Our future is in our past

Photo: Amirul Rajiv

The good news for us is that we could soon be going back to secularism through some needed changes coming into a constitution much trifled with over the decades. The bad news is that those changes could likely be of the kind that will render the secular spirit of the constitution hollow to the point of being meaningless.
Suranjit Sengupta, who has of late been keeping us informed of what the ruling party, or parliament in that proper sense of the meaning, plans to do where taking us back to the constitution as it was enacted and adopted in 1972 is concerned, has not exactly been helpful in having us get our thoughts straight on this issue. He is not to be held responsible for the intellectual muddle we are in about the constitution as it ought to be.
He speaks for his party which, over the decades, has loudly defended the non-communal nature of the Bengali people. It was this singular, remarkable position of the Awami League which helped us out of the quagmire that was the state of Pakistan through a spirited, necessary war of national liberation in 1971. The Awami League's place in history is therefore assured.
But now comes this critical question of whether, if at all, we can truly go back to a secular constitution despite all the big noises being made around the issue. Contradictions have never been the foundation of a constitution, any constitution, in any country. And yet we are now being told, in so many words and by the Awami League, that what we will end up having in the name of a secular constitution is actually political confusion.
Observe the grim realities as they keep coming up. The Bismillah factor, first imposed on the constitution by Bangladesh's first military dictator Ziaur Rahman, will stay there and yet we must imagine that the changes the Awami League government plans to bring about in the constitution will re-transform our polity into a secular undertaking. You can imagine as much as you wish. It will not help, for if you stick to the Zia idea and yet tell us that you are moving away from it, you only give out a strong impression of being ready to compromise on fundamentals.
And compromise is not always a healthy thing, especially when you deal with values. This country happens to be a homeland for people of diverse religious groups, for indigenous people straddling different zones of culture. Yes, it is predominantly a Muslim country. But the far bigger truth is that those who follow the Islamic faith in Bangladesh have never flaunted their belief system, have indeed consistently upheld their cultural nationalism as the basis of the foundations of their state. Which is why what the country's second military ruler, Hussein Muhammad Ershad, tried doing in his times through declaring Islam as Bangladesh's state religion, has never quite taken us away from our secular, liberal moorings.
Let us be blunt here. The Zia and Ershad periods were aberrations in Bangladesh's history; and what is done in moments passed in the shadows of the historically aberrant must be done away with as swiftly as possible. Faith is always a matter of individual belief. And God, no matter which one we happen to be paying obeisance to, can be pulled down to earth at huge risk not only to divinity but to the spirituality which religion always embodies for us.
The point is simple, clear and irrefutable: we uphold our faith, be it Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism or animism, in terms of the canons handed down to us centuries ago. There is another equally simple, clear and irrefutable point: we do not dilute the appeal of faith by pulling it down to the level of the temporal -- and we will not cause an adulteration of politics through an injection of the communal into it. Besides, we will not let go of our history, which is that in 1966, it was the secular nature of the Six Points which caused a sea change in our politics.
In 1971, we waged war for freedom as Bengalis driven by the spirit of secularism. In that war, being a Muslim or a Hindu or a Christian or a Buddhist or a Chakma or a Garo was irrelevant. We were all on a long, tortuous march towards creating a state for all Bengalis, a country where every citizen would enjoy the same rights, exercise the same responsibilities and dream the same dream.
Let that old dream, punctured through with so many stabs of nightmarish authoritarianism, return in revitalised and reinvented form and substance. Our future is in our past. It is in the constitution we gave ourselves precisely a year after freedom first came rushing into our yards, into the pulsating crevices of our expectant souls.

The writer is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: [email protected]