In Dhanmondi, where I live, the Awami League once governed atmospherically. For 15 years, this once leafy Dhaka neighbourhood was part party headquarters, part family estate and part national shrine. History here was something blasted at you through loudspeakers.

At the centre of an Awami ‘political Holy See’ stood House No 32, where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman lived and where, on this very August 15 in 1975, he and most of his family were assassinated. Under his daughter Sheikh Hasina, the anniversary turned Dhanmondi into the Vatican of Mujibism. 

Roads were barricaded. Ministers queued with wreaths. Television crews colonised pavements. Kangali bhoj appeared on every available corner. Grief had catering arrangements.

Today, August 15, 2026, Dhanmondi is strangely quiet.

House 32 is now mostly rubble. After Hasina’s fall in 2024, it acquired a second career as a pilgrimage site — this time for the furious ‘mob’ rather than the faithful. Whenever Hasina said something especially incendiary from Delhi, or the Awami League provided some fresh provocation, people seemed to remember that another wall of No 32 remained inconveniently upright. 

Crowds would arrive and reduce it a little further. The ‘old shrine’ became a sort of national anger-management facility.

Other relics of the Awami dynasty are nearby. The Awami League president’s office, once an address capable of producing ministers and MPs, has found more modest uses. Street people secretly sleep there, drug users have discovered its conveniences and, when nature calls, nobody now bothers to seek permission from the party presidium. 

Few political movements receive such brutally efficient architectural reviews.

Then there is Sudha Sadan, associated with Hasina’s in-law’s family, now standing deserted. Yesterday’s power addresses have acquired the melancholy appearance of film sets after the production company has gone bankrupt.

And so Dhanmondi on August 15 presents an extraordinary spectacle…nothing much happening.

There is, admittedly, plenty of security. The authorities are clearly determined that Awami League sympathisers should not attempt an impromptu resurrection. But the vast machinery of compulsory mourning has disappeared. No state choreography. No endless procession of wreaths. No political sermon booming from every speaker. No requirement that the entire republic synchronise its grief.

The silence is particularly striking because noise was one of Mujibism’s great instruments.

For years, Bangladesh did not merely commemorate Sheikh Mujib; it was instructed in him. His portrait gazed down from government offices. His speeches emerged from loudspeakers. His name adorned institutions, programmes and projects. Schools had Mujib corners. There were Mujib anniversaries, Mujib quotations, Mujib documentaries and Mujib-themed state occasions. 

One could admire Mujib, revere Mujib or remain politely silent about Mujib. The menu was not extensive. But politics, like nature, dislikes a vacuum. And where one August 15 ritual has disappeared, another has crept cheerfully back into view.

Khaleda Zia’s birthday.

No birthday in South Asia has required quite so much documentary investigation.

For decades, Awami Leaguers insisted that August 15 was not Khaleda Zia’s real birthday. They produced certificates, school records and other documents bearing competing dates. The dispute became one of those magnificently Bangladeshi political controversies in which nobody could remember how something like this became so important, yet everybody remained determined to fight about it.

The objection was obvious. August 15 was the day Mujib was assassinated. Khaleda’s public cake-cutting therefore became, in Awami League eyes, not confectionery but psychological warfare.

Sheikh Hasina regarded it as a deliberate insult. Newspapers editorialised against it. Even senior BNP figures occasionally wondered whether their leader might celebrate on another day and spare everyone the annual national nervous breakdown. Eventually the matter reached the courts.

Bangladesh may be one of the few countries where a disagreement over a political leader’s birthday could progress naturally from cake shop to courtroom. During Hasina’s rule, the cake became an act of opposition. Under the BNP, it has returned from political cold storage.

Which produces today’s wonderfully awkward tableau.

The neighbourhood that once spent August 15 drowning in officially prescribed grief now sits under heavy security while the political establishment that spent years being condemned for celebrating a birthday on the sacred date is back in power.

History has exchanged the black badge for the birthday candle. But the more consequential story is not Khaleda Zia’s date of birth. It is the astonishing collapse of Mujibism.

Sheikh Mujib himself, of course, cannot be removed from Bangladesh’s history. Nor should he be. His role in the independence struggle, his March 7 speech and his position at the centre of the political movement that produced Bangladesh are facts, not Awami League campaign material.

The problem began when historical importance was converted into compulsory sanctity.

During Hasina’s long rule, Mujib was gradually elevated from founding leader to something resembling the presiding deity of the republic. His words acquired scriptural properties. His image became ubiquitous. His biography occupied ever greater acreage in the national imagination. Criticism became suspect. Nuance became dangerous. 

Eventually patriotism itself was subtly reorganised: to love Bangladesh was to honour Mujib, to honour Mujib was to accept the Awami League’s version of Mujib, and to accept that version increasingly meant accepting Hasina.

It was politically useful and historically catastrophic. For by welding her own government so completely to her father’s legacy, Hasina ensured that anger against her regime would eventually travel backwards through the family tree.

When her government fell, protesters did not distinguish carefully between Sheikh Hasina the ruler, Sheikh Mujib the historical figure, Awami League iconography and the physical monuments through which the state had spent years enforcing its preferred memory. They attacked the entire package.

This is the occupational hazard of personality cults. They look indestructible because disagreement has been prohibited. The portraits are everywhere, the slogans universal, the commemorations enormous and the crowds suitably arranged. Then the government disappears, somebody switches off the microphones, and everyone discovers how much devotion depended on the electricity supply.

There was always another Mujib beneath the state-approved Mujib anyway: the politician whose post-independence record remains open to serious argument. The leader of 1971 was also the leader under whom Bangladesh moved towards one-party BAKSAL rule, newspapers were severely restricted and political pluralism narrowed dramatically. The achievements do not abolish the failures. The failures do not abolish the achievements.

Yet Mujibism demanded something much simpler: reverence. That was its undoing.

A country can preserve a complicated historical figure. It struggles to preserve a compulsory saint, because saints created by governments tend to share the fortunes of the governments that canonised them.

The intelligent outcome now would be neither Mujibism nor its mirror-image, anti-Mujibism. Bangladesh does not need to replace one compulsory history with another. It should be perfectly possible to believe that Mujib was indispensable to the birth of Bangladesh, that his assassination was an appalling national tragedy, and that his later political record deserves unsentimental scrutiny.

But political cultures rarely move directly from mythology to maturity. So, for the moment, Dhanmondi provides the better verdict.

For 15 years, August 15 belonged entirely to Sheikh Mujib. The government mourned. The party mourned. Television mourned. Bureaucrats mourned. Schools mourned. Loudspeakers mourned. Dhanmondi groaned beneath an industrial quantity of officially organised sorrow.

Today House 32 is rubble. The Awami League office is a ruin. Sudha Sadan is deserted. The loudspeakers have fallen silent. And Khaleda Zia has her birthday back.

Mujibism, which once appeared to possess the state, the streets and even the calendar, did not end with a great intellectual reckoning. Someone simply stopped paying for the state-sponsored black badges.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa