Why claims that Bangladesh will become a ‘Taliban state’ do not match reality

The discussion about Islamism in Bangladesh is being dominated by two extremist positions, which obscures the truth and risks drawing battle lines that are not representative of reality.

On one side is the wildly exaggerated view that with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League gone, Bangladesh will become a Taliban state. On the other is the call for religious harmony by Muhammad Yunus, the head of the interim government, in the face of the domestic rhetoric of Islamist ideologues.

The truth is more nuanced.

The suggestion that Bangladesh is being overrun by Islamists is disingenuous. It reflects the Islamophobic talking points of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party. From the Bangladeshi perspective, this is part of the propaganda that has emerged from the Awami League since party leader Sheikh Hasina was forced out of her prime minister’s seat by mass protests on August 5 and sought shelter in India.

Among the most vocal advocates of this claim has been Sajeeb Wazed, Hasina’s son, who has been granted the formidable platform of the Indian media without any scrutiny, fact-checking or rebuttal of his falsehoods.

For the past decade-and-a-half, the Indian state has exerted undue influence on Bangladesh through a client Awami League government. In an attempt to create cover for its actions, it presented Hasina as the only option against rising Islamism.

The BJP’s motivations at stepping up this claim are clear. Having failed to win an outright majority in the Lok Sabha elections despite a sustained campaign propagating Hindutva ideology and painting Bangladeshis as potential Islamist encroachers who threaten India’s internal security, it has seized the opportunity presented by Hasina’s toppling to revitalise its base.

Amidst this noise, many have failed to understand the role played by the Awami League in facilitating the rise in Islamic conservatism and Islamism in Bangladesh. It is time that the world peeks behind the curtain of secularism that the Awami League regime erected with such zeal, using it as a public relations strategy to cover up its autocracy.

Hasina’s Awami League not only appeased Islamists such as the hardline clerical organisation Hefazat-e-Islam, but actually worked closely with it. If Hefazat has a representative in the current interim government (in the form of the organisation’s vice president AFM Khalid Hossain), it is because the Awami League nurtured the group that had little visibility beyond a few regional pockets to political relevance on a national level.

Among the lasting effects of this insidious relationship is that a generation of school students have been brought up on revised national textbooks and curriculum that removed writers from religious minorities and socially liberal texts in favour of an Islamist narrative.

Adding to this challenge, Bangladesh’s public education is in its death throes, largely because of the crony capitalism rampant during Hasina’s rule. With private education prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of the population, madrasas emerged as the only accessible alternative.

A truly secular party would have reformed madrasa education. Instead, the Awami League, having outsourced public education to madrasas, made the degrees issued by these institutions equivalent to national school and university certificates. This resulted in the emergence of Islamism as a dominant view in Bangladeshi society. It gave Islamists political influence at the cost of the socio-political marginalisation of minorities.

For her contribution to this, Hasina was garlanded with the title of “Mother of Qawmi” or madrasas.

Over the Awami League’s 15-year reign, it became less representative of minorities within its party ranks and veered further right, using religious politics. Moreover, the military oppression of indigenous peoples and the capture by party members of land owned by Hindus and Buddhists trended upwards during Hasina’s rule.

However, while Islamism entered the political mainstream in the aftermath of Hasina’s fall, it has never had nationwide electoral appeal in Bangladesh. The Awami League was firmly opposed to the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders had collaborated with the Pakistani military during the Liberation War. But this opposition was based on the role of the Jamaat’s leaders rather than the organisation’s Islamist philosophy. In fact, the Awami League colluded with the Jamaat to gain power via a prolonged civil resistance movement against the then Bangladesh Nationalist Party government and subsequent general election in 1996, and worked with smaller, more fundamentalist Islamist parties thereafter, to create alternatives to Jamaat.

While there is every chance that the Jamaat will fill part of the political vacuum created by the Awami League’s spectacular demise – it has shown itself to be more functional and disciplined than the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and has deeper organisational roots than the remaining political parties – the current prominence of Islamist politics goes beyond the Jamaat alone. This would not have been possible without the Awami League’s committed patronage of Islamist organisations and parties.

Bangladesh is one of the few Muslim-majority countries not to be governed by an Islamist party or even see one becoming dominant, partly because its creation was predicated on a rejection of Islamism in Pakistan. As a consequence, the visibility of Islamist interests in the aftermath of the August uprising was inevitable, not least because both the main national parties – the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – have cynically used Islamism over the years without reforming or evolving it.

As a result, the interim government has Islamist representatives. More worryingly, the once-banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which has close links with the military, and the recently freed Al-Qaeda ideologue Jasimuddin Rahmani have resumed proselytising openly.

Like Hefazat, their extremist views are distinct from Jamaat’s brand of Islamism. The recent vandalisation of Hindu and Buddhist temples is of course condemnable, but the co-ordinated destruction of Sufi shrines across the country is more indicative of the acceptance and appeal of hardline Islamism.

Equally troubling signs come from the prevalence of misogynistic jingoism and hate speech directed at atheists, the LGBTQ+ community and indigenous minorities, with impunity.

This trend started under the Awami League’s rule. The targeted jihadi attacks on prominent members of religious minorities, freethinkers and the LGBTQ+ community from 2013 to 2016 helped eradicate dissenting voices. Rather than creating a safe environment for these persecuted groups, the Awami League enacted de facto anti-blasphemy laws, including the draconian Digital Security Act 2018 and its successor, Cyber Security Act 2023.

These were enforced by arresting members of vulnerable groups for “hurting religious sentiments”, standing in stark contrast to the complete lack of protection afforded to these communities when they were subjected to repeated bigoted attacks.

Though many believed that the Awami League was secular, its actual strategy was to project to the world the illusion of being an outpost in the global War on Terror to the world even as it appeased Islamism at home. Its authoritarianism ensured that the Islamism it was nurturing did not spill over and damage this facade.

The fundamental change in Bangladesh has not been an Islamist takeover, but the truth about the prevalence of Islamism finally being exposed.

Misunderstanding this as the country turning into a Taliban state, however, does a disservice not only to Islamist politics, but to Islam as a religion in Bangladesh.

For one thing, despite the increase in socio-political conservatism overseen by the Awami League, neither the activities nor the ideology of Salafi jihadi groups has popular appeal in Bangladesh.

For another, Islamist politics in the country is not homogeneous. On the contrary, it is fractious, with little ability to coalesce into a unified Islamism that could capture the imagination of Bangladesh.

Moreover, the hardline version of the religion, like the militant fundamentalism that sprouts from it, is a foreign import. While it is beginning to replace the syncretic, pluralistic Islam indigenous to Bangladesh, the tipping point has not yet been reached.

Looking past the alarmist discourse surrounding Islamism centred on West Asia and propelled by the BJP’s bigotry, East Asia provides ample examples of tolerant – if not secular – Muslim-majority countries having Islamist strains in their mainstream politics.

If the zealous Hindutva rhetoric in India is dialled down and the West is willing to have an honest, constructive relationship with Bangladesh, Bangladeshis can be encouraged to chart a course that draws from the experiences of these East Asian countries.

Even if that does not come to pass, the devolution to a Taliban state is neither an immediate risk nor inevitable. If the Awami League and its Indian patrons had honestly pursued secularism, this moot point would not speciously dominate conversations about Bangladesh at a time when the focus needs to be accountability for and rebuilding after autocratic rule.

Ikhtisad Ahmed is the managing editor of Netra News.