(Eight to ten armed terrorists attacked a bakery in the diplomatic zone of Dhaka, Bangladesh on Friday night. The wave of violence in the country over the past months has killed rationalists, bloggers, activists, and members of religious minorities. This article has been republished in light of the attack.)
Like Salman Rushdie’s portrayal of Pakistan in Shame, Bangladesh may be characterised as a place “insufficiently imagined”. As Bangladesh celebrates its liberation from Pakistan, at a time when the country is gripped by frenzy over the hanging of “traitors and collaborators of 1971”, a question assumes salience – is India’s eastern neighbour more Bengali or more Muslim?
This question, surrounding labels of national identity, has bedevilled not just scholars, but also ordinary Bangladeshis. The struggle to come to terms with these two competing identities has brought to the fore other contentious and vexed issues of nationalist politics and nationalism.
There is little disagreement that Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign state in 1971, riding the crest of a language movement politically backed by an equally, if not more, powerful demand for autonomy, and finally secession from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
But events since Bangladesh’s liberation and the new state’s tortured and blood-soaked history point to the adoption of a different ideology that has defined its national identity, which is in stark opposition to the secular principles of the freedom struggle.