An Inescapable Past
“This was a destruction not of a house but of our history, of my history,” said a veteran of Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation war. He was speaking to me of the destruction on Feb. 5 of the Dhaka home of Sheikh Mujib ur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first leader.
The address, 32 Dhanmondi, is as well known in Bangladesh as 1600 Pennsylvania in the U.S. It is where, in March 1971, Mujib was apprehended by Pakistani troops as they began their violent crackdown in East Pakistan that culminated in a genocide, the third Pakistan-India war, and the birth of a new nation. And it is where, on Aug. 15, 1975, Bangladeshi soldiers slaughtered Prime Minister Mujib and several members of his family in the country’s first military coup. That it now stands in ruins is an indication of how much public anger had accumulated during the 15 years of the increasingly repressive rule under Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, which ended dramatically on Aug. 5, 2024 after weeks of student-led protests.
Hasina had turned 32 Dhanmondi into a memorial for her father. Now exiled in India, where she fled after her fall from power, Hasina is plotting a political comeback. On Feb. 5, marking a gathering of her Awami League party, she planned to give a speech that would condemn Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus’s interim government and announce her intentions to avenge her ouster. The youth leaders warned that if she spoke they would destroy her father’s house. She spoke anyway and the leaders stayed true to their word: The house was smashed. For people like the liberation-war veteran, who sacrificed so much and had seen his own father killed in that conflict, this was a case of a mob indulging in senseless, self-defeating violence against a symbol of their country’s founding. But for the students who participated, it was another act of freedom in defiance not just of a “fascist” Awami League, but of a particular version of history that enabled Hasina to present herself and her family as the only legitimate custodians of Bangladesh’s independence.
The uprising began last June after a court order revived a quota system reserving a proportion of government jobs for 1971 war veterans and their descendants. This was effectively a spoils system for allies of the Awami League, the party that Mujib founded and that Hasina has led since 1981, but was draped in the memory of the liberation so that challenges to it would seem unpatriotic. This didn’t matter to a new generation eager for employment opportunities in an unfair economy. When Hasina implied that the protesters were razakars, a Persian word meaning “volunteer” but widely used for Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army during the 1971 genocide, the resulting fury swelled the protesters’ ranks to an uncontrollable level.
Symbolism played a vital role in the events around the uprising. The most potent was the symbol of Abu Sayed, a 23-year-old whom police shot dead on 16 July as he stood in the middle of a road with his arms spread wide, facing a barrage of bullets. His death was a decisive turning point in the movement, prompting the respected photojournalist Shahidul Alam to declare, “the end is nigh.” Others replicated Sayed’s act of defiance, and a graphic of a young man with outstretched arms, a staff in one hand, has essentially become the youth movement’s logo.
This figure is not only meant to taunt trigger-happy police; it is forcing open a new era for Bangladesh. Yet for this new era to form, an older one must be settled.
The Friend of Bengal
Fifty years later, the 1971 liberation war still serves as a court of appeal in which the main political players try to disenfranchise one another by litigating two unresolved issues: Who was the true custodian of Bangladesh’s independence? And what kind of nation was born? A third, more essential question emerges from these two: Who stood for and who against the spirit of the liberation?
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. At home he is known as Bangabandhu, or Friend of Bengal. In 1970, when after over a decade of military rule the Pakistan army agreed to transfer power to civilians, he led his Awami League to victory in Pakistan’s first democratic election, against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). But he was denied his mandate to form a government by a West Pakistan establishment that couldn’t abide being ruled by Bengalis. In late March 1971, amid a stalemate between East and West Pakistan, troops deployed to Dhaka from West Pakistan poised for a crackdown. Their first order of business was to apprehend the Bengalis’ leader, which they did on the first day of the operation, 25 March.
That night has passed into Awami League lore, much of it based on Mujib’s own account after the war ended. According to him, Mujib, hearing of a West Pakistani plot to kill him and blame it on Bengali extremists (therefore compelling the army to crush the rebellion in the East) sent most of his children into hiding while preparing for martyrdom. The key was for Mujib to be killed inside the house to make it clear that soldiers and not bandits on the streets were the culprits. Thus would his blood “purify my people.” Mujib dictated a final message to his people, recorded and later broadcast via secret transmitter, to fight the West Pakistan army for independence, regardless of his own fate. He wisely ordered away the paramilitary and party men protecting him to limit the bloodshed. And, most poetically, he recalled how as the soldiers took him away, having decided to arrest rather than kill him, he insisted on retrieving his pipe and tobacco.
