Our greatest hero

After the birth of Bangladesh, in the early seventies, a tall and bespectacled gentleman stood up to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. Leaders of more than a hundred countries stood up and clapped for full five minutes!
The handsome leader of the Bengalis nodded to his right and nodded to his left, smiled to his front and smiled to his back, but the clapping didn't stop. He had to wait for an unusually long time to begin speaking. And he spoke in his favourite mother tongue, a language for whose rights young people had shed blood on the streets of Dhaka during Pakistan's colonial rule.
The love and respect showered on him by the people of the world definitely made his people proud. Yours truly was a teenager then, and has remembered the UN incident with great pride all his life. Our leader was a Nelson Mandela, a Mahatma Gandhi, a George Washington to people around the globe. He was the architect of a nation's birth.
Alas! Great powers don't like freedom-loving nationalist leaders. They prefer henchmen. So our great leader got only three years and a half to rule the land he had freed after a fight of two decades or more. Mountains were made out of molehills, and there were conspiracies galore. Finally, there was a tragic end to his life. He was killed with almost his full family. Even his ten-year-old youngest son was not spared. His two daughters were abroad and escaped death. One of them became a successful prime minister of this country twenty-one years after his death.
Thirty-two years after his death, he is still the greatest leader of this land. He will remain so perhaps a hundred years later too. People love and respect him. They have forgotten his follies, which are unimportant. They remember his great qualities, which are important.
He loved them to a fault, and they loved him in return. As the poet reminds us, so long our rivers will have water in them, our people will have affection for him.
The present government feels the necessity of evaluating him properly. The chief advisor and the army chief have visited his mazaar. The army chief has publicly called for proper recognition for him. This would not have been necessary if external and internal conspirators were still not active. Conspiracy against the architect of our independence, against the Father of the Nation! This would not be possible anywhere else in the world, not even in India or Pakistan. Why are we so mean, so selfish?
People who directly opposed our independence pass judgments on him, and a section of our press prints such words with importance. Some people are ready to put his photograph on the wall along with those of five other leaders. There are always crooked people ready to belittle the best son of Mother Bengal. They were ready to worship M A Jinnah. They found nothing wrong with the respect received by Mahatma Gandhi in India. What, then, is wrong with Bangabandhu?
Bangabandhu was not a brown sahib, drinking Scotch whiskey and speaking English. He was a simple, middle class man. That is a mental block for some of us. We are used to worshipping sahibs. Or some of us are plain crooks.
We can worship Jinnah, but not the simple, punjabi-clad, fish-eating leader from Gopalganj, who had spent his life fighting for our rights. Our perversity defies logic at times.
If Bangabandhu had not been born, we would not have been a free nation on December 16, 1971. He was the undisputed leader of our freedom struggle. President Ziaur Rahman never failed to call him a noble leader. Even President Ershad once told the parliament that he was a little mouse in comparison with the great mountain named Bangabandhu.
People around the world respect him as the founding father of our nation. But why do some of his political opponents fail to show the unconditional respect that he so richly deserves?
This time a neutral caretaker government is in power. Bangabandhu's death anniversary deserves observation at the state level. Disrespecting him is disrespecting the nation. If we forget him, what shall we be left with? He is the best flower of our thousand-year-old garden of politics.
During our war of independence he was the most popular leader in our history. People fasted for him and prayed for him. A poet wrote that when he raised his hand, even trees stood at attention.
History won't forgive us if we fail to show proper respect to our greatest hero.

Junaidul Haque is a writer and columnist.