“This was a destruction not of a house but of our history, of my history,” said a veteran of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, telling me about the destruction of the Dhaka home of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s first leader, on February 5.
The address, 32 Dhanmondi, is well known in Bangladesh. It is where, in March 1971, Mujib was apprehended by Pakistani troops as they began the violent crackdown that culminated in a genocide, the third India-Pakistan war, and the birth of a new nation. And it is where, on August 15, 1975, Bangladeshi soldiers slaughtered President Mujib and several members of his family in the country’s first military coup.
That it now stands in ruins shows how much public anger had accumulated during the 15 years of repressive rule of Sheikh Hasina Wajed – Mujib’s daughter – which ended in August 2024 after weeks of student-led protests.
Hasina had turned the house into a memorial for her father. Now exiled in India, she is plotting a political comeback. Last February, she planned to give a speech that would condemn Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus’ interim government. Protest leaders warned that if she spoke, they would destroy her father’s house. She spoke anyway.
For people like the Liberation War veteran, the destruction of 32 Dhamondi was a case of a mob indulging in senseless violence against a symbol of their country’s founding history. But for the students who participated, it was an act of defiance against a “fascist” Awami League and a version of history that enabled Hasina to present herself and her family as the only legitimate custodians of Bangladesh’s independence.
A court order that revived a quota system reserving a proportion of government jobs for 1971 war veterans and their descendants – effectively a spoils system for allies of the Awami League – sparked the June-July student-led uprising. The quota system brought little benefit to a new generation of Bangladeshis desperate for employment opportunities. When Hasina implied that the protesters were razakars, a word widely used for Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army during the 1971 genocide, she crossed the point of no return.
Friend of Bengal
Today, the 1971 Liberation War still serves as a court of appeal in which Bangladesh’s main political players attack each other on two issues: Who was the true custodian of Bangladesh’s independence? And what kind of nation was born?
Outsiders can be forgiven for believing that Mujib’s status as the country’s founding father is as unquestioned as Jinnah’s in Pakistan or Gandhi’s and Nehru’s in India. The truth is that his status has always been contested in Bangladesh.
Mujib is commonly known as Bangabandhu, or Friend of Bengal: the man who led Bengalis to victory in Pakistan’s first democratic election, in 1970, against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).
But he was denied his mandate to form a government by the West Pakistan establishment, which couldn’t bear being ruled by Bengalis. In March 1971, amid a stalemate between East and West Pakistan, troops were deployed to Dhaka from West Pakistan to apprehend Mujib.
The night of March 26, 1971 has passed into Awami League lore, much of it based on Mujib’s own account. Hearing of a West Pakistani plot to kill him and blame it on Bengali extremists, Mujib claimed he sent most of his children into hiding while preparing to be killed in his house and become a martyr. This was key to make it clear that soldiers and not street bandits were the culprits. Before soldiers arrested him, Mujib dictated a message to his people, recorded and later broadcast via a secret transmitter, to fight the West Pakistan army for independence.
If Mujib’s admirers saw this as a mark of courage, for his opponents, it was proof that, in prison and removed from the battlefield, he was safe amid the slaughter.
Many years ago, a retired government official in Dhaka asked me, rhetorically, why the army didn’t kill Mujib then. He proposed a theory: West Pakistan’s leadership believed that Mujib was open to keeping Pakistan united and kept him alive for future negotiations. This explanation, whether credible or not, speaks to a larger contest over the liberation narrative. For the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by Hasina’s rival Khaleda Zia, fighters – not politicians – won the country’s independence. And according to the BNP, it was army major Ziaur Rahman, Khaleda’s husband and the BNP’s founder, who declared Bangladesh’s independence on March 27, 1971, while Mujib was in jail.
What Kind of Nation?
