To save the face of Sheikh Hasina from the charges of “brutal attack on Hindus in Bangladesh”, Awami League took a plea of Taqiyya as “Islam will not be the State Religion in BD” in some days.
Atul Brahmachari | HENB | Dhaka | Nov 12, 2016: Only history can judge the reality of this fact that Bangladesh Govt is trying now to remove the status of Islam as State Religion.
The Hindu persecution in Islamic Bangladesh is all time high. But, as the recent Jihadi attacks on Hindu people, households, shops temple in Brahmanbaria hit the news headlines and the neighboring country India has vehemently opposed such mayhem against minorities, the ruling Awami League has taken a subtle plea of Taqiyya to prove the party is too secular. Some Awami League operators were hatched the conspiracy to attack some Brahmanbaria Hindus for the political gain of the perpetrators.
Abdur Razzak, Awami League presidium member, has said that the provision in the Constitution which makes Islam Bangladesh’s state religion should be dropped from the statute. “We fought for the country and a million lives were lost in 1971 in a bid to build a secular state. People of different religions live here together peacefully. Bangladesh is a secular state and a state of communal harmony. Therefore, I personally think that Islam cannot be the state religion of this nation,” he said. Abdur Razzak, former food minister, was addressing a conference on ‘Unity is needed among the people of Bangladesh and India to resist terrorism’.
The meeting was organised on “Bharat-Bangladesh joint venture to fight against Terrorism” by the SAARC Cultural Society at the National Press Club in the city on Saturday. “I have said several times at different programmes, including one of the BBC, that Islam cannot be the state religion of Bangladesh. The Awami League-led government kept Islam as the state religion in the Constitution for strategic reasons. We will drop it from the Constitution at a congenial time,” he said. When contacted, Abdur Razzak told The Independent that this was his personal view. The senior AL leader alleged that military rulers tried to destroy communal harmony after the Liberation War. Bangladesh’s 1971 Constitution had declared that all religions were equal in the eyes of the state. However, military ruler Hussain Mohammad Ershad amended it in 1988 and made Islam the state religion.
Ershad’s action led a group of 12 citizens to file a writ petition before the High Court to overturn the amendment. On March 28, 2016, Bangladesh’s High Court rejected the 28-year-old petition calling for removal of the constitutional provision recognizing Islam as the official religion of Bangladesh. The Awami League-led government again amended the Constitution. The new amendment reinstated the principle of secularism, but also reaffirmed that Islam was the state religion.
As a matter of fact, the recent Brahmanbaraia mayhem in Diwali and Kalipuja forced at least 10 Hindu families to leave Islamic Bangladesh. The Gulshan Bakery attack in Dhaka also showed the Jihadi stronghold in Bangladesh. Two dozen writers, intellectuals, rights activists, priests were killed by the members of Jihadi outfits to reign a terror in Bangladesh to establish the superiority of Islam in Bangladesh. The Hindu population of Bangladesh has come down to 8% now a days from the high of 23% in around 1971. Hindus in Bangladesh is decreasing day by day within the Islamic indulgence of “kill the kafirs, instil fear on them, take them as jimmi”.
In such a context, the fake proclamation by an Awami leader regarding BD Govt’s initiative to declare Bangladesh as a secular state and not an Islamic one is ridiculous and unreal.
If Bangladesh can declare itself not an Islamic one and can go back to its original secular constitution of 1971, it will be the rarest of the rarest incident in any Islamic country in this millennium.
Source: Struggle for Hindu Existence
