Dhaka bans novel about Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman family massacre

DHAKA: Bangladesh yesterday banned a novel by popular fiction writer Humayun Ahmed for allegedly distorting how the nation’s first president and his family were murdered in 1975.

Humayun Ahmed’s books, written in Bengali, are hugely successful bestsellers in Bangladesh and have been translated into English, Japanese, Russian and several other languages.

Two chapters of his latest novel Deyal were published in a newspaper last week, sparking controversy over his account of how Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated along with more than a dozen members of his family in August 1975.

The high court stepped in after the attorney general sought a ban on the book, arguing that it “misrepresented established fact” about the grisly massacre by not fully conveying the brutality of the killings.
Rahman’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, who was abroad at the time of the murders, is currently the prime minister and a stout defender of his memory.

Rahman is seen as the founding father of Bangladesh after leading the country to independence from Pakistan in a bloody nine-month war in 1971.

A suggestion in Ahmed’s novel that Sheikh Russel, Rahman’s 10-year-old son, was shot dead at point-blank range when he was in a room with his two sisters-in-law is one passage that angered officials.

“It was a brutal scene, but it was not depicted properly in the novel,” Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told
reporters.

In March, the high court ordered police to pursue 17 professors for allegedly distorting the history of the liberation and for maligning Rahman in a school textbook.

Millions of copies of another textbook were also ordered to be seized in January in a dispute over credit for the independence struggle. (AFP)