Suhrawardy’s popularity, unlike Jinnah’s, was rooted primarily in the regional sphere, though he enjoyed a strong base of mass support. Jinnah’s emergence as the architect of Pakistan owed considerably to Suhrawardy’s efforts, yet Suhrawardy, in turn, received comparatively little support from Jinnah.

Teacher, comrade, and lifelong revolutionary Badruddin Umar (20 December 1931 – 7 September 2025) is no more. We offer him our deepest respect and love. Alongside this, on behalf of the people of Bangladesh, we convey our gratitude — for he devoted his entire life, thought, and activism to the cause of the people.

Hasina took dynasty politics to levels we could not have ever imagined. What happened to Sheikh Mujib’s former residence was unfortunate. But I would say that Sheikh Hasina is partly responsible for the incident.

In the annals of modern Middle Eastern history, few documents have cast a longer or darker shadow than the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Both Bengals are grappling with intense periods of unrest. While the political events unfolding in these two lands may not align directly, they share one significant commonality: distrust.

“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” — Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 3.

The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.

While Europe experienced an age of evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century, political circumstances in India posed challenges to the work of missionary preaching.

The 1947 Partition of South Asia is usually associated with divisions, disruption, and the melancholia of displacement.

Reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation of Gaza is both illuminating and depressing.

In conversation with Salimullah Khan, one of Bangladesh’s most prominent public intellectuals and a professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at North South University.

While the July Uprising was sparked by economic problems, political repression, and a desire for democracy, it found a strong and surprising voice in a new form of music for Bangladesh: rap. Two songs, “Kotha Ko” (Speak Up) and “Awaz Utha” (Raise Your Voice), came to represent the sentiment of the movement in July.

In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.

I did not personally know Tajuddin Ahmad, but he was a contemporary of ours, and the politics he practised was within the Awami League—though there were different strands within the party.

I first met Tajuddin Ahmad—or Tajuddin Bhai, as I knew him—in the 1960s, during the pre-Liberation period. After I joined the Awami League, Bangabandhu told me to meet Tajuddin Ahmad, as he would answer all my questions on politics and the party, and that he possessed deep knowledge of both politics and people.

The Daily Star (TDS): How do you view Tajuddin Ahmad’s early political journey and his emergence as a key national figure?

Every moment of the night of 25 March 1971 and the following two months will always shine brightly in the depths of my memory. Even though I might not be able to express all those living memories in words, I will try to articulate a possible description of the events.

As a person, Tajuddin Ahmad was an idealist. In his personal life and professional conduct, he was disciplined and guided by a deep sense of restraint and propriety.

No leader emerges in a vacuum. The making of a political figure is deeply influenced by the social structures around them—family, religion, education, and the broader environment all leave lasting imprints.

The historic journey of the people of Eastern Bengal in the middle half of the last century, to be more precise from 1947 to 1971, was an amazing story with great impact on the post-colonial social and political development of the subcontinent.