Why Bangladesh is unable to heal itself

It’s more than a century old, it ebbs and flows but never goes away, the conflict in Bangladesh between Bengali nationalism and assertions of Islamic faith. In its current phase, the latter is again on the rise, as history repeats itself.

The Bengali agitation against British governor-general Lord George Curzon’s 1905 partitioning of the Bengal Presidency — into a Muslim-majority East Bengal and Assam and a Hindu-majority West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — successfully reversed the execution of a divide-and-rule policy; that partition was annulled in 1911.

At the same time, Anwesha Roy writes in her book Making Peace, Making Riots that in the early period of the Swadeshi movement, which stretched from 1903-08, patriotism came to be identified with Hindu revivalism. Muslims came to resent Hindu assumptions of superiority. The riots of 1906–07 in Mymensingh, Jessore and other areas of East Bengal, which found a response among working class Muslims, bear testimony to this. The All India Muslim League was, in fact, founded in Dhaka in 1906. Historian Kenneth McPherson traced the rise of Muslim communalism in Bengal to the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation movement from 1918–22.

He pointed out the strains in the communal rapprochement during the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation movement and identified the attitude of the Hindu bhadralok as a cause for the growth of Muslim communalism. He argued that while Muslim support for the boycott (organised in Calcutta as part of Khilafat–Non-Cooperation) was overwhelming, Hindu support was lukewarm. By the end of 1923, communal relations were in ruins, leading to the Calcutta riots.

The riot of 1930, though, was linked to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Dhaka was the heart of the jute belt. From 1926 onward, the product market in jute had begun to wobble, and by 1930 it had collapsed. Elections to provincial legislatures were held for the first time in 1937.

In Bengal, the Muslim League won 39 seats, the Krishak Praja Party (KPP) 36 seats and the Congress 54 seats. Fazlul Huq of the KPP approached the Congress to form a coalition, but they couldn’t reach an agreement, with the Congress insisting on giving centrality to the release of political prisoners and the KPP to the settlement of agrarian debt. The KPP, then, forged an alliance with the League.

A significant chunk of the KPP resented this — and Huq was catapulted into joining the League and thereby ensuring its growth in Bengal. The 1940s were marked by a steady rise in the communal temperature in Bengal. The Dhaka riot of 1941 was in a way a forerunner of the horrors of the Great Calcutta Killing and the Noakhali riots of 1946. The League’s main volunteer organisation in Bengal, as elsewhere in the country, was the Muslim National Guard.

On 3 March 1944, an intelligence input provided by the Bengal government’s home department noted: ‘If, as has been recently reported by a well-placed observer, the intention of this “Council of Action” is to put the League Organization throughout India on a fighting basis against Hindus or the British government, as and when occasion arises, the League will no doubt find in the MNG a well-disciplined organization to carry out its plans.’

In British India, the MNG was to the League what the RSS was to the Hindu Mahasabha. In October 1944, Richard Casey, then governor of Bengal, communicated to then viceroy, Lord Archibald Wavell: ‘There is little Muslim opinion in Bengal which does not favour Pakistan of some sort. The supporters of the Muslim League are of course most vocal about it, but even those outside the League are not in opposition.’

In August 1947, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a student activist in Calcutta when East Bengal became East Pakistan. He returned home, to his new country, where he plunged into politics, turning into a Bengali nationalist, with a deep attachment to his mother tongue and culture. He was instrumental in renaming his party, then known as the Awami Muslim League, a more secular sounding Awami League.

Unsurprisingly, since the very purpose of carving out Pakistan was to assert and uphold the Islamic identity of Muslims, he was immediately on a collision course. The country’s founder and leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, rejected the demand for Bengali as a concurrent national or official language of Pakistan alongside Urdu. This, despite East Pakistan being overwhelmingly Bengali speaking and Bengalis being in a numerical majority compared to West Pakistanis.

Notwithstanding the brute power of the state, including the might of the armed forces, the Bengali nationalists prevailed in due course. Liberation came on a heady December day in 1971, when the Indian military, coming to the aid of the Awami League and its Mukti Bahini, secured the surrender of Pakistani soldiers.

The majority in what was now Bangladesh rejoiced at their cultural, linguistic, economic and political freedom. But not everyone was happy. The religious Jamaat-e-Islami had opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan; it never reconciled itself to the transformation.

On 15 August 1975, Mujib and most of his family became victims of a coup d’état. Subsequently, Ziaur Rahman, the Bangladesh Army’s chief of staff, took control of the country in 1977. The following year, he formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and, as its candidate, was elected as president of Bangladesh. The BNP started its journey as a centrist force but soon drifted right. Indeed, the Jamaat has been its main ally for some years.

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In the continuing tussle between Bengali nationalism, as mainly embodied in the Awami League, and Islamic assertion, as represented by the BNP and Jamaat, the former again had the upper hand from 1996-2001 and 2009–24. Sheikh Hasina, one of Mujib’s two children who escaped the 1975 massacre, became prime minister. Hasina unleashed the full coercive power of the state upon her opponents, turning her victimhood into a political vendetta. Her excesses caught up with her, though, culminating in a coup that made her flee the country in August 2024.

On her tackling of the students’ unrest last July and August, a UN fact-finding report concluded: ‘Based on reported deaths compiled by governmental and nongovernmental sources, in combination with other available evidence, OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Right) assesses that as many as 1,400 people could have been killed during the protests, [the] vast majority of whom were killed by military rifles and shotguns loaded with lethal metal pellets, commonly used by Bangladesh’s security forces. Thousands more suffered severe, often lifealtering injuries.’

The inescapable reality of Bangladesh’s predicament is that the conflict between Bengali nationalism and Islamic assertion has never gone away. All the political jockeying aside, that social conflict still underpins its present-day trials as a nation.

Ashis Ray can be found on X @ashiscray. You can read more of his writings here