প্রকাশনাসমূহ

Images of the Father…

Icon of our NATION

Sometime in the later part of the 1950s, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, then a young, rising politician, threw a question at a rather drowsy Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Was it not possible, he asked Pakistan’s prime minister, for East Pakistan to become independent someday? The question startled Suhrawardy wide awake. In a state of disbelief, the prime minister (he was in office only a year) admonished Mujib. Do not ever entertain such thoughts, he told his protégé. Pakistan had been achieved at a huge cost and its unity needed to be preserved. Mujib murmured, almost muttered: “We’ll do our job when the time comes.”

It was this spontaneity resting on decisiveness that sustained Bangabandhu in his political career. The trajectory he followed was clearly defined. There was no grey region in his politics, nothing to suggest that, like so many others before or during his time, he was ready to do flip flops. Never a fence-sitter, his overriding goal was ensuring the welfare of his Bengalis. His enthusiasm for Pakistan, a state for whose creation he had struggled mightily in his youth as a follower of the All-India Muslim League, had clearly begun to wane within months of its emergence. And by the time Ayub Khan clamped martial law on the country in October 1958, Mujib did not have any illusions about the future. Bengalis, he knew, had to find their own way to salvation.

Bangabandhu’s thoughts were as robust as his persona. Arriving in Rawalpindi a couple of days after the withdrawal of the Agartala conspiracy case in February 1969, he was intrigued by the warmth in which he was welcomed in West Pakistan. He quipped, about himself: “Yesterday a traitor, today a hero.” It was in that heroic mould that he met Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, his tormentor for years. When the dictator, by then a lion in extreme senility, offered Mujib the prime ministership of Pakistan, the Bengali leader prudently spurned it. The back door was not for him. It was Bangladesh where his heart and mind lay embedded. Indeed, he took the first step toward restoring their land to the Bengalis when he told a memorial meeting on Suhrawardy’s death anniversary in December 1969 that East Pakistan would henceforth be known as Bangladesh. His reasoning was unassailable: if Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province could keep their old names, why not Bangladesh?

There was the indomitable about Bangabandhu. The state was never able to make him bite the dust. He kept going to prison, coming out of it briefly and then going back in. Following his release in 1969, he publicly demanded that Ayub Khan take his “patwary” Monem Khan out of the governor’s office. During the election campaign in 1970, a time when almost every politician in both wings of Pakistan appeared to be directing their spears and arrows at the Awami League and its Six Points and spreading innuendo against Mujib, the Bengali leader told them in no uncertain terms: “If you can’t speak the truth, don’t tell a lie.” Indeed, lies he abhorred, so much so that when the Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar narrated to him in 1972 Bhutto’s version of the meeting between the two leaders after Pakistan’s battlefield defeat in December 1971, Mujib’s response was that Bhutto was a congenital liar.

Bangabandhu remembered faces and did not forget names. He and the late Indian journalist Nikhil Chakravartty knew each other in the 1940s. When partition came, they went their separate ways. In January 1972, however, Chakravartty was in Dhaka to cover Bangabandhu’s maiden news conference as Bangladesh’s prime minister. Chakravartty sat right at the end of the hall. Bangladesh’s leader walked into the hall, greeted everyone with his customary smile and suddenly spotted his old friend. They had not met after 1947, but the Father of the Nation had no difficulty recognising Chakravartty. Tui Nikhil na (aren’t you Nikhil)? He asked. Chakravartty was overwhelmed.

In 1973, a young parliamentarian was busy delivering a rousing speech on the national budget in the Jatiyo Sangsad. As he spoke, Bangabandhu entered the chamber and took his seat. His arrival prompted a sudden change, tonally and thematically, in the young lawmaker’s speech. He moved away from the budget and went headlong into a profusion of praise for Bangabandhu’s leadership. Mujib stared at him, but the lawmaker showed little sign of stopping. Finally, Bangabandhu intervened. Ebar thaam (finish it now). Like a punctured balloon, the young man sat down.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman could be harsh when the times demanded firmness from him. When Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal griped that Bangladesh’s emergence had weakened Pakistan and indeed Islam, the Bengali leader asked him, with few of diplomatic niceties coming in, where Saudi Arabia had been when Islamic Pakistan’s soldiers went on a rampage raping tens of thousands of Bengali women and murdering Bengalis by the millions. That put Faisal in his place. In much the same way, when Nigeria’s Yakubu Gowon asked Bangabandhu if Pakistan could not have been a powerful Muslim state had Bangladesh not broken away, Mujib’s answer silenced him: “Pakistan would indeed be strong if it had stayed united; likewise India would have been stronger had partition not happened; indeed Asia would be a power if it had not been fragmented into so many diverse states. But, Excellency, do we always get what we want out of life?” Gowon said not a word.

