Hasina killed secularism, Yunus buried it

After her fall, a powerful narrative emerged that said Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League’s politics were anti-Islamic. This narrative often describes the Awami League’s rule as “secular fascism”. This is most prominently propagated by the far right Islamist groups, but has resonated far beyond their circles. This view had already acquired popular respectability both before and after Hasina’s fall. For instance, Farhad Mazhar, a prominent figure among the interim government’s affiliates, has repeatedly portrayed the Awami League and its espoused ideology as inimical to Islam. While certain individuals’ intellectual and political biases might play a role in the promulgation of this view, there are primarily three materio-cultural factors that helped this perception gain traction among ordinary people.

First, the Awami League’s pro-India orientation has been a decisive factor. The party depended heavily on India to consolidate and continue its autocratic rule. This placed Dhaka in a relationship of clientilism with New Delhi. As a result, anti-Indian sentiment has grown in parallel with the longevity of Awami League rule. Alongside this, Narendra Modi’s repression of Muslims in India has reinforced the association of pro-Indianism in Bangladesh with being anti-Islam. Second, while the Awami League portrayed its political crackdown on Jamaat-e-Islami as a defense of nationalism and secularism, Jamaat successfully reframed state repression against it as repression against Islam and Muslims. Third, in Bangladesh, secularism, because of the conservative nature of the polity, is often popularly understood as irreligion or atheism, and therefore easily conflated with hostility to Islam. But these three factors were able to influence public imagination only due to the inegalitarian and repressive nature of the Awami League’s rule.

It is true that the Awami League presented itself as the beacon of secularism in Bangladesh. It is also true that a small section of the intelligentsia and civil society actors — who joined the party from  Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee — were a strong secular faction within the party. However, the party’s self-presentation or the presence of a small  secular intelligentsia do not prove that the party was secular in practice. Contrary to the perception that the Awami League upheld secularism, a growing body of scholarship demonstrates that Bangladesh’s polity and public sphere experienced significant Islamisation during the party’s 15 and a half years in power – a trajectory that extended the state-sponsored Islamisation of the preceding four decades.

Islamisation under the Awami League

In 2018, the German political scientist Jasmin Lorch published an insightful article called “Islamisation by Secular Ruling Parties”, arguing that despite the Awami League’s secular rhetoric, Bangladeshi polity underwent Islamisation during the party’s extended tenure in power from 2008 onwards. She studied this phenomenon through a theoretical framework that identified three conditions under which secular ruling parties themselves advance Islamisation: the rise of Islamist social movements, intense political competition, and semi-authoritarian rule. All three conditions, she contended, were present in Bangladesh during that period.

First, from 2013 onwards, the country witnessed a powerful Islamist mobilisation spearheaded by Hefazat-e-Islam, a group whose avowed aim was to bring the state more aligned with Sharia. Second, zero-sum rivalry between the Awami League and the BNP has been part and parcel of Bangladeshi politics since 1990. Hence, intense political competition was there too. Third, as the Awami League’s rule progressed, it became increasingly authoritarian. 

The empirical record bears out her analysis. In a bid to prolong its stay in power, from 2014, the Awami League began to cooperate with Hefazat. In 2016, bowing to pressure from it, the government removed 16 literary works from the national curriculum, including poems and short stories by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Humayun Azad, and Bharat Chandra Ray Gunakar, on the grounds that them being un-Islamic and pro-Hindu. Between 2013 and 2017, the state’s lax response to the targeted killings of secular freethinkers and LGBTQ+ activists by jihadi Islamist groups revealed a bitter truth: that the self-proclaimed secular party, the Awami League, would persecute the seculars when they were under attack rather than stand beside them. Moreover, instead of firmly defending freedoms of speech and expression, government ministers publicly warned freethinkers not to criticise Allah or the prophet Muhammad – an unlikely stance for a party claiming secularism as its guiding principle. Indeed, the ostensibly liberal Awami League intelligentsia’s mouthpieces imposed its intellectual dishonesty on the populace by presenting seculars as extremists and Islamists as defenders of faith and morality. 

Hasina herself participated in Islamising the governing discourse of the state, declaring that she would govern the country in accordance with the Medina Charter. As the Awami League’s rule progressed, its proximity to conservative Islamic groups increased. In 2017, following months of Islamist protests, the government agreed to remove the statue of Lady Justice – a Bangladeshi rendition of Themis, draped in a sari and blindfolded – from the Supreme Court premises. Hasina personally distanced herself from the statue, questioning how a Greek idol had found its way into the highest judicial institution of Bangladesh. 

The madrasa system of education, comprised of competing Islamist ideologies, was long viewed as a bastion of conservatism and reaction in Bangladesh. Hasina, instead of modernising and reforming the madrasa system, opted to grant degrees issued by these institutions equivalent to higher education, effectively outsourcing a crippled and failing public education system to ideologues and theocrats. At the time, many feared that such policies undertaken to appease the Islamists could help Islamise the bureaucracy, and the concern was not unwarranted. In 2018, the Awami League passed the draconian Digital Security Act, which introduced stringent blasphemy provisions that have been used to detain Sufi singers such as Rita Dewan and Sarker for allegedly offending religious sentiments. 

By the 2018 general election, the Awami League had fully normalised its alliances with Islamist groups. Nearly 90 per cent of Islamist parties either joined the ruling party directly or aligned themselves with its key ally, the Jatiya Party. Far from resisting Islamisation, the Awami League integrated it into its political strategy. These developments collectively show that the party was not a bulwark against Islamic reaction or against Islamist influence in politics; rather, it actively deepened the Islamisation of Bangladesh’s political sphere.

