Occupying a personality cult from the inside is less a matter of political alignment than of linguistic immersion. For a child growing up in Gopalganj, the birthplace of the nation’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, history arrived as liturgy instead of a series of contested events.
The grand state anniversaries—the thunderous speech of March 7th, the independence declarations of March 26th—were rhythmic devotion here. Schoolchildren memorized Mujib’s rhetoric half-consciously, the cadences of his voice hanging in the morning air like familiar hymns.
To question ‘the man’ there was not to engage in historical revisionism; it was to commit an act of psychological self-erasure.
Political scientists examining the mechanics of autocracy frequently identify this phenomenon. From Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania to the Kim dynasty in North Korea, totalitarian regimes systematically fuse the image of the founding leader with the very ontological possibility of the state.
The message is simple: without the patriarch, the nation ceases to exist. In Gopalganj, this was the baseline reality. Mujib was inherited, much like a vernacular tongue or a religious faith. Scrutiny was framed there as apostasy.
Yet domestic spaces can harbor quiet cross-currents. While classrooms and cricket pitches in the sub-district of Kashiani reinforced this singular narrative, private conversations offered a parallel education. My father, who was serving in the postal and telegraph department, possessing an institutional memory of how wartime communications actually moved, could quietly complicate the textbook orthodoxies.
Pointing out how actors, such as Ziaur Rahman, played pivotal, highly contested roles in broadcasting the early declarations of independence, my father provided me with a rare methodology. It created an insider-outsider vantage point. One could remain thoroughly embedded in the local culture of weeping at patriotic recitations [on Mujib]…while simultaneously holding the analytical tools required to dismantle the founding myth.
This local grammar of devotion of Mujib did not remain confined to Gopalganj. During the fifteen-year tenure of Sheikh Hasina, Mujib’s daughter, who ruled Bangladesh with a dictatorial iron fist until 2024, the "Gopalganj model" was aggressively scaled nationwide. Personality cults require extensive infrastructure, and the state apparatus delivered.
Textbooks were thoroughly cleansed of complexity. Currency, airports, stadiums, and universities were systematically rebranded to anchor the national story around a single family, effectively crowding out peer figures of the liberation struggle like Maulana Bhashani and Tajuddin Ahmad. A sophisticated patronage network across academia, the media, and the bureaucracy rewarded total fidelity to this single-hero historiography while quietly penalizing dissent.
This environment formed the cultural soil for what citizens eventually termed Awami fascism. It was not merely an authoritarian machine marked by rigged elections and enforced disappearances, but an all-encompassing structure of feeling that rendered loyalty to a political dynasty synonymous with patriotism.
The structural rupture arrived violently in July 2024. When institutional channels for opposition were entirely choked, the state’s heavy-handed killing of student protesters, epitomized by the death of Abu Sayed, shattered the regime's moral narrative. From the distant vantage point of Massachusetts in the US, staying silent became impossible for me.
Publicly calling for the end of the regime instantly inverted an insider’s status. The state security apparatus threatened family members back home; former colleagues demanded silence; old friends turned hostile. Yet by August 5, 2024, the hyper-concentrated autocratic regime collapsed, and Hasina fled by helicopter to India, leaving behind a nation relieved of a dictator but saddled with the deep-seated culture that sustained her.
Two years into this delicate transition, the legacy of that era persists. The old grammar of devotion remains highly visible in public discourse, where the line between empirical truth and partisan loyalty is frequently blurred. Returning to Gopalganj reveals a community navigating deep wariness. Many who now utilize their newfound freedom of expression to criticize the transitional interim authorities never once voiced a critique during fifteen years of autocracy.
Navigating this terrain requires an uneasy, reflexive stance. It means being welcomed into homes while being viewed with institutional suspicion. It means recognizing that slogans like "De-Awamification" are insufficient blueprints for political transformation. History offers stern warnings regarding improvised transitional justice.
The American-led de-Ba'athification of Iraq after 2003 remains a classic cautionary tale: a blanket purge of all party members hollowed out the civil service and fueled a bitter insurgency. Similarly, an indiscriminate campaign in Bangladesh that treats every ordinary voter as an architect of repression risks creating a permanently aggrieved, marginalized constituency.
A sustainable path forward demands that truth-telling precede or accompany punishment. Successful models, such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Argentina’s post-dictatorship trials, distinguished clearly between institutional architects and low-level participants.
Bangladesh requires a tiered approach: an independent, well-resourced commission to document state atrocities, offering conditional leniency for lower-level actors who testify honestly, while reserving criminal prosecution for the elite planners of state terror.
Institutional and curricular overhauls must be deliberate. The country needs an educational curriculum that restores a plural history, teaching the contributions of Bhashani, Zia, and others alongside Mujib, rather than merely replacing one state-sanctioned hero with another.
The renaming of public infrastructure should be transparent and legally grounded, avoiding the vindictive cycles that merely teach the public that history belongs to whoever holds immediate power.
Furthermore, the political economy of memory must be decentralized. The long-standing practice of funneling disproportionate state patronage toward a ruling family's home district must yield to a rigorous regional-equity agenda, rebalancing public investments toward historically neglected zones like Rangpur and Kurigram.
Finally, the transitional movement must guard against generating its own cult of martyrdom; a healthy democracy is measured not by the immutability of its new heroes, but by its capacity to criticize all of them. Recalibrating foreign relations, particularly with India, must occur via rigorous diplomacy rather than generalized xenophobia.
Dismantling a political culture constructed over decades is a generational project, not an electoral event. It requires the creation of a durable, plural national memory capable of holding all historical figures to the same critical light. Bangladesh cannot claim genuine liberation while any single family remains untouchable, or while structural favoritism dictates the distribution of state resources.
The closed loop of dynastic loyalty must be permanently broken, replaced by an ongoing commitment to institutional truth-telling. That complex reckoning cannot be rushed, and it must be undertaken together.
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Shamsul Arefin is currently an Assistant Professor on education leave at Gopalganj Science and Technology University, Bangladesh, and a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. He can be reached at sarefin@umass.edu