The headlines write themselves because outrage sells. A museum display changes, a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah is shredded, the image of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is cleared out, and the comment sections on every digital platform explode with predictable tribalism. One side screams about the erasure of history, the other cheers for the purification of a campus. Both sides are missing the point completely.
This is not a debate about archives, artifacts, or museum curation. It is a symptom of a deeper, institutional failure across South Asia: the chronic addiction to iconoclasm as a substitute for actual governance. When states cannot deliver economic stability, educational reform, or institutional accountability, they reach for scissors, sledgehammers, and paintbrushes. It is the cheapest form of politics available.
Let us strip away the emotional varnish and look at what is actually happening inside Dhaka University and the broader political ecosystem of the region.
The Lazy Consensus of Historical Sanitation
The dominant narrative presented by mainstream media is straightforward. It frames these museum alterations as a battle of national identity, a tug-of-war between competing founding narratives. The assumption is that by controlling the walls of a room, you control the trajectory of a republic.
This is a profound misconception. Walls do not hold up nations; rule of law, economic mobility, and institutional checks and balances do.
When authorities or student factions decide that removing a historical figure from view neutralizes their ideological threat, they reveal a staggering lack of confidence in their own population. It assumes citizens are fragile vessels, easily contaminated by the mere presence of a photograph or a canvas portrait. History cannot be beaten into submission by hiding its complex, often contradictory architects.
Jinnah created a state through partition that collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions in 1971. Mujibur Rahman led a bloody, righteous war of liberation that birthed Bangladesh, only to see the young democracy curdle into a one-party autocracy before his assassination. Both men are heavy, turbulent figures. Neither was a saint. Both left deep structural scars across the subcontinent.
Shredding Jinnah does not undo the trauma of Partition. Removing Mujib does not erase the authoritarian drift of the mid-1970s. All it does is turn a university museum into a partisan kindergarten.
The Real Cost of Institutional Vandalism
I have spent decades watching political regimes across the developing world treat public institutions as personal ideological billboards. Every time power shifts, the new incumbents rush to repaint the offices, rewrite the textbooks, and purge the galleries.
The economic and intellectual toll of this cycle is devastating. While administrators and student unions spend their energy debating who deserves wall space in a Dhaka University gallery, actual universities face crumbling infrastructure, archaic curricula, and a catastrophic brain drain. The best minds produced in these institutions leave at the earliest opportunity, heading west not because they hate their homeland, but because they are exhausted by a society that prioritizes symbolic theater over substance.
Consider the opportunity cost. Every hour spent organizing protests over museum displays is an hour not spent auditing research funding, upgrading laboratory equipment, or restructuring faculty hiring to eliminate political patronage.
The defenders of these purges will tell you this is about reclaiming dignity. Let us call that what it is: a comforting illusion. Dignity for a university is measured by citation indices, academic freedom, and graduates who can compete in a global economy—not by how cleanly sanitized its display cases are.
Dismantling the Myth of the Clean Slate
There is a dangerous fantasy embedded in these actions: the belief that a society can hit a hard reset button, scrub away the uncomfortable chapters of its past, and begin history anew from a state of pure righteousness.
History does not work that way. Nations are agglomerations of unresolved contradictions. Pakistan cannot wish away its authoritarian military lineage any more than Bangladesh can wish away the complex, blood-soaked complexities of its liberation struggle.
When you institutionalize the erasure of historical figures you find inconvenient, you set a precedent that will inevitably be used against you tomorrow. The faction cheering for the removal of a portrait today will find themselves erased by the next faction tomorrow. It is an infinite regress of petty vengeance masquerading as revolutionary justice.
A mature society does not hide its monsters or its flawed heroes behind a curtain. It puts them out in the open with proper contextualization. It says, look at this figure, look at what they built, look at what they destroyed, and understand the mechanisms of power that allowed them to do it. That requires intellectual courage. Tearing canvas is easy; building institutions that withstand the test of time is hard.
Where the Real Battleground Lies
If you want to understand why Dhaka University's museum exhibits cause such seismic tremors, you have to look at the vacuum of institutional power. When civil courts are slow, when police forces are politicized, and when political opposition is treated as existential treason, cultural symbols become proxy battlefields for real power.
People fight over museums because they are denied meaningful influence over economic policy, judicial independence, and public safety. Symbols are cheap. Fixing a broken power grid or an insolvent banking sector requires math, grit, and compromise. Tearing down a portrait requires a match and a mob.
The obsession with historical optics distracts from the structural rot underneath. Until the political class across South Asia stops treating national history as a trophy room to be redecorated after every election cycle, the region will remain trapped in a loop of perpetual grievance.
Stop worrying about who is hanging on the wall. Start worrying about the fact that the students staring at those walls are preparing to emigrate at the first possible flight. That is the only metric that matters, and right now, the scorecard is empty.
