The scales are unfavourably tilted
impart constitutional legitimacy to the military dictatorships that followed Mujib’s assassination. Among other things, Zia deleted Article 12 which proscribed religious parties.
The removal of this article paved the way for the entry of the Jamaat-i-Islami into the political arena. It is not surprising that Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party — now led by his wife — embraced the Jamaat in 2001.
In August 2005, the Bangladesh high court ruled that the 5th Amendment was unconstitutional. The BNP and the Jamaat challenged this verdict. On July 28, 2010, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh dismissed their petitions and upheld the high court’s ruling. What is more, it explicitly criticised the omission of secularism under the 5th Amendment as a step that “destroyed one of the basis of our struggle for freedom and also changed the basic character of the Republic”.
The government took years to give effect to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Eventually, the 15th Amendment passed in 2015 made Bangladesh a secular country with Islam as the state religion. This muddled compromise was Hasina’s way of striking a balance between the religious sentiments of Bangladesh’s Muslim majority and the historic mantle of the liberation war claimed by the Awami League.
But there have been escalating demands from the conservative Islamist critics of the government. The Hefazat wanted the government to prove its Muslim credentials by removing poems from school textbooks that were pronounced as ‘atheist’. The Hasina government quietly complied.
More worrying is the government’s reluctance to uphold the rule of law, especially over freedom of expression. This has emboldened Islamist outfits. Still more problematic is the government’s attempt to silence the political Opposition by using every trick in the book. In so doing it has struck a blow to democracy. Building ‘hate’ statues to stoke chauvinism will deepen the damage already done.