The Constitution That Contains a Contradiction
Bangladesh's constitution opens with the Islamic phrase Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar-Rahim — "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful." It then proceeds, within its preamble, to declare that secularism is one of the four fundamental principles upon which the republic was founded. Article 2A declares Islam the state religion. Article 12 mandates the state to uphold secularism and freedom of religion. Article 28 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. These provisions do not contradict each other — at least, that is what Bangladesh's Supreme Court ruled in 2016, holding that secularism and an official state religion can coexist without violating each other.
Whether that legal interpretation reflects the lived reality of religious pluralism in Bangladesh is a more complicated question — and one that has become sharply relevant again as the country debates the most significant constitutional reforms since independence.
How Bangladesh Got Here — Fifty Years of Constitutional Revision
To understand Bangladesh's current position on religion and state, it is necessary to trace how that position was reached through five decades of political upheaval. The 1972 constitution — adopted months after independence — was explicitly secular. Its drafters, shaped by the liberation war's rejection of Pakistani religious nationalism, banned religion-based political parties and enshrined secularism as a founding principle alongside nationalism, democracy, and socialism. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's formulation of secularism was not atheism but a specific rejection of using religion as a political tool. "Religion is a very sacred thing," he declared. "Sacred religion should not be used as a political tool."
That framework lasted three years. After Mujib's assassination in 1975, military ruler Ziaur Rahman issued a constitutional amendment in 1977 removing secularism and inserting Bismillah in the preamble. In 1988, President Hussain Muhammad Ershad amended the constitution again to declare Islam the state religion under Article 2A. These changes were made not through democratic consensus but through military decree and authoritarian legislation — a fact the Supreme Court would later use to challenge their legitimacy.
In 2010, the High Court ruled that the 1977 removal of secularism had been illegal, as it was carried out by an unconstitutional martial law regime. The court reinstated secularism. The following year, the Awami League government's 15th Amendment formally restored secularism to the constitution — while simultaneously retaining Islam as the state religion and the Bismillah preamble. The result was a constitutional text that now contains both commitments: secularism in Article 12, Islam as state religion in Article 2A, and an explicit guarantee that non-Muslims enjoy equal status and equal rights to practice their faiths.
What "Secularism" Actually Means in Bangladesh
The Bangladeshi concept of secularism — ধর্মনিরপেক্ষতা, literally "religious neutrality" — differs from Western conceptions in important ways. It does not mean the absence of religion from public life, nor the strict separation of church and state in the French laïcité tradition. It means, as Justice Naima Haider articulated in the 2016 Supreme Court judgment, that the state has a positive obligation to ensure all religions can be practiced freely — funding places of worship, providing security at religious gatherings, and preventing discrimination.
Under this interpretation, declaring Islam the state religion does not grant Islam political status or impose it on non-Muslims. It is, as the court held, a recognition of the religious identity of the majority without diminishing the constitutional protections of minorities. Bangladesh's approximately 9% Hindu population, 1% Buddhist community, and smaller Christian and indigenous communities all retain constitutional guarantees of equal status, freedom of worship, and protection against discrimination.
In practice, most of Bangladesh's legal system operates on secular principles inherited from the British colonial period. Criminal law, commercial law, and most civil law are secular. The significant exception is family law — marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption — which operates under religious law for each community. Muslim family law, Hindu personal law, and Christian marriage law apply separately to their respective communities. This means a Muslim woman inherits less than a Muslim man under the Muslim Family Ordinance, while the state does not impose this on non-Muslims.
The 2024-2025 Constitutional Reform Debate
The August 2024 uprising that ended Hasina's government opened a rare window for fundamental constitutional reform. The interim government under Muhammad Yunus established a Constitution Reform Commission, which published its recommendations in January 2025. The commission's proposals on religion and secularism proved immediately controversial.
