Nobel Laureate Dr. Mohammad Yunus’(Yunus) interim regime took over soon after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (Hasina) resigned and fled to India on August 5, 2024. Backed by the unyielding student leaders who steered the huge anti-Hasina civil unrest, his ad hoc government upended the prevailing state symbols and practices of the overthrown leadership. Those activities ranged from expunging the “imposed history” in the school textbooks to a recently proposed rewriting of national identity for the anticipated constitutional alterations. Bangladeshi identity battle’s prehistory traces back to former East Pakistan and beyond. I reflected on the colliding national imaginations in my earlier academic articles, opinion pieces and a book on the historical roots of the Muslim distinctiveness in Colonial Bengal. The relevant references will cross our paths later in this article.
The rivalry between a discerning Muslimness and a lingo-centric secular liberalism—a post-1971 conflicted phenomenon — has dominated Bangladesh politics since the country’s founding. The Awami League (AL) leaders, along with thousands of activists from the 1971 struggle, lost no time to impose their own national imagination on the new state. Their fierce mindset against political Islam and Muslim consciousness fell like a ton of bricks on their ideological opponents. The Indian blessings to isolate the Islamically inclined antagonists in the new state facilitated the secular leaders’ exclusionary claim to power. The influential Islamic parties and their leaders still fear that the AL, with Indian help, might return to Bangladesh and rekindle another stretch of corrupt dynastic hegemony.
Neither the 1970 election manifestoes, nor the surfeit of published discourses in 1971 demanded an unabashed secular state in Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshi recounts of the past came from the powerful political actors from 1971—professional historians are yet to strike a new ground in this sphere, an essential step for a sound national prism. The nation is yet to define a middle ground between the lingo-centric secular nationalism and the widely shared Islamic identity. Bangladesh is still the old swath of East Pakistan, the outcome of a controversial religious division of India in 1947! But the Islamic parties need to clarify their future vision. The Jamaat-I-Islami (Jamaat) and other Islamic parties are yet to gain huge upticks in a free and fair election.
Contrary to the expectations of the liberal nationalists who cast aside political Islam and discarded a range of Muslim symbols and traditions immediately after the 1971 independence, the Muslim identity vibrations gradually returned to Bangladesh at distinct stages. Sometimes, the pro-Islamic tremors were the quiet footsteps at the civil society precincts—their ubiquity stood for their legitimacy. But periodically, the Islamic reassertion carried their violent manifestations, too.
Not long ago, the conservative Islamic outbursts came on the heels of the July/August 2024 upheaval; they did not rest with Hasina’s expulsion from power. They wanted to change the secular and socialist directive principles of the 1972 constitution— a firm challenge to those who yearned for secularism in Bangladesh. Those beholders are not yet ready to surrender to the underlying Muslim consciousness in Bangladeshi identity. The on-going secular-Islamic dichotomy proves that the post 1971 secular state did not necessarily turn Bangladesh into a passionately non-religious society. As of this writing, the Bengali secular nationalism faced a catastrophic allegation in post-Hasina Bangladesh—it was a cover for a single party hegemony, personalized autocracy, proliferating corruption and an intense politicization of patriotism and national identity. Those who evicted Hasina from power last year wanted to reset the ideological and identity sensitivities as a bulwark against the repetition of a despotic rule. They loathed Hasina’s personality cult and abhorred her solicitation for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib), her father as the founder of Bangladesh and the exclusive mentor of “swadinatar chetona” —the Bengali nationalists’ “ideological creation” that usually went with such incantation.
I sensed rumbling discontents over the historical and contemporary identity issues: (a) the Bangladeshi liberals’ construction of secularism is rather exclusionary, compared to its more flexible Western paradigm, (b) the Indian military intervention shortened the 1971 struggle for independence, which did not allow the AL-led exiled government, their armed fighters or the student leaders, enough time and scope to define Bangladesh’s identity track, (c) it was an uphill slog for the Islamic groups and their leaders to reorganize and reassert themselves from the beginning of Bangladesh, (d) the not-so-secret Indian pressure on Bangladesh to dump the “two-nation theory” inherited from Pakistan, (e) while the liberal allies readily hoisted a lingo-centric consciousness for the new state, the Muslim identity believers were deliberately bypassed, intimidated and jailed for their alleged collaboration with Pakistan in 1971, (f) most Bangladeshi liberal secularists demonstrated a blistering distrust for political Islam, (g) the unrelenting Muslim counter-consciousness, however, survived the stern polemics of the liberal elites, and (h) the New Delhi-influenced 1972 constitution that later transitioned into a secular hegemony on multiple occasions. The Islamically-disposed student leaders, who dominated the post-Hasina interim regime, wanted to reject the 1972 Constitution, lock, stock and barrel, which, of course, the mainstream parties dreaded as the omen for the country’s catastrophic polarization.
I imagined a pluralistic Bangladeshi nationalism. An Islamic thinker and a politician in Colonial Bengal and Pakistan, Maulana Akram Khan believed that one could be a Muslim as well as a Bengali! While writing my IDENTITY OF A MUSLIM FAMILY IN COLONIAL BENGAL: Between Memories and History, Peter Lang, 2021, I came across Leo Tolstoy’s identity inspiration in his classic HADJI MURAD. The celebrated novelist compared the Chechnyan resistance with a “broken thistle” that defied human annihilation by sprouting back after every cutting —a spirit still germane to the world-wide battle of identities. Muslim identity continued as a stubborn issue. Western style secularism has failed to take roots in Muslim countries because their social and religious interactions are not identical with European and American traditions. Once A.K. Fazlul Huq’s son (late) Faizul Huq, a former student recalled that his father told him — “Never apologize for being a Muslim!”
The Constitution Commission’s recent proposal to drop “secularism” and “socialism” from the upcoming constitution signified that Bangladeshi identity politics would not work like whispers in the future! For decades, the country’s constitution waded through contradictions of simultaneously retaining secularism as well as keeping Islam as a state religion. But now the Constitution Commission wants to eliminate secularism from the country’s future statute.
Bangladeshi nationalism, an ambivalent quest, is more a domestic political question, but India has always been sensitive about the rise of Islamic forces in BD. New Delhi’s anxiety about the Islamic forces’ predominance in Bangladesh intensified since Hasina fell from power. There is a rethinking, both among the young and the old, about Bangladesh’s impending ideological moorings while the familiar “medieval orthodoxy” portrayal against political Islam has lost its grip.
Muslim identity, marginalized but resilient, is now amongst the new tools of ideological imagination in Bangladesh. The hot-button demand for a change in the national identity is now a counter-hegemonic alternative to the old 1972 constitution and the political imagination that went with it. Bangladesh was born out of the ashes of East Pakistan, and yet the 1971 separation from Pakistan was not the “End of History,” which the Bengali nationalists and their intellectual cohorts failed to acknowledge. The contemporary demands for a reversal of national comprehension are the inheritances of Muslim empowerment and Muslim identity imagination from the yore. They are as well the corrective measures for the Bengali nationalists’ denial of history since 1971!