Standing in front of the gallows inside the Old Dhaka Central Jail where his father was hanged 46 years ago, Kamruzzaman Lenin says he can’t decide whether he feels sad or angry, or both. Sad because of the great tragedy that befell his family after his father’s “unjust execution”, and angry because there has been no end to political violence in Bangladesh — a train was set on fire just two days before the 7 January national elections. For Lenin, such incidents bring back childhood memories of what happened in 1977 inside this jail.
Located in Old Dhaka, the jail no longer houses prisoners. In 2016, the jail was shifted to new premises in the Keraniganj area. But the old jail, where a Mughal fort stood till the 19th century, has housed freedom fighters of the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence as well as men like Lenin’s father, whom history has forgotten.
Sheikh Hasina government has promised a museum at the jail’s site to remember the heroes of the freedom struggle but the cycle of violence, including forced disappearances, in her own dispensation may make some Bangladeshis to take the project with a pinch of salt.
“My father was also a war hero. Former Bangladesh president General Ziaur Rahman hanged him and more than a thousand others like him inside this jail because he wanted to wipe out the history of 1971. The party he founded, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is still resorting to violence like we saw this time before the elections when Dhaka streets turned bloody with their undemocratic protests,” says Lenin, a Dhaka-based businessman in his early 50s.
But Lenin is happy a museum will be built in honour of his father and other freedom fighters by the Sheikh Hasina-led government. “That will give some closure perhaps to my tortured memories.”
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A museum and memories
Najmul Hossain, advisor to the Dhaka jail museum project says that over the years, the jail housed petty criminals who were brought in for offences like theft, dacoity, murder and rape. “This is not a place to house common criminals. This is a historical site where those who had made the supreme sacrifice for the idea of Bangladesh should be mourned, remembered and celebrated,” says Hossain whose work as an independent researcher of political history focuses on Bangladesh’s decade of independence (1971 to 1977).
Bangladesh has the Liberation Museum to celebrate its bloody origin story. It displays the arms with which members of the Mukti Bahini fought the West Pakistan army, the personal belongings of Bahini members and also skulls and bones retrieved from mass graves of those killed.
“The Dhaka Jail Museum is about the threat from within. Even after Bangladesh became a separate country, there were forces within which did not want it to exist. If the Liberation War Museum is about the threat from outside, the Dhaka Jail Museum will be about the dangers within, when sections of our own military turned against itself and the country,” says Hossain.
Hossain says the new museum will be a just tribute to the memory of men like Kamruzzaman Lenin’s father.
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1977 and the hangings of freedom fighters
Lenin was barely five years old in 1977 when his father Saydur Rahman, a Mukti Joddha (freedom fighter) in the 1971 war of independence, was hanged. After Bangladesh became free, Saydur Rahman had joined the Air Force. Growing up, Lenin wondered why would a freedom fighter and a member of the armed forces be hanged along with thousands of others like him.
“Much later, I found others like me, family members of war heroes who were picked up by Zia’s men, tortured and hanged. We formed an organisation called Mayer Kanna or the Mother’s Cry. This jail serves as a reminder to those bloody days.
Hossain, who is also the chief coordinator of Mayer Kanna, says General Zia had an alternate vision for Bangladesh as an Islamic nation and wanted to wipe out the memory of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and all those freedom fighters who fought for a secular Bangladesh in 1971.
Hossain tells how General Zia used an international crisis to turn the domestic narrative against the Bangladeshi freedom fighters. “Five armed members of the Japanese Red Army had hijacked the Japan Airlines Flight 472 enroute from Paris to Tokyo with stopover in Bombay and ordered it to land in Dhaka on 28 September 1977. The chief of air staff of the Bangladesh Air Force negotiated with the hijackers. Parallelly, a mutiny of sorts was on within the Bangladesh air force,” says Hossain.
General Zia, Hossain says, put the blame for the hijack conspiracy on member of his own armed forces. “Zia wanted the armed forces to be purged of men who fought for the war of independence. As many as 1,156 army personnel were either hanged or faced the firing squad. Three years before this, Sheikh Mujib had been assassinated. There was no one in the country to stop this madness.”
Lenin’s father was one of those sent to the gallows.
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Mayer Kanna versus Mayer Dak
Mayer Kanna has held protests demanding justice for the martyrs of 1977. On 8 November 2022, members of the organisation formed a human chain near General Ziaur Rahman’s grave at the Chandrima Udyan in Sangsad Bhavan area in Dhaka. They wanted the grave to be removed and threatened that if the demand wasn’t met, they would act on their own.
Lawmaker Naheed Ezaher Khan, the daughter of Shaheed Colonel Khondkar Nazmul Huda who was killed in the 7 November 1975 coup d’ tat, said “Zia brutally killed our father 47 years ago” in The Business Post report, adding “a murderer’s body cannot remain in a holy area like the Sangsad Bhaban.”
When US ambassador to Bangladesh Peter D Hass went to meet Sanjida Islam, coordinator of ‘Mayer Dak’ or Mother’s Call — a collective of families of victims of enforced disappearance since Sheikh Hasina came to power in 2009 — in Dhaka’s Shaheenbagh, Mayer Kanna members asked Hass to look into 1977 instead, says a 2022 report in tbsnews.net.
Sanjida is the sister of Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader Sajedul Islam Sumon, who is reportedly a victim of enforced disappearance that took place in 2013.
22-year-old Dhaka-based journalist Saqlain Rizve says because Bangladesh’s violent past continues to darken its present, a jail museum will be an apt reminder to how it all began. “People died on the streets during this election too. Whenever the museum at the Dhaka Central Jail comes up, it will put light on a part of our history which many in my generation are not even aware of,” Rizve told ThePrint.
For Mofidul Haque, trustee of the Liberation War Museum, the Dhaka Jail Museum is a welcome step. He says the new museum will effectively take the Bangladesh story forward for both its own citizens and foreigners visiting the country, who do not know much about what happened in 1977.
The museum was okayed in 2018 and Sheikh Hasina had inaugurated the initiative through video conferencing. Sources in the Bangladesh home ministry told ThePrint now that Hasina is back in power, the project will be fast tracked. A brief history of the martyrs of 1977 will be put up at the museum, who they were and how they made the supreme sacrifice. According to the plan, the jail area will be divided into three zones or segments.
The first segment, sources reveal, will have a multi-purpose Bhawan complex, a convention centre, cineplex, swimming pool and a water body. Zone two will have restored mosque, book store, flower shop, a water body and underground parking space. Zone three will house a museum dedicated to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a museum in the memory of the four slain leaders — AHM Qamaruzzaman, Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam and Captain Muhammad Mansur Ali — and a garden. Construction work for the project is in full swing and the museum is scheduled to open in 2026.
Bangladeshi academic Dr Sharin Shajahan Naomi says the events of 1977 are confined mostly to the memories of those who lost their dear ones to General Zia’s “madness”. “The best and the brightest men of the armed forces were killed in 1977. Men who would kept Bangladesh’s secular character intact within the army. That did not suit General Zia as the military regime of the time wanted to politicise Islam and recast Bangladesh in Pakistan mould. The jail museum will remind us of the dangers of such an experiment,” says Naomi.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)