For decades, politicians, soldiers, ulema, poets, and activists have tried to answer a question that refuses to go away: Is Bangladesh, at its core, a Bengali nation that happens to be Muslim, or a Muslim nation that speaks in Bengali? Each coup, each constitutional amendment, each election and street protest has tugged the country’s identity in one direction or the other. The result is less a neat answer than a jagged conversation, carried out in parliament and in village mosques, in Facebook comment threads and in the quiet of family dining rooms. That conversation did not begin in 1971, although the Liberation War was one of its great turning points. It begins earlier, in the world of undivided Bengal, when the riverine land we now call Bangladesh was simply part of a larger, looser Bengal where Hindus and Muslims shared language, food, songs and often, poverty. That conversation kept attempting to jump across razor-wire fences sharpened by colonial rulers and religious nationalists. Weaponised by state power, it gradually turned culture and faith into rival claims on people’s loyalty.The story of Bangladesh is punctuated by events that have become milestones on the highway of history, directing its movement sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Frequently, the nation found itself at a crossroads and chose one path; a few decades later, it was confronted by that choice again. The choices were not consistent and hence the frequent turmoil with each of the three driving forces vying for dominance - poverty, Bengali pride and Islamic universalism.

It is thus that a mother in pre-partition Bengal was less likely to worry about temples and mosques than about the next harvest and flood. A student activist of the language movement in the then East Pakistan was more influenced by his Bengali identity than of being a Pakistani, even after having been a citizen of that Mullah-military conundrum. A Mukti Vahini soldier was more imbued with secular ideas of Bangabandhu, as Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was called, than the Pakistani propaganda labelling Hindus as “kafirs” surrounding their land and threatening their religion. The village imams adjusted their sermons each time the BNP’s Khaleda Zia and the Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina alternated as Prime Ministers, the former emphasizing the Islamic identity and distancing from India, the latter, the secular Bengali identity and overlap with Indian history with not much to do with bigoted Pakistan. It was a continuous struggle between the choices; one which separated with a dividing ‘or’ and the one which wanted to adopt a uniting ‘and’. For a century, Bangladeshis had been asked to answer the overlap with an unambiguous answer, “Pohela Boishakh and/or Ramadan?”

Bangladesh was born in 1971 not on a blank slate, not on a unifying agenda, but on the bed of an argument. It came weighed down with at least three heavy inheritances: the cultural legacy of Bengal, the political trauma of the 1947-Partition, and the ideological promise of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims. The new state sailed into a world already crowded with invisible but powerful apparitions, that might never leave it alone with just its history, art, music, cuisine and other paraphernalia of a self-contained culture, independent of religion, politics and ideology.From the first hours of independence, the language of the new leadership left little doubt about one thing: this was supposed to be a Bengali nation. The speeches were in Bangla, not Urdu; of a people long humiliated by a distant capital; of a culture that had survived neglect, ridicule, and violence. It was a story of linguistic and cultural emancipation, told in the cadences of revolution, which had ended the domination of a minority situated more than a thousand miles to the West. That minority’s official language, Urdu, young and synthetic, contrasted with the organic Bengali, as did their hardline Islamist ideology with Bengal’s perpetual tradition of keeping apart such differences from everyday life. There was a good reason for this. Bangladesh was a Muslim majority island surrounded by an ocean of other faiths, Hindus, Buddhists and animists. West Pakistan bordered only Muslim majority countries, except its nemesis, India, which became the surgeon that severed Bangladesh, separating the conjoined twin.Yet, even in those euphoric days, another story tugged at the edges. Most Bangladeshis were devout Muslims. The mosques were full, the azan rang out over shattered cities and villages, and the war dead were buried with Islamic rites. The very same fighters who had rallied under secular slogans saw no contradiction in thanking Allah for victory. For them, Bengali and Muslim were not competing identities but overlapping ones; the former was the sacred soil and the latter the infinite sky.

The new constitution reflected this tension. On paper, it took a bold step: secularism was enshrined as a founding principle. Religion, it promised, would not be used for political ends. The state would not privilege one faith over another. For a country that had just broken away from an explicitly Islamic republic, this was a striking declaration. It signalled a desire to build a different kind of Muslim-majority state, one that placed language and culture at the centre of national identity.But constitutions are not magic spells. They cannot erase memory, habit, or belief. In the tea stalls of Old Dhaka, in madrasa classrooms, in village courtyards, people continued to argue about what independence was really for. Was it just to shake off West Pakistan’s economic and political domination? To protect the Bengali language from Urdu’s encroachment? To build a just Islamic society free from military rule? Or all of the above, in different proportions, for different people? Or none of the above; Bengalis were inherently different from the Punjabis, Sindhis, Balochis and Pashtuns and so independence was an imperative of its own.

Time has proved that the last alternative has a life of its own in Bangladesh and it refuses to die. The pipe-smoking Mujibur Rehman had made a clear choice; his killers too made a choice, clear and diametrically opposite. Sheikh Hasina and her party carried the legacy of the former. Khaleda Zia had the support of the killers but she did not carry their legacy, which is on the scene as Jamaat-e-Islami. Mohammad Yunus, who became the unelected leader of the nation during the transition after Sheikh Hasina escaped to India, had thrown his lot with the Jamaat giving it strength. Yet, the BNP did not align with the Jamaat during the elections. This distinction between the Bangladesh of Yunus and that of Tarique Rehman is better not forgotten in India.We, in India, should remember one more fact; the BNP, for all its affinity with the Islamic fundamentalists, kept a woman as its leader, even when out of power, all through the long, and at times tyrannical, reign of Sheikh Hasina. It is true that Khaleda Zia had once formed a coalition government with the Jamat to keep Sheikh Hasina out of power. It is also true that the BNP had won some elections and had ceded power when it lost. Now, after coming back to power, it has not done anything to ban the Awami League although the ban on its contesting elections, imposed by Yunus, continues. Yes, the new leader is wooing China but so did Sheikh Hasina during her last days in power. Opportunism has always been the name of the game in geopolitics.It is time Indians stop seeing Bangladesh through the friend/enemy or Bengali/Muslim binary and treat it as a strategically important neighbour which is on China’s radar as an anti-India ally.

(DAILYWORLD )