In Bangladesh, no one really commemorates August 15, the Independence of India and Pakistan. After all, how many independences can one country take? First there was the exit of the British — something to be celebrated, surely, as Bengal was at the heart of the reform and nationalist movements throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, there was the creation of Pakistan, which Bengali Muslims voted for and endorsed. Then, of course, they had their very own independence — the independence that came about in 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

The question of dates becomes even more complicated because of the events of August 15, 1975. On this day, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of Bangladesh’s independence movement, was brutally murdered along with 14 members of his family. A strong lobby in Bangladesh called for August 15 to be declared a national day of mourning.

With these complex associations, and with the layering of history which inevitably encourages us to replace certain dates with new ones, Bangladeshis would unequivocally name March 26, 1971 as their day of independence. However, even this date gestures towards an unfulfilled promise, because freedom was granted to too few, and with too many conditions.

Throughout the Bangladesh war, Pakistani soldiers repeatedly asked Bengali freedom fighters if they were Bengali or Muslim, as though the cultural identity could not coexist with the religious identity. The Bengalis of East Pakistan were Bengali and Muslim; they fought a war of independence so that they could have a country in which these two identities could be integrated.

But sadly, the fight that led to the legitimisation of this identity did not lay the groundwork for pluralism, nor indeed did it result in a final resolution of the tension between cultural and religious identity. People are still wondering whether they are Bengali or Muslim, and in the wake of this great anxiety, a sinister and violent form of identity politics has taken root that has left many Bangladeshi citizens behind.

For East Pakistan, and East Bengal before it, was not only made up of Bengalis and Muslims. It also included Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jains, and the indigenous peoples — Chakmas, Santals, and Garos. These people are neither Bengali nor Muslim, and this debate has not only disenfranchised them from the major questions of identity that grip modern-day Bangladesh, but has distracted us from the slow and steady colonisation of their lands, cultures, and habitats.

For minorities, freedom has not arrived at all, not with three dates on the calendar, not with three decades of citizenship, and certainly not with the crude majoritarianism that they call democracy.