Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is a name that evokes humanism and patriotism. He and independent Bangladesh are co-related in the same way that Nelson Mandela and South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi and India, President Abraham Lincoln and the US are.
I’d be selling the man short if I did not say that the contemporary generation needs to know what he stood for.
Sheikh Mujib’s academic career was rather uneven, but it’s impossible to determine the specific time when he embarked on his career as a politician. Whatever may be the time, it’s worth mentioning that he always had a natural proclivity towards politics, even from an early age.
History tells us that those were the painful times, under the British regime where Muslims were routinely subjected to deprivation, and hunger. This situation reverberated in the mind of the young Sheikh Mujib, so much so that he decided to join then Muslim league -- a welfare organisation for Muslims.
As a big fan of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Sheikh Mujib moulded his mind with the ideology, philosophy, and knowledge of politics that befitted the time.
He embroiled himself in sub-continent-wide anti-British agitation. His motto behind his activities was the emancipation of the people of this sub-continent from the shackles of British tyranny. He had his recurrent visits to the East and West Bengals, with the expectation of getting the masses mobilised against the English predators.
His political career reached the highest pinnacle during the era of our exploitation at the hands of Pakistan. In 1952, when the then Pakistani ruler hatched a heinous conspiracy to make Urdu the state language of the country, shrugging off Bangla, he, as a member of the Rashtrabhasa Sangram Parishad, lead a relentless protest against such linguistic oppression.
To silence him, Pakistan’s then prime minister Khawaja Nazimuddin had Sheikh Mujib incarcerated in Dhaka jail, and subsequently in Faridpur jail, where he held a hunger strike.
For this reason, on February 21, 1952, Sheikh Mujib simply got wind of the massacre as a prisoner instead of joining the language movement himself. As if trying to snatch away our language wasn’t enough, the rulers went about violating every possible right that we as a people were entitled to as human beings.
It turned out that injustice was the thrust of the governance of the martial administration of Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and others.
The East Pakistani people’s great friend, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, raised his head above the dictators with utmost courage and firm determination.
He founded his political party, the Awami League, in 1944 with assistance from Suhrawardy and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. His leadership, in particular his six-point demand, posed a massive threat to the government of that time. He felt the wrath of the martial juntas -- they confined him behind bars many times to try and bring him under their control. In 1958, he had to undergo an imprisonment of 14 months in connection with a trumped-up case.
In 1965, Pakistani Islamist fascists brought forth a charge of sedition against Mujib, which awarded him a one-year imprisonment. On May 8, 1966, he was arrested at the end of a speech in the meeting of the Narayanganj jute mill labourers.
On January 17, 1968, he had hardly stepped out of the jail gates after being released, that he was incarcerated again. Finally, on March 1971, he had to go through a three-day detention in Dhaka Cantonment before being carried to a Pakistan jail -- in Faisalabad jail he was handed the death sentence in the verdict of his trial.
To his oppressors, Sheikh Mujib was a barrier that was as steady and towering as the Himalayas. On the other hand, he was an unfathomable ocean of humanism to the oppressed.
As a spiritually ever-alive entity, he is a perennial source of patriotism, inspiration, and humanity to everybody. He was a paradigm to be followed, a road to be taken. He should be enshrined in the heart of our heart.
Let his ideology, philosophy, and greatness guide our lives and be a catalyst for a positive change in our society.
