[ad_1]
In this picture taken on February 4, 2025, students get new textbooks in their classroom at a school in Dhaka.
| Photo Credit: AFP
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.
Last year, a student-led revolution overthrew the government of iron-fisted premier Sheikh Hasina when public anger over her increasingly autocratic rule boiled over.
Also read | UN Human Rights Office report points out human rights violation under both Hasina and interim government
Her ouster has 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 its ruinous 1971 independence war against Pakistan have persisted.
Until this year, textbooks gave special exaltation to the country’s first President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for spearheading that liberation struggle.
But Mujib, assassinated in 1975 in a military coup, 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.
Revised curriculum
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 Ms. 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.
Zia had been left out of the curriculum during Hasina’s time because he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), her chief opposition.
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.
Revised textbooks mention that militia groups were responsible for the murders, without mentioning that the militias were run by Jamaat.
Asked about the changes, Hassan said that the textbook commission he helms did not want to trap the nation’s youth “in an endless cycle of hatred”.
Other signs suggest the new textbooks have conceded several changes to hardline religious sentiment in the Muslim-majority nation.
The book also excise references to transgender Bangladeshis, a demand long held by Islamist groups.
Published – February 15, 2025 10:37 am IST
[ad_2]
Bangladesh rewrites its history books to suit new orthodoxies
