Soon after taking over as the head of the new government, Professor Muhammad Yunus was asked about his opinion on the biggest challenges which he now faced. His response was quick: “Unity.”
In recent days I have heard him express this quest for national unity again and again. He has often elaborated by saying that we are one family, ethnically and culturally homogenous and therefore we have no reason to not be united.
But what is the actual objective reality regarding this sought after "unity" since the beginning days of Bangladesh? What are the factors that challenge the notion of this unity and seem to create disharmony and disunity, all through our history starting from 1972?
In order to understand these factors well we need to understand our internal “binaries,” or as Marxists might say "contradictions," which reside within us as a nation.
Bangladesh contains in her the older historical contradictions that continue to raise their heads every so often, derailing the efforts of crafting a unified doctrine for the future. All entities are created with a capacity for internal contradictions -- the Greeks invoked the idea of “unity of opposites" to explain this phenomenon. It defines a situation whereby the existence of an entity is dependent on the presence of or internal co-existence of two conditions opposite each other and yet dependent on each other.
Applied to the geographic and population-based realites of Bangladesh, this contradiction was created in the 14th century and onwards when migration of a large number of Muslims from the middle east introduced Islamic religion and culture in the Eastern part of the sub-continent. That influx and the resulting increase in the Muslim population via conversion created a new hybrid culture and philosophy that underwent a mixture of confrontation, co-existence, and admixture creating a reality of a new proto-nation that is Bangladesh today.
The religion and the religion-infused culture surrounding it (words such as Khala, Fupu, Bhabi. Pani) created in due course a defining linguistic and cultural entity that was living side by side distinctly with the Hindu and Buddhist population who did not encounter this hybridity.
My own family arriving from Yemen in the 14th century mixed with a Tripura Hindu family creating the Chaudhury clan of Kanihati in South Sylhet. All my life I have felt this contradiction within me between my deep cultural self, populated by poems of Rabindranath and other hindu poets replete with local imageries and concepts and my other cultural self, populated by Quranic verses and the persian poems of Hafiz and Rumi. This dialectics of land and water on the one side and the celestial ideas of Islam and cultural lores of the Middle-East on the other instilled within the majority population of Bangladesh an internal binary that also reflects in the political sphere.
It is the defining feature of the majority population.
In 1947 one part of this binary (let us call it Yin) won in a big way causing us to join the Islamic Pakistan enterprise. In 1971 the other part of the contradiction the Bangali Yang won, causing us to create Bangladesh. Since then, in 1975, and then electorally via Sheikh Hasina in 2009, there have been more such Yin-Yang type contradictory eruptions. There are some commonalities between 1947 and 1975 but no historic times are identical to each other so I am only talking about broad similarities.
During the Awami League’s last prolonged rule, the government relentlessly and methodically suppressed one side of our binaries, often denigrating and even criminalizing such instincts in an attempt to pave the way to a nation made unitary by brute force.
But the law of nature says that unity must come from within, it can seldom be achieved through coercion -- it can only be achieved through consensus. Absence of that consensus on the one hand and the added oppression on the other is what led to the explosive uprising of 2024.
Since 1975 we have had this stasis-eruption cycle roughly every 16 years. There are of course additional factors such as economy, consumer prices, and employment opportunity involved in these dynamics but I would like to propose that Bangladesh is behaving like a classic case of a meta-organism whose internal opposing dynamics have not yet been reconciled properly.
The quest for unity sought by many, including Muhammad Yunus, can be considered an inflection point of sorts. But unity can only happen via an explicit recognition of these two opposing entities within us. A major step should be to have an elected legislative assembly together with an unelected "upper house" comprising the diverse interest groups, communities, and voices which define Bangladesh.
Bangladesh can be a place where secularism and faith can co-exist.
Beyond such big-picture arrangements, we must take steps to create a financially just society -- one where distributive ethos, custodianship, and immediate awareness around climate mitigation all gel together.
In August 2024 the die was cast, a tryst with future destiny made -- we should make the commensurate pledges and find the sense of unity which we have long been missing.
Abed Chaudhury is a scientist and writer.
