You hear this all the time these days: “This is not acceptable in a land of 92% Muslims.”
And the inexplicable thing is, the same people who say this -- mostly young, predominantly male (although we hear some raucous support from young women also these days) -- also pay quite a bit of lip service to democracy, often in the same breath.
Forget, for a moment, how Bangladesh was founded. Forget the very basis for this Republic’s coming into existence in the first place. Do these young people even realize how undemocratic -- anti-democratic -- the words coming out of their months are?
It is the sworn responsibility of democratic states to provide the same rights and privileges to each and every one of its citizens -- regardless of ethnicity, religious belief or lack thereof, lifestyle, political allegiance etc. It is simply immaterial what percentage of the population that individual belongs to in terms of these categories.
Whether 1% or 99%, EVERY group of people in the population of a Republic has the same rights to choose what they believe, what rituals they observe or refrain from observing, what attire they wear, which food they choose to eat, what kind of music they listen to (or not), what shade of politics they subscribe to or abstain from.
Each individual has the right to their own agency, autonomy and self-determination. These are fundamental, inalienable entitlements. No democratic state worthy of the name would ever attempt to deny ANY of its citizens these choices.
Those who believe their beliefs and their choices must hold sway over all other citizens simply because they constitute a numerical majority may talk about democracy until they are blue in the face, but what they really subscribe to is majoritarianism.
Which is another way of saying they believe might makes right; that because their numbers give them a sort of brute power, they have the prerogative of imposing their will on others.
And interestingly, it is this group of people who will scream the loudest when other nations practice their own brand of majoritarianism, or when they migrate to a foreign country and face majoritarian discrimination themselves.
Each and every young individual belonging to the brave group who brought about the 2024 July Uprising in Bangladesh claims to be avowedly anti-fascist. How ironic it is, then, that they don’t seem to realize their majoritarian rhetoric takes them closer to opening the door to fascism with every single passing day.
That having spent so long fighting monsters, they no longer recognize the fact that many among them have started resembling the same abominations they have been battling against.
And if being 92% Muslim gives Muslims primacy over those of other religious persuasions in this land, should Bengalis get more privileges too, since 98% of the population of this country is ethnically Bengali?
Interestingly, most of the Gen Z political activists are vehemently against Bengali nationalism, since they have the notion that it translates into “Mujibism,” which then morphs into the kind of fascism that facilitates Indian political and cultural hegemony.
So surely they must see how absurd and downright dangerous identity politics in terms of religion, ethnicity etc is, and how it can lead to precarious outcomes?
Another irony is that so many of these young people have pledged allegiance to a political party -- Jamaat-e-Islami -- which is fundamentally undemocratic in both its policies and its practices.
They openly discriminate against women and individuals of non-Muslim religious beliefs -- their leader has categorically said women can never lead his party and non-Muslims can only become “associate members” of their party, never full members. They routinely take positions which are misogynistic and exclusionary.
They constantly, and with impunity, use religion to advance their own political ends. The stigma of their dark past, forever tainted by collaboration with the Pakistani army’s perpetration of genocide during the Liberation War of 1971 and their direct participation in the abduction and murder of prominent intellectuals during the final days of the war, seems to have become irrelevant to their young followers for the time being, but I shall always continue to hold out hope that these young people will acknowledge their error in this respect someday.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that you cannot practice majoritarian politics, flex your muscles every chance you get because you happen to be in the majority, whether religious or ethnic or by any other metric, and still claim to believe in democracy.
The very definition of democracy is allowing the same rights and privileges to those different from you as you enjoy yourself -- even those, especially those, whose ideas and practices you may take exception to.
If you can’t bring yourself to do that, or if you feel that you can’t be bothered to, then guess what? There may very well be a fascist lurking within you.
Tanvir Haider Chaudhury has worked as a development activist, a research associate, a project coordinator, an economist, and a senior banker. Views expressed are the writer’s own.
