PM to inaugurate on 5 August
Prime Minister Tarique Rahman will formally inaugurate the July Mass Uprising Memorial Museum on 5 August, opening to the public a site that has spent more than a year under construction and speculation, a senior minister confirmed on Sunday.
The date carries deliberate symbolism: it marks the second anniversary of Sheikh Hasina’s ouster, the event the museum was built to commemorate.
“It will be opened on August 5.
Prime Minister Tarique Rahman will inaugurate it,” a senior minister close to the preparations said, putting to rest months of uncertainty over when the long-delayed facility would finally open.
The museum occupies Ganabhaban, the sprawling former official residence of the ousted prime minister in Dhaka’s Sher-e-Bangla Nagar area — the same compound protesters stormed and looted as Hasina fled the country on August 5, 2024.
The interim government that took over in the uprising’s aftermath decided within weeks to convert the residence into a memorial and documentation center rather than restore it as a seat of power, repealing the law that had guaranteed the building to Hasina’s family.
Converting the residence involved both extensive physical renovation and a legal overhaul. Reports last year put the project’s cost at roughly Tk111 crore, and the interim administration constituted a board of trustees to oversee its management.
Since taking office, the BNP-led government has introduced further structural and legal changes to place the museum on a permanent institutional footing under the Bangladesh National Museum, converting what began as a caretaker-government initiative into a lasting national institution.
The museum has repeatedly missed earlier target dates. Cultural Affairs Adviser Mostofa Sarwar Farooki said last July that the museum was “nearly complete” and would be inaugurated by August 5, 2025, with public access to follow later — a timeline that ultimately slipped by a full year.
Cultural Affairs Minister Nitai Roy Chowdhury said as recently as this month that the museum would open only once cleared by “the convenience and approval of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman,” acknowledging persistent questions over the delay and the project’s cost.
Monday’s confirmation appears to finally close that chapter, fixing the second anniversary of the uprising as the inauguration date.
What visitors will see
According to officials involved in the project, the museum will house photographs, martyrs’ clothing, letters, official documents, newspaper clippings from the uprising, and audio-visual material documenting the movement that toppled Hasina’s fifteen-year rule.
Farooki has said the exhibits are designed to let visitors “understand why the July uprising happened” and revisit the period of Awami League governance that preceded it, including a dedicated section recreating the circumstances of Hasina’s escape from the building.
Farooki has also said the museum is intended to let the public “judge Sheikh Hasina’s crimes with his own conscience,” even as separate legal proceedings against the former prime minister and her associates continue in court.
A Contested Legacy
Not everyone has welcomed the project unreservedly. Transparency International Bangladesh previously raised concerns over the use of direct procurement in awarding museum-related contracts, calling for greater transparency in the spending, and some commentators have questioned the appropriateness of converting a former prime minister’s residence into a memorial site rather than repurposing it for public administrative use.
Even so, the government has treated the museum as a centerpiece of its effort to institutionalize the memory of the July uprising, alongside plans for martyr monuments in all 64 districts and nationwide cultural programs marking the movement’s anniversary.
With the inauguration date now set, the site will stand as the country’s most prominent physical monument to the uprising that ended Hasina’s government and, ultimately, brought the current administration to power.
