The intellectual in the guerrilla
Mohit Ul Alam finds a work on Khaled Musharraf riveting
Brave of Heart is a 352-page book by Bir Pratik Habibul Alam (Sector -2 and K- Forces) on the guerilla operations conducted by him and his friends in Dhaka during the liberation war. The book provides a fascinating reading of the daredevil actions of the guerilla FF's that shook the Pakistani junta to its core. In a simple but thrilling way, reminding one of the style of either Mario Puzo in The Godfather or Truman Capote in In Cold Blood, Alam describes the incidents and happenings in a matter-of-fact manner though the reader will every minute while reading it be haunted by his language laden with a fictional quality. Though written, naturally, from the rival perspectives, Alam's book will also remind one of the Pakistani classic written on the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Witness to Surrender by Siddik Salik. Guerilla operations in Dhaka started from May that year when resistance in its various strategic forms was contemplated by the Bangladesh government-in-exile and the military officers who had already defected from the Pakistan army and were stationing themselves across the border and planning full-scale war operations. It struck the brave Major Khaled Musharraf, commander of Sector -2, that if students from Dhaka University and other city institutions could be lured to participate in guerilla warfare within the city, the Pakistan army would remain unsettled and when the time came for a full-scale war the guerillas would by then have done much of the work of attrition. Brave of Heart in a way is a paean to one of our greatest freedom fighters, Major Khaled Musharraf, who along with his most trusted adjutant Major A. T. M. Hyder ("with his left arm plastered and resting in a sling") had formed the first guerilla unit under K-Force to disable Dhaka from the beginning phase of the war. Khaled's planning and masterminding the operations one after another, recruiting guerillas irrespective of their political identity, organizing youth bands into professional guerillas through proper training and motivation, and at the same time instructing them on their own safety once they are inside the enemy zone, and making them see the difference between over-heroism and heroism based on calculated risk, and finally building up a rehabilitation hospital in Bisramganj, Tripura, where female freedom fighters took on themselves the role of the nursesin all these Khaled has left a strong imprint not only on Alam and his co-fighters but also on us readers. One only wishes Khaled and Hyder hadn't died in the fateful coup of 1975 by the 10th Bengal. Cry, my beloved country, for such great heroes you have lost. Alam, the only son in the family of Engineer Hafizul Alam, left their Dilu Road house in the first week of April and along with three friends, Zia, Qayuum and Lichang, crossed the border to join the Sector-2 headquarters at Motinagar, Tripura, India. Sector Commander Major Khaled Musharraf came one day to meet the new recruits. The following is an excerpt from Alam's description of this first encounter: "A fair, tall and handsome man stepped out of the jeep the moment the sepoy opened the door for him. . . . He wore dark blue pinstriped trousers, yellow full-sleeve shirt and a belt with a holster holding a pistol. . . . Maj Khaled, a tall, very handsome young man, glanced at us for a few moments and started speaking fluently in Bangla and English. . . . He said that he would fight the Pakistan army and its government on three frontseconomic, political and military. Battles on all these three fronts would be fought simultaneously. Major Khaled spelled out his intentions in clear terms, explaining what he was going to do with the students who were joining his sector. He thanked the students of Dhaka and other districts for joining him and asked all of us present to have the courage and determination to understand what he called the guerilla warfare of Sector 2. The students would not only fight but would also ensure that the economy of the country was not crippled. This was only possible by planned insurgency at various places inside the country. . . . He rested his left elbow on his left thigh, like Rodin's 'Thinker', and then he spoke to us. From his right pocket he pulled out a packet of 555 cigarettes and lit one, . . . [and after a] . . . long puff, Major Khaled quoted Mao, "No government wants an alive guerilla". From May onward, until the fateful night of 29 August when the Pakistani military busted forty houses in Dhaka suspecting them (in most cases accurately) as guerilla hideouts and picked up Alam's comrades Bodi, Baki, Chullu Bhai, Samad Bhai, Rumi (Jahanara Imam's son), Jewel and many other great FF's one by one, many of them never to return, the guerillas had thoroughly shaken the Pakistan troops and destroyed their morale. By that time, Alam and his team had already mission-completed at as many as twenty spots, and the major operations among them that caught the global headlines were the two attacks on Hotel Inter-Continental (now Sheraton), the blowing up of the five power stations (including the one at Siddhirganj), the destruction of the power pump at Nilkhet and the ruin of the camp at Farmgate. The operations had almost a similar pattern. First, planning