The weaponisation of victimhood 

The claim that Hasina’s Awami League was anti-Islamic serves the conservative Islamist groups in Bangladesh. By invoking this claim, they position themselves as the only true victim – those who were outside political and legal safeguards during its autocratic regime. But this portrayal of victimhood whitewashes a central fact: over the last two terms of Awami League rule, virtually all opponents of the ruling party faced systematic and systemic repression. The regime did not differ in the treatment of opponents and dissidents. 

It should be noted here that victimhood does not merely describe an experience. It is also a political status that plays an important role in shaping the experience and perception of justice and worthiness during transitions from violence. We reserve our deepest sympathy for those who are most victimised. The perceived victims of an oppressive regime bear certain legitimacies that help their ethico-political claims gain popularity.   

That is why, to claim the mantle of the primary victim of the Awami League’s authoritarianism is to secure a powerful form of moral and political capital. Islamist groups understand this well. By framing the Awami League’s repression as secular violence, and themselves as its sole victim, they attempt to expand and legitimise their political claims in the public sphere.   

This trend is hardly confined to Bangladesh. Globally, far-right movements have mastered the art of weaponising victimhood. “This is the era of victims,” declared the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia during his 2014 address to the Senate. Victimhood is now abstracted from actual locations of power; anyone can claim it. In the US, white Protestant men, rallied by demagogues like Donald Trump, portray themselves as casualties of a supposedly “woke” liberal culture. Their economic hardship is attributed not to capitalist exploitation, but to immigrants and identity politics. The paradox is striking: figures like Trump and Musk, the obscenely rich beneficiaries of late-capitalism, present themselves as the saviours of the needy. This process shifts anger away from capitalism and towards progressive politics and marginalised groups. “Manosphere” and men’s rights activists employ the same logic as well. In their narrative, feminism is cast as an elite ideology that unfairly advantages women at men’s expense and thereby victimises men. But a fair analysis will reveal that by any criterion – be it economic status, political representation, legal protections, health outcomes or social freedoms – men are in a far better condition than women, who are routinely victimised due to the structural conditions present worldwide. 

Across the border, the rise of Hindu nationalism under the BJP at the expense of secularism and minorities, is predicated on the same premise. Islamists in Bangladesh are just the same. Despite holding considerable power and a record of harming women, religious minorities, gender and sexually diverse individuals, and other marginalised communities during the Awami League’s rule, they present themselves as the perennial victims of that regime, to secure and expand their political capital.

A perverse form of historical revisionism

There is a saying that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. This truism is not always true: everyone knew about the Afghan War and the consequences of foreign intervention (the rise of the Taliban), yet the Iraq War still happened. While history may not prevent repetition, it can illuminate the past and guide us towards clearer judgment.

Bangladesh emerged from a violent autocracy through a bloody popular uprising in the summer of 2024. The collective hope was clear: never again. That is why an honest and rational appraisal of the Awami League’s rule is essential. I have deliberately used the words “honest” and “rational” and avoided the much vaunted word “non-partisan” for two key reasons. First, our understanding of anything, including history, is shaped by the ideologies and biases we carry as individuals and communities. Second, while no account can ever be entirely free of bias, discussions of public history and the recent past should, at the very least, aspire to honesty and rationality. However, claiming that the Awami League was genuinely secular, or that Islamists were its sole victims, is downright dishonest and irrational. This is a perverse form of historical revisionism employed to gain political legitimacy. That is precisely why this exclusionary narrative of victimhood promulgated by the Islamists should not go unchallenged. 

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Bangladesh’s Islamists now stand at their strongest point since 1971. If they were truly as victimised, then, as they claim, how could they have grown so powerful today? Their present strength is the result of the Awami League’s dangerous policy of appeasement towards Islamist groups such as Hefazat and the party’s broader effort to Islamise the political sphere to secure legitimacy for its authoritarian rule. However, the blame for the Islamist resurgence in Bangladesh should not only be attributed to the Awami League alone. The Muhammad Yunus-led interim government has, at every turn, capitulated to Islamist pressure, if not taken the initiative to encourage and give cover to it.

Since August 5th, Towhidi mobs have destroyed and vandalised nearly 180 shrines. Hindu sites of worship are attacked with alarming regularity; already, idols prepared for Durga Puja have been smashed in at least eight locations. A professor at a government college in Narsingdi was transferred at the behest of Hefazat for publishing articles in support of equal inheritance rights for women. The University of Dhaka’s Samina Luthfa was removed from the national textbook revision committee at Islamist’s demand. At the mob’s insistence, a man accused of harassing a student at the same university was released from jail. Meanwhile, senior Islamist militants such as Salafi jihadi ideologue Jashimuddin Rahmani, released from prison, are continuing extremist political activity. The interim government endorses the words and actions of Islamists by bowing to mobs and treating concerns raised about this as Indian disinformation. These incidents are only the tip of the iceberg of what is happening in Bangladesh. They are the portents of what is to come if the disproportionate influence of Islamists in politics is not checked.

The most basic function of any government, whether in the Lockean sense of protecting rights or the Hobbesian one of restraining chaos, is to uphold law and order. On this count, the Yunus government is failing miserably, leaving the field open to Islamist mobs who now dictate terms to the state itself.●

Abdullah Hel Bubun is a student of anthropology at the University of Dhaka and a Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University.