There is quite something to be said about those Bengalis who somehow have not been able to rest easy with the place of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in history.
In the years after his assassination, a few politicians who had been his contemporaries cheerfully went into observing August 15 as “najat dibosh” (deliverance day). That was shameless behaviour, and they only ruined their own places in history by celebrating the murder of the nation’s founding father.
The late Syed Najmuddin Hashim -- civil servant, diplomat, and eminent scholar -- enlightened yours truly with remarkable tales of some Bengali civil service officers trapped in Pakistan in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s battlefield triumph in late 1971. Dismissed from service by the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and placed in camps all over Pakistan, these Bengali officers spewed venom against Bangabandhu and even made dire predictions that his new country would soon return to the fold of Pakistan.
These men had, after all, lost their cushy jobs and did not quite relish the prospect of working for a country that had till recently been a mere province of the state that now was disowning them. And yet, the irony is that these very men came home to Bangladesh and rose to high positions. They proved relentless, though, in their antipathy towards Bangabandhu.
And do not forget the Bengali officer in Pakistan’s foreign service stationed at the Pakistan mission in Delhi in 1971. On his annual leave he did not go to “East Pakistan,” but travelled to West Pakistan, where he quarrelled with other Bengalis and rudely described the Bengali liberation struggle as a conspiracy against Pakistan. He was interviewed by a well-circulated Urdu newspaper, where he referred to the Mukti Bahini as “miscreants.” He later served in senior positions in Bangladesh’s foreign service, of course after Bangabandhu’s murder, and even became a minister of state.
There is then the tale of the brother of Munier Chowdhury. An officer in the Pakistan army, he agreed with his Pakistani friends that Bangabandhu was “destroying” the Muslim country. When he first received news that his sibling had been kidnapped and killed in Bangladesh on the eve of its liberation, he quickly blamed the Mukti Bahini for the tragedy. He lapsed into stupefied silence when it swiftly became known that it was the al-Badr, the collaborators who had served as the quislings of the army he was serving, that had murdered Munier Chowdhury.
On a television program here in Bangladesh some years ago, a lawmaker of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party made a crude attempt to denigrate Bangabandhu. The Father of the Nation, he alleged, had travelled to Lahore for the OIC summit in February 1974 and on his team was Shah Azizur Rahman, the Bengali collaborator who had spoken for Pakistan at the United Nations in 1971.
Pressed to show evidence, he produced a photograph. It was one of Bangabandhu, flanked by Pakistan’s President Chaudhry Fazle Elahi and Prime Minister ZA Bhutto at Lahore airport. This Bangabandhu baiter had been trying to portray Fazle Elahi as Shah Aziz.
On the day Bangabandhu was assassinated, Brigadier HM Ershad, at the time on a training progam in Delhi, turned up at the Bangladesh High Commission and berated a diplomat for not pulling down Bangabandhu’s photograph in the room he happened to be in. Years later, in power, he permitted Bangabandhu’s assassins to form a political party and even had the leading assassin take part in the presidential election he organized in the late 1980s.
Ziaur Rahman made sure that Bangabandhu was airbrushed out of history. The indemnity ordinance decreed by the usurper regime of Khondokar Moshtaq was incorporated in the fifth amendment to the constitution. Quite a good number of Bangabandhu’s killers were sent off abroad to serve as diplomats at various Bangladesh missions! No assassin was ever brought to justice.
Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani lost little time in sending a message of felicitations to Moshtaq once Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family had been assassinated. And yet only five months earlier, he had welcomed Bangabandhu to Santosh and spoken supportively of the constitutional changes the Father of the Nation had brought about.
As for Moshtaq, it was arrogance he demonstrated in the fewer than three months he served as “president” of Bangladesh. In the last days of his life, he would inform anyone who visited him, in psychologically disturbed manner, that Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana were like his daughters, that he loved them. He was luckier than the killers he gave leadership to in 1975. He died in March 1996, three months before the Awami League returned to power.
And then there are all the men who, having come into prominence through association with Bangabandhu, turned their backs on his legacy with alacrity, in blatant opportunism after August 1975.
General MAG Osmany, having bravely resigned from parliament in protest against Baksal in January 1975, swiftly linked up with Moshtaq as the latter’s defense advisor once Bangabandhu had been silenced.
General KM Shafiullah and Air Vice Marshal AK Khandkar, removed from their positions in the army and air force in August 1975, were to serve for years as Bangladesh’s chief diplomats abroad under both Zia and Ershad.
KM Obaidur Rahman, Prof Yusuf Ali, and Mohammadullah all ditched their past with Bangabandhu and became part of the Zia military regime after 1975. Taheruddin Thakur, who was always seen around Bangabandhu in the final weeks of the latter’s life, was revealed to have been part of the conspiracy around August 15. Shah Moazzem joined Moshtaq’s Democratic League and later enthusiastically served the Ershad regime.
Abdul Malek Ukil, speaker of the Jatiyo Sangsad, told the media on a visit to London after August 15 that the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been the fall of an autocrat. He used the pejorative term “pheraon” to refer to his late leader.
Mohiuddin Ahmed, who had been a close friend of Bangabandhu, travelled to Moscow as Moshtaq’s envoy, his remit being to reassure the Soviet leadership that the new “government” in Dhaka valued its friendship with the USSR.
In the 1980s, M Korban Ali, the last minister for information in Bangabandhu’s government, joined the Ershad regime. So did Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, whose prominent role during the 1966 Six Point movement had become part of the nation’s history. Chowdhury would serve as prime minister under General Ershad.
M. Zahiruddin, once close to Bangabandhu and elected to the national assembly on the Awami League ticket in 1970 but later sidelined over his role in 1971, went to Islamabad in 1976 as Bangladesh’s first ambassador to Pakistan.
Syed Abdus Sultan, appointed high commissioner to Britain by Bangabandhu’s government, never missed any opportunity of informing people in London that he was the representative of the Father of the Nation in the United Kingdom. Bangladesh was Bangabandhu and Bangabandhu was Bangladesh, he said ad infinitum. On August 15, 1975, he reversed course. He later joined Moshtaq’s Democratic League.
Thus the chronicles of men who ought to have done better, known better, but did not. They have been expurgated from history, for good reason.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
