The ‘we-brought-you-freedom’ story has an expiry date

Of a library window

The burning books

Can’t be read.

So new ones

Will have to be written.

—Ian McMillan (@IMcMillan)

Over a decade ago, I walked into a small two-storeyed white house in Dhaka. It felt familiar. I’d grown up around houses like that in Kolkata with red oxide floors, black-and-white photographs on the wall, the rooms cool even on a warm afternoon. But this house was now a museum to the liberation war that birthed Bangladesh. Instead of family pictures, there were photographs of murdered journalists, display cabinets with old bandages, war helmets, and the cracked spectacles recovered from dead freedom fighters.

I loved the intimacy of this house-turned-museum. It felt personal in a way most museums do not.

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It was my first trip to Dhaka. When I returned home, I told my family I had never been to a country that seemed so close to its history. In India, history had receded into text books, parades and statues. But in that museum in Dhaka, I could almost feel the warm breath of history upon myself.

That is why it felt bewildering to see protesters demolishing the statue of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman after his daughter Sheikh Hasina was ousted from power. Whatever the anger against her increasingly autocratic ways, it felt baffling, as if the country, in a paroxysm of anger, was eating its own history. Since then other images have surfaced, like one shared by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on X of broken statues in the 1971 Shaheed Memorial Complex in Mujibnagar, statues that once depicted key moments in the war of liberation.

At a time when the homes, temples and lives of the Hindu minority have come under attack, it seems strange to mourn fallen statues. But this is also about watching history burn. Reacting to the burning of Mujibur Rahman’s house on Road 32 in Dhaka, historian and Columbia University professor Naeem Mohaiemen writes in Prothom Alo newspaper, “Contemporary historians propose that architecture and objects are the second draft of history, and we are a fragile nation with always vanishing archives." Now the house on Road 32 becomes part of that vanishing archive, its history burned to cinders.

As Hasina fled Dhaka and jubilant crowds swarmed the streets, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus called it a second independence day for the country. But some wondered if it was erasing the first one from history.

Rewriting history, especially foundational myths, is not uncommon. Each party tries to bend history to suit its politics. For decades after independence, the Congress was accused of privileging the Jawaharlal Nehru-Mahatma Gandhi connection for its own electoral advantage. It wasn’t quite an “endless circumnavigation around one-name history", as Mohaiemen described the Awami League’s attempt to monopolise the narrative of Bangladesh’s freedom movement, but the Congress’s opponents often complained that everyone else, even many Congress figures, had been left out of the story in order to create an aura around one family.

When the BJP came to power, it needed a new narrative. The Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav website to celebrate 75 years of Indian independence highlighted “unsung heroes". Figures like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Syama Prasad Mukherjee were returned to centre stage and stories appeared about the internal rifts in the Congress whether it was the friction between Gandhi and Subhas Bose or Nehru and Sardar Patel. The irony was as P. Sainath demonstrated in his book The Last Heroes: Footsoldiers of Indian Freedom (2022), many freedom fighters had room in their hearts for all these argumentative Indians—Gandhi and Ambedkar and Bose. When Sainath asked Shobharam Gehervar, a Dalit freedom fighter from Rajasthan, how we would choose between the Mahatma and Ambedkar, the man retorted, “Why should I choose? You choose to choose."

It is this multilayered history, that cheerfully accommodates many world views, that often gets lost when a party tries to enforce one authorised sanskari history at the expense of all others.

But Aditya Mukherjee, professor emeritus of contemporary Indian history at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, points out in a recent interview in The Indian Express that the freedom movement in India, one of the biggest mass movements in world history, spanned more than a century and had deep roots in Indian society. “You can try to denigrate the national movement but it wouldn’t be that easy even today to destroy a statue of Gandhi, Ambedkar or Nehru even if you remove Nehru from a textbook."

Bangladesh’s freedom struggle is of more recent vintage but many have seen the anger there as a sign that the “we-brought-you-freedom" story eventually comes with an expiry date whether with the African National Congress in South Africa or the United National Independence Party in Zambia or the Congress party in India.

During the 2014 election, I remember a group of Congress workers warming up the crowd waiting for a Rahul Gandhi roadshow with a skit. It basically recounted the sacrifices of the Nehru-Gandhi family complete with a reenactment of all the assassinations. A group of young men told me that they liked Rahul Gandhi but felt embarrassed his constituency Amethi didn’t even have a mall or a movie theatre. Instead, they had the Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, the Indira Gandhi School of Nursing and the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust. But they just wanted a Café Coffee Day and a park with benches. “There’s no point having a girlfriend in Amethi. What’s there to do?" said one young man, a line I never forgot.

That young generation take independent India for granted. They even take a post-liberalisation India for granted. The Congress was deluding itself by thinking it could still count on their gratitude for having been the party of the freedom struggle. In the end, the young want what young people everywhere want—jobs, progress and a fair shot at the dream for a better life. And a café.

It’s a lesson leaders are loath to learn. “My family and I are done," Sajeeb Wazed Joy, Sheikh Hasina’s son, told the BBC, sounding like a petulant scion complaining about an ungrateful populace. His mother, he said “is so disappointed that after all her hard work, for a minority to rise up against her". Now, he says a conspiracy is afoot to wipe Bangladesh’s founding father Mujibur Rahman from history. “Even the killers of 1975 (military coup) could not dare to destroy that house," he said referring to the burned house at Dhanmondi 32. But many Bangladeshis rued the destruction of Mujibur Rahman’s statues and murals. An official told The Indian Express, “(Hasina) would invoke his name at every juncture to justify her actions. So there was pent-up anger against her that made the mob do such things." What Joy forgot was that history needs engagement and renegotiation, it cannot be preserved inside a mausoleum or used as a bludgeon.

Nor can it just be rewritten each time to suit the new powers that be. On that same trip to Dhaka, I visited the mausoleum of former President Ziaur Rahman. As night fell, the mausoleum and its grounds were engulfed in darkness. People switched on their mobile phones to find their way out. When I asked an ice-cream vendor when the lights would come on, he laughed, “When (his widow) Begum Khaleda Zia comes back to power."

We were literally being kept in the dark about history.

I had chuckled then but it does not seem so funny anymore.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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