In 1947, August 14 was observed as a “Day of Liberation” by many Muslims of British India, particularly Bengali Muslims. It marked the culmination of successive revolts, political movements, and popular protests against nearly 190 years of British colonial rule.
History, however, is rarely allowed to remain whole. Bengali Muslims have repeatedly neglected -- or consciously erased -- the sacrifices of those who struggled in earlier chapters of their political emancipation.
The martyrs, activists and leaders of the pre-1947 movements, along with the families who bore the consequences of their sacrifices, have largely disappeared from public memory.
Even those who surrendered careers, security, and personal comfort for the creation of East Pakistan were later made to feel ashamed of their role. Whatever its subsequent failures and contradictions, East Pakistan formed the territorial and political foundation from which independent Bangladesh ultimately emerged.
A similar danger confronts our understanding of 1971 today.
Attempts to elevate the July 2024 uprising into an all-encompassing national narrative must not diminish the unique historical significance of the Liberation War or push earlier struggles into obscurity.
July 2024 deserves its rightful place in our national history -- but not at the expense of 1971, just as 1971 should not require the erasure of 1947 or the long resistance that preceded it.
Some observers describe this recurring rejection of our own historical inheritance as the symptom of an “ungrateful nation.” Whether or not one accepts that harsh judgment, the underlying question cannot be avoided: Can Bangladesh build an honest and confident future while repeatedly denying the people, movements, and sacrifices that made each successive stage of its freedom possible?
Bangladesh was not born from a single day, a single movement, or the vision of a single leader. Its emergence was the outcome of a long and unfinished struggle by ordinary people -- peasants, workers, religious reformers, students, intellectuals, soldiers and political organizers -- against exploitation, foreign domination, economic injustice, and authoritarian rule.
The decisive events of 1971 occupy a unique and inviolable place in our national history. Yet 1971 itself did not arise in a historical vacuum. It inherited ideas, grievances, organizational experience, and traditions of resistance accumulated over more than two centuries.
Likewise, the July Revolution of 2024 did not invalidate 1971. It expressed a later generation’s determination to recover democratic rights that independence had promised but successive governments had too often denied.
The proper metaphor for our history is therefore not a collection of competing monuments. It is a river. Many streams entered it at different times. Some carried religious reform, some agrarian justice, some Bengali cultural identity, some Muslim political emancipation, some provincial autonomy and others representative democracy.
They did not always flow peacefully together, and they cannot all be judged identically. Nevertheless, each contributed to the historical experience from which Bangladesh emerged.
The forgotten foundations
After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company’s power grew through revenue extraction, commercial monopoly, and the restructuring of Bengal’s rural economy. Those who resisted were not always equipped with modern political programs. They acted in the language and institutions available to them.
The Fakir-Sannyasi Resistance (1760-1800) brought Muslim fakirs and Hindu ascetics, together with sections of the rural population, into conflict with Company authority.
The Faraizi Movement(1818-1860) led by Haji Shariatullah and subsequently Dudu Miyan combined Islamic reform with the mobilization of impoverished cultivators.
Titumir (1831) challenged oppressive levies, landlords, and colonial power before making his last stand at Narkelbaria.
During the Indigo Revolt(1859-1860), cultivators collectively refused to grow a crop imposed upon them through coercive arrangements.
These struggles differed in leadership, territory, and ideology.
It would be misleading to force every one of them into the mould of twentieth-century nationalism. But it would be equally misleading to dismiss them because they lacked our present political vocabulary.
In their own circumstances, they asserted a fundamental principle: Those who cultivate the land and bear the burdens of society are entitled to justice and human dignity.
The same historical sympathy should be extended to the participants in the uprising of 1857, including those involved in resistance in Dhaka and elsewhere in eastern Bengal.
Later came the controversies surrounding the 1905 Partition of Bengal and its annulment in 1911. Hindu and Muslim communities did not always understand those developments in the same way.
Many Muslims of Eastern Bengal saw the new province, with Dhaka as its capital, as an opportunity for education, employment, and political recognition. Many anti-partition nationalists viewed the division as a colonial strategy.
Honest history must preserve both experiences rather than suppressing one to simplify the other.
The Tebhaga movement of the 1940s similarly demanded a fairer share of the harvest for “bargadars.” Its enduring lesson is not confined to party history. It belongs to the cultivators -- including many women -- who confronted an unequal agrarian order and insisted that those producing society’s wealth should not remain permanently dispossessed.
Remembering 1947 without diminishing 1971
The meaning of 1947 remains one of the most sensitive questions in Bangladesh’s historical memory. It should be approached neither through nostalgia nor through retrospective contempt.
Millions of Bengali Muslims supported the Pakistan movement because they believed a separate homeland would rescue them from political marginalization, economic deprivation, and entrenched social inequality. Their hopes were real.
The failure of Pakistan’s ruling establishment to honour those hopes does not make the original aspirations fraudulent. Nor does it erase the work and sacrifice of the people who struggled for what they understood as freedom.
For many Bengali Muslims, August 14, 1947 was a “day of liberation”. For many others, Partition brought fear, displacement, and communal suffering. Both truths belong to history.
To acknowledge the emancipatory meaning that Pakistan possessed for large numbers of Bengali Muslims is not to defend the discrimination subsequently imposed upon East Bengal.
Nor is it to weaken the sovereignty or moral foundations of Bangladesh. On the contrary, it helps explain why the people of East Pakistan reacted so powerfully when the promises of 1947 were broken.
