The story of January 10, 1972

In these 47 years which have gone by, I have remembered where I was, where millions of others were, on the day Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came home to the country he had led to freedom. 

January 10, besides being significant in Bangladesh’s national history, has been for me a tale of my journey into witnessing history as it happened first-hand. I was there at Tejgaon airport minutes after daybreak on this day in 1972, in the company of my friend Billal. 
A huge crowd had already gathered there, despite the fact that the Father of the Nation was not expected to arrive before early afternoon. It was thrilling to hear people greeting each other with a full-throated declamation of Joy Bangla. Liberty was in the air. 
It would take roundness once Bangabandhu stepped on to the soil of this free country, his country.

On January 10, it is the drama of the moments preceding Bangabandhu’s return to Bangladesh that I recall. None of us knew, even as the Liberation War went on for nine months in 1971, where he was or in what condition he was. 

All that we recalled was that troubling image of him in the custody of the state oPakistan at Karachi airport, an image sent out to the media in April by the Yahya Khan regime only to prove to the outside world that contrary to Bengali claims, Mujib was very much Pakistan’s prisoner and sure to face trial on charges of sedition. 

After all, Yahya Khan had vowed on March 26, 1971: “This crime shall not go unpunished.” In August of the year, for the first time in months, we had something of a clue as to where Bangabandhu was when the murderous regime announced that the Bengali leader would go on trial on the charge of waging war against Pakistan. And lest it embarrass itself, the military junta made sure the trial was held on camera. 

In 1971, not one among the 75 million Bengalis celebrated Eid. And every man, woman, and child prayed for Bangabandhu’s safety, prayed that he would not be executed by a junta gone insane. And, as we were to learn after liberation, Bangabandhu had been sentenced to death by the military tribunal. Had war between India and Pakistan not broken out on December 3, it is a near certainty that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would have been hanged by the Pakistani regime in clandestine fashion. 

The miracle of Bangladesh’s liberation was a huge factor in saving Bangabandhu’s life. Yahya Khan, minutes before he handed over power to ZA Bhutto on December 20, expressed the desire that the Bengali leader be executed in line with the verdict of the secret military tribunal. 

The shrewd Bhutto, knowing full well that such an act would jeopardize the lives of the 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war in Bangladesh, would have none of it. He placed Bangabandhu under house arrest on December 22, the very day the leaders of the Mujibnagar government came home to a free Bangladesh. Mujib and Bhutto were to meet for the first time since March five days later, on December 27.

That meeting was decisive. Bangabandhu learned through Bhutto, for the very first time, that East Pakistan had disappeared, that Bangladesh was free, though Bhutto did not exactly use that term. He resorted to chicanery. East Pakistan, he informed Bangladesh’s founder, was under Indian occupation. 

Bangabandhu spotted the reality between the lines. Bhutto wished for Pakistan and Bangladesh to maintain some links. Mujib would not make any commitment until he returned home. In the pre-dawn hour of January 8, 1972, Bhutto, Pakistan’s president by default, saw Mujib off at Chaklala airport. 

“The nightingale has flown,” he said to no one in particular. Hours later, Bangladesh’s founder arrived in London. The BBC was the first media organization to carry the news. But that was something I would not know until late in the evening here in Dhaka. 

Earlier, waiting at the reception of Bangladesh Betar in Shahbagh for an audition in English news reading, I suddenly was witness to the dramatic news that Bangabandhu had flown out of Pakistan but no one knew where he was headed. Everyone around me was truly agitated, and smelled a new Pakistani conspiracy. 

I decided to forgo the audition, literally ran home, in Malibagh, and tuned in to the radio for news. It came after dusk had fallen. “The East Bengali political leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman arrived in London a short while ago from Pakistan,” intoned the newsreader on the BBC’s World Service. 

We jumped for joy. An hour later, on the BBC’s Bengali Service, we heard Bangabandhu’s voice for the first time in 10 months: “I am happy to share the unbounded joy of freedom won in an epic liberation struggle by my people,” said he. Tears of overflowing happiness streamed down our faces.

Two days later, as soon as the comet aircraft bringing Bangabandhu home landed at Tejgaon, something magical happened. With thousands of others, I was on the road outside the terminal building. Within seconds — and I have no idea how it happened — I found myself on the tarmac, right beside the overcrowded truck that was to take the leader to the Race Course, today’s Suhrawardy Udyan. 

He looked thinner, ran his hands through his hair, smiled, and yet looked sombre. As the truck inched out of the airport, I tried to climb on to it from behind. There was barely space there for one of my feet. The other I let graze the road. Colonel Osmani sternly admonished me: “Khoka, betha paabe. Neme poro.” 

I did not heed his advice, and hung on to the truck all the way to the Race Course. 

These days, every time I see that picture of a returning Bangabandhu on the truck, in the company of all those important men, I know that in the rear there is a 16-year-old me hanging on to that vehicle. 

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor-in-Charge of The Asian Age.

Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune

The post Bangladesh: When the liberator came home appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Once again, xenophobia got the better of reason

The quality of political discourse has been in steep decline of late in India. Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has accused the very reputed Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) of waging war against India. 

And that is not all. In a recent broadside against Rahul Gandhi, who described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a chowkidar who has turned into a chor — a sentry who is now a thief — Sitharaman let out the tweet that the entire family of the Congress president was a bunch of thieves. 

“Rahul Gandhi ka khandan chor hai,” as she put it. 

Gandhi’s ire at the prime minister was aroused by what has come to be known as the Rafale affair, implicating the government in a questionable purchase of 36 Rafale jets for the air force from France. The firm authorized to handle the purchase was Anil Ambani’s Reliance group. Apparently the Indian authorities attempted to depict the choice of Reliance as a French initiative. 

That prompted a quick retort from Francois Hollande, who was French president in 2015 when he and Modi met in summitry, to the effect that his government had no choice over the Reliance decision. Indeed, said a statement from Hollande’s office, it was the Indians who proposed the name.

Sitharaman apart, prominent political figures in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been causing tremors in the South Asian region. Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, has been speaking of his worries over “illegal migrants” from Bangladesh. In his reflections on the subject, he focuses on the tens of thousands of Bengalis from Bangladesh, in his view, who have infiltrated India and taken up jobs which could well have gone to Indians. 

In an age of increasing xenophobia, all the way from Donald Trump’s America to increasingly right-wing-dominated Europe to Hindutva India, such outlandish nationalism is only to be expected. But what did shock people in India and Bangladesh was the facile manner in which Amit Shah referred to “illegal” Bangladeshis as termites who needed to be picked one by one and flung out of India. 

His tone was one of fury, an attitude which Indian politicians usually reserve for Pakistanis. But describing Bangladeshis as having entered India in unauthorized manner and insulting them as termites hits a new low even for the BJP.

Our sense of history reminds us, in light of Amit Shah’s termite-related politics, of the evil which Rwanda’s Hutus perpetrated against its Tutsis in 1994. The Tutsis were referred to as cockroaches which needed to be crushed if Rwanda was to be a pure country for its majority Hutus. 

What followed was predictable: Within a matter of days, as many as 800,000 Tutsis were done to death through a cheerful wielding of knives and machetes. The pogrom would not have stopped had Paul Kagame, himself a Tutsi, not entered Kigali forcefully in triumph and steered the country back to a semblance of civilized order. 

In Rwanda today, no one can speak of those dark times without feeling deep pain over the cockroach approach to murder. And now, we have men like Amit Shah spot in their advocacy of a nationalism that has been a subtle but absolute rejection of the political liberalism which underscored India till the advent of the BJP administration in Delhi.

For Bangladesh, the truth today centres around factors which call for vigorous diplomacy on its part to be handled. The BJP government in Assam has already muddied the waters through coming forth with the ill-advised National Register of Citizens, a weapon which, once it has identified real Indian citizens in the state, will go after those whose names did not make it to the NRC. 

Once again, xenophobia got the better of reason when the Assam authorities coolly informed the world that as many as 4,000,000 illegal migrants from Bangladesh had been identified. The implication was not hard to miss: These 4,000,000 people are now aliens, foreigners, or interlopers who cannot stay in India but will have to leave it. 

And go where? Silly question, that. There is Bangladesh, which is their home, say these purveyors of the new politics playing out in India. And what if Bangladesh refuses to accept them as its own, indeed, seals its borders with Assam?

That last question has not had a response, save for some right-wing Indian politicians to suggest that they will try to convince Bangladesh into accepting these 4,000,000 people whose names are missing on the NRC. It really does not matter for the Assam authorities that among the individuals whose names have not figured on the NRC and who now face the prospect of becoming stateless are a former chief minister of the state, and a Muslim at that, and a former judge of the High Court. 

Topping it all are the innumerable cases of Indians whose ancestors have lived, worked, and died in Assam for generations, and who have the documents to prove that they are not Bengalis.

Their stories have not been taken into consideration. For the BJP-wallahs in Assam, they are Bengalis from Bangladesh who have lived, married, and worked in the state in illegal manner and must now have their comeuppance.

Amit Shah’s termite politics has taken a big page out of Assam’s NRC textbook. One cannot be quite sure others in India will not follow in his footsteps.

For Bangladesh, already burdened with the weight of over a million Rohingya on its frail shoulders, the imperative today is for an initiation and practice of smart diplomacy. 

With Aung San Suu Kyi and her generals cheerfully putting the finishing touches to the genocide against the Rohingyas; with Assam’s NRC stealthily working away to deport 4,000,000 of its people on flimsy grounds; and now with a leading politician of the ruling BJP coming down hard on the illegal migrants issue, policy-makers in Bangladesh have a tough job on their hands. 

They need all the ingenuity and all the diplomatic skills they can muster in reassuring their people that matters will not go out of hand.

Will they do that? Can they do that? 

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist.

