Besieged by the largest protest in the country’s history and the unbending public fury against her rule, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (Hasina), suddenly resigned, and fled to India in a hurry on August 5, 2024. Bangladesh and the region are still reeling since that seismic event. Barely a month has passed since Dr. M. Yunus’ interim government has been restoring governance and reinstating the country’s infrastructure in the aftermath of a colossal civil unrest during July and August. Not surprisingly, the country’s history as well as its identity perceptions are too fermenting with disparate claims and counterclaims coming to the fore. The swirling narratives allege that Dr. Yunus’ interim government has dipped under the militant Islamists who had earlier navigated the massive campaigns that ousted Hasina from power. Whenever, the AL and its leader Hasina are not in ascendancy in Bangladesh, the succeeding regime suffers the accusation of being in collusion with the Islamic zealots. This overworked Awami-Indian rhetoric no longer inspires multitudes after Hasina’s autocratic régime went down.
Has Bangladesh’s political landscape changed so profoundly since August 5, 2024—the beginning of the Bangladeshi phase beyond Hasina’s grip? Will Bangladesh now rewrite its past? Will Bangladesh re-envision its known national ethos? Both writing and reading of history is a highly politicized avocation in Bangladesh! Is the nation in intellectual turmoil over its historiography at its 53rd year as an independent state? I venture this piece as I have previously written on this subject in a couple of my books, peer reviewed journals, newspapers, and multiple media outlets.
The volleys over who did what during the 1971 independence struggle, the Muslim ubiquity niggling the liberal/secular aches, the national anthem discord, and the lingering rows over the fatherhood of Bangladesh independence are not the newfangled calls. But those long-standing nuances recently gained fresh traction. Now the slings and arrows of that spur fall on the liberal celebrities, who compliantly validated Hasina’s despotism spread over long 15 years.
There is more to this curve. Hasina enhanced her popular standing by invoking the charismatic popularity of her late father, the AL leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib), once at the pinnacle of power in Bangladesh. The dynastic name recognition of her renowned father was Hasina’s anchor for her long and highhanded leadership. The public compassion for her terrible loss in the 1975 bloody overthrow that killed her father and most of her family members further enabled Hasina’s consolidation in the AL hierarchy.
Tajuddin Ahmed, along with a band of the AL leaders maneuvered the 1971 independence struggle as Mujib was in a West Pakistani jail. But Hasina bolstered Mujib’s image as the only leader who directed the nation to independence. She did it cleverly since she brought the AL back to power in 1997 after a long hiatus. She habitually retold that it was her father who brought Bangladesh to her freedom from Pakistan. Such allusions complemented the public submission to her controversial tenure after three rigged elections boycotted by the main opposition parties and censured by most international observers. Now those factors drive the post-Hasina campaigners against the historical claims that she wrought to prolong her tyrannical rule. On the edge of political reimagination since Hasina tumbled from power, such twists of the yore made history a facilitator to a totalitarian madness.
It became a punishable offence for anyone who relegated her father’s eminence as the founder of Bangladesh and Hasina erected Mujib’s statutes at the country’s vantage points. During the July-August upsurge, the angry mob turned against Mujib’s pictures (along with Hasina’s photos in the government offices) as well as the Mujib statutes. Stunned observers watched the ferocity with which the mob destroyed Mujib’s images. And then, Mujib’s last residential home (that earlier became a museum) at Road 32, Dhanmondi, came under attack. One speculation is that the angry mobs were chasing the specter of Mujib’s hegemonic BKSAL party—the suspected ancestry of Hasina’s autocratic rule!
The battle between the secular liberals and the Muslim identity believers came down from the pre-Bangladesh, Pakistani days. But the emerging doubts against strong secular homogenization now, however, stand for a global religio-political debate. The AL dropped the “Muslim” from the party’s nomenclature in 1955, but it accepted Pakistan Constitution’s Islamic bias. Mujib acknowledged the Legal Framework Order (LFO)—based on Pakistan’s fundamental laws and its Islamic state principles; it was the bedrock of the 1970 election that catapulted Mujib and his AL to the peak of Bangladesh politics. Stringent secularism was more a post-independence plot in Bangladesh when the AL leadership, flushed in its victory, jettisoned Muslim identity as an anti-liberation trajectory. Most likely, it stretched under Indian pressure to sideline Muslim identity in Bangladesh—the upshot of India’s quintessential Muslim fear. Except the outbursts of the Hefazat-e-Islam and the occasional Islamist rumbles, the Muslim identity remained the embedded issue during the 15-plus years of Hasina’ reign. Her political calculus was, however, different—-she did not cast herself as an uncompromising secularist. She postured herself as a practicing Muslim in personal life, and she did not amend the Islamic acknowledgement of the Bangladesh constitution. On the other hand, she indulged in harsh suppression of the Muslim groups, parties, and their leaders. Still, a handful of Islamic leaders and groups received Hasina’s patronages.
The Jamaat-I-Islami (Jamaat) suffered the worst during the Hasina rule—its top leaders endured jail, hanging and a virtual decapitation from politics since 2009. Once the Hasina regime ended, the Muslim identity and the Jamaat and its cohorts as well as the Islamic sensitivities sprawled into mainstream politics. They have a new matrix of confidence and visibility that their liberal antagonists hate. The current questions about Bangladesh history, the national anthem issues, and the identity perceptions wafted from those streams of old and conflicting discourses. The earlier stories of 1971, the engineered details of Bangladesh’s pre-history and identity discernments are now the suspected sponsors of Hasina’s disgraced régime.
Her emboldened opponents currently ask how the AL-maneuvered Chetona forced a public amnesia about what happened before 1971—even the academics hesitated to delve into the record of Muslim empowerment that created an educated Muslim middle class in East Bengal/East Pakistan culminating in independent Bangladesh. The anti-Hasina demonstrators are, for example, signaling at the reevaluation of the 1947 Partition as the precursor of the 1971 independence. Such probes will open the “hidden history” of Bangladesh lost in the post-1971 Bangladeshi script. They will upend the familiar historical accusation that the 1947-71 East Pakistani space was Pakistani “internal colonialism.” An awakened sense of Muslim consciousness became the biggest ideological challenge to secular lingo-nationalism held in great esteem by the AL and its liberal allies.
The “political Islam” espoused by the Jamaat-e-Islam (Jamaat) was not the forte of all the Islamic groups and Muslim leaders in Bangladesh. When the BNP shared power with the Jamaat in 2001, the Bangladeshi Islamic power became an avowed threat to the secular parties and the country’s liberal enthusiasts. Soon, they found sympathetic ears in the Western world, which inflated the scattered violence possibly enacted by the Bangladeshi “cocoon” of Islamic extremists. Those perceptions waned over the years and especially since Hasina fell from power. Secular Bengali nationalism polarized the country between “us” against “them” since the dawn of Bangladesh. It tormented democracy in a Muslim-majority country where secular liberalism was still an urban elitist paradigm imposed on the bulk of the population.
Whatever the post-Hasina protestors are doing about rewriting history or transforming the national anthem is a reaction to what the Hasina-led AL regime, its cohorts and their earlier predecessors did to deconstruct Muslim identity in Bangladesh. Not surprisingly, Bangladesh, after Hasina, will search for a fresh software of its history with a reconceptualization of its identity—those efforts might heal the old wounds as well as safeguard the country against tyranny, and ensure national unity and security. But Dr. M. Yunus’ interim regime may defer those questions until an elected government tackles those intensely politicized narratives.