NEW DELHI: Why Islamism might yet determine the future of Bangladesh.
The signs are impossible to miss. Contrary to the euphoria of a “student-led secular revolution”, some of the biggest decisions taken by the interim government of Bangladesh fronted by Nobel Laureate banker Mohammad Yunus have had nothing to do with students, or secularism.
Instead, the notorious chieftain of a murderous Islamist outfit, Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, also known as Ansarullah Bangla Team, has been released from prison. Muhammad Jasimuddin Rahmani is the imam of an organization whose adherents hacked to death several atheist bloggers in Bangladesh. They have also been implicated in a major bank robbery. Their explicit goal is to create an Islamic state under Sharia law in Bangladesh.
The Yunus government has also taken a decision to lift the ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami, and its student wing, Chhatra Shibir. The Jamaat, too, wants an Islamic state in Bangladesh, as does another radical Islamist group, the Hefazat e-Islam. Soon after the departure of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina earlier last month after months of mass protests, and the end of her authoritarian rule, it became obvious who ruled the streets in Bangladesh—even though the protests that led to Hasina’s ouster was fronted by thousands of students, they had been joined in even larger numbers by the organized cadre of the Islamist groups, many of whom were also, technically, students.
It is because the “muscle” of the protests came from Islamists that the immediate attacks came on everything that these groups hate—minority Hindu populations in and around the capital Dhaka, Hindu temples, and, importantly, every insignia of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of the modern Bangladeshi nation, popularly called Bangabandhu or Friend of Bangladesh, and the leader of its war for independence from Pakistan, who was assassinated in a military coup in 1975. Bangladesh was created in the name of preventing oppression from Urdu-speaking Pakistanis from the west who were notoriously oppressive towards the Bangla-speaking easterners. The breakaway of Bangladesh also proved that the logic of the partition of India—namely that Muslims needed a separate homeland based on religion—did not have any basis.
The Jamaat and many an imam and ulema had opposed the creation of Bangladesh, and sided with the Pakistani army, which conducted a campaign of mass rape and murder of tens of thousands of Bangladeshis to prevent the region from breaking away. In 2021, Jamaat and other Islamists tore through numerous Hindu places of worship before the biggest Hindu festival in the country, Durga Puja. Hasina, who had not only seen the Islamists attack her father, but also faced rebellions including within the country’s armed forces aimed at enforcing sharia law in the country, took significant steps to curb the menace including war crime trials for conspirators and participants in the 1971 liberation war, followed by death by hanging for those found guilty. But even she had no choice but to accommodate some Islamists. So, while Hasina was considered firmly against groups like the Jamaat, under her watch another hardline radical group, Hefazat e-Islam, grew with her tacit support (“her Islamists”, if you will) with the avowed aim of making Bangladesh an Islamic nation under strict sharia law including enactment of a blasphemy law, capital punishment for any “defamation” of Islam, segregation of men and women, removal of statues from public spheres of people commonly revered (considered against Islam by Islamists) and declaring the minority Ahmadiyya sect as “non-Muslims”.
The actions following Hasina’s eviction demonstrated the seriousness of such demands. Statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were hammered, pulled out, attempts were made to decapitate the heads of the statues, and they were urinated upon. The main mausoleum dedicated to the memory of the liberation war showing the surrender of the Pakistani army was destroyed. Even the statues of policemen who died fighting terrorists in the 2016 attack on the popular Holey Bakery in the posh neighborhood of Gushan in capital Dhaka have been torn down and posters of the until-recently-banned terror outfit Hizb-ut-Tahrir put up. The Tahrir is yet another group that demands the conversion of Bangladesh into an Islamic caliphate and after Hasina left the country, they have once again emerged overground and have been organizing marches in Dhaka. Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in several countries including Germany, Russia, China, United Kingdom, Turkey, most central Asian countries, Indonesia, and, until recently, Bangladesh. That they are back openly doing marches in the heart of Dhaka is bad news both for Bangladesh, and the neighbourhood.
All of this adds up—even though Bangladesh’s increasingly smaller but influential and vocal secular minority are sometimes reluctant to admit this—to a future where Bangladeshi politics is likely to be dominated by Islamism, quite in the way Pakistan’s has come to be. The difference is that the secular constituency in Bangladesh always has been, and is today much bigger than in Pakistan. But they have neither street power, nor, now, political power. Muhammad Yunus, no doubt, would like things to remain calm as he tries to rebuild a shattered economy, and to ensure this, would turn a blind eye to some things. But it is unlikely that the Islamists would not make use of this opportunity to further strengthen their grasp on power, especially since the interim government has, as a constituent member, A.F.M. Khaled Hossain, the head of the Hefazat e-Islam, as minister for religious affairs.