If this was a profile of courage for Mujib’s admirers, for his opponents it was proof of something else: that Mujib, removed from the battlefield, was alive and safe in Rawalpindi amid the slaughter in Bengal. On my first visit to Dhaka many years ago, a retired government official asked me, rhetorically, why the army didn’t kill or disappear Mujib then, given that in the chaos of the moment the top brass could easily have feigned ignorance of what had happened to him. My interlocutor proposed his theory: The West Pakistan leadership believed that Mujib was still open to keeping Pakistan united and was therefore to be kept alive for a future negotiation.
It’s difficult to determine whether this explanation is credible, but it does speak to a larger contest over the liberation narrative. For the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by Hasina’s perennial rival Khaleda Zia, who has twice been prime minister, it was fighters and not politicians who won the country’s independence. And it was army major Ziaur Rahman, Khaleda’s husband and the BNP’s founder, who declared Bangladesh’s independence over the radio on 27 March 1971, two days after Mujib was arrested. That he did so “at the directive” and “in the name” of Mujib is no longer noted.
Wielding a broad coalition of anti-Awami League constituencies, the BNP has long struggled to create a brand of its own. This may explain why the party gives as much importance to a legitimizing myth around 1971 as it does.
In a deeply polarized society, both narratives have teeth. For the Awami League, the BNP’s fidelity to an independent Bangladesh is questionable, given its pro-Pakistani sympathies and, above all, its long partnership with the Jamaat-i-Islami that explicitly opposed Bangladesh’s creation, on the grounds of Islamic unity. BNP and Jamaat supporters, meanwhile, accuse both Mujib and Hasina of having surrendered Bangladesh’s sovereignty to India. The Awami League holds Ziaur Rahman responsible for the assassination of Mujib and that of many of his family members, in the bloody 1975 coup that augured 15 years of military rule; the BNP blames Mujib’s extreme concentration of power in a one-party state for provoking the violent backlash of 15 August 1975. And on it goes, a tooth for a tooth.
What kind of a nation?
The 1975 coup also opened debate over whether the country’s essential character was rooted in geography or in religion. Bengal was a major site of British divide-and-rule strategies and resistance to them. In a bid to suppress local resistance to colonial rule, the British partitioned Bengal in 1905 between a Hindu-majority West Bengal and a Muslim-majority East Bengal. This had the reverse effect of what was intended: Instead of quelling Bengali nationalism, it “provoked an upsurge of nationalist protest, and the province had become the focus of both the constitutional and revolutionary faces of the freedom movement,” wrote the late Patrick French in his virtuoso account of the independence movement, Liberty or Death. While the protests forced the British to reunite Bengal in 1911, their effects didn’t stop there. A nationalist Bengali identity assumed new force and became a primary threat to the British Empire. The repressive 1915 Defence of India Act was passed specifically in response to agitation in Bengal.
The 1947 partition is hence commonly referred to in Bangladesh as the Second Partition of Bengal. In June of that year, the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted for a united Bengal to join Pakistan. After legislators from Hindu-majority West Bengal later 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 that in the event of a provincial partition, East Bengal would join Pakistan, where Bengalis would form the popular majority.
Political power would, however, be concentrated in Karachi and, after the federal capital was moved, Islamabad. Clearly, the predominately Urdu-speaking West Pakistan leadership didn’t believe its own rhetoric about Muslim unity, and it immediately saw the country’s ethnic and linguistic diversity as a threat. Tensions between the center and the provinces created either secessionist or ethnic nationalist movements in Balochistan, the Northwest Frontier Province, and Sindh—but most prominently in East Bengal. The defining moment after the Second Partition was Jinnah’s 1948 policy declaring Urdu—the linga franca of minority West Pakistanis—the sole national language, provoking a movement in 1952 for Bangla to be given equal status as a national language. On the movement’s first day, 21 February, police killed four student demonstrators at Dhaka University (for which a monument, Martyr Tower, was built in central Dhaka in 1963). Although Bangla was ultimately recognized as a national language and enshrined in the 1956 constitution, these killings made reconciliation between the eastern and western wings of the country all but impossible.
The refusal to honor what a wide majority of Bengalis—indeed a majority of the country—voted for in the 1970 national election was the final indignity. Estimates of the numbers killed in the violence that followed, as West Pakistan tried to crush Bengalis in the East, vary widely from 30,000 to over 3 million, though many foreign observers and academics have come to a consensus figure of around a million. There is, as the respected journalist David Bergman has argued, “an academic consensus that this campaign of violence, particularly against the Hindu population, was a genocide.” It was only through India’s intervention in December 1971, and the third India-Pakistan war, that the massacre stopped and a new nation was born.
