One morning in July 2017, a group of 30 to 40 students belonging to the SUST (Shahjalal University of Science and Technology) Chhatra League (BCL), the student wing of the currently ruling party, Awami League (AL), crowded in front of Assistant Professor Minhaz Sobhan's office to confront him regarding his recent Facebook post that had gone viral the night before. 1 The post had been debated intensely among students on the university's Facebook site. With emotions flaring, the number of reposts and comments quickly multiplied, spreading beyond the university circle. Several colleagues had called the professor advising him to avoid the university campus as he might be physically attacked. His office was locked in anticipation. The students started to vandalize the office from outside while shouting slogans against the teacher, calling for the university to take action against him. Chanting the common BCL slogan "jaẏ bāṃla, jaẏ baṅgabandhu" (Victory to Bengal, Victory to Bangabandhu [friend of Bengal i.e., Sheikh Mujibur Rahman]), 2 they tore down Minhaz Sobhan's nameplate and used it to break his office's small window. As a symbolic act they threw the wooden nameplate on the floor and stomped on it. Later that day, the BCL students proudly shared their Facebook posts with pictures of the nameplate amid pieces of broken glass, along with descriptions and pictures of the meeting with the university's vice-chancellor concerning this incident and their demands. 2 Minhaz Sobhan's Facebook post was also heatedly debated among the university's faculty and the issue dominated conversations for a couple of days; even teachers not Performing the Party. National Holiday Events and Politics at a Public Univer...

This article explores the complex role of political ideologies in everyday politics and for urban middle-class Bangladeshis’ evaluation of political parties. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and, more specifically, conversations and contentions around the removal of ‘Lady Justice’ from the front of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in 2017, I show that although the Awami League continues to be considered a ‘secular party’, many people do not believe that the Awami League is implementing secular policy and criticise it for what they perceive as ‘hypocrisy’. I argue that this seemingly paradoxical situation can be explained by a political structure that is marked by high factionalism and party competition. Data from research among politicians and the left-leaning, so-called ‘culturally-minded’ milieu in Sylhet, shows that certain segments of the educated middle class acknowledge the pragmatic realities of politics and do not expect the Awami League to act ‘progressively’. Nonetheless, they continue to position the party’s ‘progressive’ and ‘secular’ ideological basis as a primary reason for supporting the party. The article thus contributes to a deeper understanding of contemporary popular and elite practices and perceptions of party politics, democracy, and what might be labelled the ‘party-state effect’.

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People in South Asia who neither believe in god(s) nor engage in religious practices nevertheless often self-identify as Muslims or Hindus rather than—or in addition to—identifying as atheists. The situational and contextual dynamics generating such positionings have implications for the conceptualization of nonreligion and secular lives. Based on ethnographic research in India and Bangladesh and focusing on two individuals, we attend to embodied and more ambivalent modes of nonreligiosity. This enables us to understand nonreligion as situated social practices and beyond what is typically captured with the term ‘religion’. Studying nonreligion also where it is not visible as articulated conviction or identity not only contributes to accounting for the diversity of nonreligious configurations but also offers significant complementary insights.