The 1975 coup opened debate over whether the country’s character was rooted in geography or religion. Bengal was a major site of British divide-and-rule strategies. To suppress local resistance, the British partitioned Bengal in 1905 between a Hindu-majority West Bengal and a Muslim-majority East Bengal. Instead of quelling Bengali nationalism, however, it “provoked an upsurge of nationalist protest” as Patrick French argued in “Liberty or Death.” The protests forced the British to reunite Bengal in 1911, giving new force to Bengali national identity.
In 1947, Bengal’s Legislative Assembly voted for a united Bengal to join Pakistan. After legislators from West Bengal voted for the partitioning of Bengal and for West Bengal to become part of India, Muslim-majority East Bengal legislators, who still sought a united province, voted for East Bengal to join Pakistan in case of provincial partition.
In the newly created Pakistan, political power was concentrated in Karachi and, after the federal capital was moved, in Islamabad. West Pakistan’s leadership viewed the country’s linguistic diversity as a threat, and in 1948, Urdu — the lingua franca of a minority of West Pakistanis — was declared the sole national language. It sparked a movement in 1952 in East Pakistan for Bangla to be given equal status. On the movement’s first day, police killed four demonstrators at Dhaka University. Although Bangla was later recognized as a national language, these killings made reconciliation between the east and the west of the country all but impossible.
West Pakistan’s refusal to honor the mandate of the 1970 national election — the Awami League won the majority of seats in the National Assembly — was the last straw. It prompted protests in East Pakistan. West Pakistan responded by unleashing the army on the East Pakistanis and at least a million were killed in the violence that followed. According to veteran journalist David Bergman, “This campaign of violence, particularly against the Hindu population, was a genocide.” Only through India’s intervention in December 1971, and the third India-Pakistan war, did the massacre stop and a new nation emerge.
Liberation provided an opportunity to codify Bengali nationalism. The 1972 Constitution espoused nationalism and secularism, in addition to democracy and socialism. It also banned the Jamaat-e-Islami and any religion-based party.
The Awami League’s emphasis on ethnic nationalism and secularism was openly contested after Mujib’s assassination, when Ziaur Rahman, taking control after the 1975 coup, promoted a religion-based conception of Bangladeshi national identity: a Muslim nation that happened to be majority Bengali rather than a Bengali nation that was majority Muslim. Zia’s constitutional amendments replaced “secularism” with “absolute trust and faith in the almighty Allah” and lifted the ban on religion-based parties.
For the Awami League, the BNP’s fidelity to an independent Bangladesh is questionable, given its pro-Pakistani sympathies and its long partnership with the Jamaat-e-Islami, which explicitly opposed Bangladesh’s creation. BNP and Jamaat supporters, meanwhile, accuse both Mujib and Hasina of having surrendered Bangladesh’s sovereignty to India.
But the binary between Awami League secularism and the religious politics of its opponents has not been neat. Hasina’s government, for example, reinserted secularism into the 2011 Constitution but retained Islam as the state religion. But 1971 remains a potent political weapon, one that Hasina deployed against her rivals on returning to office in 2009, tapping a still deeply felt wound: the role of Bengalis who collaborated with Pakistan in that war.
Accountability and Its Discontents
In the 2008 election, the Awami League made the trial of alleged perpetrators of war crimes in 1971 an important plank of its election campaign. Following its victory in that election, the Awami League updated the 1973 International Crimes (Tribunal) Act to facilitate the prosecution of the Jamaat-e-Islami leadership. The ICT began work in earnest in 2010 to significant criticism at home and abroad for its lack of due process and use of the death penalty. The trials soon became the national story, as a legitimate demand for justice turned into political theater and led to a string of high-profile convictions.
In February 2013, the tribunal issued a death sentence for Jamaat Vice President and popular preacher Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, provoking violent demonstrations that killed over 40 people. The same month, another Jamaat leader, Abdul Quader Mollah, was sentenced to life imprisonment. This decision caused a different kind of protest: young people filled Dhaka’s Shahbagh Square demanding that Mollah be sentenced to death. Faced with unprecedented protests, the High Court yielded.
