New Delhi, Aug. 5 -- A year is not a long time in a nation's history. Yet over the past one year, since nationwide protests compelled former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country, Bangladesh has been riven to a point where it is difficult to recognise not only the place it has become but to even wonder why it ever separated from Pakistan and came into being.

The basic hypothesis behind the inception and birth of Bangladesh, beginning in 1952, less than five years after the partition of the subcontinent of India into the countries India and Pakistan, was language and, by extension, its unique Bengali cultural identity. Islam was, and is certainly, an inherent part of that identity, but the defining feature of the identity they ...