First Published on Dhaka Tribune

The post View from Bangladesh: Amit Shah and his termite politics appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It was a long war / BIGSTOCK
 

Three years ago, a retired Pakistani police officer named Raja Anar Khan appeared on Pakistani television to reflect on the duties he performed as an intelligence officer between April 1971 and early January 1972. 

Those duties related to guarding and keeping watch on Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, once the chief of the Awami League had been flown to erstwhile West Pakistan and lodged in solitary confinement in Mianwali.

Khan’s remarks were made before the well-known Pakistani media personality, Mujibur Rehman Shami, who I have had the pleasure of meeting on some of my trips to Pakistan. I have always found Shami to be a pleasant personality, keen on interacting with media people from the sub-continent. 

In his conversation with Khan in December 2015, Shami was able to ferret out some rich information about the dark times Bangladesh’s leader spent in Pakistani incarceration during the entire period of our War of Liberation.

Khan was placed in Mianwali jail in the guise of a prisoner, but really to keep watch on Bangabandhu. This strategy was adopted in order for Bangabandhu not to know that his movements were to be recorded by this officer. Khan told Shami that the Bengali leader, who was in a cell without access to newspapers, radio, and television, asked him why he too was in prison. 

Khan told him a lie. He was there, he said, on charges of abducting a woman. But, as he made it known, something told him Sheikh Mujibur Rahman did not believe him, and indeed knew somehow that he had been planted there to keep an eye on him.

Much of what we don’t know about Bangabandhu’s imprisonment by the Yahya Khan junta in 1971 came to light in the course of Khan’s reflections. When the regime placed Bangabandhu on trial before a secret military tribunal, he appeared before it, but after a few days refused to go there. 

He had already made it known that he did not recognize the court. For four or five days he stayed away from the tribunal, but was eventually persuaded by Khan and a couple of other officers to return. 

For the first three months or so, Bangabandhu remained guarded in his conversations with Khan. But then he began to be at ease in his company, at one point telling him after a court appearance that a Bengali brigadier, who had been testifying against him through telling the tribunal of his meetings with Mujib, was lying. 

He had never seen that officer in his entire life, Bangabandhu told Khan. 

At one point, once war broke out between India and Pakistan in early December 1971, the junta decided to shift Mujib from Faisalabad to Mianwali. The vehicle in which he was taken to Mianwali was stacked with pillows and quilts, with barely any space for Bangabandhu and his jailer, so that an observer along the route would not know if anyone other than the driver was in the vehicle. 

The windows of the vehicle were daubed in mud. Bangabandhu asked Khan why all that mud was there. Khan could not possibly let him know that a war was going on, but mumbled a response which the Bengali leader did not buy or could not follow. The vehicle sped to its destination.

In Sahiwal jail, Bangabandhu began keeping a diary into which he made daily entries.

Late in the evening of December 16, 1971, hours after the Pakistan army surrendered in Bangladesh, a senior prison official named Khwaja Tufail knocked loudly on the gate of the corridor leading to Bangabandhu’s cell in Mianwali prison. 

Khan, whose quarters were near the gate, initially refused to open it out of fear that doing so would lead to his prisoner coming to harm in light of the news from Dhaka. But Tufail persisted. 

When Khan let him in, both men unlocked the door to Bangabandhu’s cell and asked him to follow them out of the place. One recalls that a sentence of death had already been pronounced against Bangabandhu. 

Being woken up in the middle of the night somehow convinced him that he was being led to his execution. Indeed, he asked Khan and Tufail calmly if he was being led to the gallows. 

The two men told the Bengali leader his life was in danger in the cell and so they had to move him out of the prison. Information had reached them that the junta had been provoking jail inmates to assault and kill Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in reprisal for the surrender in Dhaka. Bangabandhu was put in a car and speedily moved out of Mianwali jail and to a safe house in town.

On the day Pakistan’s new President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to see Bangabandhu at Sihala rest house outside Rawalpindi, where he had been moved on December 22, Anar Khan, unbeknownst to both men, concealed himself behind a curtain to listen to their conversation. 

Bangabandhu was surprised at Bhutto’s arrival, and once the latter gave him some idea of the change that had occurred, expressed his indignation that power had been transferred not to the majority leader — which he was — but to the minority leader. Bhutto did not inform Mujib that East Pakistan had become Bangladesh.

On January 5, 1972, as Bangabandhu prepared to fly to freedom, Raja Anar Khan, who addressed Bangabandhu as Baba, asked him for a parting gift. By then, Bangabandhu had been given newspapers and a radio. 

He had a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He autographed it for Khan: “In the long war between the falsehood and the truth, falsehood wins the first battle and truth the last.”

Two days later, the Father of the Nation flew to freedom. 

In February 1974, in Lahore for the Islamic summit, Bangabandhu enquired after Raja Anar Khan and asked Pakistani officials to have him brought over. Conveyed Bangabandhu’s wish, Khan decided not to see him. 

He was afraid such a reunion would lead to his persecution by his own government in future. 

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist.

First Published on Dhaka Tribune

The post Pakistani jailer remembers incarcerated Bangabandhu appeared first on SabrangIndia.