Prescriptions for us
Munim Chowdhury, Founding Member of Tagore Society of New York
It has become a daily practice for Western envoys to write prescriptions for all ailments of Bangladesh. Now it seems the Indian envoy has joined the league. It sounds like big brothers telling his younger brother what is the right thing to do. Indian envoy's remark on practice of secularism in Bangladesh is rather undiplomatic. I certainly believe Bangladesh has a long way to go before we can claim ourselves a secular nation. Constitutional provision does not guarantee secularism in practice in India or in Bangladesh. True secularism has to be practised in daily life and exists in the heart of the people and not in the mouth or printed in the constitution. In the 1960's a professor of comparative literature of Jadovpur University after visiting the villages of the then East Pakistan wrote, " True secularism is in better practice in the villages in East Pakistan than anywhere else in the sub-continent".A true Bengali can never be a non-secularist.
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