How the rise of Pro-Pak Jamaat is tearing apart secularism in Bangladesh
Opinion by Aleya Sheikh
Bangladesh was not born in a conference room, not in a diplomatic settlement. It was born in the blood. The nine months of 1971 represent one of the most horrific episodes of mass violence in post-World War II history—a genocide carried out by the Pakistan military against its own Bengali citizens in the eastern wing of the country. The dead are estimated to be from three hundred thousand to three million. Women were raped as a weapon of war. The intellectuals were hunted and killed methodically. In the middle of this carnage was not just the Pakistani army, but also its ideological partner—Jamaat-e-Islami—the religious political party that had spent the last two decades since 1947 crushing Bengali cultural identity in the name of an undivided Islamic Pakistan. Jamaat’s student wing, Al-Badr, was auxiliary killers for the Pakistani military, identifying and killing Bengali freedom fighters and Hindu minorities. The December 1971 liberation was therefore not only a political divorce from Pakistan but a moral condemnation of religious nationalism as an instrument of oppression.
It is a verdict that is now being systematically reversed.
When Bangladesh adopted its constitution in 1972, the founding fathers enshrined four fundamental state principles: nationalism, democracy, socialism and — crucially — secularism. This was no mistake. The millions who had fought and died to free themselves from Pakistan had done so precisely because they rejected the two-nation theory that said religion alone could define a nation. The constitution of 1972 was a declaration that the Bengali people would not be consigned to faith. Secularism, in this context, was not anti-Islam, but anti-theocracy. It was the constitutional form of a hard-won conviction that religion must not be employed as a weapon by the state against its own citizens.
However, constitutions are only as strong as the political will to enforce them. Over five decades, successive governments have amended, eroded and manipulated the founding document of Bangladesh to get incumbency advantage. Scholars have observed that the 1979 Fifth Amendment, under military ruler Ziaur Rahman, erased secularism and added the Bismillah invocation. Under President Ershad, the 1988 Eighth Amendment went further, declaring Islam the state religion. Only in 2011 did the Awami League government restore secularism through the Fifteenth Amendment, controversially retaining Islam as the state religion and creating a constitutional duality that has been debated by legal scholars ever since. “The constitution has been amended seventeen times, mostly to give successive governing parties an incumbency advantage, one constitutional scholar noted.
Then, on August 5, 2024, came. The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, precipitated by a mass student uprising, has created a political vacuum that Jamaat-e-Islami has taken with disturbing alacrity to fill. The party, which was banned from contesting elections in 2013 when a court declared its registration illegal, re-emerged as a major organised force. Moreover, with its resurgence came an instant attack on the constitutional soul of Bangladesh. The Constitution Reform Commission appointed by the interim government headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus recommended that secularism, socialism and nationalism should be removed altogether from the constitution and be replaced with “equality, human dignity, social justice and pluralism.” Jamaat went even further, demanding that even the word “pluralism” be dropped, proposing instead a formulation that would carve out protections only for explicitly named identity categories. Without its secular substance, the cosmetics of pluralism would leave minorities and heterodox believers without any structural constitutional protection. That is not reform. It is erasing.
The attack on Bangladesh’s secular identity has not stopped at the constitutional text. It has been inscribed in blood on city streets, temple walls and Sufi shrines. The Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council of Bangladesh said there were at least 2,442 incidents of violence against minorities between August 2024 and June 2025, including killings, sexual assaults and attacks on places of worship. Prothom Alo’s own correspondents recorded more than 1,000 attacks on houses and business establishments of minority communities in the first fortnight after Hasina’s ouster. Hindus, who make up roughly 8% of Bangladesh’s 180 million people, have suffered a spate of vigilante violence that NPR called one of the worst episodes of targeted communal violence in recent Bangladeshi history.
The Sufi shrines, the very embodiment of Bangladesh’s syncretic, pluralistic Islamic tradition, have been singled out for particular ferocity. A coordinated attack was carried out on the devotees of the shrine by armed attackers, believed to be linked with Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing Chhatra Shibir, an international leading human rights organisation reported. Police vehicles were parked outside, and police officers reportedly did not intervene. This was not a single event. Since August 5, 2024, extremist groups have attacked, vandalised, looted and burnt more than 107 Sufi shrines, and blocked 321 annual festivals. This intentional assault upon Sufi culture is a trademark of Wahhabi-inspired Islamism—the ideology which Jamaat has represented throughout history.
Alongside this violence, Jamaat and its allies have waged a parallel war on Bangladesh’s liberation war legacy, the very historical memory that defines the nation’s birth. In the first 10 days alone, more than 1,494 sculptures, murals and monuments have been vandalised, set on fire or uprooted in 59 districts since August 5. The Mujibnagar Memorial Complex in Meherpur, the holy place where the first government of Bangladesh took oath on April 17, 1971, was attacked and turned into ruins. Broken pieces of sculptures of freedom fighters’ resistance, suffering of refugees and the historic March 7 speech are now surrounded by scattered plastic litter. Prothom Alo’s investigation found that the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs has received reports of damage from at least 35 districts. However, no funds have been allocated for restoration. No case has been filed against the perpetrators. The Liberation War Affairs Adviser admitted that the environment was “not conducive to filing cases” — an astonishing admission of official paralysis in the face of what is effectively the physical demolition of national memory.
Into this charged atmosphere, Pakistan’s military tossed in a grenade of its own. Last December, on the last Friday, the Pakistani military crossed a line by branding Bangladesh’s independence hero Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman a “traitor.” That label was used by the Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, to insult an entire nation and one of its founding leaders at a press briefing. As the Dhaka Tribune observed in a scalding editorial reply, Pakistan’s own official inquiry into the 1971 war, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, had charged the Pakistani army with senseless arson, killings, rape of Bengali women as a deliberate tool of terror, and systematic targeting of Hindu civilians. That report did not mention Mujibur Rahman as a traitor even once. For Pakistan’s military to do so, 54 years after liberation, is not a historical argument – it is a provocation. It also tells us a lot about whose interests align with whose.
This is no accident of timing. As Jamaat steps up its efforts to change the constitutional identity of Bangladesh, the Pakistani military establishment provides ideological cover by resurrecting the narrative that Bangabandhu was an enemy of Islam. The same slur was used to justify genocide in 1971. Bangladeshis ignore the pattern of Jamaat’s domestic manoeuvres being in synchrony with the return of Pakistan’s hostility toward the founding story of Bangladesh at their peril.
What is unfolding in Bangladesh is the slow, systematic dismantling of the idea that gave the country reason to exist. Secularism did not come to Bangladesh from outside: it was the hard-earned conclusion of a people who had lived under the boot of religiously justified oppression. To replace it with a hollow ‘pluralism’ that Jamaat itself wants to further dilute, while destroying the physical and historical symbols of liberation, is to betray not just a constitution but three million dead.
Bangladesh finds itself at a crossroads its founders could never have imagined — confronting the possibility that the very forces their sacrifice defeated may yet shape the country’s future. The answer is not in silence, not in administrative paralysis, not in conciliation of parties whose founding ideology was genocidal. It must be demonstrated in the rehabilitation of Mujibnagar, in the prosecution of those who attacked shrines and temples, and in the unapologetic defence of secularism — not as a relic of 1972, but as the living principle of a pluralist democracy.
