International economist and Dhaka Tribune contributor Jyoti Rahman has recently written an article on the specter of communal violence occurring before the coming national election.
The article titled “An Unholy Omen Is Looming over Bangladesh” and published on the renowned Indian website The Wire, suggests that orchestrated large scale communal violence is increasingly likely to occur in the coming days, with Durga Puja approaching and the election looming.
According to the author, the current regime is also likely to be the main beneficiary of such violence as it will use it to portray the opposition before the international community as irredeemably violent and communal, an often used and successful strategy from the political playbook.
Here I am aiming to provide a short review of the author’s main arguments and a brief commentary.
Jyoti Rahman argues that for the minority community in Bangladesh, which is mainly comprised of Hindu religionists, de facto equality of citizenship has never been realized although it has been granted de jure equality.
This lack of equality has been manifested through the community becoming subject of more organized violence, less security of property, more indignity of religious stigmatization.
Periodic bouts of communal violence in Bangladesh have gained most notoriety, although they are nowhere close to the scale and intensity of religious violence that have been taking place in our neighbouring country for a long time.
However, ordinary Hindu citizens of Bangladesh have significantly higher risk of property loss than loss of life or limbs. This lack of security of property is a complex legacy of the historical Enemy Properties Act, endemic lack of rule of law, and nefarious local politics.
One of the main points of the article is that, although Islamist organizations and BNP have been often blamed for organized violence against the Hindu community, paradoxically it is individuals associated with the supposedly minority-friendly Awami League that most often takes the lead in expropriating properties of ordinary Hindus.
This finding has been confirmed by researchers who explicitly belong to the AL camp of intellectuals. Moreover, this fact cannot be attributed to the longevity of AL in power because the most famous study came out in 2000, when the length of tenure at power for AL was no more than for other parties.
Studies made by independent NGOs in more recent years have similarly found that life and property of ordinary Hindus have not been any more secure during the current tenure of the ruling party.
That said, there is also little doubt that in a free and fair election, no matter how the majority population votes, Hindu community will overwhelmingly vote for AL.
The answer to this apparent puzzle is quite simple. Minority communities in today's world want equality of dignity as well as equal protection of law.
If among major parties in a democracy, one party renders more respect to the minority community than the others, even rhetorically, the community is highly likely to flock to where they have more respect.
Until quite recently in the modern era, minority communities everywhere were quite satisfied to live in polities that provided them security and opportunities for prosperity. Getting equal rights and respect from the government, as accorded to the majority group, was often the least of their concern in a physically and materially precarious world.
However, that world is no more. Equality of dignity for individuals as well as groups, is becoming a universal value. We can speculatively trace the transition to the new world from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) charter adopted by the United Nations in 1948, where the very first line of the first article proclaims “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
Equal dignity and respect for all groups is next to impossible to realize in a polity that insists on an explicit majoritarian identity. As events all around the world have demonstrated, group identity is more salient than ever in the politics of democracies.
Groups are demanding that they should be accorded not only their due share in distributions of political rights and economic wealth, but also collective dignity.
BNP political leadership seems to have recognized that their past political rhetoric, if not political actions, may not have accorded due recognition of equal dignity of citizenship for minority groups.
The thirty-one-point program of national rebuilding emphatically proclaims a vision of a “rainbow nation” where different groups, faiths, ethnicities and identities are equally recognized and cherished. This is a most welcome development.
Our neighbourhood in South Asia is going through a difficult period of heightened communal strife and tensions. Even darker days seem to be ahead for minority groups in the region.
If our country can insulate itself from such despairing trends and become a better haven for minorities, it will only be writing a glorious chapter in its history.
Shafiqur Rahman is a political scientist.