There are new questions over the future of Bangladesh after a shooting at a restaurant in Dhaka in early July in which more than 20 died. The attack revealed links between its perpetrators — from the educated middle class — and ISIS, which was quick to claim responsibility. Bangladesh has a population of 169 million, with an average age of 25, and is 89% Muslim. It is undergoing both an identity crisis and a political crisis, the two closely linked. The identity crisis relates to the relationship between Islam and the state, and the divisions left by the 1971 liberation war; the political crisis is perpetuated by the struggle between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Awami League, the party of prime minister Sheikh Hasina. And Hasina uses the fight against Islamism to block all political opposition.
To understand this, it’s useful to look at Bangladesh’s short, turbulent history. In 1947, the partition of the subcontinent created independent India and a two-part Pakistan. East Pakistan soon felt neglected by the central government in Islamabad, West Pakistan. When advocates of greater autonomy for East Pakistan won the 1970 general election, the outgoing government tried to prevent them from taking power. To help repress the Bangladesh Awami League — which had led the struggle for independence under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — the Pakistani armed forces used local militias, the Razakars, which recruited from groups close to the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami. Military campaigns, massacres, murders of intellectuals and rapes by the Razakars and their supporters claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and led to a flood of refugees. The Indian army’s intervention enabled the separatists to win, leading to the creation of the state of Bangladesh in December 1971.
As prime minister of a secular, socialist democracy, Mujibur Rahman became known as the ‘father of the nation’. He was assassinated in 1975, (...)