Two independence struggles, therefore, endowed Bengali nationalism with a rich history of resistance to colonial and West Pakistani domination. Liberation provided an opportunity to codify that nationalism. Distinguishing the new nation from the one it had seceded from, the 1972 constitution espoused nationalism and secularism, in addition to democracy and socialism, as founding principles. It also banned Jamaat-i-Islami and any other religion-based party.
The Awami League’s emphasis on ethnic nationalism and secularism was openly contested after Mujib’s assassination, when Ziaur Rahman, upon assuming control after the 1975 coup, promoted a different conception of Bangladeshi national identity, one that underscored its religious and territorial makeup: a Muslim nation that happened to be majority Bengali rather than a Bengali nation that happened to be majority Muslim. If Bangladesh was essentially Bengali, this argument went, then it would have reunited with West Bengal after 1971. The fact that it hadn’t was proof that the two-nation theory calling for South Asia’s Muslims to have a homeland still applied.
Rahman’s constitutional amendments replaced “secularism” with “absolute trust and faith in the almighty Allah,” lifted the ban on religion-based parties, and called on the state to “to consolidate, preserve and strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity.” The constitution’s preamble now began with the Muslim salutation: “In the Name of Allah, Beneficent, the Merciful.” Islamic studies became a compulsory subject for all Muslim schoolchildren. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who imposed martial law in 1982, a year after Rahman’s assassination in a mid-level coup, later inserted a constitutional clause declaring Islam the state religion. This Islamization drive ran in parallel to the one occurring in Pakistan under General Zia ul Haq’s military regime, albeit significantly more cautiously and gradually.
By no stretch has the binary between Awami League secularism and the religious politics of its opponents been neat. Political expediency and patronage have shaped policy choices at least as much as ideology, if not more. Hasina’s Awami League, for example, reinserted secularism into the constitution in 2011 but retained Islam as the state religion and made several, often alarming concessions to Islamists, some of whom remain a powerful force not despite but because of her policies. But 1971 remains a potent political weapon, one that Hasina flaunted against her rivals on returning to office in 2009, tapping a still deeply felt wound: the role of Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army in that war.
Accountability and its discontents
War crimes were destined to be a major issue. The 1973 International Crimes (Tribunal) Act authorized the prosecution of members of “any armed, defence of auxiliary forces, irrespective of nationality, who commits or has committed in the territory of Bangladesh” crimes against humanity. The purpose was to prosecute Pakistani prisoners of war, some 93,000 of whom had been captured by Indian troops and transported to India.
Pakistan’s government, led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after the country’s dismemberment, made the release of all prisoners of war a precondition of its recognizing the new Bangladeshi state. Its ally China, acting on Islamabad’s behalf, wielded its first-ever UN Security Council veto to block Bangladesh’s admission to the UN. With so much riding on recognition from Pakistan, Mujib and Indira Gandhi yielded: the Delhi Agreement of 1973 called for the repatriation of all POWs in the three countries. As per the terms of the Simla Agreement between Islamabad and Delhi the year before, this repatriation deal triggered Islamabad’s recognition of Bangladesh.
For the country to feel whole, however, it had to hold someone to account for the genocide. But who?
If the Pakistan army was the main culprit, for many veterans of the civil war the Jamaat-e-Islami’s role was just as malevolent. Two of its armed wings, Al Shams and Al Badr (the original razakars), were widely accused of having committed atrocities like murder, rape, arson and looting alongside army soldiers. With Jamaat playing a prominent role in politics during the democratic interlude of 1990–2006, little action was taken against it. By the 2009 election, however, which came after the army had suspended democracy in 2007, Sheikh Hasina promised accountability for 1971 at last. Returning to office, her government updated the 1973 law to make it easier to prosecute Jamaat’s leadership and established the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT). The tribunal’s work began in earnest in 2010 to significant criticism at home and abroad for the absence of due process and the use of the death penalty.
The trials soon became the national story, as a legitimate demand for justice turned into political theater. The people convicted include the Jamaat party chief Motiur Rahman Nizami and several other senior party members and office bearers. It also included a prominent BNP figure, Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, who was hanged in November 2015.
