Pakistan may be the flavour of the day when it comes to bashing Islamic fundamentalism in the subcontinent. But there are signs that things are not too well on India's eastern flank either.
Bangladesh, with the world's third largest Muslim population, has been witnessing a social churning that suggests that religious intolerance is on the rise. There was consternation when the Bangladesh Nationalist Party came to power after forging an alliance with the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami. While Prime Minister Khaleda Zia responded to fears with tut-tuts, the Jamaat seemed to be moving towards its long-stated goal of making Bangladesh an Islamic State in name and in spirit.
Bangladesh's cultural elite may still cherish the secular ideals of its founder, but on the ground, the situation is not comforting. The Society for Environment and Human Development, a local NGO, has pointed out that "the intimidation of the minorities, which had begun before the election, became worse afterwards". Attacks on Hindus have increased, as has been the boldness by which rabble-rousing clerics have been spouting their message to an ever-growing audience. It is one thing to witness crowds on the streets of Dhaka protesting against the US's war on terrorism and quite another to hear stories about jehadis being recruited to fight in Kashmir, Chechnya and Afghanistan.
More and more students have been
entering madrasas over the last decade which analysts describe as "a potential
time bomb". For a country that continues to suffer economically, the danger
that the lure of religious extremism poses cannot be played down. With
the news of Muslims in danger in India, Bangladeshis could be sitting on
a hair-trigger. With religious intolerance becoming an ugly spectacle in
other parts of the region, one hopes that Bangla-desh is stopped in its
tracks before fundamentalism truly bares its teeth.