Bangabandhu had a sure sense of destiny. When a foreign newsman asked him, at the height of the Agartala trial, what he thought his fate would be, his answer was emphatic. “You know,” he told the journalist, “they can’t keep me here for more than six months.” He turned out to be almost right. He was freed seven months into the trial. After he was arrested by the Pakistan army on the night of March 25-26, 1971, an officer asked Tikka Khan over walkie talkie if he wanted the prisoner brought to him. Tikka Khan answered in disdain, “I don’t want to see his face.” Three years later, on February 23, 1974, Tikka Khan, as Pakistan’s army chief, saluted Bangabandhu at Lahore airport when Bangladesh’s founder arrived to attend the Islamic conference. Mujib smiled meaningfully, said “Hello, Tikka,” and moved on.

Bangabandhu was a natural. His conversations were regular sessions in spontaneity. He identified as easily with a peasant or rickshaw-puller as he did with a political leader or academic or visiting statesman. His laughter was loud, came from deep within. His presence filled the room.

The scholar Khan Sarwar Murshid once asked the French philosopher Andre Malraux if he thought Mujib could lead Bangladesh to progress. Malraux said yes, and then qualified his answer: “If you don’t kill him.”

We killed him. And we go on paying the price for that gigantic sin.

Author : Syed Badrul Ahsan, The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk

National Mourning Day today

National Mourning Day today

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina placed wreaths at the portrait of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum at Dhanmondi in the city this (Wednesday) morning.

The Armed Forces gave her a guard of honour on the occasion.

Sheikh Hasina also offered prayer during her visit to the museum at about 6:15am. Chiefs of three services and senior Awami League (AL) leaders were present.

The Prime Minister later visited the graves of the members of Mujib’s family and other martyrs of 1975 at Banani Graveyard and placed wreaths and offered fateha there.

Senior ruling party leaders accompanied her.

A grateful nation pays deep homage to Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman today (Wednesday) in observance of the National Mourning Day commemorating his 37th anniversary of martyrdom, reports BSS.

On the fateful night of August 15 in 1975, some disgruntled and over ambitious army officers assassinated Bangabandhu and most of his family members at his Dhanmondi Road-32 residence in the capital in a military putsch.

Those 18 members of Bangabandhu’s family and his close ones massacred in the August 15 tragedy included his wife Bangamata Fazilatunnessa Mujib, brother Sheikh Naser, brother-in-law Abdur Rab Serniabat, sons Sheikh Kamal, Sheikh Jamal and 10-year-old Sheikh Russell, daughters-in-law Sultana Kamal and Rosy Jamal, nephew Sheikh Fazlul Huq Moni, his pregnant wife Arzoo Moni and Bangabandhu’s military secretary Bir Uttam Colonel Jalil (later promoted as Brigadier General posthumously), who rushed to the spot of occurrence on receiving an SOS from Bangabandhu Bhaban early in the morning.

However, both the daughters of Bangabandhu, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, escaped the carnage as they were abroad then.

Since the mayhem, Awami League, its associate bodies and other likeminded pro-liberation, democratic and progressive political partiers, social, cultural and professional organisations have been observing the day as the National Mourning Day.

After assumption of office in 1996, the Awami League government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina initiated trial of the self- confessed killers of Bangabandhu in a traditional court and the court awarded them with capital punishment, which was upheld by the country’s apex court. The court’s verdict for five of the self-confessed killers had been executed on January 27 in 2010 while the government had already taken steps for bringing back home the remaining absconding killers from abroad to free the nation from a stigma.

In a message on the eve of the National Mourning Day, President M Zillur Rahman recalled with gratitude Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s chequered, long and eventful political career and his immense contributions and dedication to present an independent and sovereign Bangladesh in the comity of nations.

“Father of the Nation Bangabandhu dreamt of a ‘Golden Bangla’ throughout his life. It is our utmost responsibility to materialise his dream by building a happy and prosperous country.

If we do so the soul of Bangabandhu would remain in ever-rest in peace and we will be able to pay our deepest homage to him,” the President added.

Terming the killing of Bangabandhu on August 15 in 1975 the most barbaric massacre in the history of the mankind, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, in a message, said though the anti-liberation reactionary forces and their stooges assassinated Bangabandhu, they could not kill his dreams and ideologies.

