortured. As well as silencing critics of Sunni Islam, the law also criminalises virtually all criticism of the Prime Minister or her father – the same independence leader who championed cultural freedom 50 years ago.
Weak state, powerful figureheads
Where do we go from here? One answer is that Bangladesh must redress the balance of power between government and the extreme Islamic forces inside the country. In 2019, I published a book, Many Rivers One Sea, in which I explored why Al Qaeda’s push into Bangladesh had been so successful. They had murdered a dozen intellectuals. While some arrests were made, government ministers essentially acquiesced. Rather than taking concerted action against the aggressors, politicians made statements condemning those that the terrorists had targeted, and moved towards the policies that Al Qaeda advocated. This, I argued, was in no small part the result of weak government. Bangladesh’s “liberal” state is one of the smallest in the world, if measured by tax to GDP. The neoliberal model, favouring low taxes and minimal state intervention, has dominated Bangladeshi policy ever since the right-wing coup in 1975.
Where the state is weak, individual politicians and Sunni religious institutions are, as a result, powerful. This means that the fine words in Bangladesh’s constitution, that “it shall be a fundamental aim of the State to realise through the democratic process a socialist society, free from exploitation, a society in which the rule of law, fundamental human rights and freedom, equality and justice, political, economic and social, will be secured for all citizens” ring hollow in practice. They are little match for plutocrats, religious leaders and ambitious politicians. Bangladesh today is caught in a Catch-22 situation, where authoritarian governance has reduced trust in the state and its institutions. The social contract required for a larger state has withered, and it is difficult to encourage taxation and create the positive feedback loop that accountable institutions produce.
This year, Bangladesh celebrates its independence and its first 50 years. The country is more assured economically, and less dependent on foreign powers, than it has ever been. But the forces that Sheikh Mujibur once fought against – authoritarianism, sectarianism and majoritarianism – threaten to shadow the nation in its next 50 years.
This article is from the New Humanist autumn 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
