Image 1, Mahfuj Alam
Mujibism as a Civilizational Scourge:
Student Coordinator Mahfuj Alam Paints a Picture
Shrobona Shafique Dipti, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, Humayun Kabir and Naveeda Khan
In a country like Bangladesh in which state violence is not uncommon, why did so many ordinary people openly express their shock and dismay at the Awami League (AL)-led government’s attacks on students protesting the quota system for government jobs in the summer of 2024? Why did they come out in the streets in support of the students, risking their lives to do so? Over four previous installments of the Bangladesh Chapter in the “University in Turmoil” dossier in b2o, we have been offering tentative speculations for such outpouring of public support for the students in the 2024 July Uprising. We speculated that the students evoked pity as the young and the innocent, their guileless demands for reform of job quotas appearing free of political taint. Their indiscriminate deaths and the brutality unleashed by the state on its youth struck many as senseless and so provoked anger. After a point, the dead themselves became their own cause, generating pathos that could be politically mobilized. And, as we ventured to say, the populace eventually lost their fear of the draconian powers of the state and openly rebelled.
Image 2, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and His Family
Yet as events after the uprising have shown, there may have been a stronger connection between the students and the wider society than earlier anticipated. They may not have known of this connection at the time, but it became clear at some point that both the students and the wider society were sick of the cult of personality that had grown around the figure of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the country and the father of Sheikh Hasina. While Mujib was the focus of both adulation and critique before and after independence, these consolidated into a single narrative and on the note of hero worship during Hasina’s rule. Her government propagated the idea that Mujib alone gave Bangladesh independence, minimizing the contributions of other leaders. Furthermore, the 2018 movie Hasina: A Daughter’s Tale — narrated by the daughter in question — informs viewers that it was incumbent upon her, as head of the state, to avenge the assassination of her father and other family members, because those murders were tantamount to an attack on the nation. Her discourse clearly indicated a blurring of lines between the man, the nation, and the state. She was often heard saying: “This country is my country, my father’s country; my father liberated this country.”
Image 3: Logo for Mujib Birth Centenary
What looked like the long overdue public memorialization of a historically significant figure who had been assassinated and his legacy repressed, turned into a frenzy of commemoration with mandatory participation through requirements that went much beyond garlanded images of Mujib in offices. It was mandated to have Mujib corners in every official space to enable reflection on his legacy. Mujib’s March 1971 speech declaring independence was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register in 2017 and has been broadcast annually every March. The Government of Bangladesh announced the year from March 17, 2020, to March 31, 2021, as Mujib Borsho to commemorate the centenary of the founder’s birth. Celebrations for the centenary sallied forth despite a global pandemic and included fireworks, pixel mapping and laser shows all over the country detailing the 100 years since Mujib’s birth, with programs of children singing songs with titles like Dhanno Mujib Dhanno (Thank you, Mujib, Thank you). To this we add the endless publications of Mujib hagiography, including graphic novels, and the hoisting of monumental sculptures, murals and paintings of the man in every public space.
Unaccustomed to veneration on this scale, many bad mouthed it, seeing in it not the memory of a political leader but rather the elevation of a demigod, a being with preternatural abilities to save the country from the many challenges besetting it, with his daughter leading the charge to apotheosis. It took the 2024 July Uprising and several of the more prominent student coordinators to settle into government for an explicit critique of Mujibad or Mujibism to appear. Their critique was that jatibad, or Bengali nationalism, which was at the core of Mujibism, had been rendered exclusionary by the Awami League who used it to enforce political loyalty. The students went on to argue that the 1972 Constitution of Bangladesh and its core pillars of nationalism, secularism, socialism and democracy, were to blame for building up Mujibism to such an inordinate degree.[1] At the same time, the Mujibism that now appeared on the national stage as an evil to be combatted was quite unlike the claims that Mujib had originally made about himself, and even unlike Hasin’s curation of her father’s legacy.
