Ousted top minister Sheikh Hasina said in a 2018 speech, “I continually have in solutions that my father has liberated this nation, so it is my predominant responsibility to assist the nation’s people.”
May perhaps there be any better irony than this?
Let’s rewind to the first week of March 2020. The sphere became already reeling from the speedily outbreak of coronavirus, with many countries scrambling to impose restrictions.
But Hasina, the then-top minister of Bangladesh, had something else on her solutions.
Covid preparedness? That can perhaps perhaps perhaps wait. A plague outbreak that can perhaps perhaps perhaps jeopardise thousands and thousands of lives? Not frequently a wretchedness.
Hasina’s sole focal point became on celebrating Mujib Yr, marking the centenary of her father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s beginning.
So, colleges remained open, mass gatherings persisted, and most astonishingly, Bangladesh’s first confirmed Covid-19 conditions were allegedly saved under wraps except 8 March.
Why? To make certain that the 7 March celebration of Mujib’s historic 1971 speech went forward uninterrupted. In the end, why let a pesky pandemic kill the event?
This wasn’t mere negligence—it became authoritarianism 101, where constructing a cult of persona trumped public welfare. The voters’ effectively being grew to vary into collateral hurt in the federal government’s mission to immortalise the nation’s “Father.”
Now, the financial toll of the Mujib Yr has additionally reach to gentle.
All the method in which by the last six years, Hasina’s government spent a whopping Tk1,261 crore in public funds on Mujib Yr celebrations, primarily based on recordsdata presented by linked ministries and government entities at some stage in an Advisory Council assembly of the period in-between government at the secretariat on Wednesday.
The spending spree featured everything from commemorative postage stamps and sleek publications to give an explanation for programmes devour “Muktir Mahanayak” and “Mujib Chirantan”.
Even at some stage in the pandemic, the federal government chanced on time to initiate a Mujib Yr web online page, particular cell packages, and discounted web products and companies—now not for Covid reduction, of path, however for the celebrations.
And apt devour that, an event actually speculated to be a single year ballooned dependable into a six-year political extravaganza, draining nationwide coffers in a nation grappling with spiralling inflation, frequent food insecurity, and an financial system teetering on the brink.
All the method in which by Hasina’s regime, Bangabandhu’s omnipresence grew to vary into unavoidable, thanks to tens of thousands of “Bangabandhu Corners” taking pictures up in colleges, colleges, offices, and even NGOs. These corners, decorated with colourful pictures, posters, and books, on the total grew to vary into shrines to Mujib’s entire family.
Schoolchildren were required to be taught poems and articles about him, and even recited oaths in his name at some stage in morning assemblies. Many institutions went as a long way as dedicating entire rooms to Bangabandhu Corners, which on the total integrated materials about his kin as effectively.
And it did not dwell there. Bangladesh’s 82 international missions were suggested to produce high-dwell “Bangabandhu Corners,” making plug the cult crossed borders. Institutions were compelled to buy new books on Mujib per annum, while statues and murals of him sprouted up all around the build—from airport lounges to district entrances.
With such extra, it grew to vary into manifestly obvious that while Hasina could perhaps neutral have repeatedly remembered her father’s pivotal role in the nation’s liberation, serving the people became the closing ingredient on her solutions.
Her valid mission became to etch her father’s name into the nation’s collective memory, no subject the worth or the penalties.
But let’s now not idiot ourselves into contemplating this became about preserving history or honouring a legacy. A more in-depth stare at Hasina’s actions, as effectively as these of her family and her event, the Awami League, over their 16-year regime finds a plug story.
Commemorating Mujib wasn’t about celebrating the nation’s founding beliefs. It became about weaponising his legacy for private, financial, and political web, a cynical strategy that now not finest betrayed the people however additionally tarnished the closing descend of legacy Mujib left at the support of.
That’s the reason, after the autumn of the Hasina regime on 5 August in the aftermath of an extraordinary students-led mass riot, it wasn’t apt the federal government that bore the brunt of public infuriate. The symbols of Mujib’s legacy grew to vary into top targets of wrath.
From attacks on Mujib’s historic Dhanmondi 32 situation to the destruction of murals, statues, and Bangabandhu Corners throughout the nation, the message became clear: people were fed up.
Drained of having Mujibism shoved down their throats, they revolted against the very symbols of the cult they were compelled to suffer.
On the dwell of the day, it is entirely and entirely Sheikh Hasina who ought to aloof be held accountable for the tarnishing of Mujib’s legacy.
It is just not as if she did not know what essential to be done to retain her father’s role in history, namely the brave image of his pre-independence years, while distancing herself from his wrongdoings.
All she needed to originate became “support the people”–a easy but profound responsibility she herself professed to uphold.
As an quite a lot of of syphoning off crores of taka and justifying it under the guise of commemorating Mujib, she could perhaps have directed these funds in direction of meaningful initiatives to present a enhance to the nation’s welfare and lift people out of their dire financial prerequisites.
Pretty than clinging to energy indefinitely, she could perhaps have granted the people their democratic rights, allowing them to practise and pick for themselves whether or now not they in actual fact subscribed to the ideology she inherited from her father.
But no—Hasina repeated the identical grave errors her father made at some stage in 1972-75 by searching to keep Baksal, doubling down on authoritarian control at the expense of democratic solutions.
She knew the method in which forward however willfully strayed from it. Pretty than empowering the people, she sought to exalt herself, attempting to challenge an image better than the nation itself.
In her are trying and keep Mujib because the “Father of the Nation,” she diminished him to merely “her” father, treating the people as minute better than topics in her family’s imagined kingdom.
Hasina ended up betraying the virtues of her father and embraced the total evils in him. Mujib became assassinated once in 1975, and Hasina made obvious he faced the identical destiny again in 2024.
