He posed this question in a Facebook post on Saturday (August 15).

In his post, Shafiqul Alam wrote: "Which Sheikh Mujib are some people mourning? And which Sheikh Mujib did our ancestors pray to be freed from? Are these two the same Mujib? This is a complex dilemma. The hero of 1971 became the villain of 1975."

He added: "Mujib was a character packed with such contradictory qualities. The Mujib of up to March 7, 1971, played one kind of role in history. And the Sheikh Mujib from 1972 to 1975 was different. If we do not assess these two roles impartially, we will never be able to address our fault lines."

Shafiqul Alam acknowledged: "Undoubtedly, a horrific massacre took place at 32 Dhanmondi on August 15. Even a small child was not spared that night. The entire family was killed. Any conscientious person would be pained—even if the worst criminal is killed along with their family."

However, he questioned: "But the calendar of history does not jump from March 7, 1971, straight to August 15, 1975. Many events happened in between—thousands were killed by the Rakhi Bahini, there was massive looting, and due to mismanagement, a terrible famine occurred in which historians now say about 1.5 million people died. Democracy was murdered, and all legal avenues for relief from misrule were closed. If we don't keep this in mind, we won't understand why the people of the country did not mourn that death."

Recalling the massive outpouring of grief after Ziaur Rahman's death, he said: "The problem is that the period from 1972 to 1975 has been so effectively whitewashed through newspapers, history, and cultural narratives that it is now hard to remember why our ancestors did not mourn his death. After 1990, I don't recall any mainstream newspaper focusing on that period. This is a project of whitewashing Mujib—so that in your collective memory, Sheikh Mujib remains only as the leader of the independence movement."

He wrote: "If at that time it had been heard that 'Bangabandhu is not dead,' thousands more people like you and me would have died, and there would have been no justice either—because Sheikh Mujib himself was the law in the country then." Drawing a parallel, he said: "This will be easier to understand if you remember how Hasina herself was the law during her tenure."

Shafiqul Alam said: "The July uprising was largely a revolution captured on camera. Due to the digital archiving in the post-July period, the creation of the July Museum, and the numerous documentaries on the 16 years of misrule, the media will not be able to erase Hasina's crimes even if they want to. Otherwise, someone might have written a song ten years from now—'If only the night had passed and we had heard that Sheikh Hasina had not fled.'"

He concluded: "For our collective healing, we need an impartial assessment of the pre-March 7 Mujib and the post-1972 Mujib. If we had done this, Hasina could not have used Sheikh Mujib as an icon to kill and abduct thousands of our brothers and sisters."

He ended his post with: "Mourning for Sheikh Mujib, who was killed along with his family, and mourning for all Bangladeshis who were killed from 1972 to 1975."