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The story of a rising politician

Syed Badrul Ahsan finds an autobiographical work riveting
ON his last night alive before he was murdered along with nearly his entire family by soldiers of the Bangladesh army on 15 August 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founder of the independent nation of Bangladesh and Bangabandhu (friend of Bengal) to his people, happened to be reading Shaw's Man and Superman. An avid reader, Mujib was an ardent admirer of writers, philosophers and statesmen the world over. Among those he placed on a pedestal were Bertrand Russell, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi. His library at home, today a memorial to his exalted place in Bengali history, remains evidence of the wide reading which shaped, eventually, his perception of politics in our part of the world. That was somewhat surprising, seeing that beginning with the late 1940$ and till the early 1970s, he seemed to be forever going to prison over his rising opposition to the depredations of Pakistan's ruling classes.
And yet, as The Unfinished Memoirs demonstrates only too well, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, like so many others in thrall to the All India Muslim League in the 1940s, was initiated into politics on the premise of a separate, independent state for India's Muslims. Coming in contact with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, then prime minister of Bengal and a leading advocate for Pakistan, Mujib was inexorably drawn to the communal politics pursued by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and defended to the hilt by Suhrawardy. The latter, one might recall, despite being the fountainhead of political authority in Bengal, had no qualms about declaring a government holiday on 16 August 1946 as part of his plan to observe the so-called Direct Action Day earlier called by Jinnah to press the demand for Pakistan. Tragedy swiftly took over, withthousands of Muslims and Hindus dying in riots that no one had foreseen. In these incomplete mem-
oirs, Mujib recalls the frenzy with which people hacked one another to death simply because of a difference in religious belief. Having saved lives and having survived in Calcutta, Mujib moved to Patna, where a repeat of Calcutta had descended. In all these troubles breaking out almost without warning, Mujib's belief in the political leadership of Suhrawardy never wavered. As these recollections reveal, to the very end — and that was Suhrawardy's death in late 1963 — Mujib remained a devoted, almost stubborn Suhrawardy loyalist.
The beauty of The Unfinished Memoirs, written at a time when Mujib was under threat of death from the state of Pakistan in the latter part of the 1960s (he was under arrest for advocating regional autonomy for the federating units of Pakistan and especially its Bengali eastern wing, a spell followed by the even worse reality of his trial for sedition in the Agartala conspiracy case in 1968), is in its being a first-hand, riveting account of politics in Pakistan between 1947 and 1955. Those were formative years in that the liberal democratic ambience Pakistanis were looking forward to was turning out to be an idea in unstoppable erosion. Jinnah, for whom Mujib's respect remained abiding despite everything, planted the seeds of disillusion in the new state with his insistence that Urdu be the language of the state. Mujib's impression of Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's first prime minister, is predictable: he finds Liaquat arrogant as well as ignorant of political realities. On a visit to Dhaka in 1949, the year in which the Awami Muslim League (subsequently Awami League) was formed by unhappy Bengali Muslim Leaguers, Liaquat pompously told newsmen in Dhaka that he did not know what the Awami Muslim League was. The year 1949 was in more ways than one revealing for Mujib. The police pursued him relentlessly. The Awami Muslim League, hounded by the government through a repeated imposition of restrictive orders, found itself unable to organise public rallies in East Pakistan. At one point, as the police went after Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, the founder president of the party, and Shamsul Haque, a leading party figure (another was Suhrawardy), the Moulana ordered Mujib to stay a step ahead of the police, meaning he ought not to get arrested. More critically, Bhashani asked Mujib to travel to Lahore and brief Suhrawardy, then touring west Punjab, on the travails faced by the party in East Pakistan. Mujib's account of his journey to Lahore, in pitiable conditions, makes revealing reading. He had only two rupees on him when he reached Lahore. That condition was made worse through the discovery that Suhrawardy had gone out of Lahore and would not be back for some days. When eventually Suhrawardy returned, Mujib's sense of relief was palpable. His leader piled him with warm clothes to help him cope with a winter Mujib found hard to adapt to.
The Unfinished Memoirs are an exposition of the wrong turn politics was beginning to take in Pakistan. Mujib, by 1954 a political organiser of proven skills, savoured the electoral triumph in that year of the Jugto Front (United Front) over the ruling Muslim League in East Pakistan. A combined force of Suhrawardy, Bhashani and A.K. Fazlul Huq at the head of an Awami League-led alliance simply humiliated the decadent Muslim League administration led by Chief Minister Nurul Amin. The government formed by the United Front was short-lived, though. On the day Mujib joined the cabinet, violence patently fanned by the Karachi-based central government, led to the deaths of as many as five hundred Bengalis and non-Bengalis at Adamjee jute mills in Narayanganj on the outskirts of Dhaka. And then, on a visit to Calcutta, new Chief Minister Fazlul Huq waxed eloquent about his pre-1947 association with the city. These two incidents were a Godsend to the Punjabi-dominated establishment in Karachi. The United Front ministry was dismissed under a law of arbitrary import, Section 92-a. Not a single minister, not the chief minister, raised his voice in protest. Mujib was the only minister who was carted off to prison.
One wishes, even as one turns the pages of this work of clarity-driven spontaneity, that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had written the tale of his life in its entirety. But, then, the times after February 1969, when the Agartala conspiracy case was withdrawn and he was released through a mass upsurge, assumed dramatic dimensions of a volatile kind. Mujib and his party would win Pakistan's first general elections in December 1970, would be denied the right to assume power and would then launch an armed struggle for Bangladesh's liberation from Pakistan.
The rest, as they say, is history. Mujib the ardent Muslim Leaguer would evolve into a secularist of conviction, arguing throughout the 1960s that Pakistan needed to reinvent itself through respecting the aspirational politics of its various regions.
The Unfinished Memoirs are, in a broad sense, a subtle pointer to the coming transformation of a firebrand young politician into a national leader prepared to lead a people to freedom.
SYED BADRUL AHSAN'S WORK 'FROM REBEL TO FOUNDING FATHER: SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN', WAS RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY NIYOCI BOOKS, NEW DELHI