In this fifth instalment of the Bangladesh Chapter in the “University in Turmoil” dossier, we start with a brief overview of how Sheikh Mujib understood his own ideology and how it was propagated by Hasina. We then explore the lineaments of Mujibism as criticized by Mahfuj Alam, one of the student coordinators of the Anti-Quota Movement and its leading ideologue, who currently serves in the interim government with the title of Advisor of the Communication and Broadcasting Ministry. By examining Mahfuz Alam’s speeches, interviews and Facebook posts, we will condense the case that he makes—that Mujibism is a tool of extreme domination. This instalment will be accompanied by another which will go further into Alam’s thought to draw out his vision for the future polity of Bangladesh. Having painted Mujibism as a civilizational scourge, this student leader’s offers an alternative vision equally grandiose in scale.
Mujibism for Sheikh Mujib and His Scion
Image 4, Sheikh Mujib Giving Speech Upon Return to Bangladesh in 1972
In talking about Mujibbad or Mujibism as political ideology, we need to distinguish between the initial articulation of the ideology and its subequent representation by both its inheritors and detractors. The ideology can be traced back to Mujib’s first-ever public address as the leader of independent Bangladesh, delivered in front of a jubilant crowd at the historic Racecourse grounds on January 10, 1972. He had been released from a Pakistani prison just two days before, when he came close to being executed on charges of treason, and was still coming to terms with the reality that he was now the president of an independent but war-ravaged country. In an emotional and moving speech Mujib urged the assembled crowd that they would have to work hard to not only solve the immediate crises facing his Shonar Bangla (Golden Bengal), but also to build up a new state based on new political ideas, such as that of democracy. Rejecting Pakistani claims to be a Muslim nation protected by an Islamic state, Mujib stated:
I do not want to insult Islam. I want to, however, declare in clear and unambiguous language that our country [desh] will be a democratic, secular, and socialist one. The farmers and laborers, the Hindus and Muslims of this country will all live in happiness and in peace.
On March 26, 1972, in his address to the nation via radio and television he declared that nationalism, along with democracy, secularism, and socialism would be the foundational principles of the constitution of the new state.
By May 1972 factions of the Awami League-affiliated Chhatra League or student group, began to proclaim that these four principles amounted to Mujibism, a unified political ideology that would be a more appropriate alternative in Bangladesh than capitalism, communism, or the “scientific socialism” of the Soviet Union. Soon the idea was picked up by the Awami League hierarchy and ideologues, who sought to make Mujibbad the ideology of the party and, indeed, the official doctrine of the new state. Mujib, not impervious to hubris, condoned the move and allowed the term to be incorporated in the text of the new constitution, which was adopted on November 4, 1972, and came into effect on December 16, 1972. When Mujib launched his “Second Revolution” in 1975 and moved the country’s politics towards a more authoritarian direction, he did so in the name of Mujibism.
The coup that ended his rule in 1975 was at least partly a reaction against Mujibism. After the coup, for more than two decades, subsequent governments disparaged Mujibism and held it up as an illustration of all that was wrong with Mujib’s rule. They sought to negate the ideology of Mujibism and the foundational principles of the 1972 constitution through ordinances and constitutional amendments. However, with the return of Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League to power in 2009, Mujibism was rehabilitated to become once again the ideological edifice of the regime and the country. The four principles of nationalism, secularism, socialism, democracy were restored as the foundational principles of the Constitution and were claimed to be the constitutive elements of the “Spirit of Liberation.” After the fall of the Hasina Regime in August of 2024, Mujibism has become once again the target of attack as the ideological foundation of the “fascist” regime of Sheikh Hasina.
Mujibism for Mahfuj Alam
Image 5, Subratashuvo.blog
While student coordinators Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud were in the interim government as soon as it was set up in early August, student coordinator Mahfuj Alam was inducted into government in late August after Mohammed Yunus, the head of the interim government, introduced him effectively to the world as the “mastermind” behind the student movement. By that time people had already been hearing a fair bit from Alam through his public appearances, interviews and, often, his continuous posts on Facebook.
