Why Mujib’s removal from the Taka is noteworthy

The US still has not said that the “face” of the next new $20 bill will change, almost a decade after pressure started building about removing President Andrew Jackson because he was allegedly racist. Dollar bills are regularly reconfigured to stymie counterfeiters but even as public opinion is turning against notes featuring only “old white men” there is no real reason to believe there will be any new faces.

There is certainly no pressure to remove George Washington—the first US President but also a slave owner, albeit eventually a remorseful one—from dollar bills. Bangladesh, however, has wasted no time on democratic niceties such as ascertaining public opinion and decided to remove its founding President and leader of its liberation struggle, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from its Taka and Poysha.

Given that “chief advisor” Muhammed Yunus has been saying the economy is not in the pink of health—contrary to the claims of the ousted PM Sheikh Hasina—is this the right time for Bangladesh to spend huge amounts to print notes, to assuage protestors? Taka 500 crore is already spent every year to print notes just to replace worn out ones. Imagine what replacing all currency notes will cost.

More from Opinion

Sergio Gor’s senate hearing signals the future of Indo-American ties How Trump’s ‘War on Drugs’ buildup against Venezuela has a hidden agenda

This is not the first time, of course, that Rahman is being excised from the Taka. It was odd that his face was on the currency during his own lifetime: when he became the first president and first prime minister. It was not odd, though, that his face was removed from notes after his assassination. Nor was it odd that he was back on Takas not long after his daughter Sheikh Hasina became PM for the first time.

It was certainly not surprising when Rahman disappeared again after Sheikh Hasina lost to Begum Khaleda Zia in the 2001 elections, and that he promptly returned on the Taka notes when his daughter came back to power in 2008. Indeed, it was practically a foregone conclusion that Muhammed Yunus would do exactly what many heads of government of Bangladesh have done before: remove him.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How army remains Pakistan’s biggest business house

60 years on, why 1965 India–Pakistan war still matters

Had Yunus not announced this move, he probably would have been accused by student hotheads of being a closet Rahman sympathiser—an allegation akin to being called a Razakar or sympathiser (given their role as murderous collaborators during Bangladesh’s repressive years as East Pakistan) in an earlier era. It is safer for him to spend a few thousand crore Taka printing new currency notes instead.

The ignorance of a younger generation of most countries in a time when knowledge is there at the tap of a few keys on a smartphone is starkly evident in today’s Bangladesh. Yet, how many Indians know that Mahatma Gandhi did not grace our currency notes until 1969? For nearly 20 years after Independence India had monuments and animals, scientific and agricultural achievements on currency.

Even then, that was just a commemorative gesture in his centenary year. Gandhiji became the all-pervasive ‘face’ of Indian Rupees (INR) only in 1996 because by then it had become conventional wisdom that visages on notes are harder to counterfeit than other motifs. Since then, there have been murmurs about putting other Indians or even divinities on Rupee notes but it has not actually happened so far.

The journey of South Africa’s Rand sort of echoes India’s story. After gaining independence, its first notes issued in 1961 had the face of Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch explorer who founded the trading station in 1652 that later became Cape Town. Thirty years later, as Apartheid ended, he was replaced by the ‘Big Five’ animals of the country. And finally in 2012, Nelson Mandela became the face.

Today South Africa’s GenZ, much like Bangladesh’s GenZ, regard their nation’s legendary leader with rather different eyes than their older compatriots. There are rumblings now about corruption creeping into the government and the African National Congress during his tenure, and there are insinuations that Mandela had not reached out enough to the traumatised black South Africans as President.

This bears a distinct resemblance to the current narrative about both Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—whose honorific title of Bangabandhu has fallen into disuse even as his statues have, well, fallen—and Sheikh Hasina. She was recently accused by an increasingly splenetic Yunus of heading “the world’s worst autocratic government”. Clearly he had not kept up with regimes in Syria, North Korea etc.

Be that as it may, the banishment of Bangabandhu’s face from the Taka notes yet again bespeaks the recurring identity crisis in Bangladesh. To negate Rahman is to deny the circumstances under which Bangladesh came into existence, including the key role of India in the exercise. No leader is infallible, and many reveal proverbial ‘feet of clay’ eventually. But that is no justification to deny their contribution.

Gandhiji has also had strong critics; Indian Bengalis in particular have never been big fans of his. And when national opinion was sought thrice to determine whose statue should grace the canopy that once held King George V’s figure on Rajpath (now Kartavya Path) Gandhiji lost out each time to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. But his status—on the Rupee and in the nation—did not change because of this.

Dhaka Airport was renamed after Ziaur Rahman in 1983, one of two military dictators who ruled after Bangabandhu’s assassination. When Hasina became PM, though, she did not rename it after her father but cleverly chose Bangladesh’s revered 13th century Yemeni (some say Turkic) Islamic Sufi preacher Hazrat Shah Jalal, obviating any future changes. If only she had been more subtle in other spheres.

The 20th century was arguably the most tumultuous in history, including in the US. It saw the end of segregation, the rise of feminism, the moon landings and more, but the last change of faces on dollar bills was in 1929. So, Washington’s face remains on $1, Jefferson on $2, Lincoln on $5, Hamilton on $10, Jackson on $20, Grant on $50, and Franklin on the $100 bill. No changes are foreseen even now.

The reported current plan to change Bangladesh’s currency notes to reflect this July’s agitations presages an almost certain change, sooner or later. The existing ruling dispensation will not last and there will be a showdown; who will get the upper hand eventually is moot and so also is what will be the face of the Taka. But if the Islamists do prevail as many anticipate, there will be no face at all, of course.

The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.