Review Essay
History, from one who made it
It was a young, bright Kamal Hossain who was taken on board Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's legal defence team in the Agartala conspiracy case in 1968. That was one of the early hints of the bigger role Hossain would play in the shaping of politics in what was till 1971 united Pakistan and, beyond that seminal year, the free republic of Bangladesh. Bangabandhu's faith in Hossain's legal abilities were made clear when the future founder of Bangladesh eventually joined, with Hossain as his constitutional adviser, after the withdrawal of the conspiracy case, the round table conference called by an embattled President Ayub Khan in Rawalpindi in February and March 1969.
Over the next couple of years, Kamal Hossain's prominence as a key adviser to Bangabandhu was revealed through his participation in the political negotiations, which eventually were to prove abortive, involving the Awami League leadership, the Yahya Khan junta and the Pakistan People's Party in March 1971. At these negotiations, Hossain, in the company of Bangabandhu, Tajuddin Ahmed and other senior figures of the Awami League, left little question as to how he perceived the case for regional autonomy as was being propounded by his party. During the protracted, often bitter talks, it was Kamal Hossain on whom devolved the arduous responsibility of not only articulating the finer aspects of the Six Points but also refuting, point by point, the arguments and objections raised by the legal team assisting President Yahya Khan. As Bangabandhu and his more senior party colleagues shaped the Awami League position at the talks, it was left to Hossain to explain that position in hard-nosed parleys with the junta's representatives.
There is little that one does not know about the events leading up to the emergence of Bangladesh in December 1971, a triumph which followed a nine-month genocide conducted by the Pakistan army once Yahya Khan fled to West Pakistan on the evening of 25 March 1971. And now come, from Kamal Hossain, the intricate details of what truly transpired during the negotiations, what the level of junta chicanery was and how gross the procrastination of the regime was before it abruptly and surreptitiously put an end to the talks on 25 March. And all day long the Awami League team, and with it the rest of the country, had waited anxiously for a political solution to the crisis. Hossain gives you the record in this necessary presentation of history from one who was there. Observe, in the writer's own words:
Since exhaustive discussions had taken place, what was required was to finalise a draft to be put before Bangabandhu and Yahya. I waited for a telephone call throughout the fateful day of 25 March. The telephone call never came. Indeed, when I finally left Bangabandhu at his residence at around 10.30 p.m., on 25 March, Bangabandhu asked me whether I had received such a call. I confirmed to him that I had not.
Bangabandhu and Bhutto
The rest is, of course, history. And it was history which essentially was being fashioned since the beginning of the decline of the Ayub regime. Kamal Hossain's disappointment with the role of the West Pakistan-based opposition at the round table conference in March 1969 is palpable. Ayub Khan refused to concede the demand for regional autonomy and the break-up of the One Unit scheme since, in his opinion, these were fundamental questions that could be taken up by the elected representatives of the people. The only concessions he ended up making were his regime's readiness to provide for a federal parliamentary form of government and elections based on adult franchise. Bangabandhu and the Awami League promptly dismissed Ayub's gestures. The Punjabi section of the political opposition did precisely the reverse. Here is Kamal Hossain's record of events:
No sooner had Ayub read out his award, the Punjabi leaders, without even waiting for a show of consultation among the members of the Democratic Action Committee, hastened to congratulate Ayub.
Ayub Khan's move predictably did not go down well with Bengalis, who swiftly made their response known through demonstrations in Dhaka. As Hossain tells the story, the beleaguered president knew only too well that only Bangabandhu's word was listened to with respect in East Pakistan:
He met Bangabandhu immediately after the breakdown of the Conference and pleaded his inability to accept the Six Points demand on the ground that constitutional amendments to give effect to it would not muster enough support in the National Assembly.
Kamal Hossain with Krishna Menon (right)
The significance of Kamal Hossain's record of events, all the way from his return to Dhaka at the end of his legal studies in Britain and right till the assassination of Bangabandhu and the violent overthrow of his government, consists in his being the only surviving member of a Bengali team which remains a pivotal force in any enumeration of history in these parts. By virtue of his closeness to Mujib, Hossain was privy to much information that one did not know before the arrival of this work. Take, for instance, the report K.M. Kaiser, a senior Bengali diplomat who would serve both Pakistan and Bangladesh as ambassador to China, conveyed from Governor S.M. Ahsan to the Awami League parliamentary party then meeting at Hotel Purbani. This was towards the end of February 1971; and the report noted that a decision had already been taken to postpone the National Assembly session scheduled for early March in Dhaka. On the evening of 28 February, Hossain met Ahsan. And these are his recollections of the meeting:
I found him looking quite dejected. He informed me that he was deeply disappointed by Yahya's failure to respond to the message he had conveyed. He then said that he intended to submit his resignation, and he wanted to inform Bangabandhu of his intention. I immediately told Bangabandhu of Governor Ahsan's decision. Bangabandhu advised that Governor Ahsan should not resign as he alone could be expected to send objective reports of the situation and wanted me to convey to him his appreciation of the efforts he had made. As I was leaving, I noticed the seniormost civil servant, Shafiul Azam, emerging from General Rao Farman Ali's room. They seemed to represent a parallel contact point for Yahya in Dhaka.
