Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I wish to thank the clerk for making all the arrangements to get me up here because I have a cast on my leg and it was going to be very difficult for me to negotiate the Hill in this condition, so I must thank him. I thank you for asking me to come.
Mr. Chair, honourable members of the committee, members of the press, parliamentary staffers, friends, we are very grateful to be given another chance to appear before you.
I am Anu Bose. I'm the adviser to the executive committee on parliamentary and governmental affairs of BHBCUC. I'm also the liaison with the Christian community. My antecedents are in Bangladesh but I was born in West Bengal, Calcutta, now known as Kolkata. I am a Canadian by choice and also by marriage.
You have already received a written submission from us, so today I will confine my remarks to a few points because I would indeed like for you to be able to ask me questions, and I will do my best to answer. If there is something that I cannot answer, then I will certainly get back to you after having spoken to the council.
First of all BHBCUC, or as we call ourselves the unity council for short, would like to debunk the myth that Bangladesh is a secular Muslim nation. I was very shocked to see these very words in a March 12 op-ed in the National Post written by a former aide to Minister Paradis. The idea of secularism has always been very contested throughout the short history of Bangladesh. The founding father, Sheikh Hasina's father, was secular, and the original Bangladesh constitution has secularity within it. Religious pluralism and freedom of religion are also enshrined in article 41.
You know they had two very long periods of military dictatorships. Two generals in quick succession, General Ziaur and General Ershad. They brought in amendments that abrogated the secular orientation of the constitution when they seized power, declared martial law, and then proceeded to reinvent themselves as presidents.
General Ziaur Rahman removed the secular principle by the fifth amendment and inserted the Islamic invocation “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful”, in Arabic, into the preamble. But much more importantly, he allowed religion-based political parties, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, which had been banned, to function and flourish. In 1988, General Ershad declared Islam to be the state religion under the eighth amendment. The official name of the country remained and remains the People's Republic of Bangladesh.
The fifth amendment was declared illegal by the high court in 2005 and confirmed again by the supreme court five years later. If we accept the National Secular Society of the U.K.'s definition of secularism, then Bangladesh, as a declared Muslim country, cannot be secular because it poses the primacy of Islam, and it is a Muslim majority country, over the others.
In our earlier submission, we had pointed out that there is a widely held perception that the ethnic and religious minority vote gravitates to the Awami League, the league of the founding father of Bangladesh.
There's more than a grain of truth in that. Our Dhaka colleagues, who are in the field, have been told by the minorities that, though they've been disappointed time and time again by the Awami League's lack of vigour in enforcing their rights, they prefer to stick with the devil they know, so they park their vote, faute de mieux, with the Awami League.
This tilt toward the Awami League has always laid minorities open to harassment and threats because they do tend to vote in a bloc. Even before that, there had been a systematic undercounting of the religious and ethnic minorities in the census. The census takers aren't the best or the most well-trained, but the minorities who have lost faith in their government tend to see this as part of some kind of conspiracy to keep them off the rolls.
I find it very painful to have to come here and speak on a subject in which I have an academic interest, but which I know does affect the minorities of Bangladesh badly; that is, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
Islam in Bangladesh is not monolithic, but it is very syncretic. It absorbed a lot of Hindu and Buddhist cultural elements and it was certainly very open. The first interaction that Islam and Bangladesh had was through the Sufi tradition, which is a very gentle, mystic tradition. The Muslim communities developed away from the mainstream of Islam in greater India. The majority of the population is Sunni, but there are two conflicting tendencies within it. One is the Deobandi, which is a very strict, revivalist movement, somewhat akin to Wahhabism, dating from 1867. The Barelvi, which is very predominant in Pakistan, is a much more folksy kind of Islam.
The roots of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh lies in the politicization of Islam by the two successive military dictators, who needed this to create an aura of political legitimacy around them. General Ziaur also tried to curry favour with the gulf states by bringing in his amendments, but this paid off and soon Bangladesh was exporting hordes of its unemployed manual and white-collar workers, especially into Saudi Arabia.
