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Just about two years ago, March 7 would arrive in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi, the area where I live, with a kind of orchestrated loudness that felt almost ritualistic.

My parents live on Road No. 3A, the same road that once housed the Awami League chairperson’s party office before it was burned down after August 5, 2024. For years, every March 7 meant an unavoidable soundscape.

Loudspeakers would blast Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s historic speech throughout the neighbourhood from morning until evening, often on a continuous loop. The speech would only briefly pause during the adhan from nearby mosques before resuming again.

If you lived anywhere near that office, you probably did not choose to listen to the speech, you endured it.

This year, however, March 7 arrived almost silently.

The once-busy party office is still a charred ruin more than a year and a half after the uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic government. The crowds that once gathered there are gone.

Newspapers carried the historic day in small columns rather than front-page celebrations. Apart from a few opinion pieces and scattered social media posts reflecting on the speech and Mujib’s legacy, the overwhelming spectacle that once defined March 7 in Dhaka was absent.

This transformation is not merely about the fall of a regime. It reflects a deeper crisis surrounding the legacy of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in post-Hasina Bangladesh.

There is little dispute that the March 7 speech remains one of the most important moments in Bangladesh’s history. Delivered before a massive crowd at the Racecourse Ground in 1971, the speech mobilised Bengalis during the escalating confrontation with the Pakistani state and effectively prepared the nation for the coming Liberation War.

UNESCO later recognised it as part of the Memory of the World Register, acknowledging its historic significance.

Also read: ‘What I Want Is Justice’: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Speech That Changed History

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