An anonymous Tagore?

A few days ago while reading the newspaper a name on one of the headlines caught my attention-- the inside story was about a man who claimed himself a controversial speaker before delivering a speech in a discussion meeting on Plassey Day. In that meeting he said that we are an independent Muslim country but our national anthem is written by an anonymous Rabindranath Tagore!

In Bangladesh it's a very common phenomenon that the political leaders always use the religious belief of the general people as their election weapon. Islam is a great religion and the term 'Islam' literally means

peace. But in our country we often find that some people in the name of Islam are doing certain things to serve their own purposes, which are not and never supported by Islam. In these cases the bigots always use the religious emotion of the common masses, most of who are ignorant of the basic tenets of Islam.

It's a historical fact that in 1947 India and Pakistan were divided on the basis of religious majority. But after that in 1971 the emergence of the new country, Bangladesh, was on the basis of Bengali Nationalism which was an ultimate consequence of the great Language Movement of 1952. The people of this new country have two identities- one is Muslim and the other is Bengali. Mixture of these two identities has given birth to Bangladeshi Nationalism for which we find an amalgam of Bengali culture and Islamic heritage in our everyday way of living. So along with our identity as Muslims it is impossible to deny our linguistic and geographic identity.