In a public appearance on August 11, 2024, at the R. C. Majumdar Auditorium of Dhaka University for an event organized by the July Gono Porishor (July Mass Space), during which the students in the movement and their allies were making known their ideological stances and political visions, Mahfuj Alam gave a speech that lasted a short eighteen minutes but that immediately went viral. The speech is interesting both for what it tells us about how some students viewed the present and possible future of Bangladesh and for its tiptoeing around the issue of the legacy of the 1971 Liberation War and its manipulation by Awami League. In follow-up interviews with the national Bangla daily Prothom Alo, Alam was similarly reticent, although he did mention Mujibbad in passing. It was in his Facebook posts that he has raged against Mujibbad, often repeating himself in what can come across as fits of social-media anger. What is very apparent from his speeches, interviews and posts is that he considers Mujibism to be an ideology, or worse – a pathology that has affected anyone even remotely affiliated with the party and that a renewed Bangladesh will need to wipe out. He has argued that the four pillars of Bangladesh’s Constitution have been perverted to prop up Mujibism.
Ventriloquizing wider criticism, Alam pointed out that people saw Bengali nationalism perverted during Sheikh Mujib’s own time. Mujib privileged Bengaliness over all other ways of being in the world; his party has inherited this exclusionary stance. At the same time, this commitment to Bengali nationalism appeared hypocritical as the Awami League was seen to be aligned with India from the beginning and later to have even handed over the country’s political and economic autonomy to India. Therefore, what we see as nationalism today was only the illegitimate appropriation of the 1971 Liberation Struggle and the slogans associated with it by the AL.
Alam argues that secularism was misused by the party to suppress religion within the country from the beginning. It did this at its own peril as it alienated the Muslim masses from Dhaka, which became synonymous with a permissive government and elite society. State-endorsed secularism, as evidenced in the 2013 Shahbag Movement, was alien to many (see the third installment in our series). Moreover, the AL used its claim to secularism to secure international support for its regime, profiting financially from the global war on terror while using anti-terrorism initiatives to repress religious political parties. Alam claimed that the AL government arrogated secularism exclusively for itself, denying that other parties, such as the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), also positioned themselves as secular.
Socialism gets its fillip in Alam’s view from the fact that even during Mujib’s time, the poorly concealed corruption of the members of his party undermined the government’s claim to be for the people. This hypocrisy was only further consolidated by the Hasina government, which used ambitious development goals as a front for large-scale looting by political elites. But even beyond corruption, Hasina’s government engaged in massive social experimentation by giving special privileges to the business sector, which had no political experience or ties to constituencies. This effectively led to the creation of an oligarchy dependent entirely on the state. The blind eye turned to growing inequality while the government indulged in large infrastructure projects also drew opposition (see the fourth installment in the series).
Finally, the routing of democracy was in full view in the fifteen years of Hasina’s rule, with her persecution of members of the opposition party and vocal critics, their routine disappearance, the extensive rigging of elections, and violence against student-led advocacy even for such non-ideological causes as road safety. Widespread knowledge of the existence of secret detention centers and of the torture of political prisoners made a hash out of Hasina’s claims to being the elected leader of a functional democracy.
Image 6, Burning of Dhanmondi 32, Sheikh Mujib’s House, February 2025
Image 7, Demolition of Dhanmondi 32, Sheikh Mujib’s House, February 2025
Mahfuj Alam’s specific contribution to these common criticisms was to re-cast Mujibism not merely as the political ideology of the ruling party but as a working machinery of cultural and political domination. Thus, for Alam, the Shahbagh Movement of 2013 was not an emancipatory uprising, but a revival of Mujibism through the consolidation of a liberal-nationalist orthodoxy that silenced religion and political dissent. In this way, Mujibism was used to drive a wedge among Bangladeshis of all stripes, echoing a frequent line within the student-led study circles and magazines. He charged jatibad or Bengali nationalism with being discriminatory against non-Bengali Bangladeshis, such as indigenous communities. But even more unusual were Alam’s charges of Islamophobia against it. The notion that Muslims could be Islamophobic, while known in the global discussion on the topic, was a surprise to many in the country.
He reminded his various audiences of BaKSAL or the Bangladesh Krishok Shromik Awami League (Bangladesh Peasants’, Workers’, People’s League). It was a party created in 1975 through constitutional amendment, while a presidential order made all other political parties illegal, forcing them to integrate with BaKSAL. This single party, an expression of Mujib’s growing authoritarianism, ruled the country from January to August 1975 until Mujib’s assassination, after which it was dissolved. Alam saw Hasina’s rule as the logical expansion of Mujib’s authoritarianism, a BaKSAL 2, its continuity with its predecessor indicated by the prevalence of surveillance, clientelism, violence, and cultic memorialization.
