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__NEWS__Bangladesh_________________________
Uneasy Observers
Christians in Bangladesh, struggling under a Muslim majority, have little
political power, but much to fear from the country’s October elections.
By Anto Akkara
If Sunday wraps up the weekend in much of the world, it is the beginning of the work week in Bangladesh, where Islam is the majority religion. Apart from their inability to enjoy the Sabbath rest that Sunday brings in the traditional Christian life, the Christian people of Bangladesh suffer through other difficulties—such as the fact that even Catholic schools are expected to remain open on Sundays.
“We are certainly handicapped,” admits Bishop Theotonius Gomes, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Bangladesh (CBCB). “We still have Sunday as our day of obligation. In some places, we try to teach catechism on Fridays. But it is not very effective.”
The regular patterns of Christian life in Bangladesh were turned upside down in the 1980s when the military ruler, General Ershad, decided to make Friday—the Muslim holy day—the regular weekly holiday, replacing Sunday. This decision was widely hailed by the Muslim majority, which now accounts for over 90 percent of Bangladesh’s population of 130 million. The objections from the minuscule Christian community (numbering 400,000—two thirds of them Catholics) went unheeded.
Known as East Pakistan (a part of Pakistan) until 1971, Bangladesh came into being following a war of liberation in which local troops, aided by the Indian army, fought off the Pakistani rule. But even after their secession, the Muslim majority in Bangladesh still looks to the similar Islamic society in Pakistan as a role model. The shifting of the weekly holiday in Bangladesh came soon after Pakistan shifted the weekly holiday to Friday.
Bishop Gomes relates:
Although Christians and others wanted the Sunday public holiday to be restored, it never happened. In fact Pakistan reverted to the Sunday holiday after a few years, under pressure from businessmen and others. But here we did not have much support when Pakistan made that decision. So, now we have to live with it.
To “live with” the Friday holiday, Catholics have to rush to attend Sunday Mass early in the morning before going to work, or in the evening after work. Apart from Mass itself, other church-related activities are organized on an inconsistent basis. Bishop Gomes concedes that many parishes have “yet to adjust” to the new weekly schedule.
The Catholic Church continues to accord the sabbatical status to Sunday, with Church-run institutions remaining closed on that day. Still, among the 400 schools operated under the auspices of the Catholic Church, many are open on Sundays. The schools feel heavy pressure from society at large and from the government in particular, since the schools receive substantial aid from the government.
The social pressure that is exerted, even on Christian institutions, to adhere to the Islamic calendar is evident from the fact that even major organizations like the Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh—the social-action wing of the nation’s main Protestant bodies—have switched over to the Friday holiday. The group dutifully starts the work week on Sunday for its 600-odd employees.
Evangelization and service
In this overwhelmingly Muslim nation, evangelization by Christians is not dangerous—in the way that it is dangerous in many of the Islamic nations of the Middle East, or in nearby Afghanistan under the Taliban. Bangladesh remains a secular state, as stipulated by the nation’s constitution, and the policies of the government are generally in line with that secular character. However, the freedom of religion that the constitution guarantees cannot be put into practice without risking the ire of the country’s Muslim fundamentalists—who, Bishop Gomes points out, are becoming increasingly vocal.
As a result of the growing social pressure from Islamic groups, it is unusual to find Muslims embracing Christianity. Even when Muslims do come forward on their own volition, expressing a desire to become Christians, the Church must be “extremely careful” in her response, Bishop Gomes says. On those few occasions when the Church in Bangladesh has found new converts in recent years, they have come mostly from among the minority tribes in the remote Chittagong Hill region. Only very rarely do converts come from the ethnic and religious mainstream. “It is true that the ordinary people have a liking for us. They have great admiration for our schools and other institutions. But it does not go beyond that,” Bishop Gomes reports. As a result, he observes, “our presence is steady.” The Christian proportion of the country’s population remains stagnant at 0.3 percent.
The declining social “space” accorded to the non-Muslim population is also evident in the national population profile. The ratio of Hindus—who accounted for 30 percent of the population of East Pakistan as of 1950—has been reduced to below the 10 percent mark. Over the decades, and especially in the years since independence, many of the nation’s Hindus have crossed over to the adjacent Indian state of West Bengal, where Bengali—the official language of Bangladesh—is also the mother tongue.
Christians run a wide range of social-action programs in Bangladesh, including hundreds of micro-credit programs designed to empower the rural poor and to improve the dismal health scenario. With nearly a quarter of the population living under the threat of arsenic pollution, church groups have taken it as their mission to make clean drinking water available to the poor villages.
