Daily Times

British newspaper Daily Mail reported on March 2 that Bangladesh’s Supreme Court is now reviewing a petition to remove Islam as the state religion. It will decide whether the former President Muhammad Ershad’s 1988 decision designating Islam as such was illegal or not. A hearing scheduled for late March takes place against the backdrop of the rising extremism in Bangladesh alongside the emergence of a local Islamic State (IS) faction. Christians, Hindus and Shiite Muslims alike were targeted through 2015, by way of machete attacks and homemade bombs.

Most recently, on February 21, a Hindu priest named Jogeshwar Roy was hacked to death in Panchgarh district by fanatics. His murder was followed by similar fatal strikes on numerous prominent bloggers, belonging to religious minorities. IS soon claimed responsibility for Roy’s death, through social media, tweeting that, “Soldiers of the Caliphate had liquidated the priest.” Police officials, however, rubbished IS claims as they have done through all of last year, stressing that home-grown militants, and not international jihadists, were responsible for the recent killing spree. Is the government still in denial?

On October 24, 2015, a Shia shrine in Dhaka was bombed on the day of Ashura; leaving one dead and over a hundred injured. A few weeks earlier, unknown assailants had gunned down Kunio Hoshi, an elderly Japanese citizen, in Rangpur district. Hoshi’s murder came only a few days after the Italian aid worker, Cesare Tavella, fell to a hail of bullets in Dhaka’s diplomatic neighbourhood.

The SITE Intelligence Group, a jihadist watchdog focused on online snooping, revealed that IS had accepted responsibility for all three hits. Given what we know so far, snowballing extremism in Bangladesh traces back to one of the two options. These attacks were either perpetrated by rebranded radicals, or political saboteurs. Let us start with the first option. Do IS admissions of responsibility fit the profile? On the surface, no.

IS prefers flashy ways to kill, like high-yield car bombs or elaborately-staged executions. Moreover, the militant group expertly uses social media to make itself look invincible, thereby, attracting wannabe jihadists. Still, there are rhetorical commonalities between the original IS and its supposed Bangladeshi lieges. Hoshi and Tavella died because they belonged to a “crusader coalition,” while IS bombed the Ashura rally because mourners there were “polytheists.”

This uptick in domestic militancy, however, comes as no surprise, and coincides with the Awami League’s (AL) years in office. Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Vajid, is an avowed secularist, who has often been accused of using the Islamist card to scare up votes, by opponents. Vajid has also, in the past, gone after alleged war criminals with a vengeance, many of them being leaders of Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party. The country’s International Crimes Tribunal has already tried and hanged two JI patriarchs, Abdul Kader Mullah and Mohammad Qamaruzzaman; sparking countrywide protests by incensed partisans.

Political sabotage, the other possible motive, has its roots in Hasina’s autocratic rule. Long-time rival, Khalida Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is, of course, the prime suspect, but most of Hasina’s political opponents and the free press are also chafing under her dictatorship. Mahfouz Anam, editor of Dhaka’s Daily Star newspaper, explained to a British interviewer recently, “I think you have a phrase for the prime minister in the UK? First among equals. Here it’s different. Hasina is first. No equals.”

Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss Zia’s hand in the recent events for obvious reasons. Her bitter political rivalry with Hasina stretches back over two decades and Zia had led the entire opposition boycott of national elections, in 2014, for fears of rigging. Vajid, who, thereafter, has cakewalked to victory, and now worries that Zia is trying to discredit her government, and blames the BNP for “supporting terrorism and launching killing sprees across Bangladesh.”

Her case in accusing Zia is twofold. First, Vajid points to the BNP’s long political ties to the JI, and its militant subculture that cannot stomach a secular Bangladesh. Vajid believes that Zia is egging on these disgruntled Islamists, to ruin her government’s image. Second, Hasina claims that the recent acts of terrorism are Zia’s version of payback for Dhaka, upholding the death sentence of senior BNP leader, Sala Uddin Chowdhury.

At the end of the day, the loss is Bangladesh’s to bear, and there will be an economic consequence, if such attacks continue. The country’s export-driven economy, especially the garments sector, could stall, if new orders drop significantly because of the foreign executives being afraid to make a trip. Previous episodes of rioting in 2014 and 2015 have already dented Bangladesh’s tourism industry with hundreds of booking cancellations.

That said, if recent attacks do signal the arrival of IS in Bangladesh, or a local rebranding outside of the BNP’s sphere of influence, then, it is imperative that Vajid and Zia cease fire, and find a way to coexist for the greater good. A weak central government does neither any favours, since as Syria and Iraq have shown us, this exact situation first allows IS to foment unrest, and then start taking over territory.

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad