A Nation Born Secular, Still Arguing About What That Means

Bangladesh declared independence in 1971 with four foundational principles written into its soul: nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism. Of the four, none has been more contested, more amended, more weaponized, and more misunderstood than the last one. More than five decades after the original constitution was drafted, Bangladesh is still having the same argument — and in 2025, that argument has become more urgent than ever, with a Constitution Reform Commission proposing to replace the word "secularism" with "pluralism" entirely.

To understand why two words in a constitutional document can generate this much political heat, you have to understand what secularism actually meant to Bangladesh's founders — and how dramatically the country's political class has distorted that meaning in the years since.

What Sheikh Mujib Actually Said

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's founding father, was explicit about what secularism meant in the Bangladeshi context. It was not, he said, the absence of religion. His formulation was direct: Hindus would observe their religion, Muslims would observe their religion, Christians and Buddhists would observe theirs. No one would interfere in anyone else's religious beliefs. The state would not take sides.

This was a specific and deliberate response to the experience of living under Pakistan, where Islam had been used as a political tool to suppress Bengali cultural identity, justify discrimination, and ultimately legitimate the genocide of 1971. Bangladesh's secularism was not anti-religious — it was anti-instrumentalization. Religion was too sacred, Mujib argued, to be used as a political weapon. The secular state was the guarantee that it wouldn't be.

The 1972 constitution reflected this vision. Article 8 enshrined secularism as a fundamental principle of state policy. Article 12 elaborated further, prohibiting the state from giving preferential treatment to any religion and protecting citizens from religious discrimination. Religion-based political parties were banned — a direct consequence of Jamaat-e-Islami's role in opposing Bangladesh's independence and the atrocities of 1971.

How It Unraveled — And When

The secular foundation didn't survive the decade. Sheikh Mujib was assassinated in 1975. Military governments followed. In 1977, Chief Martial Law Administrator Ziaur Rahman issued an amendment that removed "secularism" from the constitution and inserted the Islamic phrase Bismillah into the preamble, replacing the secular principle with "Absolute Trust and Faith in the Almighty Allah." Religion-based political parties, including Jamaat-e-Islami, were unbanned.

In 1988, under President Hussain Muhammad Ershad, the parliament declared Islam the state religion — a move that created the constitutional paradox Bangladesh has lived with ever since: a document that simultaneously commits to equal treatment of all religions while designating one as the official religion of the state.

The 2010 Supreme Court ruling that Zia's 1977 amendments were unconstitutional — because they were imposed by an illegal martial law regime — restored secularism to the constitution in principle. The 15th Amendment of 2011 confirmed this restoration while simultaneously retaining Islam as the state religion under Article 2A. Bangladesh now has a constitution that says, in effect, both things at once: we are a secular state that treats all religions equally, and Islam is our state religion.

Legal scholars have been arguing about what this actually means ever since.

The 2025 Reform Debate: Replace It or Reinforce It?

The Constitutional Reform Commission established under Muhammad Yunus's interim government has proposed something that has reignited the debate with fresh intensity: removing "secularism" as a foundational principle and replacing it with "pluralism." The commission's argument is that pluralism better captures the diversity of Bangladesh's society and avoids the political baggage that the word "secularism" has accumulated through decades of weaponized use and misuse.

Critics find this deeply troubling, and their critique is not simply nostalgic. As analysts writing in The Daily Star have pointed out, a state cannot be genuinely pluralist without being secular first. True pluralism — where no religious community is privileged over others at the level of state structure — requires that the state itself maintain neutrality on religious questions. Replacing "secularism" with "pluralism" while retaining Islam as the state religion doesn't resolve the contradiction; it just renames it.

The debate also carries echoes of a parallel conversation happening across the border in India, where the ruling BJP and its affiliates have pushed for removing "secular" from the Indian constitution, arguing it was imposed by Indira Gandhi's controversial 42nd Amendment of 1976 rather than representing the original vision of India's founders. Both countries, simultaneously, are reconsidering what their founding commitments to religious neutrality actually require — and what it means to abandon or redefine them.

Religion, Minorities, and the Ground-Level Reality

Constitutional debates can feel abstract, but the situation of Bangladesh's religious minorities makes them concrete. Bangladesh's constitution simultaneously guarantees equal status for Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and other religions while naming Islam as the state religion. Article 41 guarantees every citizen's right to profess, practice, and propagate their religion. These are real protections — and they matter.

