The Bangladesh high school student, Laiba, is being educated for the future, but what he learns has been determined by the last chapter in the battle of their country over its past.
Last year, a revolution led by students overthrew the government of Prime Minister Jeikh Hasina, when public anger for his increasingly autocratic rule was overlooked.
His exhibition has led Bangladesh to do something that has followed each sudden change in national leadership: rewrite his history books to adapt to new orthodoxies.
“The tradition of altering the story must stop at some point: the sooner, the better,” said Laiba Mother Suraiya Akhtar Jahan AFP.
“Textbooks should not change every time a new government assumes the position.”
The radical changes in the school curriculum are routine in Bangladesh, where the febrile political divisions dating from their ruinous independence of 1971 have persisted.
Until this year, the textbooks gave a special exaltation to the first president of the country Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for leading that liberation struggle.
But Mujib, killed in 1975 in a military coup, is also the father of Hasina and the misfortune and exile of his daughter have abolished the stature of the late leader.
“The books had become the political manifesto on one side,” Riazul Hassan, head of the National Agency responsible for reforming the curriculum, told AKM. AFP.
“That does not conform to the purpose of textbooks. We try to direct them again. “
The new history books have eliminated dozens of poems, speeches and articles written by Mujib, along with images of their daughter.
On the other hand, they now value hundreds of people killed in the protests who finally knocked Hasina last summer while bringing back from exile to other previously erased heroes from the early history of Bangladesh.
Among them is the former head of the Ziaur Rahman Army, unrelated to Mujib, accredited with the issuance of the first public proclamation of Bangladesh’s independence during the 1971 War.
Zia had been out of the curriculum during the time of Hasina because he founded the Nationalist Party of Bangladesh (BNP), its main opposition.
His return to the page predicts the resurgence of the political force he created, which is very favored to win the expected elections for next year.
‘Endless cycle’
While the review of the official history of Bangladesh gives clues about the country’s future direction, critics say that the new curriculum has its own omissions.
Of particular containment is one of the darkest chapters of the country: the murderous purge of its intellectual elite in the last days of the 1971 war.
The main party of Bangladesh, Jamaat-E-Islami, which at that time opposed the independence of the country, helped orchestrate these murders.
The textbooks reviewed mention that the militia groups were responsible for the murders, not to mention that the militias were directed by Jamaat.
The omission is significant because Jamaat, another party suppressed by the Hasina government, is likely to be an important force in the next Bangladesh Parliament, and has ruled in the past in coalition with the BNP.
The professor of the University of Dhaka, Mujibur Rahman, without relation to the leader of Independence, said AFP That the apparently deliberate attempt to obscure details around the purge raised questions about the reasons behind the changes.
“The real question is whether this interim government wants students to learn real history,” he added.
When asked about the changes, Hassan said that the textbook commission that Helms did not want to catch the youth of the nation “in an endless cycle of hate.”
“At some point, we need to start reconciliation,” he added. “Should we make our textbooks flooded with hate? How rational would it be?
‘Minimize your anxiety’
Other signs suggest that new textbooks have admitted several changes to the religious feeling of a hard line in the Muslim majority nation.
The Hasina government, despite all its other deficiencies on rights issues, was praised to defend the rights of the transgender community of Bangladesh.
The new textbooks implement references to the transgender Bangladeshis, a demand that has long has religious groups.
Hassan acknowledged that the decision had been made after the objections of a Muslim group that campaigns against representations of transgender problems in the curriculum.
“We took your concerns in account,” he said, “and made adjustments accordingly to minimize his anxiety.”
