Will new Bangladesh manage to pull towards religious tolerance?

Events in Bangladesh and the overthrow of the government have come with predictable violence, especially against minorities, particularly Hindus. Attacking minorities is for some reason a pillar of nationalism in South Asia’s post-Independence states.

All nations here also contend with an unresolved identity crisis. The Constitution of Bangladesh opens with the phrase ‘<Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim’. Article 2A says that ‘the state religion of the Republic is Islam, but the State shall ensure equal status and equal right in the practice of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and other religions’.

A 2010 order from Bangladesh’s Supreme Court apparently restored secularism. It said that the ‘preamble and the relevant provisions of the Constitution in respect of secularism, nationalism and socialism, as existed on 15 August 1975, will revive’. However, it left the text on the State’s religion untouched. And so, we have the unusual situation of a nation whose Constitution opens with a Quranic verse in the name of Allah, yet its preamble pledges ‘that the high ideals of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism shall be the fundamental principles of the Constitution’ — while there is also a state religion, which is Islam.

Like Dubai, Bangladesh has its weekend holidays on Friday and Saturday, and is one of the few nations that works on Sunday. This is a practice that even Pakistan does not follow.

At Independence, Pakistan integrated religion into law because it felt this would lend a positive impulse to the nation. Explaining this, Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, said material and scientific development had leapt ahead of the development of the human individual. The result was that man was able to produce inventions that could destroy the world and society. This had happened only because man had chosen to ignore his spiritual side — if he had retained more faith in God, this problem would not have come up.

It was religion, he said, that tempered the dangers of science and, as Muslims, Pakistanis would adhere to Islam’s ideals and make a contribution to the world. The nation-state  enabling Muslims to lead their lives in alignment with Islam did not concern non-Muslims, so obviously they should not have a problem with a reference to that, he held.

What actually happened instead, though, was that the laws concerning Pakistan’s Muslims fell away in time. Early Islam existed at a time when there were no jails. Punishment for criminal offences was usually corporal; there was no ‘detention’. Pakistan introduced amputation of limbs as punishment for theft and trained a set of terrified doctors to carry these out. But Pakistan’s judges, trained in a common law like India’s, were reluctant to pass these sentences. So the laws remained frozen and unused. Pakistan introduced stoning as a punishment for adultery — yet nobody there has been stoned to death.

A brief period of enthusiasm for lashing those accused of drinking alcohol ended. In 2009, the Federal Shariat Court read down the punishment for lashing, with the judges saying drinking was a lesser crime. Under President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan changed the punishment for rape — which was conflated with fornication if the survivor could not produce witnesses to the act — from Shariah back to the penal code.

The law enforcing zakat by debiting 2.5 per cent from the bank accounts of Pakistan’s Sunnis failed because people withdrew their money just before it was due to happen. The Shia, who have a hierarchical clergy to whom they give the money directly, had previously objected and were exempted. A Shariat court order demanding a ban on interest in the banking system has been ignored by successive governments.

The law enforcing fasting during Ramzan — quite needless, because most subcontinental Muslims observe the fast anyway — ran into opposition after Muslim restaurant owners and multiplex owners complained.
The last major attempt to Islamise Pakistan was over two decades ago, under Nawaz Sharif: the so-called 15th Amendment, which was defeated in the Senate. Pakistan remains insufficiently Islamic and, with no hierarchical clergy like Iran’s, can never become theocratic. Unlike Saudi Arabia, it has never had a moral police because Pakistanis are culturally South Asians with local practices.

While Pakistan has moved towards secularism, India has moved substantially in the other direction. This has been true since the 1950s, but far more so in recent times.

In 2015, BJP states began criminalising the possession of beef, triggering a series of beef-related lynchings — even with no actual beef involved.

In 2019, India’s Parliament criminalised the utterance of triple talaq in one sitting, punishing Muslim men for a non-event (because the Supreme Court had already invalidated triple talaq earlier).

After 2018, seven BJP states criminalised interfaith marriage by disallowing conversions and invalidating such marriages, including the applicability of inheritance laws to children born within such relationships. Conversions to Hinduism — defined as the ‘ancestral religion’ — are exempt and not counted as conversions in the BJP states of Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. Many states have been squeezing Christians through anti-conversion laws as well. Yet nobody has ever been convicted of forced conversion — so surely laws are not required; the intent is to harass.
In 2019, Gujarat tightened a law that keeps Muslims ghettoised by preventing them from purchasing and leasing property belonging to Hindus. In effect, foreigners can buy and rent properties in Gujarat that Gujarati Muslims cannot.

We need not get into the treatment of Kashmiris here, because the collective punishment imposed on them no longer arouses our interest.
Pakistan wanted to be constitutionally communal; India wanted to be secular but is communalising itself.

All three nations share a penal code given to them by Macaulay a century and a half ago. But each has amended its laws to enable the state to specifically target minorities. This is today happening in India and is something Pakistan has already been through.

One hopes that Bangladesh, with its second chance at a new beginning, moves towards the secularism that is the inevitable destiny of all three nations that comprised Old India.