The author treats a fight over Jinnah’s portrait at Dhaka University—its placement, removal, and defacement—as proof Bangladesh has cut 1971 off from 1947. The claim: no Pakistan, no Bangladesh; no Jinnah, no Pakistan; and that today’s Indian Muslims under Modi show the fate Bengal’s Muslims escaped. The author cites two books: ‘Modi-fied’ India (Peter Lang, 2026) and Bangladesh: a Polarized and Divided Nation?

Renaming (Jinnah Hall to Surya Sen Hall, Quaid-e-Azam Avenue to Bangabandhu Avenue) is, for the author, inversion. The piece paints Anushilan/Surya Sen as a Hindu-revivalist current hostile to poor Muslims after 1905, and Jinnah’s 21 and 24 March 1948 Dhaka speeches as a warning about “fifth columnists” and Indian press, not a ban on Bengali in the province. Urdu as state language is framed as a shield for a two-wing state. Dhirendranath Datta’s 23 Feb 1948 Bengali motion is called a destabilizing ploy. These are the author’s readings.

The author lists Jinnah as secular (11 Aug 1947 speech), credits Bengali Muslims and the League, and says 1971 proved the provincialism Jinnah feared while costing Muslim unity and leaving Indian leverage. Respect for Jinnah, the close says, is about origins, not Islamabad’s cult. That is a brief, not a settled history of 1947–71.

History is not a decorative ornament for nations; it is the spine that holds their identity upright. When nations forget their history, they do not merely lose memory — they lose moral direction. Bangladesh today stands at such a crossroads. The recent controversy at Dhaka University over the placement of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s photograph — followed by its removal, defacement, and denunciation — is not merely a dispute over a portrait; it is a symptom of a deeper malaise: a nation increasingly estranged from the historical forces that made its very existence possible.

Bangladesh emerged in 1971, but its story does not begin in 1971. It begins in 1947, when Pakistan was born — a Pakistan that had two wings separated by nearly a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory. Without Pakistan, there would be no Bangladesh. Without Jinnah, there would be no Pakistan. And without the Muslim League’s political struggle, the Muslims of Bengal — my parents’ and grandparents’ generation — would have been condemned to the fate that today’s Indian Muslims suffer under Modi’s BJP: second-class citizenship, daily humiliation, mosque demolition, bulldozer justice, and the slow erosion of constitutional rights.

This is not a matter of sentiment. It is a matter of historical fact. Those interested in a deeper exploration of these dynamics will find extensive documentation and analysis in my book –‘Modi-fied’ India: The Transformation of a Nation(Peter Lang, 2026).

The Forgotten Debt: Jinnah and the Bengali Muslims

It is fashionable today in Bangladesh to vilify Jinnah, to erase his name from halls, avenues, and textbooks, and to replace him with figures whose historical roles were far more ambiguous. Jinnah Hall became Surya Sen Hall; Qaid-e-Azam Avenue became Bangabandhu Avenue. The irony is painful. 

Forget, for a moment, that the Anushilon Samiti — the organization Surya Sen joined in 1916 — was a Hindutvadi outfit that explicitly excluded Muslims. Its members were required to take solemn vows while holding the Bhagavad Gita or standing before images of Hindu deities such as Durga or Kali. Forget that its ideological foundation rested heavily on Hindu revivalist literature, including Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s antiMuslim, bigotry-laden and deeply offensive Anandamath, with its polytheistic anthem Vande Mataram. Forget even that the Samiti vehemently opposed the 1905 Partition of Bengal — a partition welcomed by the vast majority of Bengali Muslims because it freed them from the suffocating grip of absentee Hindu zamindars basking in Kolkata. And forget, too, that in the post1905 era the Samiti’s coercive “Swadeshi enforcement” routinely brought it into violent conflict with poor Muslim peasants and traders, who depended on inexpensive British salt and cloth; Samiti volunteers, drawn largely from upper-caste Hindu youths (Bhadralok), often used intimidation and force to destroy their livelihoods.

How many Bangladeshis today know any of this? How many understand what those violent revolutionary — or more accurately, terrorist — activities ever accomplished for Bengal, or for the Bangladesh of today? 

The honest answer is: very few — and even then only superficially. While the general public today largely remembers these revolutionaries through a romanticized anti-colonial lens — unaware of the deep communal divisions they exacerbated — their actions fundamentally altered Bengal’s history forever. 

Yet today, this historical reality is entirely inverted: figures like Surya Sen are celebrated as heroes, while Jinnah — the man who secured political dignity for millions of Muslims against those........

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