The ICT’s most consequential year was 2013. In February, the tribunal issued a death sentence for the Jamaat Vice President Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, a popular preacher, provoking violent demonstrations that left over 40 people dead, including several police officers. The same month, another Jamaat leader, Abdul Quader Mollah, was sentenced to life imprisonment. This decision drew a different kind of protest, as huge numbers of young people filled Dhaka’s Shahbagh Square demanding that Mollah be given death rather than a life sentence. Their anger grew again that September, when the Supreme Court commuted Sayeedi’s sentence to life imprisonment. One report described the Shahbagh protests as “the biggest mass demonstration the country has seen in 20 years.” In response, the government amended a law prohibiting the state from challenging ICT verdicts and successfully appealed to enhance Mollah’s sentence: The high court raised it to death in September 2013. Mollah was hanged that December.
When I attended an ICT hearing in Dhaka on the invitation of one of the prosecutors in the immediate aftermath of 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 also 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 and the death penalty sounded quaint. An older activist, who had fought in the liberation war, told me that while he acknowledged critiques of the death penalty, he believed that the Jamaat collaborators deserved whatever the maximum punishment on the books—if that meant execution, so be it. To be sure, many other rights activists opposed the death penalty and the ICT itself, and they argued that the “Shahbaghis” had undermined the quest for justice and lit a dangerous fuse.
Just how dangerous soon became evident. Shahbagh had 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) madrasa sector. The ICT breathed new life into an organization that had previously focused on curtailing women’s right to work and other freedoms. 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 had been the prime organizers of the Shahbagh movement. On 15 February 2013, one such blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was hacked to death by machete-wielding members of an extremist group, Ansarullah Bangla Team, which espoused Al Qaeda’s ideology. At Hefazat rallies, clerics explicitly called for the bloggers’ hanging. Soon, a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers started circulating in the press and elsewhere, with nobody claiming authorship. On 26 February 2015, the blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death outside a book fair in Dhaka. Ansarullah again claimed responsibility. Four other secular bloggers, publishers, and commentators were killed in a similar fashion the same year.
The politics of 1971 has indeed been bloody of late. Hefazat remains an influential force (as does Jamaat), bolstered by concessions Hasina made to appease it, including yielding to the group’s demand in 2018 for qaumi madrasa diplomas to be recognized as the equivalent of a Master’s degree. And now, after several years of dormancy, the ICT has been revived—to prosecute Hasina in absentia for her crimes.
A New Era?
In November 2023, Hasina inaugurated a new site of murals and a large golden statue of her father to honor his role in Bangladesh’s freedom struggle. On the day her government collapsed, protesters demolished it. Several other sculptures and images of Mujib were destroyed in the ensuing days. In January, the interim government changed the national curriculum to reflect the BNP version of events, replacing Mujib with Rahman as the recognized founding father—a bid, officials said, to rectify historical inaccuracies. The destruction of 32 Dhanmondi seems almost a logical, if disturbing, climax. The youth movement’s more revolutionary elements are also calling for scrapping (rather than amending) Mujib’s 1972 constitution and permanently banning the Awami League.
But there are other more forward-looking rumblings within the youth leadership. It’s worth recalling that student demonstrations over the quota system first occurred in April 2018, and that in July young people again took the streets after two students were killed in a road accident. What began as a call for improved road safety grew into a huge protest about broader governance failures. These events augured an emergent force in the polity: Organized youth who weren’t allied with a party ideology or a 1971 narrative, as their predecessors in Shahbagh Square had been, but who were focused on bread-and-butter issues. And they clearly rattled the government, which after initial attempts at appeasement cracked down harshly, in a precursor to the events of 2024.
In their engagement with the student leadership, one can clearly see a new generation of activists and political leaders less inclined to fight in the name of old myths. Arguments over 1971 have so saturated the country’s politics that national reconciliation may to some extent depend on an open debate about them. But the more compelling struggle ahead may not be between different accounts of the country’s birth, but between those who want a new politics focused on justice, equity, and democratic governance and those who want to stake their claim on high office by summoning the ghosts of liberation past. Repeating the cycle of vengeance and delegitimizing one’s opponents again may be tempting in a deeply traumatized nation, but it will likely have a bitter afterlife. The past often does.
Shehryar Fazli is a Program Manager for the Inclusive Democracy in South Asia Opportunity at Open Society Foundations. He has covered South Asia in various roles for over 20 years. He is also author of the novel, Invitation (2011), which was runner-up in the Edinburgh Book Festival’s 2011 First Book Award.