Bangladesh was then transformed into, what I would call, a remittance junkie. In 2013, remittances from Saudi Arabia alone were estimated at more than $1.3 billion U.S., while Canadian aid fluctuated between $96 million and $120 million, which is very small beer.
Many of these workers brought back a strict Wahhabi ideology, which is fairly close to but not quite Deobandi, and helped to create a support base. Then there was this intricate playing of footsie between the two largest political parties, the AL and the BNP, with Islamist fundamentalist parties, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, which is a parliamentary Islamist party.
The Awami League legitimized the Deobandi-based Quomi madrasa movement, which has grown like mushrooms after rain and flourished. They are the progenitors of something called Hefazat-e-Islam, the helpers of Islam. If you remember, there were these huge marches after Friday prayers, practically every Friday, over these last few months, of young people, students of the Quomi madrasa, fighting running battles in the streets, and calling for death and hanging of secular people.
Nobody really knows how many groups flourish in Bangladesh. But what we do know is that we have a list of about 29, and there are overlapping leadership and overlapping and interlocking memberships.
I was really surprised to read that a four-member delegation of Daesh from Syria had come a-visiting to Chittagong and had met with the top brass from banned Islamist organizations. People tell us that there are, in the depth of the Chittagong jungles, training camps. We have never been there because foreigners or even Bangladeshis who are not from the hill tribes, like Dr. Aditya Dewan, can go in there.
Now how do these people finance themselves? Most South Asian countries are plagued with illicit financial transfers, so it's very easy to tap into these sources. Also there are remittances. I don't know if you know that there is something called the hundi system, which is an informal system of money transfers through relatives or unregistered agents. There's a parallel economy, or an economy within an economy. The best authority on that is Dr. Abul Barkat, who is a professor of economics at Dhaka University. The data I have from him dates from 2008, so it's not very useful right now.
The space for secular dissent is also shrinking. You must have heard of the death of Avijit Roy, the blogger, the American citizen who was hacked to death and his wife badly injured on a Dhaka street. He was an American so the FBI came a-calling. But there was another one three years ago, an architect, a Bangladeshi, also an avowed atheist and blogger, who was also killed the same way in front of his house.
Both these gentlemen had received death threats. I was shocked to read that a professor at the elite Bangladesh University for Engineering and Technology, had been questioned about the death of this blogger. But the government has also cracked down on prominent atheist bloggers, accusing them of defaming the Prophet and Islam. Bangladesh is now ranked as 146 out of a 180 countries by Reporters without Borders on their press freedoms index.
Just before I close, I'd like to tell you about what is happening in Bangladesh right now. You must have all read that Bangladesh has been paralyzed since January 5 by a series of uniquely South Asian protest tactics, the hartal and the abaradh. Now the hartal is when you shut down the city. Mr. Sinha Roy who had visited his mother, had to go to the airport in an ambulance pretending he was ill, because there was no other way he could have caught his flight. He saw petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails being thrown all around him. He said it was the first time in his life, since he fled Bangladesh, that he was scared.
The abaradh is even more offensive. It means people blocking highways and railway tracks, strewing nails on the road and removing railway ties and lines. There's already been one derailment. Trains don't move, trucks don't move, and buses don't move. Al Jazeera says 1,200 vehicles have come under arson attacks and 112 people have died. There is no way we can verify. A huge number of people have been rounded up, sometimes innocent, and thrown into jail.
The country's economy has suffered $21.7 billion in losses as of May 9. The garment industry, it's biggest export, has come to a halt. It has hit the poor, the daily waged workers, small shopkeepers, and people in the informal economy very hard, as they have little or no savings to fall back on. But neither of these two ladies are for the turning.
We have a series of recommendations, Mr. Chair. Do you want me to read them out or would you rather have the questions first?
