Another plot to erase the legacy of Bangabandhu
Bangabandhu’s legacy has endured. Questions about his post-1971 political moves have been there. But he remains a pivotal figure in Bangladesh’s history.
The People’s Republic of Bangladesh, having emerged as a sovereign State through a tortuous war of liberation 53 years ago, is currently caught in an existential crisis. In the aftermath of the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government in early August, the State has been reeling from one crisis to another owing specifically to the efforts of those who now hold political power to bring about a wholesale break with the past. Last week, the interim government in Dhaka cancelled eight national holidays linked to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s memory, including the March 7 commemoration of the informal declaration of the country’s independence by Mujib in 1971, the August 15 National Mourning Day marking his assassination, and the November 4 National Constitution Day.
On the very day the Awami League government lost power (August 5), mobs stormed Gonobhaban, the prime ministerial residence. Worse was the torching of the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhanmondi. The site, once the family home of Bangladesh’s founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the place where he and most of his family were gunned down in a bloody coup d’etat in August 1975, was turned into a museum to preserve Mujib’s legacy by his surviving children, his daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, in 1994.
The assault on the museum, popularly referred to as Dhanmondi 32, sent shock waves throughout the country. The security forces did nothing to prevent the rampaging mobs from setting it on fire. To date, no one in the interim government has condemned the ransacking and burning down of Dhanmondi 32, which raises questions about the motives of those currently wielding authority in Bangladesh.
It is not the first time that the legacy of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has come under attack in independent Bangladesh. His assassination in 1975 swiftly led to the coup leaders pushing the country down the road to mediaeval darkness. The nationalist slogan “Joi Bangla” was replaced with the Pakistan-sounding “Bangladesh Zindabad”. In the years following Mujib’s assassination, neither the name of Bangabandhu, revered as the Father of the Nation, nor of his close political associates who led the War of Liberation were mentioned in public. Mujib and the history of the war were airbrushed out of history. The legacy of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was restored only after Bangabandhu’s daughter Sheikh Hasina led the Awami League back to power in June 1996.
Mujib died at the age of 55, but in that relatively brief span of time he transformed politics in what was East Bengal/East Pakistan. Even as he argued for political pluralism in Pakistan, Mujib was focused on the rights of Bengalis within a State that had come into being through the partition of India in August 1947. Beginning in the mid-1950s and going all the way to the early 1970s, Mujib emerged as a Bengali nationalist unwilling to compromise on what he perceived was a need to end the political and economic discrimination against his people.
In all, Mujib spent 13 years in incarceration — the first prison stint was soon after the establishment of Pakistan and the last was when the Pakistan army arrested him and put him on trial before a military court in 1971. In the late 1960s, he was charged in the Agartala conspiracy case and accused of conspiring to have East Pakistan secede from Pakistan. Following a mass uprising, the case was withdrawn, and all accused were released in February 1969. At that point that a grateful nation conferred on him the honorific “Bangabandhu” (friend of Bengal). In December 1969, Mujib gave a fresh expression to Bengali aspirations by announcing that the province of East Pakistan would henceforth be known as Bangladesh.
A significant aspect of his career relates to the Six Points programme of regional autonomy he placed before Pakistan’s political classes in February 1966. Based on the Six Points, Mujib and the Awami League participated in the 1970 election. In a 313-seat national assembly, the Awami League won an impressive 167 seats. The man once tried for treason was now poised to take charge as prime minister (PM).
But that was not to be. Intrigue by the Pakistan army and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party to deprive the Bengalis of power in Islamabad eventually led to a genocide the army unleashed on March 25, 1971. Before his arrest, Bangabandhu passed on a declaration of independence to his party leaders in Chittagong. Bangladesh’s independence war raged over nine months. Crucial support from India and the Soviet Union buttressed the struggle as the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali guerrilla army, fought the Pakistanis.
Away in what was then West Pakistan, Bangabandhu, charged with waging war against Pakistan, was sentenced to death by a military court in November 1971. He escaped execution due to the intensification of hostilities between the Indian Army and the Mukti Bahini on one side and the Pakistan army on the other. Released from Pakistani captivity by the new government of Bhutto, Bangabandhu arrived in London on January 8, 1972. He flew to Delhi on January 10 to convey his gratitude to PM Indira Gandhi for India’s moral and material assistance to the Bengali cause. On the afternoon of the same day, he returned home to a tumultuous welcome.
Bangabandhu’s legacy has endured. Questions about his post-1971 political moves have been there, of course. But he remains a pivotal figure in Bangladesh’s history. His ideals of democracy and secularism underscore the nation’s ethos: He remains Bangladesh’s Father of the Nation.
Syed Badrul Ahsan, a Bangladeshi journalist,has authored biographies of Sheikh MujiburRahman and Bangladesh’s wartimePrime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad.The views expressed are personal
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