Seeking A Bangladesh Beyond Binaries 

Breaking binaries is not easy, not the least when a binary is deeply rooted in forming an identity. In a country overwhelmingly populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims, linguistic and religious identities have frequently come into conflict, creating intense socio-political polarisations. 

On August 3, 2024, roughly 48 hours before a sea of anti-government protesters on the streets forced Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to fly out of the country, Mahfuz Alam (Abdullah), one of the key leaders of the student-led mass uprising, explained their ideology and political position in a Facebook post. He called for breaking the cultural-religious binary that has dominated Bangladesh’s political discourses. 

In his August 3 post, Alam―who subsequently became the special assistant to Bangladesh’s interim government’s chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus on August 28―welcomed the participation of the Leftist and Islamist forces in the student-led mass agitation, but with a caveat: no attempt to revitalise the Shapla-Shahbag binary would be entertained. 

Shahbag-Shapla refers to the head-on collision that the country’s secular-liberal-atheist camp, which prides itself on the Bengali cultural identity, had with the Islamist forces in 2013.

The former agitated at Dhaka’s Shahbag Square, demanding capital punishment for the the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) leaders who opposed the 1971 Liberation War and collaborated with the Pakistan Army in perpetrating genocide on the people of what was then East Pakistan. Their criticism of Islamist politics extended to criticism of many Islamic practices and sometimes Islam itself.

Islamists showed their power with Hefazat-e-Islam’s (HeI) massive gathering at Shapla Square in Dhaka to press for an Islamic way of life. That rally saw vandalism by rally participants and a controversial crackdown by security forces, leading to many deaths. The HeI, notably, has a rivalry with the JeI for the Islamist space. 

Alam and his friends at the Democratic Students Front (DSF)—who were at the forefront of the anti-Hasina agitations in July-August 2024—have, over the past few years, been speaking of bringing the country out of the secular-religious binary and military interventions. 

They argued that both sides in the binary held extremist trends, thrived on the vilification and dehumanisation of the other, and made killing the other justifiable. Alam and his comrades describe themselves as moderate/centrist and democratic. They saw the binary as a barrier before people’s organic solidarity. One of their ways to break the binary was to preach inclusivity, using the word instead of secularism. 

Since August 2024, Alam must have realised that breaking the binary is easier said than done. Since the Yunus government took charge, Islamist forces and religiously-motivated mobs have raised their head and frequently resorted to undemocratic practices to suppress views they oppose–from targeting Sufi shrines in a series of attacks and demolishing statues and sculptures to opposing women’s football, baul-fakiri music events, secular festivals like Basanta Utsav (spring festival), kite-flying events, celebration of Valentine’s Day, public display of sanitary napkins, theatre festivals, vandalism in the book fair for selling books that they find objectionable, and so on.

With every such action, the secular forces championing the Bengali linguistic and cultural identity have raised their voice, expressing grave concerns over the rise of the Islamists. Vandalism and erasure of symbols of the Liberation War, coupled with the JeI’s continued efforts to justify their role in 1971, added fuel to the fire. And the polarisation revived. 

Old Conflict 

Bengali ethnolinguistic or cultural nationalism had its roots in the last leg of the nineteenth century, soon followed by the rise of Hindu nationalism and Muslim nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century. Bengali nationalism’s popularity rose during the Swadeshi movement against Bengal’s first partition in 1905. While the Partition was finally revoked in 1911, the faultlines on religious and economic grounds had been laid bare. 

In 1947, as the religious identity of the Bengali people became prominent, the province was bifurcated, with Muslim-majority eastern Bengal becoming part of Pakistan and Hindu-majority western Bengal becoming part of India. However, the conflict between linguistic and religious identities resurfaced in eastern Bengal (East Pakistan) soon after, starting with the Bengali language movement of 1952. The two major reasons that led to the Partition of Pakistan in 1971 were East Pakistan’s charge of economic and cultural domination by West Pakistan. 

The Bengali nationalism of the Liberation War was essentially linguistic-cultural. Since all Islamist parties opposed eastern Bengal’s parting of ways with the Islamic nation of Pakistan, cultural nationalism assumed a conflicting relationship with Islamist politics. Leftists, even those opposed to the Awami League, have been pro-1971 and largely part of the spectrum of Bengali cultural nationalism. 

