A personal reflection on secularism in Bangladesh, religious harmony, equal citizenship and the courage to challenge prejudice in everyday life.
In Bangladesh, even celebrating a neighbour’s religious festival can invite questions about allegiance. A greeting, a shared meal, a song can become something to explain. I find this deeply troubling. An equal place in the country should never depend on whether somebody else approves of our beliefs or our affection for another community.
Secularism requires equal citizenship and freedom of conscience. It demands that the state protect people across religious differences, and that we question the prejudices through which those differences become grounds for exclusion. The sincerity of that commitment becomes clear when defending someone else’s freedom costs us approval within our own circles.
My mother inspired this understanding of Secularism
In teaching us about language, culture and politics, she encouraged an openness towards people whose beliefs differed from ours. That upbringing continues to shape my convictions. The responsibility for putting them into practice is now mine.
There is politics in language, in culture, in how we are raised. It lives in the names we use for other communities, the customs we dismiss, the people we learn to consider fully our own. A child notices whose festival is welcomed and whose is discussed with suspicion. These lessons begin long before anyone learns to use the word secular.
We should examine what those lessons produce. A person may grow up educated, accomplished and socially respectable while retaining an unquestioned sense that other communities belong on lesser terms. Religious prejudice can sit comfortably beside a university degree. Education gives us the means to challenge it; the willingness still has to come from us.
On Shashthi this year, the sight of cattle being slaughtered on city streets distressed me. I thought of our Hindu neighbours, for many of whom cows carry sacred significance, beginning one of their most cherished festivals. The experience made me think about consideration in shared public space: how much attention do we give to another person’s sacred day when exercising our own choices?
Religious coexistence asks us to consider how our actions are experienced by others. That responsibility belongs to every community. Respect for people’s freedoms should be accompanied by sensitivity in how we use our streets and conduct our celebrations. Being entitled to do something does not exhaust our responsibility towards those around us.
Unnecessary display of Secularism
My celebration of Puja comes from affection and solidarity. Some call it barabari: excessive enthusiasm, an unnecessary display. I see a reason to make friendship visible when another community’s belonging is questioned. A greeting or a shared celebration can express a willingness to stand beside people whose joy matters to us.
Participation must remain a choice. Nobody should have to attend another religion’s worship, join a ritual or post a festival photograph to prove their decency. The obligation is to defend other people’s equal rights, including when their beliefs and practices are unfamiliar to us. There are many ways to honour that obligation.
The hypocrisy I find hardest to accept comes from people who speak fluently about secularism and then mock another community’s religion, caste, food or rituals in private. A university degree does not make a communal slur intelligent. Calling it a joke does not remove its cruelty.
We have to examine our own part in this. Sometimes we object weakly. Sometimes we laugh because everyone else is laughing, or stay silent to preserve a friendship. Meanwhile, the person being ridiculed is expected to absorb the insult gracefully. Our discomfort becomes their burden, and our silence helps make that arrangement socially acceptable.
This is where practising secularism becomes difficult. It means questioning the beloved relative, the agreeable colleague or the friend whose prejudice we have learned to accommodate. We need to be able to say that a remark is cruel and stay with the discomfort that follows. Otherwise, our public declarations ask very little of us.
People also ask why I speak so sharply about Muslim fundamentalism, instead of giving equal attention to fundamentalism in every other religion. My answer begins with where I live and what I can confront. In Bangladesh, I have a responsibility to question coercion and exclusion operating around me, including when they claim Islamic authority.
Pointing to a Hindu extremist elsewhere cannot answer for a Muslim extremist here. The same principle applies in reverse. Another community’s wrongdoing cannot cancel our responsibility for what happens in our own surroundings. Consistency requires us to apply the same principles; it does not require every piece of writing to catalogue every injustice.
Devotion can coexist with freedom of conscience. My objection is to the claim that one interpretation of religion should govern everyone else’s choices or determine whose citizenship counts. That claim deserves scrutiny wherever it appears. A religious label offers no exemption from responsibility for coercion, discrimination or violence.
I welcome people questioning injustice within their own traditions. Familiarity can help them identify abuses and reach audiences that others cannot. But birth into a community gives nobody exclusive ownership of the right to criticise it. People of any faith, or none, can challenge religious coercion. Their criticism should be judged by its accuracy, fairness and concern for human dignity.
Noam Chomsky makes a useful distinction in a 1981 interview: honest criticism of any society is legitimate, while the consequences of our actions matter when deciding where to direct our limited efforts. I take from this a responsibility to speak where I can help, especially where silence would protect people within my own social world.
Rokeya offers another way to think about courage. In Sultana’s Dream, she imagines men secluded while women govern and pursue knowledge. I read that reversal as an invitation to examine arrangements made to seem natural. Customs we inherit can be questioned, including when the people defending them are people we love.
Criticism across religious boundaries must remain possible. So must scrutiny of the critic’s methods. Careful criticism identifies the claim, action or institution at issue and allows room for evidence and disagreement. It loses its integrity when it turns ordinary believers into a single guilty population. I will question harmful practices without lending my voice to blanket contempt for a community.
Bangladesh’s constitutional text contains tensions we must face. Article 2A names Islam as the state religion while also promising equal status and the right to practise other religions. Article 12 sets out secularism through opposition to communalism, political abuse of religion and religious discrimination. Article 27 provides equality before the law; Article 41 protects religious practice subject to its stated conditions. These provisions place the relationship between religion, equality and state power firmly within public debate.
Whatever our personal beliefs, equal citizenship needs reliable protection through public institutions. It should be visible in access to justice, safety during worship, freedom of expression and the ability to live without religious coercion. A festival greeting has meaning, but the commitment behind it must also extend to the ordinary days when a neighbour needs us to take an injustice seriously.
Our Hindu, Buddhist and Christian fellow citizens should be able to celebrate without feeling that their belonging depends on someone else’s generosity. Muslims deserve the same security, including freedom from coercion by those who claim to speak for them. People who do not believe deserve it too. Religious harmony becomes credible when these protections hold even in the absence of personal goodwill.
I am angry because I love Bangladesh. I want its cultural life to have room for the people who create and sustain it. I want us to confront prejudice without retreating into hatred ourselves. That requires courage in our friendships and families, as well as accountability in our institutions.
If visible solidarity is dismissed as barabari, we should ask why the prejudice making it necessary has become so easy to accommodate. The prejudice we excuse in private becomes part of the country we build in public. Our neighbours’ equal citizenship is not ours to grant or withhold.
