A transition is underway in Bangladesh. Even if the new power-holders seek to turn a new page, transitions can’t fully be separated from history. History often sends reminders to politics.
Let us start with 1971. A civil war erupted in what then was East Pakistan. Pakistan’s army sought to suppress an uprising for liberation. Western governments, led by the United States, were not in favour of Pakistan’s break-up. In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (2013), Gary Bass showed that to weaken the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the US was looking to “open the Chinese door”. Pakistan was the only country which was close to both the US and China. The US sought Pakistan’s mediation, and to support Pakistan in the civil war, President Richard Nixon ended up sending the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal.
Western artists and non-governmental sectors had a different view. America’s newspapers supported the liberation struggle. Two musical events revealed where the sympathy of artists lay. George Harrison, an ex-Beatle, not only wrote a song, ‘Bangladesh’, which became a top-10 single in Britain, but also sponsored a “Concert for Bangladesh” at New York. Joan Baez, already known for her opposition to the Vietnam war, also wrote a song, ‘The Story of Bangladesh’. Its opening verse became famous: Bangladesh, Bangladesh/Bangladesh, Bangladesh/ When the sun sinks in the west/ Die a million people of the Bangladesh”
Ironically, Pakistan’s attempt to prevent an independent Bangladesh was deeply rooted in an ethnic bias. Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s military ruler between 1958 and ’69, outlined the prejudice in his book, Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, 1966-1972. Attachment to Bengali as a language, he stressed, exemplified inadequate Muslimness, excessive Hinduisation and a largely uncultured life. Urdu, for him, was a Muslim language and Bengali a Hindu one. “They are consciously Hinduising the language and culture. Tagore has become their god. Everything has been Bengalised, even the plate numbers on vehicles are in Bengali.” Further, “their urge to … revert to Hindu language and culture is close to the fact that they have no culture or language of their own, nor have they been able to assimilate the culture of the Muslims of the Subcontinent by turning their back on Urdu.” Much like the colonial masters, West Pakistan would rule East Pakistanis, “civilise” them, and make them adequately Muslim.
By the end of 1971, helped by India’s intervention, Bangladesh liberated itself from such colonial desires. Its leader, Sheikh Mujib, formed the government and the 1972 Constitution declared that Bangladesh would be secular, in which all religions would be respected, not simply Islam. And Bengali, of course, would be the national language.
But soon, the news took a dark turn, both economically and politically. In 1974, a famine took anywhere up to 1,00,000 lives. Stories of Bangladesh’s mass poverty started replacing those that India had been stuck with. To many, Kissinger’s dismissive term for Bangladesh — “a basket case” — began to look all too real.
In 1975, Sheikh Mujib was assassinated with his whole family, with the exception of two daughters who were abroad. One of them is the now deposed Sheikh Hasina. Military rule for roughly a decade and a half followed. Secularism was dropped from the Constitution and an Islamic national identity proclaimed by the new state elite. After the early 1990s, civilian rule intermittently returned and the two main parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), alternated in power. The former was more secular, the latter more Islamic. Finally, in 2011, under Sheikh Hasina’s AL government, the 15th Constitutional Amendment restored secularism. But this was done in a way that also recognised Islamisation as a growing social reality. The Amendment kept Islam as a “state religion”, while assigning “equal status” to all religions and prohibiting “the abuse of religion for political purposes”.
This contestation between religious/ethnic/racial equality and majoritarianism is reminiscent of such struggles in several other countries — such as the US (White majoritarianism vs racial equality), France (what Stanley Hoffmann called “ethnic Frenchness” vs equal citizenship) and, of course, India (secular nationalism vs Hindu nationalism). To say that Islam has risen as a force in Bangladesh and minorities have often felt insecure is beyond doubt, but to say that secularism is dead and minorities have no place in the nation is not true. The reality is somewhere in between.
This duality came through recently as well. There were attacks on the Hindu minority and the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami was lifted, but Mohd Yunus, upon assuming charge of the interim government, unequivocally stated that the state was committed to protecting the minorities. It is noteworthy that the BJP state governments have made no such statements, even as lynchings and bulldozer demolitions have continued.
Communalism is a social project in Bangladesh, promoted by some right-wing groups. It is not a state project, though it was under the military and BNP rule. The difference between social and state projects is important. Neither the outgoing AL government, nor the interim one, called Bangladeshi Hindus “termites” or “infiltrators”.
By the early 2000s, the story of Bangladesh took a positive turn. The Grameen Bank created by Yunus became a microfinance model for the Global South. It was also endorsed by Bill Clinton (and later Barack Obama). Yunus got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Finally, a fitting response to Kissinger’s “basket case” epithet came in the last 15 years. By 2023, the per capita income of Bangladesh ($2,529) was higher than that of India ($2,489), let alone Pakistan ($1,407). By 2021-22, its literacy rate (76 per cent) had also caught up with India and was far ahead of Pakistan (58 per cent in 2019); and its infant mortality rate (24) eclipsed India’s (26), and left Pakistan (51) far behind.
If all of this happened under Sheikh Hasina, why did she fall? She ignored a decades-old lesson — that exceptions notwithstanding, economic growth without sufficient job creation, coupled with an authoritarian repression of dissent, is insufficient for political legitimacy. If the army, after a point, refuses to shoot at mass protests, the end can only be near. Rulers in the Global South and beyond should pay attention.
The writer is Sol Goldman professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute
