FAITH AT THE MARGINS

SECULARISM DEBATE & RELIGIOUS ACTIVISM IN BANGLADESH’S POST-UPRISING POLITICAL ECOLOGY

Resumo

Although religious minorities and their rights to perform rituals on their religious sites have often been studied in many ways in the context of Bangladesh, after the July uprising of 2024 and subsequent events of vandalism over marginal religious sites - amid a breakdown in administrative presence - have sparked a new debate on whether the existing discourse of secularism as a constitutional pillar and Islam as state religion are enough to protect the rights of religious expressions in Bangladesh. Furthermore, the longstanding debate over secularism and state religion got a newer dimension when the recently formed committee responsible for constitutional reforms had proposed the substitution of the idea of secularism with Bahuttwavad or religious pluralism. In this context, given the lengthy history of religious activism in the public sphere of Bangladesh, it is still unclear how this specific activism is shaping the political ecology and addressing the encounter of the recent constitutional and legal debate at the grassroots level in this post-uprising period of Bangladesh. Through conducting key informant interviews (KII) and in-depth interviews (IDI), this paper will investigate the diverse narratives of religious activists of Bangladesh on how the constitutional debate on secularism and state religion is considered as a point of contention that affects the question of religious freedom for the minorities, specifically in the post-uprising period after the July massacre of 2024. The study also discusses how divergent understandings of this debate among religious activists may provide a new ground of potentials for redescribing the rights of marginal religious expressions to exist. Finally, the research critically explores how dissimilar forms of religious activism are shaping the competing narratives of rights, belongings, and state-religion relationalities. Through this, it concludes how the complexity of religious activism in Bangladesh is existing parallelly as a potential space for rights-based advocacy and a terrain of theological contestation.