DHAKA: Bangladeshi high scho­oler Laiba is being educated for the future, but what she learns has been determined by the latest chapter in her country’s battle over its past.

A student-led revolution overthrew the government of iron-fisted premier Sheikh Hasina last year when public anger over her increasingly autocratic rule boiled over. Her ouster prompted Bangladesh to do something that has followed every sudden change in national leadership: rewrite its history books to suit new orthodoxies.

“The tradition of altering history must stop at some point — the sooner, the better,” Laiba’s mother Suraiya Akhtar Jahan said. “Textbooks should not change every time a new government takes office.”

Radical changes to the school curriculum are routine in Bangladesh, where febrile political divisions dating back to 1971 fight against then West Pakistan have persisted.

Textbook commission head says the nation’s youth must be freed from ‘an endless cycle of hatred’

Until this year, textbooks gave special exaltation to the country’s first president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for spearheading that liberation struggle. Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975, is also Hasina’s father, and his daughter’s disgrace and exile has dented the late leader’s stature.

“The books had turned into one side’s political manifesto,” AKM Riazul Hassan, head of the national agency tasked with reforming the curriculum, said.

“That does not conform to the purpose of textbooks. We tried to get them back on track.”

New history books have expunged dozens of poems, speeches and articles penned by Mujib, alongside images of his daughter. They instead now valorise the hundreds of people killed in the protests that ultimately toppled Hasina last summer, while bringing back from exile other previously erased heroes of Bangladesh’s early history.

Among them is former army chief Ziaur Rahman — no relation to Mujib — credited with issuing the first public proclamation of Bangladesh’s independence during the 1971 war.

However, Zia had been left out of the curriculum during Hasina’s time because he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), her chief opposition.

His return to the page augurs the resurgence of the political force he created, which is strongly favoured to win elections expected by next year.

‘Endless cycle’

While the overhaul of Bangl­adesh’s official history gives clues as to the country’s future direction, critics say the new curriculum has its own litany of omissions.

One significant omission is the mention of Jamaat-i-Islami — Bangladesh’s main Islamist party that had opposed the country’s independence and later suppressed by Hasina’s government. Likely to be a major force in Bangladesh’s next parliament, the JI has governed in coalition with the BNP in the past.

Dhaka University professor Mujibur Rahman said the apparently deliberate attempt to obscure details around the purge raised questions about the reasons behind the changes. “The real question is whether this interim government wants students to learn the actual history,” he said.

Reconciliation

Asked about the changes, Riazul Hassan said that the textbook commission he helms did not want to trap the nation’s youth “in an endless cycle of hatred”.

“At some point, we need to start reconciliation,” he added.

“Should we make our textbooks flooded with hatred? How rational would it be?”

Other signs suggest the new textbooks have conceded several changes to hardline religious sentiment in the Muslim-majority nation.

Hasina’s government, for all its other shortcomings on rights issues, was lauded for championing the rights of transgender community.

The new textbooks excise references to transgender Bangladeshis, a demand long held by Islamist groups. Riazul Hassan acknowledged that the decision had been taken following objections from a Muslim group campaigning against representations of transgender issues in the curriculum.

“We took their concerns into account,” he said, “and made adjustments accordingly to minimise their anxiety.”

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2025