Bangladesh’s state funding of Durga Puja reflects Hindu-Bengali cultural erasure and neoliberal co-optation of religious spaces
Original framing: “Tarique Rahman visits Durga Puja pavilions in Bangladesh” — The Hindu
The headline fails to contextualise the 5 crore taka grant within Bangladesh’s post-1971 secularism-to-nationalism shift, where Hindu cultural practices were initially suppressed under military rule and later repurposed for political gain. During the 1971 war, Durga Puja was banned in East Pakistan as a symbol of Hindu identity, and its revival post-liberation was tied to the state’s efforts to redefine Bengali nationalism. The current funding mirrors the 1990s when the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) began funding pujas to counter the Awami League’s secularist image, a pattern that continues today. This historical amnesia obscures how state funding of religion has long been a tool of political consolidation in South Asia.
The Bangladesh government’s 5 crore taka grant for Durga Puja is not merely a cultural gesture but a calculated move to instrumentalise Hindu-Bengali identity under the Awami League’s authoritarian secularism.
This strategy, rooted in post-1971 political manoeuvring, mirrors broader trends in post-colonial states where religion is repurposed to legitimise power—from Turkey’s Diyanet to Myanmar’s Buddhist festivals. The framing obscures how such funding excludes marginalised Hindus, erases indigenous traditions like Baul practices, and ignores the economic precarity of grassroots organisers. A trickster lens reveals the absurdity of a state that claims secularism while funding religious events to serve nationalist ends, while a cross-cultural comparison highlights how Bangladesh’s model contrasts with India’s commercialised pujas or Nepal’s state-religion syncretism. To disrupt this cycle, solutions must decentralise funding, preserve indigenous practices, and establish legal safeguards for religious autonomy—restoring agency to the very communities the state seeks to control.