Where the family house used to stand, shaded by trees on a lakeside street, there are now piles of broken brick, concrete, glass, and tiles.
A visitor, Anwar Hossain Swapan, is picking his way through the house’s charred concrete pillars amid the rubble. He stops to read graffiti denouncing the “fascism” of the family who once lived here.
For most of Mr. Hossain’s life, this structure was the symbolic heart of independent Bangladesh. The house had been the home of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the independence leader and long-revered founding father of the country, who was assassinated in 1975. To his people, he was affectionately known as Bangabandhu, or Friend of Bangladesh, and for the past few decades this house had been a museum.
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Political transformations often raise sensitive questions about the meaning of the past. Bangladesh is grappling with the myths of its origins as it tries to rebuild its democracy.
“We used to visit it. In fact, everyone used to visit back then,” says Mr. Hossain. “This is the heritage of Bangladesh.”
But last August, during a student-led uprising that continues to transform the country today, protesters ransacked the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum. Then, in February 2025, hundreds of protesters returned, demolishing the historical site, calling it “a shrine to fascism.”
Mr. Hossain says it’s “painful” to see the destruction of the museum. But he also recognizes that it has become a symbol of a government that “caused suffering” to Bangladeshi people. “That is the other side of this place.”
The student uprising that began last year forced Bangladesh’s longest-serving leader, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the elder daughter of the late Sheikh Mujibur, to flee the country.
As prime minister for the past 15 years, Sheikh Hasina increasingly concentrated power in her own hands, wielding her family’s history as a political cudgel. Constructing what some called a civic religion around her father, she foregrounded her family’s suffering, and her own, as the heart of the nation’s identity.
As her regime became more autocratic, elections became sham exercises and space for dissent and debate withered. Sheikh Hasina distorted Bangladesh’s origin story to legitimize her near-absolute power, during which corruption and graft became widespread.
In an era in which democratic norms have retreated around the world, including in the United States, Bangladesh’s break with authoritarianism raises hopes for a political transformation, on a par with a past generation of people-power movements in Indonesia and the Philippines, and the postapartheid refounding of South Africa.
This transformation includes how the country understands its founding history, and the mythology surrounding Bangabandhu and his prominent role in Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan in 1971, and the moment when army officers gunned down the new nation’s first president and prime minister at his residence, killing him and most of his family members, including his wife and 10-year-old son. Sheikh Hasina and her sister, out of the country at the time, survived.
Such internecine violence would define Bangladesh’s politics for nearly two decades. It was not until the 1990s that democracy was restored. Sheikh Hasina was elected to her first term as prime minister in 1996.
After her opposition party won elections in 2008, she began her second term as prime minister, consolidating power and changing the constitution, forming what became a personalized, one-party government, organized around the founding mythologies that surrounded her father.
Now after her dramatic ouster and flight into exile in India, the family cult of personality has ceded to raucous iconoclasm.
After her departure Aug. 5, 2024, protesters not only ransacked her father’s house-museum and her own official residency, but also tore down official shrines to Sheikh Hasina and statues of Bangabandhu in scenes that echoed the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
“When the politicians become historians, that becomes propaganda and not history,” says Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowduhury, a former lawmaker from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “That is what Sheikh Hasina started to do. And all her deeds and misdeeds, the symbol used was her father. So when she came down, the symbol came down with it.”
Since then, an interim government has been led by Muhammad Yunus, a microcredit banker educated in the U.S. who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He is trying to help restore and overhaul Bangladesh’s democratic institutions.
He and the student-backed interim government face myriads of challenges. They have struggled to shore up the economy and restore public safety – killings and robberies have risen sharply – as they prepare to hold multiparty elections within a year.
Student leaders have formed a new party, hoping to loosen the grip of older dynastic parties. They’re also taking on some of Bangladesh’s foundational myths, including the centrality of Bangabandhu and how the nation came into being.
School textbooks have already been updated. “Our generation will know the real history of our liberation war,” says Asif Mahmud, a linguistics student from Dhaka University who now serves in the Yunus administration.
A new museum is expected to memorialize last year’s uprising, which Generation Z activists like Mr. Mahmud compare to the 1971 war. The protest movement of 2024 “is another part of our liberation,” he says. “Liberation is not just the land we get. Also the people should be liberated.”
Such rhetoric alarms those who worry about reopening the divisions of 1971, when Bengali partisans fought Pakistani forces – and each other.
