As Bangladesh heads closer to the February 12 national election, its ties with Pakistan have hogged international limelight. Many see this as Bangladesh walking back on its history. Pakistan is today viewed by the world as the hub of terrorism. Pakistan observers link this fundamentalist terrorism to the forces its leadership unleashed at the birth of the nation.
Though the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, called himself secular, he unleashed fundamentalist forces that led to the partition of India and creation of Pakistan. Jinhan’s secular mask was soon thrown away by the nation created for Islamists, who later captured military institutions as well. And now, Pakistan watchers mockingly say, Pakistan doesn’t own an army the Pakistan Army owns a country.
One of the consequences of unleashing Islamist forces for and in Pakistan was the persecution of Bengali-speaking Pakistanis who lived in East Pakistan. A group of Bengali activists rose in protests in the 1950s and 1960s. That protest later turned into a movement for the Liberation of Bangladesh. India had to intervene in the Liberation War of Bangladesh as it triggered an immigration crisis in India.
Of the many heroes that emerged from the Bangladeshi Liberation War, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman were the most prominent. Mujibur led a political campaign while army officer Rahman led the military revolt against Pakistan Army’s brutal crackdown on protesters and general Bengali-speaking populace. Pakistan denied Mujibur to form the government despite winning a landslide in the 1970 election. The Islamist forces that Jinnah and the Pakistan Army had unleashed were against the idea of a Bengali from East Pakistan ruling over the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. Bangladeshi freedom fighters shed blood, stood against persecution and sacrificed their lives to protect their cultural identity and self-esteem of the Bengali people.
Now, the caretaker or interim government of Bangladesh under Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus stands accused of unleashing similar forces in the country. Yunus faces similar criticism from rights groups and international agencies that was seen during Pakistan’s crackdown on East Pakistanis during the Liberation War. One fallout of the Yunus brand of politics is the rewriting if school textbooks which is never an academic exercise.
Bangladesh and reimagined history
Rewriting school textbooks is about memory, legitimacy and the moral foundations of a nation. In Bangladesh today, the struggle over how 1971 is narrated is shaping not only domestic politics but also the country’s geopolitical posture — particularly towards Pakistan, the very state from which it fought to break free.
“Rewriting of history textbooks, especially the ones taught in schools and colleges, was carried out with a vengeance between 2001 and 2006 under Zia’s prime ministership. The role of Sheikh Mujib in the 1971 war was drastically downplayed and the revised textbooks said he had not played any role in the liberation war. It was Ziaur Rahman who was projected as the prime hero of the war. Mujib’s role was reduced to that of a mere bystander,” says recently published “Inshallah Bangladesh”, a critically acclaimed account of the 2024 Bangladesh revolution that led to the toppling of the Sheikh Hasina government by Deep Halder, Jaideep Mazumder and Shahidul Hasan Khokon.
What makes this moment especially sensitive is that the shift is unfolding under leadership associated with reformist credibility and global goodwill. Yet critics argue that Bangladesh is witnessing not merely curricular adjustment, but a deeper reorientation of identity — one that coincides with warming engagement with Islamabad and a loosening of the moral centrality of the Liberation War.
History is not a chapter in Bangladesh — it is the constitutional foundation
Bangladesh is one of the few countries whose founding trauma is embedded directly into its constitutional DNA. The 1972 Constitution was built on four foundational principles: nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism. “Nationalism” in that framework did not mean religious identity. It meant Bengali linguistic nationalism — a direct rejection of the Pakistan state’s attempt to define identity primarily through Islam and Urdu.
The Language Movement of 1952, the Six-Point Movement, and the Liberation War were all driven by the assertion that language, culture and political rights — not religion alone — defined the Bengali nation. Every time the interpretation of 1971 shifts, it is not merely historical debate; it is a reinterpretation of what those constitutional principles mean.
Bangladesh’s politics has long swung between two identity models
Since independence, the country’s political trajectory has oscillated between two competing visions: a liberation model rooted in secular, language-based nationalism, and a model that places greater emphasis on Islamic identity and strategic distance from India.
This pendulum is visible in constitutional and political shifts. Secularism was diluted after 1975, Islamic symbolism entered the Constitution, and Islam was later declared the state religion. Subsequent governments restored some liberation-war symbolism while retaining those Islamic markers. The result has been a layered and sometimes uneasy state identity.