Kamal Hossain was unable to move out of Dhaka once the army struck. On the evening of 25 March, as he came back home amidst growing fears of a Pakistani military assault, he saw among the crowd waiting for him the journalist Selig Harrison, to whom he had earlier spoken of one of two choices before the country --- a political settlement incorporating Bengali demands or an insane option, a military onslaught. Notes Hossain: "As soon as I saw him, I said, 'The insane option has been adopted and I am leaving home'". He then headed, with Amirul Islam, for Dhanmondi to pick up Tajuddin Ahmed but on the way dropped in at Bangabandhu's almost deserted residence. A surprised Mujib asked him, "Why haven't you gone to the old town, as you were told to do?" Hossain and Amirul Islam offered an explanation, before asking Bangabandhu what he would be doing. Bangabandhu told them, "You leave that to me, from now on we are independent. Our people are united and will fight."
On 3 April 1971, Kamal Hossain was taken into custody from a relative's home in Lalmatia and immediately flown to imprisonment at Haripur in West Pakistan. In the course of the nine months of war, he was kept in solitary confinement, with no access to radio and newspapers. On the way to prison and later he was subjected to intense interrogation by the army, which was keen to know of Hossain's activities on the night of 25 March. Temptation was thrown his way, through asking him to put down in writing information about the insurrection in East Pakistan prior to the military crackdown. He did precisely the opposite, which was in effect a record of the duplicity the regime had resorted to under the pretext of negotiations from 16 to 24 March.
Duplicity is a thought which recurs in Kamal Hossain's accounts of his meetings with Pakistan's minister of state for foreign affairs Aziz Ahmed through 1973 and 1974. Indeed, a certainly impressive section of this work is that which deals with Pakistan, beginning with the release of Bangabandhu and the writer by the Bhutto government and their flight to London in January 1972 and ending with the fruitless negotiations between Bangladesh and Pakistan during the visit to Dhaka by Prime Minister Bhutto. The Mujib-Bhutto summit resolved nothing, owing largely to Pakistani intransigence and obfuscation. The repatriation of Biharis to Pakistan and the division of assets and liabilities between the two countries were simply issues Bhutto's team was unwilling to give serious attention to. Hossain draws a comprehensive picture of the Machiavellian traits which worked in Aziz Ahmed.
Foreign Minister Kamal Hossain at UN on the day Bangladesh enters world body.
A point of reference for students of South Asian history of the 1970s is certainly Kamal Hossain's recapitulation of the tortuous process of negotiations leading to the tripartite agreement involving India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1974. The writer details the insistent appeals from Islamabad to Dhaka for a release of its prisoners of war, including the 195 Pakistan army officers Bangladesh expected to place on trial for war crimes. The Pakistani argument for the PoWs' release was piteous: if they were not returned to Pakistan, the army could remove the newly-installed government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Islamabad would deal with the war crimes accused on its own. The appeal was just as quickly followed by a threat: if the Bangladesh government refused to have the PoWs, especially the accused officers, freed, the Pakistan authorities would place Bengali civilians stranded in Pakistan on trial for treason. It surely did not make sense. In the end, though, the April 1974 agreement left the PoWs free to return to Pakistan, the Bengalis to go home to Bangladesh, with the overriding issues affecting relations between the two countries remaining unresolved. It was a sad Bangabandhu who told Kamal Hossain: "For me, I am borne down by the thought that this is the first time in my life that I have not been able to fulfill a public commitment. I had told our people that the war criminals shall be tried on the soil of Bangladesh. I have not been able to keep my word. . .Let us hope that this act will bring some good to our people."
As a prime maker of modern Bangladesh's history, Kamal Hossain brings to his readers an authentic account of events leading not just to the emergence of a free Bangladesh but also the revolutionary zeal with which the country went into giving itself a constitution, inaugurating a democratic order and connecting with the rest of the world in terms of trade and diplomacy. China's vetoing of Bangladesh's entry into the United Nations in 1972 and 1973 called for deft handling; negotiations with India on a host of issues required diplomatic finesse; convincing the Middle East that Bangladesh's secularism was no threat to the Islamic sentiments of a majority of its population needed intellectual input; and tackling the famine of 1974 required sober governance. These were major challenges before the government. It met them with a sense of purpose and came out looking pretty well.
After all this, it is the prologue which draws your attention, which has you empathise
with Kamal Hossain. The Fourth Amendment to the constitution disturbs him, for
obvious reasons. And he has this thought to share:
"I had a deeper fear, which I had shared with Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. I was reminded of this by Farashuddin, who had retired as the governor of Bangladesh Bank. He told me that he had overheard me telling Bangabandhu, when I went to see him just before leaving for Oxford, that I was uncompromisingly opposed to the one-party system, not only because I was among many in our like-minded circle who were committed to a multi-party democracy, but because the system would make him a prime target for anyone conspiring to seize power, since the position of head of state, chief executive, and head of the political party would now vest in one person. This fear foreshadowed the tragedy that was to engulf us within eight months."
SYED BADRUL AHSAN EXECUTIVE EDITOR OF THE DAILY STAR, IS CURRENTLY AT WORK ON A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE POLITICS OF DESHBANDHU CHITTARANJAN DAS, NETAJI SUBHASH CHANDRA BOSE AND BANGABANDHU SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN.
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