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A liberator's hamartia

Martin Swapan Pandey
THE life was cut short and it rained on the evening of August 16, 1975, soon after his body was hastily buried A as some army men stood guard. But the fifty five years he lived, he lived to give birth to a nation. How did he do it? If anyone, Syed Badrul Ahsan has it all in his masterpiece From Rebel to Founding Father: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
The study of history is captivating when all the right dots are connected with masterly accuracy and superior authority. Miss one dot, and history is a riddle. And if history is the exact, dispassionate recording of time, it is one. Layer upon layer, the past unfolds before our eyes and some of history's greatest giants come back to life as we read it. We don't miss a single dot - Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, AK Fazlul Haq, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Indira Gandhi, just to name a few, who mattered in the making of the country Mujib would bring into existence. The roles of each of these individuals, and scores others, are offered in minute detail in a way that we stop reading and shake our heads in shock or in astonishment and pace around the room to digest what we have just swallowed. And then start reading again.
To weigh what lies ahead, one must dig into the past. Dig not to brood over but to consider, reflect and get a sense of what is in the making. And Badrul Ahsan digs deep and relates what nobody can relate. To give a sense of Mujib's political awareness even in his schooldays in the late 1930s, he tells us how a young Mujib confronted Suhrawardy and Fazlul Haq with the demand that development work be undertaken in his native Faridpur district. Mujib was not yet 20 then. Read on, and the history of the Awami Muslim League, Pakistan in the post-Jinnah era, the Language Movement, Mujib's taking charge after Suhrawardy, the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the Six-Point Movement, the rise of Bhutto, the Agartala Conspiracy case, the 1970 elections, the failed negotiations between Yahya, Bhutto and Mujib, the black night of March 25 and the Liberation War happen before your eyes.
There is no skipping, no omission of facts here, for doing so would be a denial of history - a cardinal sin for a historian. In the first few chapters, Mujib will be missing page after page and men like Suhrawardy, Fazlul Haq, Bhashani, Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan will dominate. There are three reasons for that. First, Mujib was yet to take centre stage in these early years. Second, Mujib's story would be incomplete if the stories of these men were held back. And third, while these men occupied centre stage Mujib was either languishing in a Pakistani jail or crisscrossing the country on election campaigns or organising the grassroots of his party, the Awami Muslim League that was later renamed as Awami League. It was a charge he was given by his guru Suhrawardy, who saw in Mujib an organiser and a politician whose ability to connect with the masses was unparalleled.
And when Mujib took centre stage in the real sense after Suhrawardy's death in 1963, there was no looking back. But
consider the title: From Rebel to Founding father. By calling Mujib a rebel, the author makes his readers face a moment of truth. If Mujib was any rebel, what did he rebel against? He rebelled against the time he was living in. His was a rebellion against the piles of political and economic injustice done to his people by the Pakistani dictators, and nothing short of a war could undo that.
So the war begins and the author turns graphic: those barbaric shootings at Dhaka University, at Rajarbagh Police Lines and at Pilkhana on the night of 25 March. And from that night on the massacre of some 30 lakh people, the rape of about 2 lakh women, the persecution of Hindus and the exodus of some 10 million people to India during the nine-month war, as Mujib remains in a Pakistani jail for the entire period.
Once you finish it, you may argue that the book does not give any details of the battlefields, the resistance put up by the freedom fighters, including women and children, the LIS administration's continued support for the Pakistani junta, India's diplomacy for the cause of the Bangladesh war and the reason why Indira Gandhi ordered her generals to prepare to intervene (which Gandhi actually did in early April when her generals said they needed about seven months to prepare, that is until the winter when snow and dense fog would prevent Chinese troops from attacking India, if the Chinese wanted to). But it is good to remember that this book is not about the war and the international diplomacy for and against it. It is a book about the man who led his people to war, one that his people won. A bible on the creation of Bangladesh the book may be, but even the Bible does not explain why God needed to rest on the seventh day, after he was done creating the universe in the six previous days.
After the war, the first time we see Mujib upon his arrival from Pakistan's prison is on 10 January 1972. It is an emotional Mujib that we now see who for the first time cries in public as he speaks to the million-strong crowd that gathered to greet him that afternoon at Suhrawardy Udyan. Subsequently, taking charge from Tajuddin Ahmad, he began what he later called his "ditio biplob" (second revolution) to right the
wrongs of the war. It was a massive job even for Mujib, and he sought three years from his people to finish his unfinished revolution.
But Mujib was a tragic hero and tragic heroes must falter. Soon he loses a trusted friend likeTajuddin. Then come the one-party system called BAKSAL and the banning of all newspapers save for four, and those, too, would be government-controlled. Enemies are on the prowl. While Hamlet and Macbeth's hamartia was their indecision, Dr Faustus's excessive pride in his knowledge and King Oedipus's in error of judgment, Mujib's was his failure in identifying enemies like Khandaker Moshtaque. Mujib's was a father's belief that his sons would not be his assassins. But in time they would be.
And the way Syed Badrul Ahsan relates the story of the rise and fall of the Father of the Nation, one can only wonder how he took the pleasure or the pain of such thorough research. To read him is a pleasure.