Others warn that dogmatic students could replace one set of self-serving historical narratives – Sheikh Hasina’s version – with their own. And in a nation of 170 million people, many of whom are barely getting by in a flood-prone country the size of Illinois, waging a battle over history seems jejune.
But studying the past can also light the path forward for a young nation like Bangladesh. Other countries have probed, sometimes painfully, the taboos of their own origin stories, says Sarmila Bose, an Indian author who published a controversial book in 2011 about Bangladesh’s liberation war.
“No society can really progress without knowing its own history and learning something from it,” she says. “There comes a point when the society is ready to listen to a different point of view or challenges to the established narratives.”
It will not be an easy task, however. Such narratives are deeply embedded into how people understand themselves and their political and cultural identity as Bengalis.
Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP/File
Mohammad Idris is also picking his way through the rubble at Dhanmondi 32. He came with a black marker pen to add to the graffiti on the charred walls of the ruined house-museum.
He’s irate at what happened. It was the work of “enemies of the country – the razakars,” he says, using a slur referring to Bangladeshis who supported Pakistan in the 1971 independence war.
“This is the house of the person who called upon the Bengali nation to fight for independence,” says Mr. Idris, a provincial farmer who wears a faded shirt with a frayed collar. His voice rises as he describes its destruction as “a matter of shame for the nation.”
On the wall, he left a simple message with his black marker: “One day the extremists will be brought to justice.”
How a new nation alternated between democracy and autocracy
Every society has generational divides. In Bangladesh, those divisions are compounded by a political history in which three generations grew up in three different countries.
Before 1947, Bangladesh was East Bengal and part of British India. After colonial rule ended, it was East Pakistan, one-half of a Muslim-majority state, divided by 1,000 miles of Indian territory.
In December 1970, Pakistan held parliamentary elections amid widespread demands by Bengalis for greater autonomy. The movement’s leader was Sheikh Mujibur, and his political party won a landslide victory in East Pakistan.
Three months later, Pakistan’s military arrested him and launched a war in East Pakistan, backed by the U.S. and its Cold War strategy in Asia. After a nine-month war, in which India sided with the Bengali partisans, Pakistan was defeated and an independent Bangladesh was declared in March 1971.
The new country was left traumatized. Hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were killed during the nine-month war, and Pakistani troops committed atrocities against civilians, including widespread rape. Bengali partisans also committed atrocities of their own against Bengalis considered “collaborators” during the civil war. Indeed, not everyone supported independence, and some fought alongside the Pakistani army. After independence, millions fled the country.
Sheikh Mujibur’s family home in the city of Dhaka became the new country’s power center in its capital city. Here, he hatched government policies and received foreign visitors – and made a home to raise a family and entertain friends.
“It was an open house, so anyone could walk in at any time,” recalls Rehman Sobhan, an economics professor who was a foreign envoy during the war of liberation and who went on to serve on the country’s nascent planning commission in the early 1970s.
But independent Bangladesh struggled to find its footing. Sheikh Mujibur’s erratic leadership and mismanagement of the economy contributed to a 1974 famine, which ranked among the worst around the globe in the 20th century. A year later, he abolished multiparty democracy and assumed absolute power.
This calamitous period of his rule is glossed over in the hagiographical accounts of his life. Instead, the details of his murder have become an enduring chapter of the nation’s history.
The Bangabandhu Memorial Museum displayed dried blood and bullet marks on the walls of the former house. It also preserved his bedroom, his office, his hair cream, and other artifacts of his life. The date of his assassination would later be designated National Mourning Day.
Nearly two years after the coup, an army officer, Ziaur Rahman, who had also fought in the war of liberation seized power. But in 1981, he, too, was assassinated. His widow, Khaleda Zia, would go on to lead her husband’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
Serving two separate terms as prime minister from 1991 to 1996 and from 2001 to 2006, Ms. Zia would help reestablish democratic norms after the turmoil of the previous two decades.
Her democratic rival during those years was Sheikh Hasina, who led the Awami League. The two women, both scions of dynasties born out of the liberation struggle, alternated in government for nearly two decades.
After a major Awami League victory in 2008, Sheikh Hasina began to dismantle democratic checks on her power. This set the stage for the unbridled glorification of her father – and herself – in public life.
As prime minister, Ms. Zia had rewritten textbooks to elevate the role her husband, Mr. Rahman, played in the liberation movement. That may have been the trigger for what followed.
Sheikh Hasina believed her father was being written out of history, says Dr. Sobhan. “She began overcompensating – and then eventually went completely berserk.”
