Bangladesh crisis: Why Xulhaz Mannan won't be its last victim
The brutal and selective killings in Bangladesh of intellectuals who don't toe a hard Islamist line recall Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto saying in 1971 that if "Muslim Bangla" (as he called Bangladesh) was primarily a Bengali nation, it should merge with West Bengal. If it was Islamic, it should remain East Pakistan.
Neither course was acceptable to a people who were proudly optimistic in that dawn of freedom of forging a personality that was both Bengali and Muslim.
Question
The unresolved question of Bangladesh's identity remains as poignant as ever 45 years later, inviting the mischief of west Asian terrorists who boast of being behind the murders that keep society on the boil. The latest victim epitomises all that is anathema to fundamentalists - 35-year-old Xulhaz Mannan was a gay rights activist, editor of Roopbaan magazine and employed by the American embassy in Dhaka.
Bangladeshis might be better able to come to grips with the dilemma if only they bring themselves to discuss it. But that isn't the Bengali - Hindu or Muslim - way. It's impolite to mention religious differences. Politeness demands glossing over cultural chasms. "The only difference," a Bengali Muslim scholar told me once, "is that Hindus hold the water glass with the right hand and Muslims with the left!"
Only Bengalis indulge in such dangerous hallucinations. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman held forth on Tagore when we met in London before Bangladesh was born as if Rabindra Sangeet solves all political problems. One reason for this blind spot is that Bangladesh's leaders are not communal. But the politics of opportunism won't allow them to ignore grassroots communalism.
When my wife and I were visiting Dhaka in 1985, general HM Ershad, then president of Bangladesh, invited us to tea in his cantonment bungalow. Conversation veered to politics and he stressed - wrongly as it happened - that Bangladeshis would never vote for the Awami League's Sheikh Hasina Wazed, now prime minister, because Muslims expect their head of government to lead the nation in prayers, which a woman cannot do.
Apart from the political misjudgment, he was historically unaware of Razia, Sultan of Delhi from 1236 to 1240. What embarrassed me was the president's own obvious embarrassment at bringing up a purely Muslim situation with non-Muslims.
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| They do a disservice to their country by not discussing the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism. |
He kept apologising to my wife and me both for denigrating a female contender for power and for giving a sectarian reason. Yet, only three years later Gen Ershad's eighth constitutional amendment made Islam Bangladesh's state religion.
Two recent autobiographical books by senior Bangladeshi bureaucrats I have known maintain this self-defeating silence over the communal divide. Rehman Sobhan's Untranquil Recollections: The Years of Fulfilment tells of an upper class Muslim whose world straddled all three countries of the subcontinent at the highest level. Rehman was an internationally known economist and helped to compile the six-point programme that became the basis for Bangladesh's liberation struggle.
The much younger Kamal Siddiqui, who was the first district magistrate of Khulna after liberation (when I met him), grew up at the other end of the spectrum. But, as described in In One Life: The Memoirs of a Third World Civil Servant, he retired as cabinet secretary under Khaleda Zia.
Challenge
They do a disservice to their country by not discussing the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism or the implications of the Hindu population dwindling from 22.05 per cent in 1951 to 8.5 per cent in 2002.
While the East Bengal Evacuee Act, Defence of Pakistan Ordinance, Enemy (Custody and Registration) Order, and Vested Property Act dispossessed wealthier Hindus, the poor suffered all manner of bullying, intimidation and other pressure tactics.
Both arose from the bedrock of communalism in Bangladeshi society - even in the Awami League - that prevents Wazed from undoing Ziaur Rahman's constitutional changes. These include starting parliamentary sessions with "Bismillahir-Rahmaanir-Rahim" (In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful); Articles 8(1) and 8(1A) proclaiming "absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah"; and Article 25(2) promising that "the state shall endeavour to consolidate, preserve and strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity".
Secularism
Although in 2010, the Bangladesh Supreme Court restored secularism as one of the constitution's basic tenets, it didn't touch Islam's official status.
Only a month ago - on March 28 this year - the high court rejected the last of many petitions against Gen Ershad's amendment and confirmed Islam as state religion.
Wazed dare not change the constitution on this point. That awareness of the popular mood probably also explains her statement allowing religion-based parties.
There are many reasons for faulting this ambivalence. It encourages bigots in groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's coalition partner during Khaleda Zia's prime ministership, the Jama'at ul Mujahideen Bangladesh, and the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh whose leader, Siddique ul-Islam, was hanged in 2007.
It invites meddling by al Qaeda and the Islamic State which claim responsibility for some of the killings of secular thinkers and bloggers. It permits persecution of the minority while authority seems to look away.
And it makes anti-India policies politically rewarding. The combined effect is to prevent a resolution of Bangladesh's identity dilemma and keep the country in a permanent state of uncertainty and instability.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)