: Why it is imperative to restore secularism in Bangladesh #IndiaNEWS #National <br>In essence, he was holding aloft the idea that his message of emancipation and national independence for Bangladesh,

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Why it is imperative to restore secularism in Bangladesh #IndiaNEWS #National
<br>In essence, he was holding aloft the idea that his message of emancipation and national independence for Bangladesh, away from the stranglehold of Pakistan, was fundamentally a reassertion of Bengali cultural and political heritage. It was a principle resting on secularism, the conviction that Bangladesh had returned to being a home for people across the religious divide.
Fifty-two years on, Mujibs message of a secular Bangladesh calls for serious scrutiny, given that in the decades since his assassination political illiberalism in the form and shape of non-secularism has undermined the spirit of the country. The fact that the Awami League, the party through which Mujib initiated the movement for a secular polity, has been in power without interruption for the past fourteen years has made not much of a difference in a return of the country to secular nationhood.
For one thing, the imposition of Islam on the country as the religion of the state by the Ershad military regime in the 1980s is yet another measure to be done away with. For another, and coming in the light of the state religion factor, right-wing religious parties, with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party beside them, have grown exponentially in the past many decades, to a point where the political discourse is punctuated not a little by their evident desire to see Bangladesh turn into a religion-based or theocratic state.
For all its huge majority in Parliament, the Awami League has remained stymied by the fear that any move toward dismantling the state structure as it was progressively cobbled into shape following the assassinations of 1975, first of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and then of his colleagues who organised the War of Liberation in 1971, will upset the cart.
Besides, an unspoken objective of the ruling party remains the need to tap the right-wing religious political formations as a vote bank. It is a factor which worries secularists in the country, upsetting them to no end knowing that a traditionally secular political party is today unable or unwilling to undertake the onerous task of a restoration of secular politics in Bangladesh.
And yet within moments of Bangladeshs liberation in December 1971, the provisional government presiding over the armed struggle for freedom decreed a ban on four right-wing political parties which throughout 1971 had publicly and brazenly supported the Yahya Khan junta in its suppression of Bengali rights through military operations in the country.
In broad measure, though, the ban clamped on these parties was an early sign of Bangladeshs espousal of secularism as it started out on the road to independent existence as a nation-state. In other words, it was a fulfilment of the non-communal goals set in the mid-1960s by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party, a reality that was now formally taking shape in light of the successful conclusion of the War of Liberation.

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