A nation’s founding myth as a political cudgel
Under Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly autocratic rule, the personality cult surrounding her father became inescapable.
His image was omnipresent in public spaces. Buildings, barracks, bridges, and sports tournaments were named for him. Bangladeshis were urged to always use his full title, Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu. Ruling-party lawmakers wore his trademark six-buttoned vest, the Mujib coat, to honor him in public.
Her regime revised criminal law and made it risky to criticize Bangabandhu – or even to treat his image disrespectfully. In 2017, a local government official posted a child’s drawing of the nation’s first leader online to mark a public holiday. That landed the official in jail for “defamation of the nation.”
Sheikh Hasina also emphasized her own suffering to drive home the family’s sacrifices. In August 2004, she survived a grenade attack that killed 24 people at an Awami League rally and left her with hearing loss.
As prime minister, she would weep in public as she recalled her family tragedies. In private, she invariably cried, too, and touched her damaged ear, says Gwyn Lewis, the United Nations’ resident coordinator in Dhaka. “It was partly theater. But she always did it,” she says.
She could also be stoic in talking about death and heartbreak, and she was deft in exploiting personal tragedy for political gain, says a source close to the family who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely. But she also harbored a deep sense of betrayal and suspicion. “There is no trust in this family,” the source says.
Since the grenade attack had taken place in August – the same month as her father’s assassination – it became an official “month of mourning” of her family. The month of mourning became an indivisible “symbol of sacrifice” that subsumed the nation’s sacrifices into their own, says Arild Engelsen Ruud, a professor of South Asian studies at Oslo University in Norway.
Textbooks reinforced this narrative. A generation of children was taught that Bangabandhu was the main reason the country was able to win independence in 1971. But this history left a lot out and began to grate, says Professor Ruud.
“So many people sacrificed and fought and came out of the war with missing limbs and ruined families,” he says. “All of this is downplayed, because the official narrative is all about Mujibur Rahman.”
After independence, Bangladeshis who fought in the war were celebrated as freedom fighters. They, as well as their descendants, were given pensions and other benefits. The actual number of freedom fighters has long been a source of contention, though, since it was subject to political meddling, rule changes, and incomplete records. (Bangladesh currently recognizes nearly 200,000 freedom fighters.)
These benefits, an effort to consolidate political power, would be the spark for the 2024 student uprising against Sheikh Hasina. That July, her regime dramatically increased the share of public sector jobs reserved for these descendants from 5% to 30%.
University students in Dhaka who coveted a steady government job after graduation saw their path blocked by these quotas. So they took to the streets, calling themselves Students Against Discrimination.
Two weeks into the protests, Sheikh Hasina held a press conference in which she referred to protesters as “razakars,” the slur used against Bengali collaborators in 1971.
Students understood the insult – and its historical sting. “It means the betrayal of Bangladesh,” says Shamanta Sharmin, an activist. “It has an emotional and political meaning.”
Far from being silenced, activists reclaimed the word. As the protests swelled, a new chant went up: “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar! Razakar!” In response came another: “Who said it? Who said it? Autocrat! Autocrat!” Their demands for quota reforms became demands for Sheikh Hasina to step down.
By early August, after a violent crackdown had failed to end the protests and instead rallied urban workers behind the students, Sheikh Hasina had run out of options. The army, which had previously enforced a shoot-on-sight curfew, refused to intervene. As protesters marched on her residence, she escaped in a helicopter Aug. 5, and then boarded a military flight to India.
Three days later, the student leaders she dismissed as “razakars” were at Dhaka’s airport to greet Professor Yunus, whom they had asked to head an interim government. He praised the students and vowed to reward their trust in him.
“I express all my appreciation and gratitude to the youth community who have made this possible. They saved this country. They have allowed the country to be reborn,” he said.
Bangladesh’s student uprising
Under an enclosed white canopy in a park in Dhaka, hundreds of people sit in ragged rows on a carpeted floor. Some carry crutches. Outside dusk is falling, and the city’s streets are clogged with people heading home to break the Ramadan fast, riding on rickshaws and bicycles or traveling back in cars and buses.
Inside, young men pass out boxes of rice, candied snacks, and fruit wrapped in red cloth bags. Tonight’s event is hosted by some of the students who led the 2024 protests and have formed a political party, the National Citizen Party, to contest the upcoming elections.
Handing out free food in public is what parties do in Bangladesh – and what voters expect. But tonight’s event is for a specific group of people. A printed sign pinned on a canopy wall proclaims a fast-breaking for “July martyrs, injured, and bereaved.”
