Every country tells a story about itself. The story Bangladesh tells or rather, the story it argues over, cuts to something fundamental: not just who governs, but who belongs.
Ziaur Rahman’s answer to that question was deceptively simple. He called it Bangladeshi nationalism, and four decades on, it remains one of the most consequential and least understood ideas in the country’s political life.
The misunderstanding usually starts in the same place. Critics frame it as a rejection of Bengali identity; a political maneuver designed to distance Bangladesh from its liberation inheritance. But that reading collapses under scrutiny. Ziaur Rahman never disputed that Bangladeshis are Bengali in language and in cultural temperament. What he disputed was the assumption that language alone could bear the full weight of national identity for a sovereign, plural state.
It is worth sitting with that distinction, because it is not a small one.
When Bangladesh emerged in 1971, it inherited not just a flag but a country, a country that included, alongside its Bengali-speaking majority, the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Mro, Bawm, and dozens of other communities across the Chittagong Hill Tracts, each with languages, histories, and ways of life that Bengali cultural nationalism had no natural vocabulary to accommodate. A national identity that could not speak to them without asking them to dissolve into the majority was not a national identity at all. It was a majority identity with national pretensions.
This is where Bangladeshi nationalism did its most serious philosophical work. Ziaur Rahman proposed a civic identity, rooted not in ethnicity or language but in shared citizenship, shared territory, and a shared stake in the country’s future. His now-famous bouquet metaphor was not decorative. It made a precise argument: that a nation, like a bouquet, draws its strength from the distinctiveness of its parts, not from forcing every flower into the same shape. A Chakma could remain fully Chakma. A Marma would lose nothing of cultural life. A Bengali would surrender no part of linguistic heritage. All would be, and feel, Bangladeshi.
That is harder to build than it sounds and Ziaur Rahman knew it. His pragmatism showed in the way the philosophy extended outward. Rather than tethering Bangladesh to a single regional patron, he opened diplomatic and economic relationships across the Muslim world, China, the United States, and the broader developing world. The early architecture of the remittance economy, the expansion of Bangladesh’s international footprint, the deliberate cultivation of strategic space, all of it was an expression of the same underlying instinct: that a country confident in a secure, composite identity can engage the world on its own terms.
Scholar B K Jahangir, in his rigorous study of Bangladeshi nationalism, argued that in a society of this complexity, single-identity nationalism does not unify, it privileges. Durable cohesion, he contended, requires a political framework expansive enough to hold different communities, regions, and traditions without demanding that any of them disappear. The philosophy Ziaur Rahman articulated was precisely such a framework.
The bouquet, in other words, was not a metaphor for sentimentality. It was a metaphor for statecraft.
That is why the idea keeps returning. In an era of intensifying identity pressure, geopolitical competition, and the constant temptation to define nations by what or whom, they exclude, the question Ziaur Rahman posed remains the right one: how does a diverse society hold together without becoming coercive? His answer was incomplete, as all political philosophies are. But it pointed toward something that many countries, far larger and more powerful than Bangladesh, are still searching for a nationalism that draws its strength not from uniformity, but from the dignity of difference held in common.
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