Bangladesh Set to Become Again a Secular State.

Justice at Last?

Glory to the Great Bangladeshi People!

 

News just in:

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government plans an attempt to turn Muslim Bangladesh into secular state, a minister said.

Nearly 90 percent of the population is Muslim and Bangladesh ranks fourth after Indonesia, Pakistan, and India by the number of Muslims, with over 130 million.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision declaring the Fifth amendment, which dropped secularism as a guiding state principle, as null and void.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami party had appealed against the High court judgement.

“In the light of the verdict, the secular constitution of 1972 already stands to have been revived,” Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said late on Saturday.

“Now we don’t have any bar to return to the four state principles of democracy, nationalism, secularism and socialism as had been heralded in the 1972 statute of the state,” he said.

Bangladesh gave up the word “secularism” in the 1975s.

(from here) (Reuters here)

Background here.

There are also the forthcoming Tribunal and Trials of War Criminals (here)- those who stood with Pakistan in its mass slaughter during the 1971 War of National Liberation (here).

Many of the alleged crimes were committed by  members of the Jamaat-I-Islami or related Islamist groups. In Britain these political forces are closely aligned with George Galloway’s Respect Party. They have also enjoyed close relations with the SWP and Ken Livingstone’s advisers.

The principal link, through the East London Mosque, is claimed  here . The contents of this site, Bangladesh Genocide Archive,  are well worth looking at. If you can stand weeping at suffering and the indifference of the world today  to the plight of the Bangladeshi people.

It will be interesting to see, as the legal process unfolds, how the above UK groups and individuals  justify their alliance with war criminals.

We await Islamophobia Watch’s wriggling.

 

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