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[Image: 20211027_bangladesh_hindu_protest_afp.jpg]

THE latest episode of communal violence against Hindus in Bangladesh has led to calls that the Muslim-majority country return to the 1972 constitution that envisaged the nation as secular.

However, the Sheikh Hasina government believes it will be an “onerous task” to amend the constitution and remove Islam as state religion, sources in the Bangladesh government told ThePrint.

This is despite the fact that Dhaka knows it is important to uphold secular values as Bangladesh stares at unprecedented economic growth.

The move to amend the constitution on such a sensitive topic, the sources said, will give rise to more violence and disrupt the government’s plans to steer the country to growth and development.

Islam was made the state religion of Bangladesh in 1988, when the country was under the rule of the erstwhile military dictator Hussein Muhammad Ershad. His predecessor Ziaur Rahman, another military ruler, is believed to have set in motion the process of Bangladesh’s Islamisation.

However, secularism remains one of the four basic pillars of their constitution as laid out in the preamble, along with nationalism, socialism, and democracy.

There have been several reports of violence against the nation’s Hindu minority in Bangladesh.

The latest came amid Durga Puja celebrations, with the violence starting on October 13 and continuing in the days afterwards.

Several puja pavilions were vandalised, villages torched, and temples desecrated by religious fundamentalists in a country where over 90% of the population is Muslim.

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