In her message, the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, said that although the killers had assassinated Mujib, they could not kill his dreams and ideals. Millions of people nurture in their hearts the ideals of Mujib.
‘Let us take forward with bold steps the struggle to build a Golden Bangla as dreamt by Bangabandhu turning the grief of the great loss of the father of the nation into strength,’ she said.

The Oriental Sun – Life, Activity and contribution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Narrative Verse

ISBN: 984 05 1677 9

The Oriental Sun – Life, Activity and contribution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Narrative Verse By Mihirkanti Choudhury (Author)

Publisher(s):Tua-Trisha

First Published:2001   No. of Pages:72    Weight (kg):0.5  Price:$5.00

Sheikh Mujib: Triumph and Tragedy By Sayyid A. Karim

ISBN: 984 70220 041 7

Sheikh Mujib: Triumph and Tragedy By Sayyid A. Karim (Author)

Publisher(s):The University Press Limited (UPL)

First Published:2009-No. of Pages:407-Weight (kg):0.5- Price:$28.00

Writing an objective biography of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the only larger-than-life political figure of Muslim Bengal, is no easy task for a historian. In this well-researched book, Sayyid A. Karim has given a fascinating account of the life of Sheikh Mujib and makes an assessment of his legacy. Separating the man from the myth, the author has drawn a moving portrait of a heroic man who triumphed against all odds and became the founding father of a new nation, Bangladesh. While still young, Sheikh Mujib passionately supported the Pakistan movement, believing that the creation of a Muslim state was the best way of emancipating Bengali Muslims from the twin yokes of British rule and Hindu economic domination. But after Pakistan came into being, he passionately rejected the power centre in distant West Pakistan which showed an utter lack of interest in the well-being of Bengalis Muslims and Hindus alike. He became the foremost standard bearer of Bengali nationalism. For a while, shortly after the establishment of military rule under Ayub Khan, Sheikh Mujib even toyed with the idea of independence. The collapse of the Ayub regime ten years later gave him the glimmer of hope that revival of democracy in Pakistan was within reach. But when his party, the Awami League, won an absolute majority in the National Parliament, it soon became evident that the military had no intention of relinquishing power. Mujib was arrested, and the Pakistan Army resorted to a blood bath in a vain attempt to crush Bengali nationalism. After nine months of the liberation war, Sheikh Mujib returned to a free Bangladesh in early 1972 as its undisputed leader. Ill-advised, he adopted populist measures like nationalisation. The economy went into a downward spiral and famine was not long in coming. The 1914 famine had a profound effect on his psyche. Bangladesh had always filled his thoughts and he became convinced that a fundamental change of course was needed to surmount the crisis. He replaced the multi-party system by one-party state and concentrated power in his hands to implement what he called his second revolution. Machiavelli wrote: Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor dangerous to handle, than a new order of things. Only a true revolutionary, with an iron will to take ruthless measures against anti social elements and die-hard opponents of the new order could successfully carry out the far reaching changes in government and society envisioned by Sheikh Mujib. Deep down he was a soft hearted man and did not have the ruthless streak in him to take strong action against counter revolutionary elements. He ignored warning signs of a conspiracy by disaffected army officers and thereby paved the way for the tragedy that befell him.

The Unfinished Memoirs-SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN

 

ISBN: 978 984 506 111 7

The Unfinished Memoirs (Deluxe Edition)-By SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN (Author)

Publisher(s):The University Press Limited (UPL)
First Published:2012, No. of Pages:323, Weight (kg):1, Price:$53.00

When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s diaries came to light in 2004, it was an indisputably historic event. His daughter, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, had the notebooks their pages by then brittle and discoloured— carefully transcribed and later translated from Bengali into English. Written during Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s sojourns in jail as a state prisoner between 1967 and 1969,they begin with his recollections of his days as a student activist in the run-up to the movement for Pakistan in the early 1940s. They cover the Bengali language movement, the first stirrings of the movement for Bangladesh independence and self-rule, and powerfully convey the great uncertainties as well as the great hopes that dominated the time. The last notebook ends with the events accompanying the struggle for democratic rights in 1955. These are Sheikh Mujib’s own words—the language has only been changed for absolute clarity when required. What the narrative brings out with immediacy and passion is his intellectual and political journey from a youthful activist to the leader of a struggle for national liberation. Sheikh Mujib describes vividly how—despite being in prison—he was in the forefront of organizing the protests that followed the declaration of Urdu as the state language of Pakistan. On 21 February 1952 the police opened fire on a peaceful student procession killing many. That brutal action unleashed the powerful movement that culminated in the birth of the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971. This extraordinary document is not only a portrait of a nation in the making; it is written by the man who changed the course of history and led his people to freedom.

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