It is exactly three years since the government led by Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh National Party and supported by the Jamaat-e-Islami fundamentalists, came to power. The operations of extremists pre-date this event; and even before the fateful election of 2001, there had been a number of bomb outrages, aimed principally at Leftist, secularist or Bengali cultural activities. Since that time, mysteriously untraceable atrocities have become more intense, and over 150 people have been killed in bomb blasts, responsibility for none of which has been attributed to anyone.

The presence of the Jamaat in the government of Bangladesh is, perhaps, astonishing, since it fought against the very existence of Bangladesh as a separate country in the War of Liberation of 1971, when Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan, whose Eastern (and subordinate) province it had remained since Partition in 1947. After the War, which witnessed one of the great massacres of the 20th century, the pro-Pakistani forces lay low; and, in any case, their power appeared dwarfed by that of the military, which emerged to rule Bangladesh after the assassination of Sheikh Mujib, who had dominated the liberation struggle and ruled until he, along with most of his family, was killed in 1975. Zia ur Rahman formed the BNP from the Dhaka cantonment; and its strongly nationalist rhetoric provided an alternative to the secular, pro-Bengali, mildly Leftist Awami League, which had been the inheritor of popular support after liberation. The dictatorship of Ershad, following the assassination of Zia ur Rahman lasted from 1983 to 1990; when the “return to democracy” saw the election of Khaleda Zia (widow of Zia ur Rahman) until 1996, when she was ousted by the Awami League, led by the daughter of the murdered Mujib, Sheikh Hasina. The BNP returned to power in 2001, this time with the support of 17 Jamaat MPs.

The one-third of a century of Bangladeshi freedom has been characterised by a kind of low-intensity cultural civil war, in which the point of contention has been the struggle for the soul of this new country: does it embody a secular, pluralist Bengali culture, called into being by a war of popular struggle against the Pakistani oppressors, or is it a potential Islamic state, nourished by a fierce patriotism, which thrives mainly on the omnipresence of its neighbour, India, which encloses it virtually on all sides?

The election of 2001 decisively tipped the balance towards the latter; particularly since this took place in the immediate aftermath of 11 September. I was in Dhaka on that day; and I met not a single person who at that time thought it a good idea to fly aircraft into public buildings, particularly when 64 Bangladeshi nationals were among the victims. However, by the time of my next visit, in February 2002, I met scarcely anyone who did not regard bin Laden as some kind of hero. Of the course, the war in Afghanistan had intervened; and the images of the dead and wounded of women and children had shown to the people of Bangladesh what appeared to be an equally arbitrary slaughter of the innocents by the greatest military power on earth. The consciousness of the whole country had changed in six short months, and in common with the experience all over the world, sympathy for the Americans had turned to wrath.

The past three years have also witnessed the intensification of the attacks by the Israelis upon the Palestinians, and the laissez-faire response of the Bush administration; the renewed assault on Chechnya by Vladimir Putin’s increasingly violent and corrupt regime, and of course, the war in Iraq, Bush’s malignant and mendacious pretence – ably abetted by the persuasive charms of Tony Blair – to seek out phantom weapons of mass destruction.

The effect of all this, both on the consciousness of the people, and on the audacity of extremists in Bangladesh, cannot be overestimated. It has to be acknowledged that none of this started with the Khaleda Zia government – the forces which were opposed to the freedom of Bangladesh were regrouping, awaiting their opportunistic moment, just as the neo-conservatives in the USA had been biding their time, waiting for the moment when they could ride forth with their war cries of dominance and destruction. From the 1970s to the 90s, more than 64,000 madrassas were established in Bangladesh, many of them with money from Saudi Arabia, with large concentrations of these close to the borders with the Indian North-east. The conduct of these institutions lay outside of the purview of government. Many Islamic charities and non-government organisations were also operating beyond official scrutiny, including al Haramain, a “charity” which even Saudi Arabia banned in June 2004, although it was still operating in Bangladesh.