But to understand what happens to Bangladesh next, you have to turn not just to these Islamist groups in the country, but to a man who was born in India but later moved to Pakistan, and has been admired by a galaxy of extremists from the Muslim Brotherhood to dictators in Pakistan and of course the Jamaat-e-Islami which he created. Syed Abul A’la Maududi and his Jamaat vehemently opposed the partition of India not because they wanted a united India (the stand taken by Mahatma Gandhi) but because it would divide the Muslim population. What Maududi and his followers would have liked instead is the Islamisation of the entire subcontinent. They argued that any division would be against the concept of a unified ummah—the seamless community of the faithful. In the Maududi worldview, the right model is that of a “theodemocracy” (a term created by the early Mormons in America) where the principles of democracy are governed by a broader rule of God. When his ideas did not take root in India, Maududi moved to Pakistan and while the Jamaat-e-Islami did not become a major political party, Maududi’s ideas were picked up by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq who came to power through a military coup in 1977, and since then it has affected every institution in Pakistan, and the spread of these ideas has made Pakistan the global capital of lynching in the name of blasphemy (often through false cases). That in Pakistan today hundreds can gather at a moment’s notice demanding instant “sar tan se juda” (beheading) justice for any real or imagined blasphemy slight is a direct result of the deep propagation of Maududi’s ideas. Righteous violence, and the idea of jihad, “as a struggle against injustice”, which includes action against “non-believers” is embedded in the Maududi worldview, which emphasis that the Islamist struggle must continue until there is absolute acceptance of what the Islamists believe is the fundamental exhortation of their faith.
To a degree, Bangladesh has been saved from this kind of barbarism due to the early efforts of secularisation and promotion of language-based nationalism by Mujibur Rahman and then, since 2009, by the efforts of Sheikh Hasina. Hasina, while quietly accommodating many Islamist demands, still kept their worst impulses at bay, especially after the killings of the atheist bloggers created worldwide condemnation.
But the times are changing. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan was a major blow for the Islamists, and the Maududi perspective—how could the ummah truly unite under one flag and one God if language was enough to divide it? India’s participation on the side of the Bangladesh liberation army has been an old bone of contention for the Islamists. The Jamaat in Bangladesh remains deeply connected to the Jamaat in Pakistan and, as the immediate destruction of the liberation war monument which showed Pakistan’s moment of defeat the moment Hasina left, the Islamists wish to wipe out all public memory of the liberation war and paint India as the “regional oppressor”, and a “country of infidels (Hindus)”, and this will strategically tie down India from both Pakistan and Bangladesh, with Islamists sharing a unified ideology on both sides in effective control of the respective governments of the two countries.
All reports suggest that funding for Islamist extremism is pouring in from the UK, Qatar and—after the clampdown by governments in the UAE and Saudi Arabia—from independent wealthy individuals who, feeling the pressure at home, are turning their gaze to the Indian subcontinent. What one needs to keep an eye out for is the following—one of the demands of the Islamist groups is related to an amendment in the Bangladesh Constitution called the fifth amendment. Passed in 1979 after the assassination of Mujibur Rahman and his entire family (barring Hasina and another daughter who were abroad) in August 1975, among other clauses, this amendment inserted the words “in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful” in the Bangladeshi Constitution, thereby changing the secular nature of the Bangladeshi state. This amendment lasted till 2010 when, under the Hasina regime, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh declared it illegal, and through the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution secularism was brought back as a first principle of the state in 2011.
The Islamists are desperate to get this removed and for the state to revert to existing in a format that underlines its Islamic nature. Under Hasina, religious parties had also been barred from political activity but with the ban on the Jamaat being lifted under the Yunus government that obstacle has been cleared.
The next step is to change the nature of the Constitution. If that happens, there is little that can stop the Pakistanisation of Bangladesh, and the descent to blasphemy laws and mass lynching, and murders of Ahmadiyyas and other minorities, especially Hindus will likely accelerate.
Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at O. P. Jindal Global University, and co-founder of the foreign policy platform Global Order.