But the gap between constitutional guarantee and lived reality has been visible in recent years. The UN documented 2,924 attacks against religious minority communities in July 2024 alone, during the political upheaval that accompanied the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government. By April 2025, reports of attacks against Hindu statues continued. In October 2024, 21 Hindu families protested the seizure of 1.5 acres of their land in Patukhali. Ahmadiyya Muslim leaders reported ongoing violence against their community, citing the March 2023 attack during their annual Jalsa Salana as emblematic of a pattern that predates the 2024 political changes.

Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus has publicly stated that no one will be discriminated against on the basis of religion in the new Bangladesh. Whether constitutional reform reinforces or weakens the legal framework protecting that commitment matters enormously for the communities most vulnerable to religiously motivated violence and discrimination.

The Global Context: Bangladesh Is Not Alone

Bangladesh's struggle with the relationship between religion and state is not unique — but its particular version of that struggle has features that make it worth examining carefully. The French debate that gave rise to the concept of "laïcité" — a strict separation of religion from public life — represents one end of the spectrum. France has faced its own crises over how to apply secular principles to a society where religious identity, particularly Muslim identity, is deeply intertwined with questions of immigration, integration, and national identity. The French model of secularism, once considered an achievement of the Enlightenment, has become a contested political tool in debates about headscarves, halal food, and the boundaries of religious expression in public spaces.

Turkey offers another version of the same tension: a constitutionally secular state with a Muslim-majority population, where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's top-down imposition of secularism in the 1920s created a society where the question of religion's role in public life has never been fully settled, and where the AKP government under Erdoğan has spent two decades reasserting Islamic symbolism in public governance without formally abandoning the secular constitutional framework.

Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country, has operated under the principle of Pancasila — a state philosophy that acknowledges monotheism without designating any religion as the state religion — since independence. The Indonesian model is frequently cited as evidence that majority-Muslim societies can maintain functional religious pluralism without formal secularism, though Indonesia too has faced rising religious intolerance in recent years.

What these examples share is the same fundamental insight Bangladesh's founders understood in 1972: the question is not whether religion matters in a society, but who controls the relationship between religion and state power — and what happens to those who belong to minority traditions when that relationship is managed badly.

The Phrase That Captures It Best

Bangladesh has a cultural phrase that secular advocates frequently cite: "Dharma Jār Jār, Utshob Shobār" — one's religion is one's own, but festivals belong to everyone. It captures something real about how millions of Bangladeshis actually live their religious and communal lives: deeply faithful in their personal practice, genuinely comfortable sharing cultural celebrations across religious lines. Eid, Puja, Christmas — in many Bangladeshi communities, these are not exclusively owned by their originating faiths but are occasions for broader communal participation.

This cultural reality is the strongest argument for whatever the constitutional framework ends up calling itself — secular, pluralist, or something else — to protect rather than undermine. The danger is not that Bangladeshis are incapable of religious coexistence. The evidence suggests they have been practicing it for generations. The danger is that political actors use constitutional frameworks to override that lived coexistence with exclusionary state power.

What the Constitution Actually Needs to Do

Bangladesh's constitutional debate about secularism and pluralism is ultimately a debate about what the state owes its citizens regardless of their religious identity. The practical requirements are clearer than the terminology debate suggests. Family law based on religious tradition creates different legal realities for citizens of different faiths — a civil marriage under the Special Marriages Act 1872 currently requires renouncing one's religion, which effectively penalizes interfaith couples who want to marry without abandoning their religious identities. This is a concrete area where constitutional values and legal practice diverge in ways that affect real people.

The protection of minority communities from religiously motivated land seizures, violence, and discrimination requires not just constitutional statements but enforcement mechanisms with teeth. The 2,924 documented attacks in July 2024 did not happen because Bangladesh's constitution failed to prohibit religious discrimination — it explicitly does. They happened because the enforcement apparatus collapsed and political actors chose not to prioritize minority protection during a period of upheaval.

Whether Bangladesh calls its foundational principle "secularism" or "pluralism," the operational question is whether the state will enforce equal protection regardless of religious identity, whether minority communities will have legal recourse when their rights are violated, and whether political actors will be constrained from using religion as a tool for mobilizing majoritarian sentiment against vulnerable communities.

Sheikh Mujib's original formulation remains the clearest guide: religion is too sacred to be used as a political weapon. The constitution's job is to make sure it isn't. Whatever word gets written into the preamble, that is the principle Bangladesh needs to actually practice.

win-tk.org is a wintk publication — covering Bangladesh's politics, constitutional debates, and social developments through analytical journalism.