Alam now warned that Mujibism couldn’t simply be undone through electoral change. The task was to reclaim history and reimagine sovereignty by destroying the false gods of political mythology. He described Dhanmondi 32, Sheikh Mujib’s residence turned museum – and usually referred to only by its address — as the sanctified center of the Mujib cult. It not only represented the AL but broadcast India’s hegemony in Bangladesh. Alam even condoned the February 6, 2025, destruction of the building by a large crowd (see Images 6 and 7), seeing the vandalism as a symbolic and structural dismantling of the Mujibist order. This “bulldozer procession” was a response to Hasina’s speech from India promising her supporters that she would soon return.
In fact, Alam himself challenged state mythology by removing Sheikh Mujib’s portrait from the Durbar Hall in Bangabhaban, the official residence of the President of Bangladesh in November 2024. In a statement widely circulated at that time, he declared: “Sheikh Mujib and his daughter must be held accountable for what they have done to the people of Bangladesh.” He said the Awami League must apologize for the undemocratic 1972 constitution, the famine of 1974, the billions of dollars laundered abroad, and the thousands of extrajudicial killings between 1972–75 during the Mujib period, and agains between 2009–24, during the Hasina period, saying “without acknowledgement, apology, and justice, there can be no reconciliation.” For Alam, only after such an apology and the trial of the “fascists” could there be a genuine exploration of the plural spirit and political potential of 1971 that had existed before it was replaced by a monolithic nationalism and weaponized secularism. In his August 2024 speech, he had already hinted that an “AL framework,” read Mujibism, was always operative within the Bangladesh context whether people were aware of its ubiquity or not. Ultimately, in his view, one could only really be done with Mujibism by destroying its foundation, the 1972 Constitution.
Concluding Analysis
The demand to be done with Mujibism was echoed in many quarters beyond Alam. On January 1, 2025, the Students Against Discrimination called a rally urging the government to deal decisively with this problem for fear that all the sacrifices of the previous year would come to naught. In the last moment this gathering was turned into a unity rally, putatively so as not to appear that the students were bringing undue pressure on the interim government to make reforms on its own, ahead of the reports from the various commissions set up to make recommendations for change and to implement them within a legitimate framework.
The Constitution Reform Commission that was tasked with deciding on the fate of the 1972 Constitution came out with a report on February 2025 suggesting a replacement of its four pillars by “equality,” harkening to an older period in the nineteenth century when economic parity was seen as important to social change, “human dignity,” pointing to the language of human rights articulated in the early twentieth century which had come to replace earlier fight for economic equality, “social justice,” importantly parsed by the theoreticians of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century from the perspective of Islam, “pluralism,” a more contemporary demand for a common vision borne out of a recognition of diversity, and “democracy,” under much threat globally in its contemporary form as capitalist democracy. While not entirely internally coherent, these were an interesting grab bag of values to replace nationalism, secularism and socialism, while democracy was retained from the older suite of values. Whether these find a footing within the context of Bangladesh and whether they indeed route out Mujibism to the satisfaction of Mahfuj Alam and others is yet to be seen. Meanwhile, they have their own vision for a future civilization. To return to the question with which we began our piece, why did the wider populace come out in such support of the students? We claim it was because the students and the broader society were fed up not just with state authoritarianism in the present, but what they considered the suffocating legacy of a political dynasty.
Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury is a campaigner working for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association on climate, policy, renewable energy and human rights.
Shrobona Shafique Dipti, a graduate of the University of Dhaka, is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh with an interest in environmental humanities and multi-species entanglements.
Humayun Kabir is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at Queens College, CUNY. He studies Bangladesh’s history and politics to elicit a political thought specific to the region.
Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked on religious violence and everyday life in urban Pakistan. Her more recent work is on riverine lives in Bangladesh and UN-led global climate negotiations. Her field dispatches from Dhaka in the middle of the July Uprising may be found here.
[1] It is noteworthy that many legal scholars and activists in Bangladesh maintain that the 1972 Constitution cannot be blamed for the excesses of any government, particularly since it has been so hedged in through suspensions, abeyances and amendments since it was first written.