Anas Ansar on Bangladesh's politics of memory

In an article for The Daily Star, ABI staff member Anas Ansar reflects on Bangladesh's fraught relationship with its own political history. 

 

August, he argues, has become the most contested month in the national calendar: it marks the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, the July uprising that ended Sheikh Hasina's rule on August 5, 2024, and the birthday of the country's first elected woman prime minister, Khaleda Zia. 

 

For Ansar, the real challenge is not which events Bangladesh remembers, but whether it can do so "without turning remembrance into political ownership." Pointing to recent incidents of intimidation at Dhaka's Dhanmondi 32, he warns that when every act of mourning becomes a declaration of political allegiance, a country divides not only its history but its citizens. As he puts it, "the freedom to remember is inseparable from the freedom to disagree." A mature democracy must be spacious enough to hold competing memories together — a test he sees as central to Bangladesh's new democratic journey.

 

Read the article on The Daily Star's website.