India, June 25 -- Bangladesh's constitution, as amended by the Fifteenth Amendment in 2011, lists secularism as a fundamental principle and contains provisions eliminating communalism, barring the privileging of any religion, and prohibiting discrimination based on faith. The same constitution, in Article 2A, retains Islam as the state religion. That constitutional tension has been described by legal scholars as structurally unresolved - two provisions with incompatible logic occupying the same document. For minorities seeking legal protection from communal violence, the gap between what the constitution states and what the courts and police have historically enforced is where their security disappears.
The 2001 post-election violence is t...