Aakar Patel | Can Bangladesh control attacks on minorities, move to secular future?

Bangladesh’s Constitution opens with the phrase “Bismillah ir rahman ir Rahim”. Article 2A says “the State religion of the republic is Islam, but the State shall ensure equal status and equal rights in the practice of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and other religions”.

A 2010 order from Bangladesh’s Supreme Court apparently restored secularism. It said 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, the preamble pledges “that the high ideals of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism shall be the fundamental principles of the Constitution”, but there is also a state religion, which is Islam. Like Dubai, Bangladesh has its weekly holidays on Friday and Saturday and is one of the few nations that works on Sunday. This is a practice that even Pakistan doesn’t 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 human individual’s development. The result was that man was able to produce inventions that could destroy the world and society. This happened only because man had chosen to ignore his spiritual side and 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 State’s enabling of Muslims to lead their lives in alignment with Islam did not concern non-Muslims, so obviously they should not have a problem with that reference, he said.

What happened instead was that the laws concerning Pakistan’s Muslims fell away in time. Early Islam existed when there were no jails. Punishment for criminal offences was usually corporal instead of 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 common law like India’s, were reluctant to pass these sentences and so the laws remained frozen and unused. Pakistan introduced stoning as a punishment for adultery, but nobody was stoned to death.

A brief period of enthusiasm for lashing those accused of drinking alcohol ended, and, 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 bank accounts of Pakistan’s Sunnis failed as people withdrew their money just before it was due to happen. The Shias, who have a hierarchical clergy to whom they give money directly, had earlier objected and were exempted.

The law enforcing fasting in Ramzan -- quite needless because most subcontinental Muslims observe the fast anyway -- ran into opposition after Muslim restaurant owners and multiplex owners complained. A Shariat court order demanding a ban on interest in the banking system has been ignored by successive governments.

The last major attempt to Islamise Pakistan was over two decades ago under Nawaz Sharif: the 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 moral police because Pakistanis are culturally South Asians with local practices.

While Pakistan moved towards secularism, India has moved substantially in the other direction. This has been true since the 1950s but especially in recent times. In 2015, BJP states began criminalising the possession of beef, triggering a series of beef lynchings. In 2019, India’s Parliament criminalised the utterance of “triple talaq” in one sitting, punishing Muslim men for a non-event (as the Supreme Court had already invalidated triple talaq earlier). After 2018, seven BJP states criminalised inter-faith marriage by disallowing conversions and invalidating such marriages, including those which had children. Conversions to Hinduism — defined as “ancestral religion” — were 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. Nobody has ever been convicted of forced conversion, so this is not required, but the intent is to harass. In 2019, Gujarat tightened a law that keeps Muslims ghettoised by denying them access to purchase and lease of properties from 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 as the collective punishment imposed on them no longer arouses interest in us.

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 they have amended their laws to enable the State to specifically target minorities. This is happening in India today and is something that Pakistan went through.

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