at the Dhanmondi Road 28 hideout (Chullu Bhai's office of a foreign agency), then reconnoitering the targeted spots for a couple of days, then positioning the guerilla groups at the vital spots on the day of the charge, synchronizing all their actions to the minutest degree, and having them completed. Sometimes the guerillas needed to use other people's cars forcibly to run an operation. Injury frequently happened. Mokles, FF Mukhter's brother, received a bullet in his chest, and it was Dr Azizur Rahman, a physician of the P.G. who operated upon the wound at Dhanmondi 28 hideout at the dead of night. Such help from the civilians was aplenty. Acting out a plan of Shahdat Chaowdhury, Alam's own sisters, Reshma and Asma, made numerous Bangladesh flags to fly in the Dhaka sky from floating gas balloons on 14 August 1971, virtually turning Pakistan's independence day into Bangladesh independence day. Some of the recapitulations of these operations are sensational and hair-raising. The episode of fixing up explosives at a toilet in the Hotel Intercontinental by the rookie recruit Baki (of Gulshan, not the one of Khilgaon) amidst tight security is described with such verve that one would not only feel how intimately the Libeartion War is re-visualized by one of its frontline fighters but also how such descriptions can inspire us and elevate our spirit and make us so hopeful about our country. The book germinates a sense of rejuvenation that is so rewarding. The busting of the hideouts happened, Alam records, from an all too-familiar scenario. Bodi, the great FF, was betrayed to the Pakistan army by one of his friends. By torturing Bodi the army extracted the next name, and the method continued. When news of the 29 August debacle reached Melaghar, the K-Forces Headquarters, Major Hyder wept like a child, but not forgetting their mission, the second line of guerillas was soon formed led by Nasiruddin Yusuf Bachchu and included Sadek Hossain Khoka and Mofazzal Hossain Maya among others. They conducted operations from Savar until liberation. Their major thrusts consisted of operations at Green Road and Motijheel. The book also records some very disturbing developments in the Muktijuddha camp even at that early time. Word spread that in the K-Forces most of the recruited FFs had been taken from leftist political student wings and not from Awami League student-front Chhatra League. Being under pressure from the government-in-exile, Khaled in great dismay had to send Shahidul Alam Khan Badal, a compatriot of Alam from the beginning, to another camp, his problem being that he was the youngest brother of Rashed Khan Menon, a leftist politician at the time (as history will have it Menon today is an MP on a 'boat' ticket). The other disconcerting bit of information that struck me as worth mentioning is the desire of Indian Brigadier Sabeq Singh for recruiting Hindus in the Mukti Bahini to give it a balanced composition. Accordingly, Major Khaled sent Shahdat Chowdhury, Badal and Alam to the refugee camps to recruit at least 100 to 200 Hindu young men. But the young men who were approached "were ready to do anything for Bangladesh except fight the enemy". Hearing this Brigadier Sabeq Singh became very worried. A footnote on the following page says that this Sabeq Singh later on, after retirement, masterminded the Sikh uprising at the Golden Temple and died with Bhrindanwale in 1984. Alam has also presented heroic portraits of many a freedom fighter, from "A Born Fighter" Ishraque, whose witnessing a twenty-year pregnant woman being slashed by a Pakistani with his bayonet and yet not betraying him, is the most touching description in the book, to Cadet Kamrul Hasan Bhuiyan, Commander of Muradnagar thana, who didn't allow the Pakistanis to recapture the Nabinagar road through a three-day battle, and the valiant Subedar Wahab of Belonia who never for a day crossed the border but became a nightmare for the Pakistani troops, and Captain Abdul Gaffar Halder, Bir Uttam of 4th EBR. Beside these glorious images, the book also records heart-felt salutations to the Tripura inhabitants for their support, and such warm personalities as Dr Sujit Dey of Agartala in whose house Alam and Shahdat happened to meet Major Zia for the first time. Victory Day arrived on 16 December, 'butcher'-in-command Niazi surrendered. The next morning Alam came to know that an Indian officer would announce the independence of Bangladesh on radio and TV at 8:30 am. That couldn't be allowed to happen; the country's independence must be declared by a Bangladeshi. So Alam collected Fateh Ali Chowdhury and Shahdat Chowdhury and Shoheed and went to ex-DG Shamsul Huda Chowdhury's house at Eskaton and managed to have him make the radio station operational for them. They requested Maj ATM Hyder to do the announcement, who accordingly did it on both radio and later on in the afternoon on TV. The book has a picture of this announcement. The epigraphs at the chapter heads are aptly inspiring. One very minor factual mistake to note: the construction company, The Engineers Ltd., has been mentioned as having constructed the Kalurghat Bridge at Chittagong. It doesn't seem possible, because the said bridge had been there from the British period, when probably the firm didn't exist.
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