The Caste Question in East Pakistan and Bangladesh

Abstract

In the wake of the United Nations “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance” held in Durban in 2001, many nongovernmental organizations initiated advocacy campaigns against caste-based discrimination, highlighting the social and economic hardships experienced by Dalit communities in Bangladesh. This article demonstrates that there is a longer history of engagements with the caste question among social scientists in East Pakistan and Bangladesh; however, the endemic practice of identifying caste inequity exclusively with Hinduism often resulted in advocacy campaigns and the social sciences subsuming Dalit experiences into the social predicament of Hindus as a religious minority group. The decoupling of caste and religious minorities in the political and social domains in the aftermath of advocacy campaigns has led to renewed efforts to acknowledge the singularity of Dalit experience in contemporary Bangladesh.