Their work was soon to bear fruit. No sooner were the election results known in Bangladesh in 2001 than attacks on minorities occurred in the rural areas. Many Hindus were dispossessed of their property, were threatened and mutilated. Some fled to India. The writer and broadcaster Shahriar Kabir interviewed some of them in West Bengal. For his pains, he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the government as soon as he returned to Bangladesh. This set the tone for a period of rising intolerance, violence and disorder in the country. This included an attack upon the Ahmadiya Muslims, the banning of their publications by the government, and by the assault on their mosques by extremists, declaring that they are non-Muslims and their mosques not authentic sites of worship. It has involved the murder of writers and journalists who are secular, humanist or proponents of Bengali culture. The writer Humayun Azad was attacked with a machete in February 2004; and died later, partly as a consequence of his injuries. The British High Commissioner was injured by a grenade at a holy shrine in Sylhet in April 2004. Experts from Scotland Yard were called in, but their investigations proved no more fruitful than the desultory efforts of the languid Bangladeshi authorities. Meanwhile, the activities of an elusive individual known as “Bangla Bhai” terrorised the North of Bangladesh, intimidating villagers and killing those they called “anti-social elements”. Police have made no efforts to curtain these activities. An Awami League MP was gunned down at a rally in Tongi on 7 May 2004. One of the best-known NGOs, dedicated to secularism, Bengali culture and the emancipation of women, was targeted in the same month, the leadership arrested, detained and abused, accused of “sedition”. The culmination of these events occurred on 21 August, when bombs at an Awami League political meeting killed 20 people, including the veteran women’s affairs worker Ivy Rahman, and Sheikh Hasina narrowly escaped with her life.

It is no accident that, earlier, Khaleda Zia had withdrawn the intense security which had surrounded Hasina. Death-threats to Hasina had been dismissed by the administration as “efforts to provoke sympathy” for the leader of the Opposition. Even after the outrage of 21 August, government spokespersons insisted it had been engineered by the Awami League for political purposes that remain obscure. While one should never underestimate the role of incompetence and corruption, the supineness of the BNP/Jamaat government in response to violence against law-abiding citizens who do not agree with its intransigent view of the country, suggests something more than mere indifference to law and order.

One of the apparently most astonishing elements in all this has been the relative silence of the West on these sorry events. The US under-secretary of state for South Asian affairs, had called Bangladesh “a model Muslim democracy”. Even after the British High Commissioner had been injured, as soon as he returned to Dhaka he could not wait to underline the democratic credentials of the government. The West has been at pains to demonstrate that, although it has either initiated, or connived at, violent assaults on Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Iraq, it is not anti-Islam. In the so-called war on terror, it needs to provide itself with allies in the Muslim world; and Bangladesh is one of the countries appointed to fulfil this role.

An unfortunate choice; the more so since Musharraf, that notable instigator of terror, has been transformed from military dictator to statesman in the eyes of the USA, and he has promoted himself as the saviour of his nation and the staunchest ally of George Bush in this increasingly abstract and eccentric war on terrorists. But with the scrutiny turned by the West upon Pakistan, and equally, on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, the centre of extremism has shifted; and Bangladesh has been the doubtful beneficiary of this chain of world events.

India is directly threatened by these developments. The rancour of Pakistan towards an India which assisted the coming into existence of Bangladesh has been rekindled through the good offices of the ISI and Bangladesh's Directorate General of Forces Intelligence. Since Pakistan is now officially engaged on dialogue with India, what could be more appealing than diverting its resources to assist the Bangladeshi nationalists and their Jamaat allies, who have been encircling India’s North-east with the 200 or so camps, from where they can give succour and support to insurgencies against India? The foreign minister of Bangladesh has openly stated that Bangladesh has the power to create havoc in the North-east, since the seven states there are “Bangladesh-locked”. To help destabilise India would be, not only a triumph for Bangladeshi “patriotism”, but would also help the long-term project of the extremists of re-gaining, for a disputable version of Islam, an entity lost 33 years ago to Pakistan.

Bangladesh was born as a country committed to secularism, socialism, nationalism and democracy. The military erased secularism and socialism from the Constitution; and the fundamentalist forces are doing their best to stifle democracy also. If the present trends in Bangladesh go unchallenged, they will replace the ancient, secular and pluralist culture of Bengal with yet another regime built on the joyless intolerance and inflexibility peculiar to those elements of humanity, which exist in all religions, and think they are the sole proprietors of truth

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About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is an author and freelance journalist based in London. He has written plays for the stage, TV and radio, made TV documentaries, published more than 30 books and contributed to leading journals around the world.