Still, in contrast to the situation in other countries where the Catholic hierarchy retains control of nationwide charitable groups, the special legislation enacted in this Islamic nation has ensured that Church leaders cannot exercise direct control over large charitable bodies. Thus, for instance, only three bishops sit on the 36-member board of Caritas Bangladesh. Moreover, Caritas cannot fund or support any faith-oriented program. Under the laws enacted in the late 1970s, any non-government organization that receives aid from abroad, or from the government, must engage in purely charitable work, without becoming involved in evangelization and without excluding anyone from its services.
A warning blast?
The minuscule Christian community in Bangladesh suffered a severe shock in June of this year when a powerful bomb exploded during Mass and wiped out virtually the entire choir of a parish church in Baniarchar, in the Gopalganj district, about 180 miles south of Dhaka. Ten young choir members perished in the blast, and a dozen people were hospitalized.
Police soon detained four Muslim clerics, members of the militant group Harkat-ul-Jihad, on suspicion of masterminding the attack. Authorities said that one of the men arrested—Moulana Mohammad Akbar, the vice principal of an Islamic school in Dhaka—had recently visited Afghanistan and learned how to make bombs. However, Catholic Church leaders were reluctant to cheer for the quick police action. “I am not sure whether they have sufficient evidence against those arrested,” said Archbishop Michael Rozario of Dhaka, the president of the bishops’ conference. “We expressed concerns that the prompt arrests might only divert attention from the investigation, curbing the drive to find more concrete evidence.”
Three months after the blast, Archbishop Rozario’s initial reaction appears prophetic. Early in September, Bishop Gomes told CWR that “there has not been much development in the investigation.” Interest in the bombing had waned, he said, and now investigators “cannot tell how and when a new development might be seen.”
Although the Church leadership has refused to blame any particular group for the bombing—which was the deadliest attack ever carried out in Bangladesh against a Christian target—other observers point out that the main suspects in the blast are Muslim fundamentalist groups. Several such groups are dedicated to wiping out the secular character of Bangladesh and establishing an Islamic government according to the principles of Sharia law. The bomb blast, these observers say, must be seen in the context of the other incidents in which Christian cultural programs have been disrupted, and Christian educational institutions ransacked. Such incidents, reported with some regularity in the country’s more remote areas, have been noted even in Dhaka in recent years.
“A sophisticated bomb would not have been placed in a remote village church without a reason,” argues Chitta Francis Rebeiro, editor of a Catholic weekly in Dhaka. Rebeiro is convinced that the blasts have a “political angle.” He explains his reasoning: The Baniarchar parish where the bomb blast took place is located in Gopalganj, the home district of Prime Minister Hasina Wajed. It was Wajed who handed over power to an interim government in July, as the nation prepared for parliamentary elections which were scheduled to take place in the first week of October. The political party that Wajed heads, the Awami League, favors the continuation of the secular state. In the October elections, the Awami League is in competition with the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) headed by Begum Khaledi Zia. And Muslim extremist groups are allied with the BNP.
So the church bombing could be intended as a warning message not only to Christians, but also to secular-minded politicians. If Rebeiro’s analysis is on target, the future of Bangladesh under a BNP-led regime could entail serious dangers for Christians—dangers far more significant than the requirement to work on Sundays.
With both the Awami League and the BNP making determined bids for power, the Catholic Church is helplessly watching an increasingly bitter and violent campaign that has already claimed three dozen lives. The country’s bishops, well aware of their own political limitations, have not issued any guidelines for voters during the run-up to the election. Bishop Gomes explains: “The Church is a very small minority. Except in very small pockets, the Church does not mean much to the political parties. The vote of the Christian community does not make a great difference.”
Still, Bishop Gomes says, the Christians of Bangladesh are certainly concerned about the outcome of the national elections. The campaign has a direct bearing on the future for religious minorities, he observes:
Our two major parties are very much at odds with each other. There are some groups who wish to establish a more religious (Islamic) state here. And whatever the political philosophy of a group, our concern is that no one will take to terrorism.
Clearly, as the citizens of Bangladesh head for the polls on October 1, to elect the new members of the 300-seat People’s Parliament, a victory by the Bangladesh National Party is the last thing that Christians and other minorities want to see.
Anto Akkara writes regularly for CWR,
from his home in New Delhi.
Back to Catholic World Report October 2001 Table of Contents