Secularism and State Religion in One Constitution

Bangladesh is the rare country whose constitution declares both secularism and a state religion, and it arrived there by successive amendment rather than by design. Secularism was one of the four founding principles in 1972. It was removed after the 1975 coup, when Ziaur Rahman replaced it with a declaration of absolute trust in Almighty Allah, and in 1988 Hussain Muhammad Ershad added the eighth amendment making Islam the state religion. In 2011 the fifteenth amendment restored secularism as a principle while leaving the state religion clause in place, and in 2016 the High Court dismissed a long pending challenge to that clause, so both now stand together. What this means in practice is contested rather than settled.

Personal status law is administered separately for Muslims, Hindus and Christians, so marriage, divorce and inheritance depend on the community a person belongs to, and Hindu women in particular have far weaker inheritance and divorce rights than Muslim women. The Vested Property Act, which allowed the state to seize property of those declared enemies after 1965 and was used overwhelmingly against Hindus, was repealed in 2001 but restitution remains substantially incomplete. Attacks on Hindu temples and homes, often triggered by allegations of blasphemous social media posts, have recurred with enough regularity to become a pattern rather than a series of incidents.