Bangladeshi Nationalism

In Bangladesh, the concept of Bangladeshi Nationalism was established against the concept of Bangalee nationalism. But this was not all about our nationalism. In the subcontinent the Bengal was the vital place where the root of nationalism engraved by the revolutionary activists during the period of 1905 to 1910. Though the concept of nationalism was arisen both in the minds of moderate politicians and revolutionary activists during the same period it was true that the revolutionary activists were successful to show it as a matter of fact. Revolutionary activists, especially Aurobindoo Ghosh, considered it as a religion. But his religion did not mean so called religion. Actually, it was nothing but a principal for him which acts like a religion in human life.

In Bangladesh, the concept of nationalism, Bangalee or Bangladeshi, whatever it is, highly interacted with the concept of religion. For Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, secularism is the key factor of his Bangalee nationalism and according to his view; secularism is not the state of absence of religion. It means no one will use religion as a political weapon. It is quite different from the basic western idea of secularism where secularism means the separation of politics from the church and that is why the term secular was derived from the term “saeculum”.

But for Zia’s Bangladeshi nationalism, it was the complex composition of secularism and religious concept. Zia did not declare Bangladesh as an Islamic country but Islam as a religion got a priority over all the religions and he introduced Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim at the beginning of the constitution.