The passing of Abul Maal Abdul Muhith is certainly the end of an era. His eighty-eight years of life were a time when but for the last few years of it was spent in intense political and intellectual activity. His voice was always one that spoke in the tones of the assertive. It was not that everyone agreed with him. But everyone heard him with respect that was deep and abiding. His language was often blunt, as those who recall his propensity to be dismissive of opinions with a single word, ‘rubbish’, will testify to. And yet beyond that obvious state of irritation, Muhith remained the one figure in government who listened to people and who people listened to in one-on-one conversation. Unlike so many of his colleagues in government, Muhith successfully remained free of hubris or aloofness in interacting with his fellow citizens.
Muhith’s was a multi-dimensional character. As he passes into the ages, a grateful nation remembers the varied and various roles he played in a career that few have matched or will be able to match in the coming years. Beginning as a civil servant in the pre-1971 days, Muhith demonstrated a remarkable capacity for upholding professionalism in a career that would soon branch out in a multitude of roles. And within that role came the intensely intellectual approach to life, indeed to politics, that he loved to emphasise through his writings. His works on the language movement of 1952 as also his research on the factors leading to the emergence of Bangladesh will always remain testimony to the scholarly attributes which defined his life and career.
Within the broad ambience of that life and that career was embedded a powerful element of the patriotic, a personality trait Muhith demonstrated all too well in 1971. In Washington in the service of the state of Pakistan, he did not fail to inform himself that he did not need to be torn between his service in the Pakistan state and his emotions that called for a full identification with the Bangladesh cause. There was little of the ambivalent in him. He knew what to do in that decisive year for his fellow Bengalis and he did it. He spurned the state he served and let the world in on the thought that decency and democratic principles dictated that he go over to the nation, his own, then struggling to arise out of the blood and gore into which the Pakistan occupation army had pushed it.
It was an intense campaign of publicizing the cause of Bangladesh he launched himself into in that year of decision. People and governments abroad needed to be brought level with Bangladesh and its tortuous war of national freedom. Muhith was articulate, passionate and yet he knew of the power of reason which needed to be brought into an enunciation of the Bangladesh idea during the War of Liberation. He did the job well and came home to make his contributions to the reconstruction of a war-ravaged economy.
Muhith’s entry into politics brought about a wholesale change in his idea of what needed to be done where shaping a strong national economic base was concerned. Because he did not forget that all politics is about keeping a nation happy or optimistic about its future, Muhith took charge as minister for finance in the Ershad regime in the 1980s. It was a role he would later play, for a far longer stretch of time, in the government of Sheikh Hasina with aplomb, as his handling of the budget every year would show. But there were the certain weaknesses which he could not wish away. Consistently uncomfortable with black money transforming itself into white, he railed against the increasingly bad system. He promised not to have ill-gotten money earn respectability and yet in the end he was unable to keep his promise.
But that did not take away from his integrity. He was vocal in his condemnation of people whose carelessness he thought had led to a siphoning off of the country’s foreign reserves abroad. He was a good communicator, but his communication with people abjured the desire to please in order to earn popularity. Bluntness defined his use of language and he was not apologetic about it. He was not afraid to proffer his opinions at cabinet meetings.
In losing Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, the nation bids farewell to a man who symbolized the sophistication which was the hallmark of the generation he was born into. Few there were who dared to question his performance in public life, for Muhith always did his homework. That is not what one can say about so many others who came in after he had walked away into the sunset.