DHAKA – The pandal went up before most of the club’s members had any idea what it was for. By Wednesday evening, workers had set the structure in the garden of Bangladesh’s National Press Club in the capital, its frame rising above rows of chairs and a stage prepared for musicians. The occasion, as people inside the building began to understand, is a qawwali concert. The date is August 14. That is Pakistan’s Independence Day.
Sources within the club say the event has been funded by the Pakistan Embassy in Dhaka, with a reported allocation of roughly 2 million Bangladeshi taka. No official documentation confirming the amount or the funding arrangement had been shared with the general membership by Wednesday evening. No formal notification of any kind, about the event itself, its sponsor, or the management committee approval behind it, had been issued to the club’s several hundred members.
General Secretary Md. Ayub Bhuiyan, under whose leadership the event has been organized, did not respond to calls from reporters seeking comment. Club President Hasan Hafiz was also unreachable. A section of members say that silence has itself become part of the story.
Bhuiyan has been at the center of at least one previous episode that drew similar scrutiny. On September 12, 2024, a commemoration of the 76th death anniversary of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, was held at the National Press Club. That event was organized formally by an outside organization, providing Bhuiyan and other attending journalists a degree of institutional cover. But the presence of the National Press Club’s general secretary at a Jinnah commemoration at his own institution generated sharp public reactions at the time, particularly in a country whose founding identity is inseparable from its liberation from Pakistani military rule in 1971.
What is happening on August 14 is different in a specific way. The qawwali evening is not being organized by an outside body operating independently on borrowed premises. It is being organized as an event of the National Press Club itself, under the management committee that Bhuiyan leads. Kader Gani Chowdhury is serving as convener of the subcommittee overseeing it. Whether or not the Pakistan Embassy formally appears on any paperwork, sources familiar with the arrangements say the embassy has provided the money that is making the evening possible.
For the members raising questions, the location matters as much as the funding. The National Press Club is not simply a building available for hire. Founded in the years that surrounded Bangladesh’s independence struggle, it has carried within its walls the historical memory and identity of the Bangladeshi press, including its connection to the events of 1971. When members say the club is being used to celebrate a foreign government’s national holiday with funds from that government’s embassy, and without informing the membership, what they are measuring is a distance between what the institution says it is and what it is now doing.
The timing of the event adds another dimension. August 14, Pakistan’s Independence Day, is followed directly by August 15, the day Bangladesh marks the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation. Bangabandhu, as he is universally known, was killed along with most of his family in a military coup in 1975, an act that erased much of the political order he built. Some members say they are not opposed in principle to a cultural exchange with Pakistan. But they are asking whether placing a Pakistan Embassy-funded celebration on the eve of that particular anniversary reflects a judgment, conscious or otherwise, about whose history deserves to be elevated in this moment.
That question sits inside a broader set of changes in Bangladesh’s external orientation. Under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, whose party won a general election after the formal banning of the Awami League, Bangladesh has moved perceptibly closer to Pakistan and China. The appointment of a senior cabinet secretary with reported ISI-linked ties earlier this year was one visible marker of that shift. Contacts between Bangladesh’s National Press Club and Pakistani media institutions have tracked this broader movement.
In February 2025, Bhuiyan led a ten-member delegation of journalists on an official visit to Pakistan. Pakistan’s state news agency reported on the trip. The delegation toured the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, Pakistan Television and a number of other Pakistani media organizations. Discussions included expanding contacts between journalists from both countries and the possibility of reciprocal visits. The August 14 qawwali evening has followed that sequence, but it represents a different scale of proximity: not a visit to Pakistan, but a Pakistan Embassy event inside the home of the Bangladeshi press.
Sheikh Hasina, whose government shaped Bangladesh’s posture toward Pakistan through more than a decade in power, has been in exile in India since the 2024 uprising that ousted her administration. She has not commented publicly on the National Press Club event.
The questions club members are pressing have not been answered by those who organized the evening. What was the specific sum provided by the Pakistan Embassy? Was the event approved in a formal committee meeting, and if so, when? Is a record of that decision available to the membership? If a national press institution accepts foreign government funds to celebrate that government’s national day, do its members not have a right to know?
Thursday evening, as the qawwali begins in the Press Club garden, August 15 will be hours away.
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