Islamist forces initially took a few steps back after the creation of Bangladesh. However, following a period of internal conflict between pro-Liberation War forces, cultural nationalism weakened. During about a decade and a half of military rule, General Ziaur Rahman preached Bangladeshi nationalism, which was inclusive of Islam. He replaced ‘secularism’ in the Constitution with ‘Absolute Trust and Faith in the Almighty’. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad declared Islam as the state religion.

However, two incidents in the early 1990s revived the binary of linguistic versus religious identity. First, in 1991, the JeI declared Ghulam Azam as its head, under whose leadership the JeI collaborated with the Pakistan army in 1971 and engaged in atrocities against Liberation War fighters and their families. Azam was still a Pakistani national when the JeI named him its ameer. 

The formal restoration of a key anti-Liberation War face in Bangladesh politics—all the more a Pakistani national—triggered the pro-Liberation War forces, some of whom, in 1992, formed the Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee (Committee to Eradicate Killers and their Agents). It is this civil society organisation’s agitation seeking trial of those who collaborated with the Pakistan army in 1971 that finally culminated in the Shahbag agitation of 2013. Hasina subsequently used the Shahbag agitation to suppress Islamist forces. She dubbed all her opponents as Islamist-linked. 

New Waves 

Many Bangladeshi civil society members have shown in recent years that this conflict got wrongly portrayed as a conflict between Bengali identity and Muslim identity, completely overlooking the fact that many deeply religious Muslims participated in the Liberation War. Conflating Islamist politics with believers and suspecting practicing Muslims as potential Islamists led to unnecessary polarisation over identity issues, they argued. 

According to Sohul Ahmed, a Dhaka-based researcher and writer on genocide, while opposing the JeI’s Islamist politics, civil society members’ ignorance or disregard for Islam often results in such a language that is difficult to distinguish from Islamophobia. “There are many people who are religious and follow Islam, but the way they speak when opposing Islamist politics, they can easily sound Islamophobic,” Ahmed says.

During the July-August 2024 agitation, the declared centrist-moderate forces were at the forefront. They condemned the Hasina regime’s rampant crackdown on Islamists but also upheld the Liberation War and declared a mission to reclaim the history of the Liberation War from Awami League’s ‘usurpation’. They welcomed the leftists and Islamist forces in the agitation but only ‘as part of the masses’ and clarified that they would not be allowed to take any leadership role. 

However, Islamist forces came out after Hasina’s exit, claiming the August upsurge to be a triumph of Shapla over Shahbag, demanding that it was now time for those behind the Shahbag movement to face trial. Their leaders and social media activists have pressed for imposing an Islamic way of life. The sight of religiously motivated mobs dictating terms has spread panic among a large section of the people, especially the civil society. 

The cultural war was back, now the BNP, the largest party in the post-August scenario, emerging as the main upholder of the Liberation War’s legacy and basher of Islamist politics. The BNP, which Liberation War hero General Ziaur Rahman founded in 1980 during his reign as the military ruler, had a long association with the JeI since 1991. Now they are direct rivals. Leftists and civil society members are expressing concerns over the muscle-flexing of religious forces. 

According to Dhaka-based socio-political researcher and commentator Altaf Parvez, Bangladesh, in reality, is an intensely class-divided society, where the wealth gap is immense. That binary has been carefully kept behind the curtains and it is to hide that binary that attempts were made to create an artificial binary in the name of Shahbag and Shapla. That binary suited both Hasina’s Awami League and the Islamists and, finally, helped Hasina run the country for a decade and a half without allowing any free and fair elections. 

He said that even though the leaders of the July-August upsurge came to power by speaking of reducing discrimination, there has been no progress toward reducing the wealth-based binary in the first six months, and the farmers, workers, and the oppressed have remained largely ignored.  

Parvez pointed out that the July-August movement was possible because people participated in it, rejecting the Shapla-Shahbag binary. Those who came to power toppling the Hasina regime initially spoke of breaking the binary, but that changed with time. 

“The forces of the upsurge now stand a divided lot. Whatever those in power may now say, their actions are aiding and abetting the old binary in different degrees, and they are taking their stand on one side of it,” Parvez said, adding, “To be precise, Shapla is dominating Shahbag currently. Culturally, Bangladesh is going through a period of ‘Shapla’s domination.” 

He added that the battle remains unresolved, and the results of elections expected in some months would reflect the current extent of the binary’s influence. 

As of the last week of February, Alam and other self-proclaimed centrist student forces of the August Upsurge are caught in an intense power struggle with the Islamist forces over retaining a grip in the new party that the student leadership is set to launch.