Why 1971 memory shapes foreign policy psychology
Bangladesh–Pakistan relations have never been purely diplomatic. They are shaped by unresolved questions from 1971, including the absence of a formal state apology from Pakistan, disputes over pre-1971 financial assets, and the enduring public memory of mass atrocities. These factors have long acted as psychological constraints on how close Dhaka could move towards Islamabad.
If the centrality of 1971 weakens in education and national symbolism, that psychological barrier lowers as well. The “Inshallah Bangladesh: The Story of an Unfinished Revolution” argues that for a different geopolitical comfort zone to emerge, “the genocide of 1971 has to be completely erased from textbooks and from the nation’s public memory”.
“The Islamists are trying to widen the fissure between India and Bangladesh so that New Delhi could establish a permanent presence in Bangladesh — the Islamists are trying to widen the fissure between India and Bangladesh,” write the authors, who travelled the country and interviewed hundreds of witnesses, including the oused Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at her secret exile residence in New Delhi.
The Jinnah symbolism and the identity question
Muhammad Ali Jinnah is not a neutral historical figure in Bangladesh. He represents the two-nation theory, the privileging of Urdu, and the political structure East Pakistan ultimately rebelled against. The decision to commemorate him publicly in Dhaka in 2024 was therefore seen by many as symbolically loaded.
To erase that symbol, Bangladesh celebrated its own Father of the Nation, Mujibur Rahman, the father of Sheikh Hasina. Mujibur was assassinated by the same fundamentalist forces in 1975, while Hasina and her sister were away, and thus escaped the massacre of the family. When Hasina climbed the ladder of politics and became the prime minister, her government set up panels to rewrite the country’s history, establishing Mujibur a figure that towered over Jinnah in Bangladesh.
“The rewriting of all history texts to make her father, Sheikh Mujib, the central figure of the liberation movement while whittling down or even obliterating the role and contributions of others… The history of the liberation movement became a Mujib-centric one,” write the authors of the Inshallah Bangladesh.
“To celebrate Jinnah and Urdu is to completely reverse the ideals of the freedom movement and turn back the clock,” they write about Yunus turning the Bangladesh’s clock back to Pakistan times.
The issue is not the event alone, but what it signals: that figures once seen as embodying the political logic Bangladesh rejected are becoming discussable in mainstream space.
Civil society space and political risk
Bangladesh’s political culture has long involved sharp cycles of repression under different regimes. Space for dissent has narrowed at various points in its history, making open debate over national identity politically charged. Claims that muted public backlash reflects fear rather than approval must be seen within this broader pattern of polarisation.
These ideological signals are unfolding alongside renewed diplomatic engagement between Dhaka and Islamabad. Trade and connectivity discussions have resumed, maritime links have reopened after decades, and high-level meetings have taken place. Calls to revive regional forums long stalled by India–Pakistan tensions have also resurfaced.
Each step can be defended as pragmatic diplomacy. Yet in the Bangladeshi context, diplomacy cannot be divorced from memory. When engagement accelerates while the narrative of 1971 appears less morally central, the two processes begin to look linked rather than coincidental.
Reconciliation without reckoning?
Yunus supporters argue Bangladesh cannot remain permanently bound by 1971. Economic diversification, regional connectivity and strategic autonomy require engagement with all neighbours, including Pakistan.
Critics counter that the issue is not engagement but sequence. In many post-conflict reconciliations, acknowledgement of past crimes precedes normalisation. In the Bangladesh–Pakistan case, the foundational trauma of 1971 remains politically and emotionally active. Moving forward while that memory fades institutionally risks turning reconciliation into amnesia.
What ‘unleashing forces’ really means
The fear is not of military reversal. It is of ideological regression: religion-centred political identity overtaking linguistic nationalism, dilution of the secular constitutional spirit, rehabilitation of Pakistan-era narratives, and weakening of the moral exceptionalism of 1971. These are the forces Bangladesh’s liberation war sought to escape.
Can a nation built on memory afford to blur its origin? Bangladesh has every sovereign right to pursue an independent foreign policy. But its state identity is inseparable from a war fought to define who the nation was — and was not.
The debate is not about freezing history. It is about whether reinterpretation is shading into erasure, and whether that erasure makes it easier for ideas rejected in 1971 to re-enter the political mainstream. The central question is no longer only how history is told. It is whether, in softening the story of 1971, Bangladesh is also softening its distance from the very forces it once had to fight to escape.
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