Once upon a time, on the edge of the Bay of Bengal, there was a delta that seemed to grow rice and wealth out of water and land. Medieval travelers like Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan who passed through our region in the fourteenth century, wrote of Bengal as a land of plenty, crowded with markets and ships, rich in grain and textiles. To many outsiders it looked like an earthly paradise.
To many of its own people it often felt like something closer to organized hell. The turning point came when foreign traders arrived by sea, set up factories, then built a fort that would later be known as Fort William. Around that outpost grew Calcutta, the nerve centre of a new kind of rule. What started as commerce turned into conquest. Over time, a private trading company became the political master of one of the richest agrarian regions on earth.
Railways were built less to connect people and more to speed up the extraction of jute, indigo, tea and rice. Modern education was introduced, but with a purpose: To create a class that, in Macaulay’s famous phrase, would be Indian in blood and colour but English in taste and mind.
The colonial census, systematically conducted from the late nineteenth century, did not merely count people. It sorted them into rigid boxes of religion, caste, and community.
Hindus and Muslims who had lived with layers of shared culture, language, and local customs were now increasingly imagined as two rival blocs. This was the first big engineering of identity on this land. It worked so well that long after the British left, we continued to think and fight inside those division lines.
Partition: First freedom at a heavy price
Anti-colonial politics in India had hardened around two big projects by the 1940s. Project one envisioned a secular, territorially united India under Hindu leadership. Project two imagined a separate country for Indian Muslims. Allama Iqbal’s stirring line “Sare Jahan Se Achha, Hindustan Hamara” could no longer contain the fractured political imagination of the Indian subcontinent. A two-state solution had become all but inevitable.
For many Bengali Muslims, Pakistan appeared as the only realistic exit from a Hindu-majority polity where they feared permanent marginalization. In reality, the Muslim identity that had been mobilized to win Pakistan was soon turned against half of that very state.
Hafeez Jalandhari’s Qaumi Taranah, opening with “Pak Sarzamin Shad Bad”, could not hold the two wings of Pakistan together. West Pakistani elites treated the Bengali majority as politically suspect and culturally inferior. The language they spoke, the songs they sang, even the way they practiced Islam did not fit the official template.
Out of this humiliation came a new imagination. The Language Movement of 1952, the constitutional struggles of the 1960s, and the Six-Point demand were not only about administrative autonomy. They were also about dignity.
A generation of East Pakistani leaders of the Bengali community gradually shifted from a purely religious notion of nationhood to a linguistic and cultural one. By 1971, the main confrontation was clear. One side stood the Pakistani state and its local Islamist allies, Jamaat and Muslim League, defending a centralized Islamic nationalism that demanded obedience and homogeneity.
On the other stood a broad coalition of Bengalis, religious and liberal, urban and rural, who were rallying around language, culture, and the demand for self-rule. The victory of 1971 gave us a new state and a new narrative, but it did not settle the question of nationalism once and for all.
Two nationalisms inside one state
After independence, two streams of nationalism gradually took shape inside Bangladesh. The first was Bengali nationalism. It rooted the state in the language, literature, and culture that had been central to the liberation struggle. But, they have reduced the complex diversity of Bangladesh into a single cultural story.
The second was Bangladeshi nationalism. It emerged in the late 1970s, partly as a reaction against what its proponents saw as the cultural overreach of Bengali nationalism and its closeness to India. Bangladeshi nationalism tried to shift the basis of identity from ethnicity to citizenship, from “Bengali” to “Bangladeshi.” In practice, however, it re-centred Islam as a key marker of the nation.
For decades, these two nationalisms have dominated the state. They quarrel on many things, yet on paper, both occupy the centrist ground. Both promise better governance, human rights, economic opportunity, and some measure of pluralism. They alternate in power, rewrite the constitution in their own language, re-edit school textbooks, rename public spaces, and knock each other out of history.
What they have not done is deliver a stable social contract that most citizens trust. While these two centrist nationalisms were busy delegitimizing each other, a third project was quietly rebuilding itself: Islamic nationalism.
This project never fully disappeared after 1971. Both Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalisms misread Islamist politics as a policing issue, while a fractured education system and expanding madrasas deepened a social and cognitive divide. At the same time, tactical alliances with religious parties helped Islamic nationalism grow into an independent pole of power.
Beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalism
All three nationalism projects carry both emancipatory and authoritarian possibilities. Bengali nationalism gave us the language of liberation, but it has also silenced ethnic minorities. Bangladeshi nationalism sought to ground belonging in citizenship, but it had compromised with the forces that opposed the Bangladesh independence. Islamic nationalism speaks in the language of justice and moral order, yet when it gains state power in other contexts, like Iran and Afghanistan, it often narrows individual rights, reduces women and minorities to second-class citizens, and fuses religion with coercive authority.
So the real issue is not to romanticize one and demonize another. The real issue is to recognize that the balance of power among these three nationalisms is shifting. If centrist politics continues to fail, Islamic nationalism will not remain an “option.” It will become the framework in which the state is re-imagined, from law and education to foreign policy and everyday life.
In this context, the coming 2026 election looks less like yet another power contest and more like a stress test for the entire centrist political project in Bangladesh. If voters give a mandate to centrist forces, it will be a conditional reprieve. It will be a last invitation to repair the republic before the centre politics collapses.
To deserve that reprieve, centrist politics must stop treating Islamic nationalism simply as a security threat on the one hand and a convenient vote bank on the other. It has to confront it politically, through a few clear commitments.
Centrist politics must first defend basic rights without compromise: Free speech and association, equal citizenship across religion, gender and ethnicity, and real protection for minorities.
It must restore genuine electoral competition, education needs a deep overhaul that links general and madrasa streams, improves school quality and teaches critical, civic thinking instead of fear and memorisation.
If this does not happen, the path ahead is relatively predictable. Islamic nationalism will continue to grow inside the vacuum left by discredited centrist elites.
Once it captures the state, it will reshape laws, education, and public culture in its own image. At that point, pushing back will be far harder than it is today.
Asif Bin Ali is an Atlanta-based geopolitical analyst and a doctoral fellow at Georgia State University. He can be reached at abinali2@gsu.edu.