| The national flag of Bangladesh was a product
which first came into idea of painter Quamrul Hasan. On the
3rd March 1971, ASM Abdur Rab the then VP of Dhaka University Students´ Union
had the honour of hoisting the first flag of Independent Bangladesh at the Dhaka
University premise popularly known as Bat-tala.
Bangabandhu Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman hoisted the flag of independent Bangladesh at his residence,
32 Dhanmondi R/A, at the outskirt of Dhaka, on the 23rd March 1971. It was an
unknown Awami League worker who hoisted the first flag of independence at the
historical meeting at the then Ramna Race-course on the 7th March 1971 where
Sheikh Mujib tacitly called for armed struggle against Pakistani occupation
Army.
For Quamrul Hasan, making and shaping of the flag needed several months to
complete.
Unique features of the first flag of Independent Bangladesh was
absence of the crescent and star (as in the Pakistan´s flag) , symbol of the
Islamic states. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Bangalees dreamed for the secular
Bangladesh.
The red circular disc with map of Bangladesh symbolizes blood of thousands of
Bangalis killed by the Pakistanis since 1947 in the Golden Bangla. The green
backdrop is, nevertheless to say, symbolizes the vitality, youthfulness,
greenery and of course symbolizes also our land as the agrarian since the pre-
Vedic age.
Many western writers have written in their books while
interpreting on the green backdrop of the Bangladesh flag as colour of Islam
which is essentially a wrong information.
Please note the Lonely Planet's Bangladesh 1996 edition. Here the author
wrongly writes "First flown officially from the rebel Bangladesh embassy in
Calcutta when the War of Liberation began". Writing partially correct "The
Bangladesh flag is green for the lush country, not for Islam, as some
fundamentalists would prefer".
The CIA world
factbook 1997 has also made the same mistake!
The present flag , quite different from the first one,is bottle green in the
background, voided of golden- coloured map of Bangladesh, rectangular in size in
the proportion of length to width 10:6. The red circle has a radius of one-fifth
of the length of the flag. Red circle´s centre is placed on the intersecting
point of the perpendicular drawn from the nine-twentieth part of the length and
the horizontal line drawn through the middle of its width.
The flag of Bangladesh was first hoisted in the UN September 1974. China used
her veto against admission of Bangladesh in the UN 1972 and repeated in the year
1973. The Bangladesh flag appeared later in the UNs´ stamp series "Flag of the
member state". |