The commission recommended removing secularism, socialism, and nationalism from the constitution's preamble, replacing them with four new principles: equality, human dignity, social justice, and pluralism. The proposal was framed as a way to move beyond the ideological battles of the post-independence period and adopt principles with broader consensus across Bangladesh's political spectrum.
The reactions revealed how deeply divided Bangladesh remains on these questions. Left-leaning parties and civil society organizations argued that removing secularism would betray the liberation war's founding vision and potentially expose religious minorities to greater vulnerability. The BNP rejected the commission's "pluralism" proposal and called instead for restoring "absolute faith in Almighty Allah" — returning to the Zia-era formulation. Jamaat-e-Islami and the National Citizens' Party, formed by students who led the 2024 protests, partially supported "pluralism" but argued it should be replaced with "multiculturalism" or a Bangla equivalent. No consensus emerged.
Religious Minorities — The Ground-Level Reality
Constitutional provisions matter, but they are tested by what happens on the ground. The period around the August 2024 political transition included a significant number of attacks on religious minority communities. The interim government acknowledged 2,924 attacks against minority communities during the July 2024 protests period, according to a UN report. Bangladesh police published figures estimating 1,769 attacks and acts of vandalism between August 5-20, 2024, of which 1,234 were identified as politically motivated and 20 as communal.
These incidents were serious and required serious response. But they must also be read in context: student and Muslim community members organized in front of minority-owned businesses and houses of worship to offer protection. The attacks were condemned by the interim government. They reflected the breakdown of law enforcement during a political transition rather than a state policy of minority persecution.
The longer-term challenge for religious minorities in Bangladesh is not acute communal violence — which remains relatively rare — but the slower erosion of land rights, economic opportunity, and institutional representation. Hindu families in Patuakhali documented land-grabbing in 2024. The Chittagong Hill Tracts, home to over 65% of Bangladesh's Buddhist population, has seen its indigenous demographic composition shift dramatically since 1971 through government settlement policies. These structural issues persist regardless of which party holds power and are not resolved by constitutional provisions alone.
Bangladesh Compared — South Asia's Varied Approaches
Bangladesh's balancing act looks different when compared with its neighbors. India's constitution declared the country a secular republic from independence, with no state religion — but the word "secular" was not added to the constitutional preamble until 1976, and Hindu nationalism's rise under the BJP has generated a parallel debate about whether India's constitutional secularism remains operative in practice. Nepal formally abolished Hinduism as the state religion in 2007 following the end of its monarchy. Pakistan's constitution declares Islam the state religion and requires the head of state to be Muslim — a more explicitly theocratic framework than Bangladesh has ever adopted.
Bangladesh occupies an interesting middle position: more religiously pluralistic in constitutional commitment than Pakistan, more explicitly acknowledging of Islam's majority role than India, and navigating the tension between those positions in a society where religious identity and national identity have been intertwined since the liberation war in ways that cannot be separated by constitutional language alone.
Faith, State, and the Question of Who Bangladesh Is
The debate over secularism versus religious identity in Bangladesh's constitution is ultimately a debate about national identity — about whether the liberation war of 1971 produced a Bengali secular nation or a Muslim-majority nation that happens to guarantee religious freedom, and whether those two descriptions are reconcilable or mutually exclusive.
The Constitution Reform Commission's January 2025 recommendations attempted to sidestep this debate by proposing principles — equality, human dignity, social justice, pluralism — that neither secular nationalists nor Islamic conservatives could fully claim as their own. Whether that middle ground can hold through the 2026 parliamentary elections and whatever constitutional process follows will be one of the defining questions of Bangladesh's next political chapter.
What Bangladesh has demonstrated over fifty years is that the relationship between religion and state is not a problem to be solved once and permanently but a negotiation that each generation must conduct for itself — within constitutional frameworks that reflect the accumulated compromises of those who came before, and the unresolved tensions they passed on.
win-tk.org is a wintk publication — covering Bangladesh's politics, society, and constitutional development through analytical journalism.
