**Bangabandhu discovered the nation. He built upon the foundations of his elders but the thrust,

the originality of his own leadership is beyond dispute, writes

Prof. Zillur Rahman Siddique**

TL < Y heart is filled with |\/| pride when 1 think of the J.VJLneroes this much-maligned people of ours have produced during the last two hundred years. I use the word hero' in the broadest possible sense. Most of our heroes left their mark in fields other than Solitical. In the roll call of onour. the political heroes. 1 fear, will be easily outnumbered by such giants as Raja Rammo-han Ray, Vldyasagar and Rabindranath. We need a Carlyle of our own to speak about heroes who lived amongst us.

Carlyle obviously thought that only heroes mattered, a most challenging thought. There are many views of history. and his view is not one of the most acceptable at the moment. It may well appear that as societies get more settled, there is less occasion for a hero to play his role. If we looked at the political sense of the more stable Western nations, we would realised the truth of this. Democracy, like death, is a great leveller. No democratic society would support for long persons as colourful as a Churchill or a Fazlul Huo. Churchill the hero is the product of war. He. with all his heroism. is simply Inconceivable either before the war or after. Fazlul Haq's heroism did not wait for a national crisis to assert itself. Destined to lead a people out of hopelessness — the sum total of poverty, ignorance, and a general denial of rights — he assumed the leadership of this people early In his career, and carried the responsibility till the end of his days, which means a span of fifty years or more. Despite everything that might be said against him — his lack of consistency, of philosophy. of organisational skill, his personal weaknesses — there is a greatness of spirit about him and who can deny this? He did not found a party as Suhrawardy did but he founded a people that later became a nation. Parties disintegrate but nations survive.

The last of our heroes. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is closer to Fazlul Huq than to Churchill, though his career offers some resemblance to both. Like Fazlul Huq. his was a sustained leadership and not the gift of a crisis. Like Churchill, he rode the tides of history, and even after conceding the greater merit to events, the man was a match for the events. And this remained true till the moment of liberation.

Sheikh Mujib combined in himself the charisma of Fazlul Huq and the patient political skill of Suhrawardy, lie consol-

idated the party and discovered the nation. He built upon the foundations of his elders but the thrust, the originality of his own leadership is beyond dispute. Some of the qualities and advantages his peers possessed he certainly lacked — family, intellectual attainment, for example. He made up these deficiencies by his mettle, the quality supremely needed in the turbulent 'sixties. He gathered around him a band of devotees, willing to lay down their lives for the cause and many did. He was a man of the people, as Bhasani was. and a leader of youth where he resembled Suhrawardy. Unlike political philosophers. Abul Hashem for example, he lacked in creed but his vision was whole.

Heroes and tragedies go together. Tragedy was perhaps in-eritable in this case too. but the form it took will remain an eternal shame to the people. Students of Shakespeare will look for the tragic flaw in Mu-jib's character, was he a Timon, a Coriolanus or an Otheflo? Was he as unsuspecting, as gullible as the great-hearted Moor? 1 doubt. 1 cancel out Coriolanus. 1 cannot call Sheikh Mujib an egotist. That he had a personal flavour remains one of his many endearing points. One has to look for reasons of his steep descent — political descent I mean — one ne rose to the pinnacle of power. What failed him. or who failed him? In Shakespeare's heroes, it is not always the fatal flaw which is within the hero, but also the external forces which work on these flaws. In the case of Sheikh Mujib. the last, perhaps the greatest and certainly the most tragic of our heroes, the tragedy stemmed, perhaps equally from both within and without. The greatness of a tragic hero is hardly diminished on account of the flaws.

*«The flaws explain, however weakly that may be but never justify, the huge waste, the tragedy of the fall.

There is a time for mourning and a time for exegesis. Apparently. we have already passed from the one to the other. At a farther remove from both, there is a time for the poet, for the raw life to the transformed Into art. for lived experience to be rounded off into a poetic vision. When the time comes, a great tragic poet may find his hero in Sheikh Mujib. He will have enough material for his work. What I wonder about, is how will he provide the catharsis — "Cahn of mind all passion spent?" This will be his supreme challenge.

Reprinted with the author’ kind permission