Mohiuddin Ahmed’s moment of glory, the first in his life of devotion to the national cause, came in August 1971. On the first day of the month, he made history, indeed carved a niche for himself in the annals of a state struggling mightily to be born out of the crucible of war.
In the presence of Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury and all those Bengalis who in the United Kingdom had come together in defence of freedom, Mohiuddin Ahmed electrified the crowd at Trafalgar Square by his ringing declaration of identification with the War for Liberation being waged back home.
Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad and the Mujibnagar government were quick to grasp the import of Ahmed’s move. By his dramatic decision to turn his back on Pakistan and its diplomatic mission in London, he became the very first of Bengali diplomats in Europe to inform the world of the intensity of the struggle.
He was young; he did not know how long it would take for liberation to come to his country. But like all brave men believing in the nobility of human struggle, he took the plunge. Tajuddin Ahmad congratulated Mohiuddin Ahmed. The young diplomat thus became an integral part of Bangladesh’s history.
With liberation came that second moment of glory for Mohiuddin Ahmed. He was one of three Bengali diplomats to be informed, early on January 8, 1972, that a freed Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was about to land at London’s Heathrow airport after a long flight from Pakistan’s Rawalpindi.
By the time MM Rezaul Karim, Mohiuddin Ahmed Jaigirdar and Mohiuddin Ahmed reached Heathrow, Bangabandhu had already arrived, along with Kamal Hossain and Hossain’s family.
Mohiuddin Ahmed broke into tears. Nearly ten months after the Father of the Nation had been spirited away to Pakistan by its soldiers, seeing him in flesh and blood and feeling the emotions welling up inside his own self were only natural for Mohiuddin Ahmed. Bangabandhu reassured him that things would be fine thenceforth.
Now that Mohiuddin Ahmed is dead and interred, it is the soul of the man, the many travails he went through in his career we recall. In that dark age which engulfed the nation between August 15, 1975 and June 12, 1996, he paid a price for his patriotism.
Dictators and quasi-dictators, uncomfortable in his presence and with his boldness, sought to have him out of the way. He was sent off to various capitals before being called home, to be taken out of the Foreign Office and shifted to ministries he was not comfortable in.
And then came that moment of villainy, the villain being the “Bangladeshi nationalist” regime of the day, when his services were dispensed with. His fault was simple: He had remained loyal to Bangabandhu’s politics and to the spirit of the War for Liberation.
Of course, Mohiuddin Ahmed regained his place in the nation’s diplomatic structure following the restoration of the Bengali secular government in June 1996. He was elevated to the rank of secretary at the Foreign Office; he served as principal of the Foreign Service Academy.
Yet, there is the feeling in so many among us that the expertise and the talent which underscored his diplomatic capabilities were not fully brought into play by the state.
A time came when he retired from service, but in circumstances where a fairly good number of superannuated diplomats were reassigned to ambassadorial positions and were even brought into national politics and given places as advisors and cabinet ministers, it was manifestly wrong, indeed unpardonable, for Mohiuddin Ahmed to have been ignored.
But no, Ahmed did not complain. Never one to indulge in sycophancy, to attempt to be close to the powers-that-be, he kept his sights on politics, to be sure that politics was being employed in the service of the people. He was not one to keep his silence when things went wrong or when mistakes were committed by those in power, by those aligned to power.
Through his columns in the newspapers and in his conversations, Mohiuddin Ahmed spoke truth to power. That individuals holding fealty to the spirit of 1971 held high office was not enough to make him happy. If they failed to uphold the rule of law, if they indulged in corruption or did nothing to clamp down on it, he came forth with his trenchant criticism of the state of affairs. His bluntness spared no one.
Mohiuddn Ahmed was different from so many others. An abundance of boldness, even when the ‘Bangladeshi nationalists’ held sway in the country, was what kept him going. He was not averse to telling off diplomats-turned-ministers of the nefarious role they had played in 1971 at a time when the entire Bengali nation was locked in an existential struggle for survival.
His contempt for religious fundamentalism was well-pronounced and so was his abhorrence of men and women he considered inimical to the values upheld in the constitution even if those men and women held the levers of power. He had little patience with people who remained ignorant of history or misinterpreted it.
In his observations of society, Ahmed would take regular swipes at the media, or sections of the media, for the lapses he spotted in their reportage and editorial comments. He felt no fear in his expression of views on subjects over which others preferred to keep carefully considered silence.
The freedom fighter in Mohiuddin Ahmed -- the courage he demonstrated at Trafalgar Square in 1971 was never dimmed -- brooked no nonsense from any quarter.
When a lapsed Indian diplomat spun a yarn about his ambassador (Apa Panth) and he being on hand to welcome Bangabandhu to London on January 8, 1972, Mohiuddin Ahmed made it known to me that it was all a figment of the diplomat’s imagination. Those two men were simply not there at Heathrow.
Diplomacy was Mohiuddin Ahmed’s forte. His reflections on the history of global diplomacy, of the pitfalls it stumbled into and of the vistas it opened up, were riveting. He was a voracious reader.
Those who read avidly, for whom books complement the natural course of life, are people whose comprehension of the world gives them that certain poise which marks them out as voices of wisdom. Ahmed’s was that voice of wisdom.
Mohiuddin Ahmed lived life on his own terms, on the heights, from where he looked down in disdain on all the oleaginous men and women to whom personal aggrandizement was all and the country mattered little.
This brave freedom fighter could have been our eloquent national voice in the powerful capitals of the world. He could have been a foreign policy expert, a national security advisor whose world view the Bangladesh state could have profited from.
In a world where mediocrity flows without end in streams of muddy hues, Mohiuddin Ahmed could well have made a difference. He could have been the brilliant, urbane foreign minister we never had after Kamal Hossain.
But did he complain? No. Did he have any regrets? None at all. He fought for his country and then fought those who kept it in their sinister grip for years.
In Mohiuddin Ahmed, the spirit of Trafalgar meshed in purposefully with the power of ideas and of words that was his, right till the end of his mortal existence.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.