When I attended an ICT hearing in Dhaka just after these events, I was a strong critic of the whole process — and I remain one. But interviewing students who took part in the Shahbagh Square protests, I was aware of how the trials had politicized a new generation of Bangladeshis and familiarized them with the atrocities of 1971. To them, the concerns about due process sounded quaint. Many rights activists, however, argued that the “Shahbaghis” had undermined the quest for justice and lit a dangerous fuse.
Just how dangerous soon became evident.
Shahbagh inspired a counter-movement led by the Hefazat-e-Islam, hitherto a marginal Islamist coalition supported by the Jamaat and others, and fed by a large qaumi (privately run) madrassa sector. In April 2013, barely two months after Shahbagh began, Hefazat held massive rallies in Dhaka around 13 demands, the third of which was “stringent punishment against self-declared atheists and bloggers.”
Secular bloggers were key organizers of the Shahbagh movement. In February 2013, a secular blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was hacked to death by members of the al-Qaida-affiliated Ansarullah Bangla Team. Soon, a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers was circulated in the press and elsewhere. In February 2015, blogger Avijit Roy was killed outside a book fair in Dhaka. Four other secular activists were killed in a similar fashion the same year. Soon, Hasina began courting the Hefazat to neutralize the threat from the hard right. Her appeasement of Islamist hardliners exposed the shallowness of the Awami League’s claims to be a party that upheld secular principles.
In the process, Hasina increasingly turned against the Awami League’s historic liberal base, targeting not just the BNP and mainstream political opponents but also civil society critics of government policy. As the avowed basis of her legitimacy – that her government would deliver economic development even as its popular mandate was becoming more questionable – started to falter, Hasina sought moral authority by other means: first, in counterterrorism, especially after the July 2016 jihadist attack on Dhaka’s Holey Bakery café, and then in 2018–2019 a brutal “war on drugs” that led to tens of thousands of arrests and hundreds of extrajudicial killings. Opposition party members were prominent targets in both campaigns.
As Hasina’s democratic standing continued to wane amid rigged elections, closing civic space, and ferocious security crackdowns, there remained the time-tested formula of asserting the Awami League’s virtual hereditary right to rule. To mark the 100th anniversary of Mujib’s birth, the government declared the period between March 2020 and March 2021 as “Mujib Year.” As one account put it, “billboards adorned the country, students in schools saluted his portrait, government documents featured his watermark, and mobile phones eerily played ringtones of his familiar voice in tribute.”
Any critique of Mujib’s authoritarian acts in office was, needless to say, discouraged. In November 2023, weeks before the January 2024 elections, Hasina inaugurated a new site of murals and a large golden statue of her father to honor his role in Bangladesh’s freedom struggle.
New Era
But as mass fury with Hasina’s rule gathered momentum in 2024, the Mujib legacy was not enough to save her.
On August 5, 2024, the day her government collapsed, protesters demolished Mujib’s statue on one of Dhaka’s main roads. Other sculptures and images of Mujib were destroyed in the ensuing days.
In January this year, Bangladesh’s interim government changed the national curriculum to reflect the BNP version of events, replacing Mujib with Zia as the recognized founding father — a bid, officials said, to rectify historical inaccuracies. The destruction of 32 Dhanmondi seems a logical, if disturbing, climax. The youth movement’s revolutionary elements are calling for scrapping Mujib’s 1972 constitution and permanently banning the Awami League, in effect still fighting over the country’s origin story
Others in this new generation of activists and political leaders are, however, less inclined to fight in the name of old myths. The more compelling struggle ahead, therefore, may not be between different accounts of the country’s birth, but between those who want a new politics focused on justice, equity, and democracy, and those whose claim to office relies on summoning the ghosts of liberation past. Repeating the cycle of vengeance and division may be tempting in a deeply traumatized nation, but it will likely have a bitter afterlife. The past often does.
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