Mia Golam Parwar, secretary general of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, said on Friday that the party had undergone sweeping changes and now officially honoured the 1971 Liberation War, while calling for an end to the historical quarrels that he argued were holding the country back.

Addressing a workers’ rally at Cumilla Town Hall, Parwar insisted that the Jamaat of the 1971 era and today’s party “are not the same”, citing repeated overhauls of its constitution and policy framework.

The current governing document, he told the crowd, explicitly enshrined respect for the freedom fighters’ struggle and made acknowledgement of the sacrifices of independence a compulsory condition of membership.

“It’s not possible to create new history by remaining stuck in old history,” he said, contending that nations which had broken free from divisive politics — Malaysia and Singapore among them — had surged ahead of countries still trapped in past debates.

On the National Freedom Fighters Council (Amendment) Bill-2026, Parwar said his party had previously pressed the former interim government to amend the legal definition of the Liberation War, and accused a “certain quarter” of deliberately prolonging the controversy. “This is neither patriotism nor love of independence; it’s part of a foreign conspiracy to divide the nation,” he told the rally. “The nation must escape this plot.”

He struck an optimistic note on the political mood, saying that the similar tone adopted by the prime minister and the opposition leader in Parliament’s closing session signalled a readiness to move forward. “If we do that, we can leave a new history for the next generation,” he added.