At Dhaka University, the cradle of a student uprising that overthrew Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina in August, a mural featuring her late father, the independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, has been defaced.
Red paint splatters the face of the man many Bangladeshis revere as a founder of the nation. Under his visage, which is depicted addressing an adoring crowd, someone has scrawled the words: “Icon of fascism”.
Barely half a year after a revolution that overthrew Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule, the interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is rewriting Bangladesh’s official history, downplaying Sheikh Mujib’s role in its 1971 struggle for independence and challenging the cult of personality that was built around him.
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“We are not trying to rewrite the whole thing, but there are a few things in plain sight that need change,” said Mohammad Abu Baker Majumder, a Dhaka University law student who took part in the revolt. “What the Awami League did was to create a false Mujibist ideology through stories, poems and artworks.
For Bangladesh, reaching consensus on a national narrative is an important part of the student-led opposition movement’s aspiration to break with the previous political era. The country’s traditional, bitterly opposed political camps — Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist party — draw their legitimacy from the legacy of 1971.
It also undergirds the new government’s sweeping reforms to institutions including the judiciary, media and police that Yunus claims were captured by the “fascist” Awami League during its repressive reign.
School textbooks printed by his government, which includes student activists, have demoted Mujib from his singular status as father of the nation. Hasina’s photograph and quotes, once prominently featured on the back covers, have been replaced by illustrations of graffiti that appeared during the uprising that ended her rule.
Statues of Sheikh Mujib and “Mujib corners” — shrines in public buildings — were vandalised and the Dhaka museum in his former home was burnt down during the uprising in August.
But Yunus’s team faces a range of difficult obstacles in this effort to remake the country, including high inflation, rocky relations with India over threats to Bangladesh’s minority Hindus and mounting calls from leading political parties to hold elections and transfer power to an elected government. Yunus’s critics both at home and in India charge that his student advisers are dangerous radicals and soft on Islamists.
“Professor Yunus kept on saying he wants to push the reset button, and he’s doing that by distorting history and lying about history to our new generation through textbooks,” said Mohammad Arafat, a former information minister and senior Awami League official.
“Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the central figure in independence, but because they can’t completely delete him they are putting him alongside other leaders.”
The opposition BNP, which is widely tipped to win the next election, has its own competing narrative, making the task of revisiting history even more sensitive. The party’s founder Ziaur Rahman formally proclaimed Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, and the BNP is now chaired on an acting basis by his son, Tarique Rahman.
One of the most notable changes in the textbooks involves how Bangladesh’s Liberation War is portrayed. While previous editions focused on Sheikh Mujib’s role in the struggle against Pakistan, the 2025 update references Ziaur Rahman’s independence broadcast from Chittagong — although it makes clear he did so on behalf of Mujib.
“My guideline was, don’t be guided by the narrative of either the Awami League or the BNP,” said Wahiduddin Mahmud, Yunus’s education adviser, who ordered the revision, which he called “a window of opportunity”.
India’s role has also been significantly pared down — a move that is likely to draw notice in New Delhi. While the updated editions for most grades acknowledge India’s involvement towards the end of the nine-month war, earlier textbooks provided broader descriptions of India’s contributions, including providing crucial military support, training fighters and sheltering millions of refugees, details now largely absent.
Discussions of the Bangladeshis who opposed independence have also been minimised.
Alongside Sheikh Mujib’s centrality to the struggle for independence, some Bangladeshis have also begun to question other aspects of his record, including his leadership as prime minister during a deadly famine in 1974. They are also confronting more recent events, including human rights abuses such as enforced disappearances under Sheikh Hasina.
Bangladesh’s youth “say you have to look at 1971, but you also have to look at 2024,” said Shafqat Munir, senior research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies. “1971 does not belong to just one person”.
Textbooks now also cover women-led activist group Mayer Dak (Mother’s Call), which was formed in 2014 to protest against enforced disappearances and demand justice for those missing.
“What happened in the past 15 years . . . now it’s coming to light: enforced disappearances, secret torture cells, people who were murdered and their bodies thrown in rivers,” said Abul Kashem Fazlul Haq, president of the Bangla Academy, Bangladesh’s equivalent of France’s Académie Française. “Now people are discovering those stories.”
Courtesy: Financial Times
