Is selective amnesia the price of a new Bangladesh?

When a government prints too much money, the currency gradually loses its value. When a political party overuses history, that history too loses its value. This is exactly what happened to our Liberation War history. For over 15 years, the Awami League regime exhausted the moral capital of the Liberation War to justify everything from corruption to authoritarian control, commodifying the sacred until reverence became fatigue. The consequence has been corrosive. Today, many view symbols of the struggle not as national heritage, but as regime tools. Cynicism has taken the place of memory.

However, cynicism is no substitute for history. Discarding the gold because the miner was corrupt is a grave mistake, one that is turning into a dangerous national amnesia. That danger is visible on our streets, on our campuses, and in official conduct. Stand at any busy intersection in Dhaka today and shout "Joy Bangla," the slogan synonymous with the Liberation War, and you will feel it.

Sixteen months after what was hailed as a "second independence", uttering the slogan feels less patriotic and more like a personal risk. Words that once united a fractured nation against genocide now invite abuse, threats, assault, or branding as a traitor. This fear is the clearest measure of where we stand. I write this as a citizen who welcomed the end of the Awami League's authoritarian rule. Like millions of others, I suffocated under the grip of the last decade. I felt stifled by a one-party arrogance that commodified 1971 for political legitimacy. So, I wanted reform.

Read more

Is the NCP becoming what it once rejected?

But in the bargain for a new future, I did not consent to the erasure of the history that made this republic possible. Citizens participated in an uprising to end a regime, not to lobotomise the nation's memory. The crisis we face is not merely about slogans. It is a moral inversion that was laid bare on Martyred Intellectuals Day, when Jamaat-e-Islami Secretary General Mia Golam Parwar claimed that "Indian agents" murdered our intellectuals, while a pro-vice chancellor of Chittagong University dismissed the Pakistani army's culpability as "absurd".

History is not a blank slate. Contemporary records, including Jamaat's own mouthpiece Dainik Sangram (1971), document the role of Al-Badr killing squads drawn from Islami Chhatra Sangha. The International Crimes Tribunal later judicially established Jamaat's culpable role in the systematic liquidation of intellectuals. Blaming "Indian agents" today is not revision; it is denial.

Shout "Joy Bangla" in the wrong crowd, and you risk being branded. For instance, in Muktagachha, Mymensingh, a Victory Day programme organised to honour freedom fighters was suspended after disorder broke out when veteran freedom fighter Bashir Uddin concluded his speech with the slogans "Joy Bangla, Joy Bangabandhu". A group of youths protested with counter-slogans, climbed onto the stage, and forced the upazila administration to halt the event.

By contrast, announce from a public stage that Pakistan did not kill Bangladesh's intellectuals, and you are shielded by the freedom of expression. We are fast building a country where it is physically dangerous to affirm the Liberation War, but increasingly safe to apologise for those who opposed our birth.

This corrosion has seeped into the imagination of the young. A Dhaka University student contesting in the Ducsu polls had shared a post in August in favour of pilot Rashid Minhas, who died stopping Bir Sreshtho Matiur Rahman from defecting. The post sparked a mixed reaction at the time. To celebrate the man who tried to strangle the birth of his own nation is a moral collapse.

This empathy for the oppressor is now being institutionalised. At DU, authorities were seen scrubbing away street portraits of Razakars. A similar sanitisation occurred at Chittagong University, where effigies painted on the floor were repainted. We have reached a point where the symbols of war criminals are protected from "disrespect," while the heroes of 1971 can be slandered.

That rupture is being reinforced through a campaign of renaming. Dismantling personality cults is defensible; erasing key actors of the Liberation War is not. At Rajshahi University, the Shaheed Tajuddin Ahmad Senate Building has been reduced to a generic "Senate Building." To erase the name of the wartime prime minister, who led the government while Bangabandhu was imprisoned, is to strike at the administrative core of the great 1971.

The ideological damage is mirrored by physical ruin. The Museum of Independence at Suhrawardy Udyan remains vandalised and shuttered. In Meherpur, hundreds of sculptures at the Mujibnagar Memorial Complex, where the provisional government took its oath, were destroyed. More than a year later, there is still no clear plan to restore these sites. Tenders are missing, budgets opaque, and the message unmistakable: history can wait.

The same disdain shadows our cultural symbols. Demands to replace "Amar Shonar Bangla"—branded as an Indian imposition—are surfacing with disturbing frequency. Alongside this, a more poisonous ideology is growing. Popular religious speakers now tell packed gatherings that 1971 was a betrayal and that 1947 was the "real" independence.

To argue that Bangladesh's birth was a mistake is to revive the two-nation theory in new clothes. When such claims go unchallenged, they move from opinion to open contempt for the graves of those who died resisting that idea. Alongside this, in the aftermath of the July uprising, we are seeing a familiar attempt to audit the genocide itself. Was it really thirty lakh? Were the rape accounts exaggerated? This is how denial begins: by reducing mass murder and sexual violence to a numbers game.

Even state rituals are shrinking. For the second consecutive year after the uprising, the Victory Day parade was cancelled despite no concrete security threat. When a government pleads poverty only to scale back Victory Day—while spending freely elsewhere—it signals not austerity but fatigue with the event that justified its existence. The tragedy of this moment lies in a false binary: that to be anti-fascist, you may have to be anti-1971. "Joy Bangla," we are told, belongs to a party, not to the people. But governments change; the war that created the republic does not. Because history is not a policy circular that an interim authority can repeal.

I want reform, as much as anyone. I want an independent judiciary, a professional civil service, and a press that does not live in fear. What I refuse to accept is that the ticket to this new Bangladesh is forced amnesia about the old one. The country that emerged in 1971 is not a disposable draft. It was forged through Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's vision; steered by Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmad, M Mansur Ali and A H M Kamaruzzaman; fought for under General M A G Osmani's command; voiced by Ziaur Rahman on Bangabandhu's behalf; and sustained by unnamed students, farmers-turned-fighters and mothers who sent their children to war.

Walking through a capital stripped of its victory parade, I made my own observance. Regimes may try to hijack history, but victory never belongs to any party or government. It belongs to the people. Our responsibility now is twofold. We must reclaim 1971 from those who commodified it for power, and we must defend it from those who seek to distort it through denial, dilution, or manufactured narratives. In building a new Bangladesh, we cannot afford to insult the war that made the republic possible.

Arafat Rahaman is journalist at The Daily Star. He can be reached at arafat.mcj@yahoo.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.