It is becoming clearer that the coming election is turning into a religion-centred contest, with the economy and development pushed into the back seat. Because of the Awami League’s undemocratic behaviour it has suffered political defeat, and the BNP’s lazy, half-hearted approach to politics has made things worse. Together they have created a large empty space, and that space has now been taken over by the Islamist forces- Jamaat, Hefazat, Charmonai and their teams. A section of the educated urban middle class tried to capture the “middle space” of politics through NCP, but that experiment has almost collapsed. In this situation, the only loud and confident voice in society today is the voice of the Islamists.
Of course, they are not all saying the same thing. Jamaat is more interested in direct political power, Hefazat wants to do politics by tightening social control, and the Charmonai pir seems keen to become a junior partner in power. Others outfit like “UP Bangladesh” or “Inqilab Moncho” are happy to stay within the political line of their parent organisations and help steer politics from there. The reality is that, through steady work over the last decade, the Islamists have produced a number of strong leaders among young and middle-aged people.
On the other hand, the Awami League as a party had almost fallen apart- the leaked phone calls showed this very clearly. Those recordings revealed a leadership that had become deaf; senior figures had no idea what was actually happening in the country. The BNP is facing an even deeper crisis because of its leadership gap. There has been no clear plan inside the party to develop new leaders and then hand power to them. As a result, many who could have emerged as strong leaders from student or youth fronts were either never allowed into the orbit of central leadership, or were pushed away when they tried to enter.
In other words, party representation for the middle class and the educated left, centre-left, centre-right, liberal and secular groups is now in a very poor state. The urban middle class that had pinned its hopes on BNP is rapidly losing the expectations. On the other side, the Islamists have allowed their younger leaders to come to the front – good or bad, at least they have been given space to appear. This is a very powerful instrument: if people do not have a clear and hopeful picture of the future, they will naturally be more easily influenced in the name of religion. You cannot put all the blame on them for that.
The Islamists know they will not get the secular, liberal or centre-left vote. So, they are working mainly to secure the votes of centre-right and right-leaning Muslims. That is why, when we see attacks on Bauls or the demolishong of shrines – and in many of these incidents we find the direct or indirect involvement of one Islamist group or another – criticism from the left, the liberals or the centre-left does not have much impact. The Islamists simply do not need their votes.
So, we see many Islamist-leaning intellectuals twisting arguments, bringing in different theories, and building a kind of ‘respectable’ support for this politics of ‘protecting Islam’, for punishment for ‘insulting religion’, and for the actions carried out in that name. The basic rights-based principle—that one citizen cannot lay hands on another—is what Islamists used during the Hasina years to gain broad public sympathy when their rights were violated. But after 5 August, the same camp abandoned that principle at the first chance.
Over the last decade, a hardline Islamist politics was slowly growing outside the formal centre of power; after July, they began to see themselves as ‘Islamic revolutionaries’ and tried to strip away the rights of everyone who thinks differently. Between 1947 and 1971, it was Maulana Bhashani, Suhrawardy and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who stood against this expanding influence. Maulana Bhashani turned the Awami Muslim League into the “Awami League.” Under Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy’s leadership, Bengal’s middle-class politics searched for a path between capitalism and socialism. And under Sheikh Mujib’s leadership, the growth of Bengali nationalism made the Liberation War and the independence of 1971 possible.
‘1971’ was not only the defeat of the Pakistani army; it was a shared victory of Bengali Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians against hardline religious forces and Islamic nationalism. Though some confused sections of the left, like ‘Pinaki,’ later attempted to frame the Liberation War in Islamic terms, it remains a struggle by Bengali Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians against the Pakistani army and its Islamist allies, not an Islamist war.
When Ziaur Rahman later emerged as the central figure in politics, he raised “Bangladeshi nationalism” as a counter to Islamist fundamentalism; he did not directly adopt Islamic nationalism as the state identity. Zia certainly used many Islamic symbols, and Awami League and secular circles rightly criticise him for that. But the fact remains that, just as the politics of ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’ was not possible before 1971, many researchers now argue that after 1971 this Bangladeshi nationalism became a kind of evolution of Bengali nationalism. Through the push and pull between these two lines, space opened up in Bangladesh for non-fundamentalist politics, and for some time a balance was maintained between religion and the modern state.
Although the 1947 Pakistan movement grew out of a Muslim identity-based nationalism, many of its leaders did not believe in hardline Islamist politics. But after 1947, fundamentalist groups began to read the Pakistan movement not as a movement for the freedom of Indian Muslims as a whole, but as their own victory. In the 1953 Lahore riots, various non-official sources say anywhere from several hundred to two thousand Ahmadis/Qadianis were killed; this was one of the first major communal massacres in independent Pakistan. Jamaat’s amir Abul Ala Maududi was at one point arrested and punished for incitement related to that riot.
In 2024, we saw how the Islamists claimed the outcome of the July movement as their own achievement and took on themselves the ‘duty of establishing Islam’ in the country – as if there had been no Muslims in Bangladesh before them.
We, Muslims have a long history of standing up to hardline religious forces to protect our politics, our society and our culture. Because of their own mindset, the Islamists keep forgetting this truth. That is why they do not speak of living together; they want to take everything into their own hands. The question now is: in post-2024 Bangladesh, what kind of politics can we Bengali Muslims build against this hardline Islamist politics that will protect our right to live together? Let there be Islamists in society, let there be liberals, let there be seculars, let there be believers and non-believers of all kinds. But no one has the right to destroy the shared space of coexistence, to claim everything as their own, or to attack the life and property of fellow citizens.
The views expressed in this article are of the author’s own. The writer is a Doctoral Fellow, Georgia State University, USA
