As High Commissioner of Bangladesh to the UK, more often than not, I am faced with some interesting questions from our British friends. Isn’t or wasn’t Bangladesh ‘East Pakistan’? Of course, Bangladesh is a Muslim country, but is it also an Islamic State? Are you Indian (as I always wear a Saree)? Are you Muslim (as I do not wear a hijab)? Are you Christian (as I attend breakfast prayers at the UK Parliament or Westminster Abbey’s Bangladesh National Day Prayers on 26 March)?

Smiling, I respond to these unwitting diplomatic moments with a short story, and with great pleasure.

My reply is that I am a secular Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh, which was led by a visionary Bengali Nationalist leader, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to emerge categorically as a secular and independent ‘People’s Republic of Bangladesh’ from a theocratic ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’, through an armed and traumatic liberation struggle in 1971. That independent Bangladesh envisioned by its Founding Father, the Bangabandhu, was never to be even a semblance of erstwhile ‘East Pakistan’, where Bengali Muslims were named and shamed as ‘half-Muslims’, systematically discriminated against and oppressed politically, economically, socially and culturally as a lesser race, and Bengali Hindus  and other minorities were persecuted. That in 1971, genocide against the Bengali race was committed on the soil of Bangladesh, regardless of whether they were Hindu or Muslim; crimes against humanity and war crimes were inflicted on Bengali intellectuals and Bengali women by armed forces of an Islamic Republic and their bigoted civilian collaborators. And then I add: ‘Happily, the UK stood next to the Bangabandhu and his Bangladesh during our 1971 Liberation War, and post-Independence, supported Bangabandhu’s efforts to create a secular, tolerant and inclusive Republic that ensures equal rights and respect for all religions and prevents religion based politics.’ 

Hence, as a representative of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh now led by Bangabandhu’s missionary of a daughter, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, I am all that represents a secular Bengali spirit and can be expected to be seen everywhere in the UK, regardless of my religious credentials. And of course, I propagate those secular, tolerant and inclusive values that our Founding Father Bangabandhu wanted successive generations of Bengalis to uphold, following in his footsteps prioritizing Bengali Nationalism over Islamic Nationalism. I am the product and devotee of Bangabandhu’s 1972 secular Constitution that makes me a Bengali first, without any prejudice to any religion, symbolically represented in Bengali attire, the Saree. Must I explain more, I ask?

In this historic year of the birth centenary of the Bangabandhu, ‘the Friend of Bengal’,  and on the occasion of the 45^th anniversary of his brutal assassination on 15 August 1975, I want to unfold once again the story of this diehard Bengali Nationalist who emboldened every Bengali like me to speak out for the secular Republic that he envisioned when he united and led the Bengali nation to independence in 1971.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib’s assertion of a secular Bengali cultural and linguistic identity over a theocratic identity for a Muslim majority independent Bangladesh can be linked back to his politically active student life spent in Kolkata (Calcutta) between 1942 and 1947. And, of course, his subsequent disenchantments over the overrated role of religion in the partition of India (in reality only of Bengal and Punjab), based on the ‘two nation theory’ that converted ‘East Bengal’ into a new ‘East Pakistan’.

In fact, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib was the only Muslim student from East Bengal who won the hearts and minds of both Hindu and Muslim students alike at Kolkata’s Islamia College, and he was elected uncontested as General Secretary of its Student’s Union in 1946. He deeply valued the peace dividend of secular politics and inclusive society, and assessed both sides of the ‘communal’ coin much before a Bengali ‘East Bengal’ was cosmetically converted into an ‘Islamic East Pakistani’ Province in 1947. His post-colonial secular resolve grew even stronger during the Communal riots of Kolkata in 1946, during which Muslim student leader Sheikh Mujib was found working day and night to maintain communal harmony in Kolkata city, saving many Hindu and Muslim lives alike at the risk of his own life.

A man of peace and non-violence and a Gandhian at heart, Bangabandhu not only joined Mahatma Gandhiji’s Peace Mission in Kolkata in 1947, along with Bengal’s Chief Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, but also mobilised Bengali Muslim leaders from East Bengal to join the Mission. Bangabandhu’s was also the strongest voice from East Bengal in the movement for a United Bengal as a third independent post-partition State along with India and Pakistan, based on Bengali Nationalism rather than the two Bengals’ Hindu-Muslim identities. Even though the movement eventually aborted, it certainly laid the foundation for Bangabandhu’s vision of an independent homeland for the Bengali people where Hindus and Muslims would live side by side in a secular State.