In Bangladesh, where history is habitually conscripted into the service of partisan propaganda, the boundary between fact and mythology is usually fluid.
Scholars, commentators, as well as political hacks routinely bend major national turning points to suit the factional imperatives of the day, blurring raw realities until significant historical events lose their transformative gravity.
The late Marxist intellectual Badruddin Umar once famously observed that nine-tenths of the country’s written history concerning the 1971 war of independence was built upon deliberate falsehoods. Scholars repeatedly sacrifice empirical truth for party loyalty or transient material reward. Yet, as CP Scott, a former editor of The Guardian in UK, famously remarked in 1921, while comment is free, facts remain sacred.
Ideological opponents may dispute the meaning of an event, but they cannot legitimately rewrite the baseline facts on the ground.
This battle over memory has erupted anew following the cataclysmic political uprising that culminated on August 5, 2024. In the immediate aftermath, several local media outlets, long accustomed to shielding the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina, deployed soft, sanitized language to describe her hasty departure.
Preferred euphemisms such as “departed for India” or “left the country” were carefully chosen to smooth over the ignominy of her exit. Yet standard English usage is unsparing: to “flee” means to leave rapidly in order to escape imminent danger, collapse, or arrest.
Major international news organizations rightly recognized the reality and reported that she had fled.
Predictably, revisionist commentators have sought to reframe this retreat as merely a “negotiated settlement.” It is entirely plausible that diplomatic arrangements, safe-passage guarantees, and hasty consultations with foreign governments facilitated her journey to New Delhi.
Political exile throughout global history is frequently mediated by international coordination. However, conflating the logistics of safe passage with the underlying nature of a regime’s fall is a dangerous intellectual dishonesty.
Negotiated exits explain how a fallen autocrat leaves; they do not alter why she had to leave. Sheikh Hasina did not embark on a routine diplomatic tour. She abandoned her office because a nationwide uprising rendered her authoritarian rule untenable after seventeen years of brutal repression, during which her security forces killed an estimated 1,500 citizens and injured thousands more in a desperate attempt to cling to power.
Reducing a catastrophic political collapse to a polite diplomatic compromise sanitizes a deadly tyranny and obscures the primary cause of her departure.
An equally insidious attempt to diminish the July Uprising is the effort to dismiss it as a foreign-engineered conspiracy, with persistent claims that the uprising was orchestrated by the United States. External powers undeniably maintain strategic preferences, gather intelligence, and seek to exploit political vacuums across South Asia.
The interplay between domestic unrest and foreign diplomacy is an enduring feature of international relations. Yet asserting that an international plot was at play is fundamentally different from claiming that an entire national revolt was conceived and executed by foreign puppet masters.
To reduce a massive, popular uprising to a geopolitical conspiracy is to misrepresent the scale of the movement and deny the Bangladeshi people their sovereign agency. The July Uprising was no palace coup executed by a handful of conspirators in dark rooms. It was a broad, organic, and courageous mobilization that brought millions of citizens from every social stratum onto the streets.
Ordinary people knowingly risked their lives against live ammunition, state violence, and arbitrary detention to challenge an illegitimate government. Suggesting that these citizens were mere passive instruments of foreign intelligence agencies degrades their sacrifice and replaces rigorous historical analysis with convenient political mythology.
History demonstrates that external forces may seek to influence or adapt to domestic revolutions, but they rarely create them out of thin air. Mobilization on such a profound scale occurs only when deep domestic grievances reach a breaking point.
Where a movement is sustained by widespread public sacrifice, the burden of proof rests entirely on those who allege a foreign plot.
This struggle for historical truth is part of a much longer continuum in Bangladesh. The nation's democratic journey has always been defined by the assertive political will of its people rather than the whims of external patrons or ruling elites.
It was the free choice of Bengali voters in June 1947, alongside the Sylhet referendum, that initially shaped the region's geopolitical destiny, just as the popular resistance of 1971 ultimately forged an independent republic. External interests aligned with Bangladesh's independence in 1971, just as foreign observers undoubtedly monitored the chaos of 2024, but the primary driver of change has always been domestic resolve.
To systematically sideline the agency and sacrifices of ordinary citizens in favor of conspiratorial narratives is to strip the nation of its own history. The language used to document the July Uprising matters tremendously, for it will shape how future generations understand the collapse of an autocracy.
Guarding truth against deliberate distortion requires an unyielding commitment to objective facts, no matter how uncomfortable they may be to fallen rulers or their lingering defenders.
Ultimately, a nation’s history belongs neither to fleeing dictators nor to foreign powers; it belongs irrevocably to the people who took to the streets to claim their freedom.
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The writer is a Dhaka-based journalist