August arrives in South Asia carrying an unusual historical weight. It’s the month of Partition, when India and Pakistan emerged from British rule in 1947. In independent Bangladesh, August carries an even more intimate but contested memory. On August 15, 1975, Bangladesh’s founding leader, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated with most of his family members. This month is also associated with the historic July uprising that toppled the authoritarian regime of Sheikh Hasina, Bangabandhu’s daughter, on August 5, 2024. Often quietly and somberly, on August 15, the ruling BNP also celebrates the birthday of Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first elected woman prime minister and a democratic icon who stood against totalitarian politics until her death in December 2025.
These are monumental events. But the consequential question today is not simply what happened at different points in the country’s political history. It is how Bangladesh remembers what happened, because memory is never politically neutral. Nations remember selectively; they commemorate some deaths, elevate some leaders, silence some episodes and reinterpret others. Political parties, governments, historians, media organisations and, increasingly, social media communities participate in this continuous production of national memory. Bangladesh is no exception.
The question, therefore, is not whether these events and political icons should be discussed, mourned and revisited. The question is whether Bangladesh can remember them without turning remembrance into political ownership. For decades, the country has struggled with this problem. Bangabandhu became, for many, inseparable from the state; while for others, his legacy became identified with the Awami League. The July uprising, meanwhile, is already becoming the newest battlefield over historical ownership. This is where the politics of remembering becomes the politics of forgetting.
What happens when remembering one national figure is treated as an insult to another, when mourning is permitted only within one political vocabulary, when a citizen chooses not to participate in the social media frenzy surrounding August because they refuse to be forced into a binary choice? These questions go to the heart of democratic citizenship. The episodes we witnessed in recent years, including the one that unfolded on Saturday, at the house in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi 32 where Bangabandhu was killed, illustrate the danger. Three people were assaulted as they went there to pay tributes to Bangabandhu on his 51st death anniversary. Citizens have every right to remember him, to mourn his assassination, and to visit the place associated with the country’s founding history. But when political mobilisation turns into intimidation, or mobs decide who may mourn and who may not, the problem ceases to be about history. It becomes a question of the rule of law.
A BNP supporter should not have to apologise for remembering Khaleda Zia. Honouring Bangabandhu should not automatically make someone an Awami League partisan. And those who see the July uprising and August 5 as the defining moment of their political generation should not be branded troublemakers or deniers of history. When every act of remembrance is turned into a declaration of political allegiance, a country does not merely divide its history; it divides its citizens. A mature democracy must be large enough to contain these memories simultaneously. The challenge is not to make everyone remember alike but to make room for different memories within the same democratic nation.
This is where Bangladesh’s political class, its intellectuals, and media communities must confront the truth: that we have not yet learnt the art of agreeing to disagree about history. Instead, we repeatedly attempt to settle historical questions through political power. Governments change, and with them come new monuments, new anniversaries, new textbooks, new silences, and sometimes new versions of the past. Social media accelerates the process. Algorithms reward outrage, certainty and tribal loyalty; historical complexity rarely goes viral. The result is a dangerous form of historical compression: heroes become flawless, and opponents become villains.
But how should a nation evaluate a political legacy? Perhaps by refusing the demand for perfection. Bangabandhu can be remembered as the central figure in Bangladesh’s independence struggle while his political decisions remain open to scholarly scrutiny. The July uprising can be honoured as a transformative popular movement without allowing any single political party to monopolise its meaning. It is historical maturity. Our present moment makes this particularly urgent. After the upheaval of 2024 and the political transition that followed, the country has an opportunity to redefine its democratic culture. The new government under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has repeatedly invoked democracy and national unity. The credibility of that promise will ultimately be measured by whether citizens can remember differently without fearing one another, and whether Bangladesh can move from politics of memory to a democratic culture of memory.
Such a culture would not ask citizens to forget. Nor would it ask them to remember everything in the same way. It would create space for competing memories while insisting on a shared commitment to truth, evidence, dignity and non-violence. A democratic Bangladesh cannot afford an official memory, an opposition memory, and a social media memory existing in permanent combat. It needs a national memory spacious enough for grief, disagreement and even contradiction.
Perhaps that is the real lesson of August. A nation becomes cohesive when its citizens acquire the confidence that their memories can coexist. We often forget that the freedom to remember is inseparable from the freedom to disagree. And if Bangladesh’s new democratic journey is to succeed, protecting that freedom may be the most important test of August.
Dr Anas Ansar is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at North South University (NSU) in Bangladesh and senior researcher at Arnold Bergstraesser Institute of the University of Freiburg in Germany.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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