A life lived intensely . . .
Syed Badrul Ahsan reads a young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
A few hours before his life was put to a brutal end by assassin-soldiers in August 1975, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was reading Shaw's Man and Superman. That was typical of him, for he was an intense reader in his private moments. In his public appearances, he was an inspirational leader, an orator the likes of whom are but rarely observed in history. He was as much an admirer of men like Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln as he was a fan of Bertrand Russell. Among his other heroes was, of course, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. His respect for Mohammad Ali Jinnah, despite his later and growing disenchantment with the state of Pakistan, endured. In Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Mujib spotted the quintessential political rebel on whom a nation could depend to work wonders. His admiration for the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam was immense, to a point where, as Bangladesh's founding father, he had the Rebel Poet brought over to Dhaka from Calcutta in May 1972. It was a classic and yet rare instance of a rebel meeting a rebel. Bangabandhu's library at his residence, now a memorial to him, at 32 Dhanmondi remains testimony to his voraciousness as a reader. That his reading carried definitive meaning for him came through in his political dealings with other political figures in Pakistan, notably those who consistently sought to put him into a straitjacket and thereby into silence. His wide reading gave him a suavity that did not easily come to others. You have before you the example of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of his foremost rivals in the dramatic year of 1971. Bhutto was a keen reader, but his reading did little to curb the arrogance in him. In Mujib, reading was an art to be mastered in the interest of healthy politics. It was his reading, together with his sharp political acumen, which helped him deal in sophisticated manner with such powerful yet sinister men as Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and, to be sure, Bhutto. Away from South Asia, Bangabandhu's understanding of history as gleaned from the books he read were the prop on which he based a clear, firm image of his country. He took no nonsense from Saudi Arabia's King Faisal; and he swatted Nigeria's Yakubu Gowon down when the latter questioned the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. That was the reader in Bangladesh's founding father. And all these years, students of Bangladesh's history have wondered whether Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had he lived long, would have penned his memoirs or left his ideas of his politics and his times on the record in any other form. Now we know that there was a writer in him, one who was ready to let his people as also people around the world know of the politics he was part of, of the role he played in the forging of that politics. In Oshomapto Atyojiboni (or The Unfinished Memoirs in its English translation), Bangabandhu reveals his abilities as a historian, albeit as one who has had a major part in the making of that history. Nearly thirty seven years after his assassination, we are now in possession of this unfinished autobiography and that too because of the persistence, if you will, of his wife Fazilatunnessa Mujib. She was, of course, Renu to him, the mother of his children, the woman who took charge of the home front, who looked to their children's upbringing, who indeed made it a point to make sure that the family never suffered as Mujib moved from politics to prison and back again, repeatedly over the years. The future founder of Bangladesh puts it aptly in these incomplete memoirs: "I was always a traveller", says he. The Bengali term he uses is 'musafir'. And Mujib was indeed that, a musafir. His best years, in youth and in middle age, were spent in the pursuit of politics or in warding off the ceaseless attacks made on him by various regimes in Pakistan. Just how stubborn the Pakistani establishment was about handling Mujib firmly comes through in a description of a meeting of Jugto Front ministers and Pakistan's central government in May 1954. That was only days before East Bengal's new government would be dismissed under Section 92-a. As many as five hundred people, Bengalis and non-Bengalis, had already died in fierce violence at Adamjee Jute Mills, a fratricidal exercise let loose on the day Mujib and a number of others were sworn in as ministers by Chief Minister AK Fazlul Huq. As the meeting got under way, Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra spoke rather rudely to Fazlul Huq. Mujib was unable to stomach Bogra's behaviour and told him off. That quite irritated the prime minister, who told the young minister, 'Mujibur Rahman, I have here a thick file on you.' He then proceeded to throw the file before Mujib, who, unimpressed, told the prime minister, 'It's only natural that you will have a file on me. After all, thanks to people like you, I have spent time in jail. Besides, the provincial government has a file on you too.' A stunned Bogra asked, 'Meaning?' Mujib's answer was a pointed one: 'When Khwaja Nazimuddin formed his cabinet in 1947, he did not include you in his cabinet. In 1948, when we registered our first protest over the language issue, you secretly contributed two hundred rupees to our cause. Do you remember? Most people do not remember the past.' The Unfinished Memoirs are a narrative spanning the years between Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's birth and his rise as a prominent politician in Pakistan by 1955. And why is there absolute silence after 1955? The response is a simple one: these memoirs, compiled within the three years between 1966 and 1969, when Bangabandhu was imprisoned over the Six Points and then put on trial in the Agartala Conspiracy Case, go up to 1955 for the obvious reason that after February 1969, when Mujib was freed and the Agartala Case was withdrawn, he immersed himself in a wider national political whirlpool. Politics simply turned more intense, with Mujib, who by then had become Bangabandhu, fully engaged in his battle to win political power on an all-Pakistan basis at the projected elections in late 1970. As history demonstrates all too well, he was to have yet one more spell in prison between March 1971 and January 1972. It was the year of Bangladesh's armed struggle for freedom from Pakistan. Having declared independence for Bangladesh, Mujib found himself a prisoner of the Pakistan state in what was then West Pakistan. With no access to pen and paper, deprived of newspapers and radio and television and human company, Bangabandhu was literally on death row, thanks to the marauding junta of General Yahya Khan. Hence an absence of any addition or fresh chapters to these memoirs we now have in hand. But these memoirs are nevertheless a detailed study of the evolution of a politician. Mujib's description of the Calcutta riots of 1946, following the declaration of a Direct Action Day by the All India Muslim League, are a reminder of a dark era. The city plunged into chaos and, like so many others from both the Hindu and Muslim communities, Mujib found himself hard-pressed to provide relief to the victims of the riots. His descriptions of the silent streets, the bodies of innocent men and women strewn all over the city, the fears gripping those yet alive are a powerful account of the period from one who saw it all. And yet he went on believing in the need for Pakistan. A separate state for Muslims was, for him and for millions of other young supporters of the Muslim League at the time, not merely a necessity but an inevitability as well. His convictions in place, Mujib travelled to Patna, Bihar, to be part of the reconciliation process between Hindus and Muslims there. And then, in one of those bizarre moments in history, Pakistan took shape. Mujib left Calcutta, albeit with that certain sense of loneliness at the thought that his leader Suhrawardy had stayed behind. Suhrawardy would face a number of hurdles, not least the reluctance of Jinnah's successors about letting him enter Pakistan. The Unfinished Memoirs are essentially the story of a young man from the middle class trying to make a difference in the world he was part of. And the difference comes with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's belief in the ability of democratic politics to carry a people to the heights of grandeur. Throughout his political career --- and that began in school --- Mujib's belief lay firmly embedded in constitutionalism. Which was a reason why he told Moulana Bhashani, who had earlier asked him to avoid being arrested (and this was soon after the founding of the Awami Muslim League in June 1949), that it was not in his nature to run from the police. 'How will I keep hiding like this?' The Moulana told him to travel to Lahore and acquaint Suhrawardy, who by then had arrived in Pakistan, with news of the repression the Muslim League government had let loose on the new party. Mujib arrived in Lahore, only to discover that Suhrawardy had left the city for a few days. It was in a dilemma he was put into, seeing that he had only two rupees with him and no warm clothes for the winter then running riot in the Punjab. He was hungry, but then reasoned that if he used up his two rupees in food, he would be in a quandary. It was sheer good fortune that brought him in touch with Suhrawardy's West Pakistani political associates. Suhrawardy, back in Lahore, arranged for him to stay in an inexpensive hotel, brought him some warm clothes and introduced him to West Pakistani political figures. Mujib made his way back to East Pakistan through a series of stealthy means that one encounters only in movies. Everywhere the train carrying him stopped, government intelligence personnel were on the look-out for him. But he always stayed a step ahead of them, sometimes waiting behind a tree and then making a dash for the train as it began to move again, sometimes sitting at a station tea stall in hat and dark glasses and long coat even as the intelligence men walked by. Closer to home --- he was missing his family, especially daughter Hasina and newborn son Kamal --- he resorted to similar maneouvres. He alighted from the launch a few ghats away from home, then walked and eventually made his way to his village by rickshaw. The rickshawpuller, incidentally, knew him. He was bhaijan to everyone, as yet to be Mujib bhai or Bangabandhu. These are real stories of a real politician in Bengal's real life. You get a sense of the wrong turnings Pakistani politics was beginning to take so soon after partition in 1947. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, pursued by the police, jumped from a rooftop, to land on the roof of a neighbouring building, his feet landing on a bucket in the process and alerting the owner of the house to fishy things going on. He was hit by the police, badly enough to fall into a drain and fall nearly unconscious. In Lahore, he was accosted by agents of the Liaquat Ali Khan government, to be accused as an enemy of Pakistan. They tried to hit him, literally. He warded off the blows somehow. Liaquat Ali Khan, after all, was a sinister, vainglorious man. 'I don't know what the Awami League is', he told newsmen in Dhaka. Pakistan was surely in a state of premature decline. Humour and pathos, together with a sense of history, permeate the work. Moulana Bhashani, Shamsul Haque and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, about to begin a public rally of the Awami Muslim League in Jamalpur, are informed by police that Section 144 had been imposed. An angry Mujib makes it known that he will speak at the rally, but Bhashani has other ideas. He says he will respect Section 144 and then asks the crowd to raise its hands in prayer, in munajat as it were. All hands go up, including those of the policemen. In a long munajat, the Moulana leaves out nothing that he would have said had the rally not been proscribed by the authorities. Mujib marvels at the ingenuity in Bhashani. As a story, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Oshomapto Atyojiboni makes gripping reading. As a historical document of politics in early days' Pakistan, it is a pointer to the future that was to be, for Mujib and for his people. And it reveals the poet in the man. Abbasuddin sings a bhatiali song on the river, in the plenitude of soft emotion. Mujib listens. And he watches the waves in the river sway to the rhythm of the melody. Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
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