Waging war against Bangabandhu
NOT many days ago, Sadek Hossain Khoka loftily informed the country that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's desire in 1971 was to be prime minister of Pakistan. If you choose to remind yourself, there are hordes of anti-Mujib elements in this country who will keep speaking of Bangabandhu's 'surrender' to the Pakistan army on the night of 25-26 March 1971. You are, therefore, not really surprised at the dissembling such men do in their parochial interest. The problem with Khoka, though, is that he was a freedom fighter and without question waged war against Pakistan in the name of Bangabandhu. He was young, he was idealistic and he knew full well that the supreme leader in whose name the war was being fought was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Why does he undermine himself only because he serves a party that conveniently mangles the truth?
In the days of Hussein Muhammad Ershad, JSD leader ASM Abdur Rab was once asked if he considered Mujib the Father of the Nation. His response was rather intriguing. The nation, said he, was in little need of a father or an uncle or any other guardian. The people of the country, he went on, had waged a war of liberation and had freed themselves of foreign rule. The implication was clear: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman did not matter, was of little consequence. If one were to go by Rab's understanding of history, Mujib had no role in the making of this country. And yet there was a time, between early 1971 and late 1972, when Bangabandhu did mean a whole lot to Rab and others like him. And Bangabandhu mattered again in 1996, when Rab emerged in his new avatar as a minister in the government formed by Sheikh Hasina in June 1996. Suddenly, Mujib was again Bangabandhu, again Father of the Nation.
There are instances of Bengali officers of the Pakistan foreign service who stayed loyal to Pakistan and its new leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto right till 1974. In all that time, they went around informing other Bengalis stranded in Pakistan that Bangladesh was a fleeting moment in history, that it would soon return to being part of Pakistan. By 1974, the state of Pakistan had had enough of these loyal Bengali-Pakistanis and threw them out of service. One of these diplomats, unemployed and without a country, turned up in Geneva, where Bangabandhu happened to be recuperating after hospitalization in London, seeking a meeting with him. His goal was obvious: he needed a job. And he got it. Once Bangabandhu had been murdered, he went back, like so many other ingrates, to his old business --- that of badmouthing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
So you are really not surprised when a pretender to political leadership, one whose record of academic studies has always been under question, now questions the legitimacy of Bangabandhu's assumption of the office of Bangladesh's prime minister in 1972. The surprise is not that Tarique Rahman has emerged in public with this new instance of nonsense. It is in the fact that like so many others in his paternal political organization, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, he has little knowledge or understanding of history. Or, again like Khoka, he is deliberately twisting history out of shape. Are we surprised? His father took part in the war of liberation, and then made sure that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was wiped off the pages of national history and stayed that way for twenty one years. His mother, initially unable to decide the precise moment and day when she opened her eyes to life and the charms of God's world, eventually zeroed in on the notion that she was born on 15 August. That is a most wonderful discovery. Here you have a nation steeped in mourning on the day; and there you have a party where the number of candles goes up every year in celebration of the 'birthday' of its leader. History and truth be damned.
Bangabandhu continues to arouse intense emotions among those who have never forgiven him for liberating us from Pakistan. Some months ago, the BNP's Sakhawat Hossain Bakul, clearly intending to introduce new controversy around Bangabandhu's reputation, dished out the untruth on television that the Father of the Nation had been accompanied by Shah Azizur Rahman, the well-known Bengali collaborator of the Yahya Khan junta, to the Islamic summit in Lahore in February 1974. In what he thought was a buttressing of his argument, he produced a photograph where an elderly figure in western attire and Jinnah cap stood beside Bangabandhu at Lahore airport. He did not know, or chose to create a lie, that the man beside Bangladesh's leader was Pakistan's President Fazle Elahi Chaudhry. He probably had forgotten that there were people in this country ready to put him in his place. And they did.
A Bengali who once served in the Pakistan army and, after his repatriation to Bangladesh, in the Bangladesh army once told a proud Bengali woman here in Dhaka in peacock-like arrogance that he did not consider Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the Father of the Nation. She hurled at him a response that surely put him to shame. For ourselves, here is a point we cannot forget: had Bangabandhu not led this nation to freedom, our military officers would have gone no higher than the rank of colonel in the Pakistan army and most of our brilliant civil service officers would likely have retired as no more than joint secretaries in the various ministries.
There are people who had little compunction in linking up with Khondokar Moshtaque after August 1975, who became the pillars in his hideously contrived Democratic League. These men had been raised to prominence by Bangabandhu and yet had turned on him, in the manner of Brutus and Cassius and Casca. For years after 1975, they waged war against the dead Bangabandhu. Today, because circumstances have changed, they never tire of singing, once more, endless paeans to the Father of the Nation. The chameleon always triumphs.
Be forewarned. If you have been told that Bangabandhu was not the first president of Bangladesh, if you have been informed that he wished to be prime minister of Pakistan, if you have been handed the 'new truth' that he was an illegal prime minister, a day might come when these enemies of the Father of the Nation, indeed of this People's Republic, will whisper into your ears that no War of Liberation took place in 1971, that we never went out of Pakistan, that the Mukti Bahini were really a bunch of conspirators out to destroy a beautiful Islamic republic created by their ancestors.
If you can repudiate the founding father of your republic, you can commit any sort of criminality. Because you have forgotten the meaning of shame.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: [email protected]
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