During several weeks of protests in July and August 2024, Bangladeshi security forces and pro-government paramilitaries killed as many as 1,400 people, according to U.N. investigators. At least 12% of the victims were children, and the killings may constitute crimes against humanity, their report said.
Nahid Islam, a prominent student leader who formed a new political party, steps forward holding a microphone. He wears a white skullcap and long blue tunic. He tells the crowd sitting under the canopy that Sheikh Hasina must face justice before an election is held, warning that, otherwise, a future government could “rehabilitate these fascists and murderers.” He adds, “We must understand the expectations of martyrs’ families regarding justice.”
As the event breaks up, Mir Mostafizur Rahman lingers near the exit. His son, Mir Mughdho, was shot dead July 18, 2024, while handing out food and water to protesters. His last words, which now adorn street murals at protest sites, were “Water, anybody need water?”
Mr. Mostafizur, who has a hennaed beard and wears a long white tunic, says he wants to see the killers of his son, and those who gave the orders, put on trial. Like many parents, he sees a direct line between Bangladesh’s independence struggle and their children’s protest movement.
The current government has classified more than 800 Bangladeshi protesters killed last year as martyrs – which now allows their families to receive lifetime benefits, just like those of freedom fighters. Thousands of those injured during the protests are also receiving support.
There is a certain irony in this new policy. Is the new government using the same kinds of methods Sheikh Hasina used to consolidate popularity and power?
This official recognition of martyrs carries symbolic weight, putting the participants in the 2024 movement, which began as a protest about quotas for freedom fighters, on a similar state-supported pedestal.
In an interview, Mr. Islam says the 2024 martyrs’ families deserve support, but that this won’t become another quota system to be abused. The children of those killed may qualify for support, he allows. “But this benefit should not continue for generation after generation.”
“History makes identity”
In Dhaka, the signs of last year’s uprising are everywhere. Murals painted on walls glorify the student movement. Dozens of buildings named after Sheikh Hasina and family members have been changed. August is no longer a month of mourning. A holiday in March for Sheikh Mujibur’s birthday – a national children’s day – has been scrapped.
In January, newly revised textbooks arrived in schools that highlight the role played by several leaders of liberation, not just Sheikh Mujibur, in the war for independence.
Less attention is paid to pro-Pakistani “collaborators” whom Sheikh Hasina had long used as a bogeyman to denigrate her opponents. Some books also show street murals from the 2024 uprising.
To students who back the interim government, these revisions are long overdue and part of a broader mission to reclaim history from the mythmakers. “History is very important for society because history makes identity,” says Mr. Islam.
But the new textbooks have infuriated former government loyalists who defend their version of history. “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,” Mohammad Arafat, a former information minister under Sheikh Hasina, told the Financial Times.
Bangladesh’s new textbooks are notably less expansive about India’s crucial role in 1971. This circumspection appears rooted in regional politics: India has been a strong backer of Sheikh Hasina and has sheltered her and leaders of her political party. It has ignored an official request from Bangladesh to extradite the ousted prime minister to stand trial at home.
In February, the exiled prime minister delivered a speech from India, marking six months since her ouster. She urged supporters to resist an “unlawful” government in a defiant speech streamed live.
That was the catalyst for a second destructive rampage on the national museum and official residence. The night of her speech, hundreds of people gathered outside the charred house-museum, which was still intact, and tore it down with the help of an excavator.
Dr. Sobhan, the older economist and public thinker, felt his heart sink when he saw the morning-after wreckage of Dhanmondi 32. He still lives in the neighborhood and can vividly recall the days when he worked there with Sheikh Mujibur to lay out the foundations of a new country over 50 years ago.
“I was very disturbed, and it’s because of the negligence of this government,” he says. “It was not a spontaneous act.”
The interim government says Sheikh Hasina’s speech had “reopened the wounds of the July massacre” and provoked the destruction of the site, which it called “regrettable.” Student activists shrug off the vandalism as a righteous response to delayed justice.
“This is the people of the country,” says Mr. Mahmud, the government adviser. “This is their rage, and people want instant justice.”
The more difficult task will be rebuilding not just a government, but a democratic nation with a history to celebrate – and mourn.
Sheikh Hasina’s place in that history has been tarnished, probably irrevocably. Her father’s legacy as a founding father will likely endure, even though “She pulled him down in the mud along with her,” says Professor Ruud. And in that confluence of historical revisionism and inclusive debate, a national identity that binds all Bangladeshis may finally emerge.