Pakistan’s rulers denied the Bengali majority equal recognition, transferred resources disproportionately, concentrated political and military power in West Pakistan, and repeatedly obstructed representative government.
The people who had sought dignity through Pakistan gradually discovered that they were being treated as subjects within the state they had helped create.
- The Language Movement of 1952 transformed cultural recognition into a democratic demand.
- The United Front victory of 1954 demonstrated the electorate’s capacity to reject central domination.
- The Six-Point Program of 1966 translated accumulated grievances into a constitutional plan for autonomy.
- The Mass Uprising of 1969 united students, workers, professionals and ordinary citizens against military rule.
- The election of 1970 provided an unambiguous democratic mandate. When that mandate was denied and the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight in March 1971, the struggle entered its final and most terrible phase.
The Liberation War was therefore both a rupture and a culmination. Bangladesh repudiated the oppressive structure of Pakistan, but it inherited the unfulfilled aspirations for dignity, equality, and representative government that had influenced Bengali Muslims before 1947.
Historical continuity does not mean that 1947 and 1971 were identical. It means that peoples often move toward freedom through successive stages, discovering through experience that one settlement has not answered all their demands.
From independence to the July Revolution
Political independence did not automatically establish accountable institutions. During the five decades after 1971, Bangladesh achieved important advances in education, public health, women’s participation, agriculture, industry and disaster management. It also experienced assassinations, military interventions, disputed elections, corruption, partisan capture of institutions and recurring restrictions on political freedoms.
No major political party can credibly narrate this period as a story of its own innocence. Democratic institutions became vulnerable whenever leaders treated the state as party property, opponents as enemies and electoral victory as a permanent licence to rule.
Against that background, the student-led movement of July 2024 became a much wider popular uprising. What began around the quota issue expanded into resistance against repression, unaccountable government, and the closing of democratic space.
Sheikh Hasina was forced to leave office on August 5, 2024 after weeks of protest and a severe state crackdown. The uprising was followed by an interim period and, in February 2026, Bangladesh held its first parliamentary election since the fall of her government.
July should not be used to erase 1971, just as 1971 should never have been used to erase 1947, 1952, 1969, or the earlier peasant resistances. A new political order cannot establish its legitimacy by declaring that everything before it was darkness. That habit merely replaces one official mythology with another.
The participants in July did not struggle to exchange one personality cult for a new one. Their sacrifices impose a duty to establish institutions through which citizens can peacefully remove governments, criticize leaders and obtain justice without requiring another uprising.
Lessons from other nations
Other countries demonstrate that national memory can accommodate successive liberations.
The United States honours its declaration of independence in 1776, while recognizing that its promise of equality remained gravely incomplete under slavery.
The abolition of slavery, reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement did not cancel the American Revolution; they compelled later generations to enlarge its meaning.
South Africa remembers resistance extending from early African opposition to dispossession through the African National Congress, the Defiance Campaign, the Soweto uprising, and the democratic transition of 1994. Nelson Mandela’s stature does not require the disappearance of all who struggled before or beside him.
Poland commemorates nineteenth-century uprisings, the restoration of independence in 1918, resistance during the Second World War, and the Solidarity movement against communist rule. Its later victories did not render its earlier, unsuccessful uprisings meaningless. Defeat itself sometimes preserved a people’s political imagination.
The lesson is clear: A mature nation does not need to choose only one generation of heroes. It can honour different stages of struggle while openly examining their limitations.
Principles for the Future
Bangladesh now requires a national philosophy of remembrance and democratic renewal founded on several principles.
First, history must be plural and evidence-based. No government or party should possess a monopoly over textbooks, archives, museums or national commemorations. Historians must be free to question cherished narratives without fear.
Second, remembrance must include ordinary people. The cultivator who refused indigo, the sharecropper who demanded “tebhaga”, the language activist, the freedom fighter, the garment worker, and the student protester all belong to the national story.
Third, recognition is not absolution. We can acknowledge a movement’s historical contribution while criticizing communalism, exclusion, political violence, or errors committed by some of its leaders.
Fourth, 1947, 1971, and 2024 should be understood in their own contexts. Each answered a different crisis. None should be weaponized to humiliate citizens whose family memories or political interpretations differ.
Fifth, the dignity of every community must be protected. Bengal’s history contains Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Indigenous, secular, and religious traditions. A national narrative that makes any community feel like a temporary guest betrays the experience of Bengal itself.
Sixth, the rule of law must replace the cycle of revenge. Accountability should rest on evidence, independent courts and due process -- not collective punishment or partisan justice.
Finally, the aspirations of every movement must be translated into durable institutions: Honest elections, an independent judiciary, a professional administration, accountable security forces, a free press, local government, and enforceable protections for citizens and political minorities.
Democracy means more than defeating an unpopular ruler. It means ensuring that no future ruler can accumulate the same unchecked power.
The greatest tribute to past sacrifices is not another statue or slogan. It is a Republic in which people no longer need to sacrifice their lives merely to secure the right to speak, vote, and live with dignity.
Bangladesh’s history is not a contest in which one liberation survives only by destroying the memory of another.
It is a cumulative inheritance. From the cultivators who resisted Company oppression to those who demanded Muslim political emancipation; from the martyrs of the Language Movement to the freedom fighters of 1971; and from generations who defended democracy to the young people of July 2024 -- each carried forward an unfinished demand for justice.
A nation confident in its identity can remember them all.
Mohiuddin Zaman is a retired Canadian Banker of Bangladesh origin.