Sunday, July 03, 2011

This was published in News From Bangladesh on July 6, 2011.

I am aghast at the hypocrisy of the current government of Bangladesh
who pledged during the last election campaign to return the country's
constitution back to its original form of 1972. That was when
Bangladesh was born as a truly secular country with no state religion
or room for religion based politics. Subsequent military rulers
rehabilitated religion based politics, placed the full Arabic phrase
for "In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful" at the
beginning of the constitution, and introduced Islam as the state
religion, all in the name of achieving narrow partisan gains against
political opponents of the time.

In fact it is the very political party in power now, Awami League,
that consistently represented the said political opponents of those
military dictators at that time (with some exceptions). And it was
rightfully expected that now that Awami League was back in power, it
would take great pains to restore the constitution to a form that
millions of freedom fighters gave their lives for in the country's
independence struggle from Pakistan.

There was hope that this government would have enabled Bangladesh to become a beacon of secularism with a Muslim
majority population with other religious minorities having absolute equal status where the state made no distinction between its nationals of different faiths. Alas, having the state recognise one religion (the majority) over others rendered members of other faiths second class by definition. No amount of extra nuance stating the equal status of other religions (as has been mentioned in the recent amendment) made up for that.

If a constitution belonged equally to all Bangladeshis irrespective of
faith, then one cannot place the Arabic phrase mentioned above at the
beginning of that constitution. That Arabic phrase is ubiquitous to
the Muslim faith only. The constitution has thus failed to regain a
secular nature on two fronts. And the Awami League government has
betrayed us those who wished to see Bangladesh resemble Turkey in a
world full of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

One can however appreciate the difficulty in banning religion based
politics in the country, now that some such political parties are well
established. It would have been dangerous to ban them outright and
force them to go underground and mutate into more militant forms. Let
us pray however that there will be tough laws against people of such
political parties should they create communal divisions between
Bangladeshis and/or resort to militant ideologies.

In a struggle for Bengali nationalism, the status of today's
Bangladesh's indigenous people got side tracked and there was a great
opportunity to recognise them as equal citizens of the country during
the current round of constitutional amendments. This had been a demand
of the said people and of the civil society in Bangladesh for quite
some time. This government has shamefully betrayed them as well.

Civil society in Bangladesh had strongly urged the government not to
betray the spirit of Bangladesh's independence (secularism being one
of its key aspects) during discussions prior to the vote on the
amendment. This government is showing all the signs of arrogance in
power and not listening to eminent citizens.

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