RAJSHAHI (Bangladesh): Economics professor Sanat Kumar Saha was relaxing at home when three men burst in. They tied him down and began stabbing him. Saha blames the attack on Islamist radicals opposed to his liberal views, and says he only escaped with his life because his nephew raised an alarm.
“They want to create a fear psychosis, so that the whole perspective of the state of Bangladesh can be transformed,” he said at Rajshahi University in the north of the country. “They are transforming society and making it religious orientated.”
Saha’s accusation is echoed by many liberal Bangladeshis. The secular Bengali nation they love is being steadily undermined by religious forces bent on establishing an Islamic republic.
They say that ever since the country’s main Islamist party came to power as a junior partner in the coalition government in 2001, it has used its influence to change Bangladeshi society.
Jamaat-i-Islami (the Party of Islam) says it is a peaceful organisation determined to come to power by the ballot box, to create “a welfare state based on Islamic ideology”.
“Jamaat is an Islamic party working to establish an Islamic society through the democratic process, through education and motivation,” said Jamaat’s white bearded leader and Industries Minister Motiur Rahman Nizami. “Without the spontaneous support of the people, Islam can’t be established.”
But critics such as the opposition Awami League brand them “fanatics” whose cadres, they say, have systemically infiltrated the army, police and bureaucracy, and now control most of the country’s mosques and religious schools.
Politics in universities like Rajshahi and Chittagong is now dominated by Jamaat’s student wing, and theatre, dance and poetry recitals on campus have either been stopped or curtailed.
Bangladesh was born in 1971 after a brutal war of separation from Pakistan. Although more than 85 per cent Muslim, it stood for secular Bengali nationalism.
Jamaat-i-Islami sided with Pakistan’s army, something for which many Bangladeshis have never forgiven them.
Today, the party is probably the country’s most well organised and disciplined political force. It only got just over 5 per cent of the votes in the last election, but its influence tipped the balance in favour of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) in many constituencies, analysts say.
As a result, Jamaat was rewarded with the powerful industries and social welfare portfolios in the cabinet.
Alongside Jamaat’s rise has come a worrying increase in Islamic extremism in Bangladesh, analysts say.
Human rights group accuse the government of bowing to pressure from the Islamists by turning a blind eye to a campaign of violence, harassment and intimidation against minority Ahmadi community, who some Muslims view as heretics.
“It’s a dangerous moment in Bangladesh when the government becomes complicit in religious violence,” said Brad Adams, of Human Rights Watch in a June statement.
Liberals were shocked in 1999 when the country’s most famous poet, Shamsur Rahman, was attacked by three Islamic radicals, who threatened to cut off his head with an axe. Concerns mounted after a series of bomb attacks on cinemas, theatres and secular opposition party meetings in the past three years.
But it was in August that Islamic militants really showed their destructive capability when they detonated 500 small bombs all around the country within half an hour.
They struck again on Monday, bombing courthouses in three towns.
The Awami League accuses Jamaat of being behind the attacks and of providing political cover for extremists.
Politically motivated nonsense, says the government.
“Those who have done this are enemies of Bangladesh, enemies of democracy, enemies of our religion Islam,” said Nizami, calling the attacks “heinous, inhuman and barbaric.”
Police say roughly a third of the 400 suspects they have arrested since Aug. 17 have some kind of link to Jamaat, either as former members or relatives of members, but they say that does not prove the party itself was involved.
In the southeastern town of Chittagong, liberal journalists are convinced they have seen the true face of Jamaat. Samaresh Baidya, Zubair Siddiqi and Sumi Khan all wrote articles accusing Jamaat and its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir of violence and intimidation.
In response, all three received threatening letters this year.
“Prepare your funeral dress, because you will be murdered if you continue to write false reports against Jammat-Shibir,” one of the letters says.
“On the one hand they (Jamaat) follow political democracy,” said Baidya. “On the other hand, under other names, they are strengthening their militant forces.”
Islamist parties are not popular enough to take power in Bangladesh through the ballot box, observers say. Nor are Islamists likely to get in by the back door, through a military coup, as they have in the past in countries like Pakistan.
But many commentators see plenty of reasons for concern at the way the religious right has used its position in government to expand its power like never before.
“What is happening here is a gradual transformation — although that is not to say it cannot be reversed,” said Samina Ahmed, South Asia director for the International Crisis Group.
“It is a long way from saying this (Jamaat) is a party that promotes terrorism, but intolerance — yes. Reducing the space for liberals — yes,” said Ahmed. “The more the space for liberal voices shrinks, the more extremists gain.”—Reuters
