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Abstract
How do we understand the 15th amendment of the Bangladeshi Constitution that restored the principle of secularism and simultaneously (re)inscribed certain populations as outside the cultural nation? I approach this question through a close reading of the Constituent Assembly debates of 1972. The precarious state of minorities, I contend, is not a symptom of an incomplete or failed secularism but a feature of the violence inherent to the nation-state form. The Bangladeshi example suggests not only that minority is a profoundly unstable category but that some minorities are visibly critical to national self-fashioning while others must be invisibilized as national others.
Notes
1 Indigenous peoples.
2 M. S. S. Pandian, ‘Hidden Agenda and Beyond’. The Hindu, 8 April 2000. http://www.thehindu.com/2000/04/08/stories/05082523.htm, accessed 20 March 2018.
3 W. F. Sullivan, E. S. Hurd, S. Mahmood and P. Danchin (Eds.), Politics of Religious Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2015. The essays in the volume seek to dislodge “the tendency in legal and policy circles to present religious freedom as the key to emancipating individuals and communities from violence […]” (Politics of Religious Freedom, Introduction).
4 At the last count in 2011, Hindus constituted only 9.5 per cent of the total population, down from 13.5 per cent in 1974. While the causes are complex and multi-faceted, the steepness of the decline indexes the inhospitability of the general environment. See Shelley Feldman, ‘The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh’. SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal) Vol. 13 (2016); Meghna Guhathakurta, ‘Amidst the Winds of Change: The Hindu Minority in Bangladesh’. South Asian History and Culture Vol. 3. Issue 2 (2012): 288–301; and Dina M. Siddiqi, ‘Communalizing the Criminal or Criminalizing the Communal? Locating Minority Politics in Bangladesh’, in Amrita Basu and Srirupa Roy (Eds.), Violence and Democracy in India. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2007, pp. 223–249. Violent dispossession, attacks on places of worship and social discrimination intensified by a rise in Muslim public religiosity are everyday realities for all minorities. Despite the 1997 Peace Agreement, the Pahari or Jumma population of the Chittagong Hill Tracts lives under often-violent settler–colonial conditions. See Naeem Mohaiemen (Ed.), Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism. Dhaka: Drishtipat Writers Collective, 2010; and Dina M. Siddiqi, ‘Against Forgetting? Gendered Justice in “Postconflict” Bangladesh’, in R. Manchanda (Ed.), Access to Justice: Experiments in Accountability in Post Conflict South Asia. Sage: New Delhi, 2017.
5 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006; Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’. Trans. Immanuel Wallerstein and Chris Turner, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Vol. 13. Issue 3 (1990): 329–361.
6 Sadia Saeed, Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
7 The formal restoration of secularism has had minimal meaningful impact, it appears. Last year, minorities were dispossessed of an estimated 20,000 acres of land. See Staff Correspondent, ‘20,000 Acres of Land Grabbed in 2017’. The New Age, 30 March 2018.
8 Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003; Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
9 Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
10 See Fernando, The Republic Unsettled, p. 9. Fernando provides a fascinating analysis of French debates on the doctrinal status of the hijab and the inability on the part of secular critics and members of the Stasi Commission to conceive of wearing a headscarf as a truly autonomous choice if it is also considered a religious obligation (pp. 168–169).
11 Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age.
12 Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, p. 11.
13 Humeira Iqtidar, ‘State Management of Religion in Pakistan and Dilemmas of Citizenship’. Citizenship Studies Vol. 16. Issue 8 (2012): 1014.
14 Of the 469 elected in 1970, several had perished in the war while others had been disqualified or expelled by the time the CA had been convened.
15 Vol. 2: 8, 24 October, p. 246. Emphasis added.
16 Vol. 2: 4, 19 October, p. 113.
17 Ibid., p. 114.
18 Vol. 2: 3, 14 October, p. 85.
19 Saeed, Politics of Desecularization, p. 125, italics in original.
20 This resolution, incorporated into the Constitution of Pakistan in 1949, allowed for the incorporation of Islamic principles into the Constitution. See the article by Farahnaz Ispahani in this issue.
21 See for instance A. K. M. Obaidur Rahman's speech, pp. 202–205.
22 Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide. New York: Vintage, 2014.
23 Maulana Bhashani's National Awami Party (NAP) boycotted the elections on moral grounds, leaving the AL as the only viable political option for most Bengalis.
24 See, for instance, Badruddin Umar, ‘A Leftist Critique of the Constitution’, in Rachel MacDermott et al. (Eds.), Sources of Indian Tradition: Modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, Vol. Two, Third Edition, pp. 864–866.
25 Vol. 2: 2, 1972, p. 61.
26 Ibid.
27 Vol. 2: 2, p. 37.
28 I would like to thank Neeti Nair for reminding me of the particular fear of Biharis/collaborators at that moment, and for pushing me to think about the implications of this for my argument.
29 Noted Bengali film maker Zahir Raihan had disappeared in this dark zone earlier.
30 Vol. 2: 8, p. 252.
31 Pre-eminent scholar and public intellectual, Professor Anisuzzaman of Dhaka University's Bangla Department was an integral member of the Drafting Committee. He was responsible for the language used in the Constitution, which was written entirely in Bangla. Interview with author, 21 December 2017, Dhaka.
32 Vol. 2: 13, 31 October, p. 452.
33 Aamir Mufti, in 2007, provides a compelling analysis of how this contradiction plays out in postcolonial India: Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
34 Kaptai Dam was built in the early 1960s to provide electricity for the industrial development of East Pakistan. Its construction displaced and dispossessed a large segment of Rangamati's Chakma population, destroyed the livelihoods of those who remained by the flooding of arable land and produced refugees, many of whom have yet to be ‘repatriated’. The beneficiaries of the electricity generated by the dam were overwhelming Bengali-speaking plains dwellers. See Amena Mohsin on the subsequent rise of a separatist movement: Amena Mohsin, The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1997.
35 Vol. 2: 9, p. 292.
36 Vol. 2: 13, p. 452.
37 Ibid.
38 pp. 458 and 459.
39 p. 459.
40 p. 461.
41 p. 460. Emphasis added.
42 Vol. 2: 5, p. 157.
43 Vol. 2: 7, p. 201. Italics mine.
44 See for instance Saeed, Politics of Desecularization, pp. 98–101.
45 Vol. 2: 7, p. 201.
46 Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘“Forced Pregnancy”, Humanitarian Access to Reproductive Rights, and Locating “Life” Within the Powers of “Death”’, in Veena Das and Clara Han (Eds.), Living and Dying in the Contemporary World. A Compendium. University of California Press, 2015, pp. 130–142.
47 Ibid., p. 133.
48 Vol. 2: 7, pp. 206–208.
49 Interview with the author, 30 October 2017, New York.
50 Siddiqi, ‘Communalizing the Criminal or Criminalizing the Communal?’, pp. 223–249.
51 Feldman, ‘The Hindu as Other’, 2.
52 Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age.
53 In the popular imagination, the people of the CHT have long been demonized as anti-national. The abduction by unknown perpetrators of two leaders of the Hill Women's Federation is only the latest in a series of routine acts of violence and intimidation against the Jumma population in Hill Tracts which now has more Bengali settlers than indigenous peoples. See Rahnuma Ahmed, ‘Abduction, Freedom, Failure’. The New Age, 23 April 2018.