After the Indian government lodged a strong protest following the dastardly attacks on Hindu temples and the populace by bloodthirsty Islamists in Bangladesh, it looks like the Sheikh Hasina government is working briskly to satiate New Delhi. Reportedly, Murad Hassan a prominent minister in the Hasina cabinet, currently holding the state minister for Information portfolio stated that Bangladesh is a secular country that would revert to the 1972 constitution proposed by the Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
According to a WION report, the minister said, “We have the blood of freedom fighters in our body. At any cost, we have to go back to the constitution of ’72. I will speak in Parliament to go back to the constitution that Bangabandhu went through. Even if no one speaks, Murad will speak in Parliament.”
He came down heavily on former military dictator HM Ershad and Ziaur Rahman for incorporating Islam as the state religion in the constitution and lashed out at the BNP-Jamaat for unleashing violence and creating divisions in the country in the name of religion.
Read more: Durga Puja ends early in Bangladesh
“I do not think that Islam is our state religion. We’ll go back to the constitution of 1972. We’ll get that bill enacted in parliament under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s leadership.” Hassan added whilst remarking that Bangladesh is a non-communal country and everyone can practice their faith here.
It is pertinent to note that after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on August 15, 1975, the unconstitutional military regimes had usurped the state power in Bangladesh. They tore apart the Constitution and brought in many amendments, even by martial law decrees. Islam was made the state religion by a Constitutional amendment during the reign of General HM Ershad in the late 1980s.
What happened in Bangladesh?
As reported by TFI, Durga Puja – the biggest Hindu festival to be celebrated in Bangladesh, came to an abrupt and violent end on Wednesday (October 13), when Islamists’ mobs ravaged the Hindu pandals and mandaps, desecrating the vigrahas and creating chaos by killing 4 people and leaving hundreds injured.
The cycle of violence against Hindus started with a rumour, when some BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) and Jamaat-e-Islam miscreants planted a copy of the Quran at the feet of Ganesh in the Durga pantheon at Nanuyar Dighir Par Temple in Comilla district, on Tuesday night. A district official was quoted as saying, “The miscreants took some pictures of this and ran away. Within a few hours, using Facebook, the propaganda spread like wildfire with the provocative pictures,”
The violent and communal episode reached its tipping point when the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) temple in the Noakhali district in the Chittagong Division of Bangladesh was attacked by a blood-thirsty, frenzied mob of 400-500 radical Islamists. An ISKCON priest was killed by the Islamists in the process.
https://twitter.com/iskcon/status/1449029665578831873
If Sheikh Hasina does manage to undo the wrongs of the previous Islamist regimes by restoring the Bangladeshi constitution to its original design, she would present herself as one of the modern statesmen of the Indian subcontinent.