DHAKA, Bangladesh (RNS) — Amid a spike in violence against religious minorities in Bangladesh, a national council of Buddhists, Hindus and Christians is renewing a campaign for the Muslim-majority South Asian nation to remove Islam as the state religion. 

In mid-July, student-led protests demanding reform of the country’s job quota system turned violent, culminating in the collapse of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on Aug. 5. After Hasina’s resignation, the anger aimed at her government poured onto religious minorities, especially Hindus and members of Hasina’s party, the secular Awami League, which is backed by much of the Hindu community.

The attacks on Hindu houses of worship, homes and businesses, as well as Awami League politicians, have resulted in the deaths of at least 650 people since the violence began, according to a report by the United Nations Human Rights Commission. 

The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a human rights organization, argues that enshrining Islam as the state religion has been detrimental to the country’s religious minorities and aspirations of greater democratic rule.

“According to the communalist and fundamentalist forces, Islam does not coexist with other religious faiths and beliefs and also contradicts democracy, in which they have no belief,” said Monindra Kumar Nath, the council’s joint general secretary. 

The council said earlier this month that there were 1,045 cases of human rights violations against religious minorities between June and August. Council members, including Nath, have received death threats for their activism. Nath called the reestablishment of “a discrimination-free state” a dream “dreamt by the recent student movement,” and one the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council will keep fighting for. 

The interethnic and interreligious forum was established by Maj. Gen. C.R. Dutta Bir Uttam, a veteran of Bangladesh’s guerrilla war for independence from Pakistan that began in the 1970s and was fought by people of different faiths, including Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus.

After the war in 1972, architects of the Bangladeshi Constitution included secularism alongside nationalism, socialism and democracy as the country’s four founding principles. But a few years later, the first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known as the “father of the nation” and Hasina’s actual father, was overthrown and a military ruler, Ziaur Rahman, replaced secularism with “absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah.” His successor Hussain Muhammad Ershad, another military officer, officially made Islam as the state religion with a change to the constitution.

Activists have since demanded the removal of the mention of a state religion, but despite Ershad’s fall in 1990, successive governments have kept the status quo, including those led by the Awami League. In 2011, a constitutional reform restored the original four founding principles, including secularism, but Hasina and others’ conception of secularism included a state Islam that would also guarantee religious freedom. 

But religious minority leaders say they face discrimination and many hurdles to practice their faith freely. 

Last September, the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council launched a hunger strike to hold Awami League to its election promises, which included proposing legislation that would allow Hindus to reclaim confiscated property, the creation of a national minority commission, protection for religious minorities and the reinstatement of employment quotas that would distribute government jobs more equally across faiths.

Bangladesh Hindus hold a protest rally condemning communal atrocities committed against them and other religious minority groups in the Muslim-majority country, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Aug. 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Rajib Dhar)

The Bangladesh Youth Unity Council, a student-led organization, wants the international community to remind the interim government about its international obligation to protect its citizens, irrespective of religion and ethnic identity.

“Whoever comes to power should establish a minorities commission and a ministry for religious and ethnic minorities,” said the youth council’s secretary, who requested anonymity out of concern for his safety. “They should give land rights to everyone and there should be a special tribunal to protect religious minorities.”

Communications laws, such as the Digital Security Act, are used to single out members of minority faiths, especially Hindus, for “offending the religious sentiments” of the Muslim majority. Courts have also imposed stricter penalties on religious minorities accused of posting offensive content on Facebook.

The youth secretary added that, after Hasina fled earlier this month, the movement to remove Islam as the state religion in Bangladesh is at square one. “The mob rule on the streets right now have made it clear that they don’t want religious minorities in Bangladesh,” he said. “They want only one single religion, which is Islam.”

The international community, including the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, has called for the protection of minorities in Bangladesh. 

“We have made it clear that our goal is to ensure that the recent violence in Bangladesh is de-escalated. We are firmly against any racially driven attacks or incitement to such violence,” said Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in an Aug. 8 statement.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, said removing Islam as a state religion would significantly improve the interim government’s relationship with India, which has called on Bangladesh to protect its religious minorities in hopes of preventing Hindu refugees from coming across the border.

But Kugelman cautioned that dropping Islam’s favored status is not a simple fix and he does not foresee it happening.

“Simply removing Islam as a state religion would not mean that influential religious and particularly Islamist actors would go away,” he added. “On the contrary, they would become more emboldened.”

The interim government’s prime minister, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, recently showed support for minorities by visiting Dhakeshwari Temple, a prominent state-owned Hindu site in Dhaka considered the country’s national temple.

Yunus urged Bangladeshis to be patient before assessing his government’s performance, according to local media. 

“In our democratic aspirations, we should not be seen as Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, but as human beings,” Yunus said, according to The Daily Star, the largest English daily newspaper in Bangladesh. “Our rights should be ensured. The root of all problems lies in the decay of institutional arrangements. That is why such issues arise. Institutional arrangements need to be fixed.”