Remembering the judge -- Murshed

Justice S.M. Murshed

BACK in 1968, Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan was in terrific form. He celebrated the tenth year of his seizure of power through a frenzy of exhibitions as well as exhibitionism. The moment was one of intense fulfillment for the man, for he was the only ruler in the history of Pakistan till that point in that country's history, to have survived in office for a decade. And, appropriately enough, the celebrations that deluged the country were given official sanction as the decade of development.
It was a time of wonder and amusement. The wonder arose from the thought that the dictator was proving to be incapable of calling forth humility. The amusement came in the reality of what his minions were doing despite knowing all too well the troubles that were brewing across the horizon. It was one thing that the people by and large were unaware of the ominous sings of trouble around the corner, because of the simple fact that the process of information in the Ayub era was totally under bureaucratic and political control. But it was quite another thing for the men around the field marshal not to comprehend the doom that was on the way.
A dictator can only survive that long, which means as long as his luck holds. In October 1968, the irony was that even as Ayub Khan was busy carousing in the celebrations of his overthrow of a civilian government in 1958, his luck was beginning to grow thin. The very next month he decided that men as disparate in political thought as Khan Abdul Wali Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could not be allowed to roam free. That was enough. The two were hauled off to jail, as per the appropriate provisions of the Defence of Pakistan Rules. In what used to be East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was already in deep trouble, or so the president's people thought, with the Agartala Case looming large over his future. The future, as Ayub saw it once Wali and Bhutto were marched off to prison, was safe. Maybe even assured.
It was misjudgment of the most terrible kind. But it was only to be expected. The trouble with people who come to power minus the sanction of the people, or without the consensus of men of significance, is that at a certain point in their overlordship of the country they tend to run amuck. If they don't, they simply stagnate into wheezy old men who do not know that a rock is around the next bend in the river. And the rock promises to beat everything to pulp. The point here is that what happened once Ayub Khan thought he had the politicians on the leash was the rise of non-political beings in the political consciousness of the country.
The news came in minute form. Again, that is a hallmark of dictatorship. All opponents are to be kept at bay, because they are a positive threat to the illegitimate exercise of power. And if the matter is one of acquainting the people with the presence or intentions of these opponents, the natural thing to do is to limit their appeal. This a dictatorship does through methods crude and comical. So when retired air marshal Asghar Khan announced, within days of the Bhutto-Wali arrest, that he was coming into politics, the media reduced the event to a little item in the negligible portions of newspapers.
The same was resorted to when Justice S.M. Murshed took the surprising but courageous step of telling the country that he too was there to participate in the country's politics. And, obviously, the fundamental reason behind the entry of the air marshal and the judge was to give the opposition a shot in the arm. And what a shot it was! It rocked the boat, the one in which the field marshal and his complacent loyalists has so long been cruising.
The rest of history, at least that part of it which began and ended with Ayub Khan, is now a matter of record. But what has remained un-noticed, or deliberately ignored, for a very long time is the impact of the moment created by Murshed and Asghar Khan. It is especially the impetus give by Justice Murshed to the politics of Pakistan that needs review at this distance in time. The plain fact is that Murshed brought into politics, into the negativism it had reduced itself into, a form of enlightenment that only men with intellectual content can cause to happen His record as part of the judiciary was one without scars. More importantly, his courage in the face of institutionalised nonsense, particularly the art personified by Abdul Momen Khan and the elements who thought the land would be a lot better off without Rabindranath Tagore rousing the people of East Pakistan to cultural patriotism, is a fact that has become part of the Bengali psyche.
The one point that will for long remain pinned to the Bengali consciousness is the role S.M. Murshed performed without ambivalence in the centenary celebrations of Tagore's birth in 1961. That was, perhaps, Murshed's defining moment; and he never looked back after that. And that is one reason why it was with little regret or agonising that he walked away from the judiciary in the latter part of the sixties. His coming into politics in 1968 was therefore little that could really surprise those who knew him.
Consider the times in which Justice Murshed took the plunge into politics. Pakistan was stirring itself out of lethargy, despite the clear attempt at an emasculation of its politics by the military-bureaucrat complex holding the reins of authority. But by far the most intense kind of politics was being conducted -- and quite naturally too, given the political sensibilities of the people of the region -- in East Pakistan. The causes were of course pretty much discernible. The trial of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in what the government was putting across as a case of conspiracy to have the eastern wing secede from the rest of Pakistan, had only exacerbated sentiments among the Bengalis.
To be sure, Maulana Bhashani was there, ever ready to take up the cudgels on behalf of the people. But his politics, so long agitational, only promised to be even more so in the days to come. In contrast, what Murshed was offering was a condition in which Bengali politics, and by extension, overall Pakistani politics, would attain the opportunity of intellectualising itself through democratic reasoning. But Murshed did not delude himself. His goal was not to officiate as the Bengali spokesman, or even as a Pakistani spokesman in the essence of their recognised leaders. Neither was he willing to place himself in a situation where he or anyone else would take his entry into the political arena as indispensable. Yes, the indispensability was there in that S.M. Murshed needed to prevent politics from collapsing within itself in the face of the Ayub Khan stranglehold.
But personal indispensability? It was not for Murshed to consider the issue of power, of wielding it or sharing it with anyone. His job, one that was clear to him and also to those who tried reading meaning into his move, was to keep politics responsive enough to people to keep itself going. It was also what Asghar Khan was busy trying to do in West Pakistan. But the difference between the two men was that Khan, because of his long association with the regime and that too with the military part of it, was a novice when it came to operating with political elements. Murshed was the quintessential scholar, the man who measured men and matters in terms of everything that came in association with the modern. He observed issues from a decidedly judicial or legal point of view. And he looked at the social picture through the prism of morality.
It was his understanding that Pakistan, as it stood in the winter of 1968, was quite incapable of carrying itself forth with dignity or credibility unless it was willing or energetic enough to bore deep into its soul. The six points of the incarcerated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were on the table. The points, Murshed knew, were not the last word. But they were certainly the premise from which a new beginning had to be made. The judge was not interested in the future outside the door. His gaze was on the horizon. For Pakistan, thanks to its adventurists -- Ayub Khan and all -- the horizon was shadowed by things murky.
Come 1968. The stock of Justice Murshed rose, as thoughts of a departure by Ayub Khan began seizing the popular imagination. It was said in varied circles, including official ones, that Murshed would be the man to preside over the transition to a new state of politics in Pakistan. It is interesting to imagine the state of the country as it would have shaped up under an administration led by President Murshed. Fate, and the machinations of duplicitous men in the barracks, made sure that history would run away from Murshed and then crush the country under its weight, just two years into the future. The magnificence of S.M. Murshed, however, has stayed undiminished across the years. He remains the focus of morality in these troubled times. That is he tribute on a grand scale.

(This is a reprint of an article printed earlier.)

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.