Remembering SAMS Kibria, in gathering dusk

My prayers are for Shah AMS Kibria today. And they always will be. He was a good man. He was more than a good man. He had an abundance of self-esteem. He had the ability to look into the future. He thought well and he put his thoughts down eloquently in his writings, writes.

MY FIRST meeting with Shah AMS Kibria was at a dinner hosted by Bangladesh's deputy high commissioner in Calcutta in late 1991. It was a time when Kibria was preparing to retire from ESCAP. He was on his way to Delhi for a conference. The Bangladesh diplomat in Calcutta saw, to his immense credit, a good opportunity of bringing quite a few people together in an informal way. At that meeting there was the West Bengal Finance Minister, Asim Dasgupta.

I was the youngest individual in the group, a fact that naturally impelled me into listening to the conversation which Kibria and dasgupta carried on about the collapse, as Kibria put it, of communism. It was the year when Mikhail Gorbachev slipped and the Soviet Union turned into a tale of the past. It was Kibria's considered opinion that socialism as a political concept had taken a fatal blow. Asim Dasgupta disagreed and went on to give us all an analysis of why Gorbachev's failure did not signify the end of socialism.

My impression of Shah AMS Kibria at that point of time was of a man of abundant energy. He had already spent an entire career in diplomacy and was now about to walk off into the sunset after a good many years at ESCAP. But watching him that evening in Calcutta, I wondered whether there was not something else, a new career, he was looking forward to.

The very next year, I was pleased to hear about Kibria's decision to join the Awami League. He had made the right choice, given that he was one of those brave souls who had defied the winds of uncertainty to sever their ties to Pakistan and demonstrate allegiance to the Bangladesh cause in 1971. Kibria's linking up with the Awami League, it was and is my view, was a reiteration of the secular nature of Bangladesh's politics.

It was, I reasoned, a powerful way of upholding the national cause the people of this country had dedicated themselves to in the War of Liberation, a cause that had over time become frayed at the edges, thanks largely to the predatory instincts of ambitious men intent on hoisting illegitimacy on the nation. Indeed, Kibria's entry into politics was a good way of injecting a bit more of intellectual content into the principle of governance. It was a bit of a good addition to hope, a refurbishing of it.

About a year after Shah AMS Kibria had made his way into the political arena, the telephone at my home rang on a bright morning. It was Kibria on the line. I was pleasantly surprised and yet slightly worried, for only that morning a newspaper had carried my letter relating to a recent article he had written a couple of days earlier.

There were a couple of inaccuracies that I had noted in the write-up, which was why I had sent off the letter to the editor of the newspaper. My problem was that I quite did not know how to handle Kibria on the phone if he gave me any sign that he had been hurt by my letter. Besides, he was one of those good men, powered by gray matter, I respected to know end.

And here he was, telling me on the phone he was Shah AMS Kibria. To my huge relief, he thanked me for the letter and told me that he stood corrected. He made it a point to inform me that he was a regular reader of my columns and that he looked forward to meeting me. I reminded him of the Calcutta dinner. He remembered.

At some point in the mid-1990s (and it was a time when I thought that in a future Awami League government Kibria would make a powerful, assertive foreign minister), I met the former diplomat-turned-politician at a reception. It was my belief at the time (and the belief holds even today) that Bangladesh needed to bring about a positive change in its foreign policy.

In other words, I looked forward to a period when the country would finally have a foreign policy to speak of Kibris's answer to my question was to the point, rather down to earth. He told me that since Bangladesh was a poor country, the whole issue of foreign policy was a matter of subjectivity. And then he added the point that while poor nations had little in terms of foreign policy in place.

The concept of sovereignty demanded it. I recall I went home from that meeting quite saddened. If the poverty of nations prevented them from formulating and implementing foreign policy, where was the point of sovereignty? And yet I did expect Kibria to be in charge of foreign policy when the party he had joined finally made it back to power.

When the Awami League did make its way back to office in 1996 (and it had been my privilege to be involved in a very humble way with the media campaign of the party at the elections), I looked forward, with many others, to the formation of a strong, purposeful government. And a powerful government it was, if you have time to reflect on it. But to my intense dismay, Shah AMS Kibria did not make it to the Foreign Office.

I thought it was one area where he would have made a difference, presenting as it were a sophisticated image of Bangladesh to the outside world. Kibria had the credentials for the job. He had been a brilliant student; he had made it to the top of the Pakistan civil service in 1954, an achievement which placed him straightaway in the country's foreign service. And, beginning in 1971, he played a formidable role in the shaping and execution of Bangladesh's foreign policy.

At the United Nations, at myriad global capitals and as foreign secretary in Dhaka, he epitomised the best there was among diplomats, indeed civil service offcials, a generation that has not quite been equaled in intellectual ability or administrative competence be those who were to come later, Besides, a major reason why I believed the Foreign Office needed to be handled by Kibria was the result of the years of neglect into which it had fallen, owing partly to the appointment of less than qualified men as foreign ministers. Of course, there had been Kamal Hossain and then there had been Professor Shamsul Haq. To a certain extent, there bad been Anisul Islam Mahmud. That was about all.

But Kibria was not given the foreign affairs portfolio. His appointment as finance minister initially set me wondering as to whether he would be able to do the job well. But he did do the job well in the five years he presided over the ministry of finance. We do not need to retell the story of how he managed to keep things under control, to the great benefit of the country. He would and could have done more, especially in the matter of handling some of the notorious defaulters on bank loans.

There are yet these defaulters, in the guise of the elite, around to remember the heat kibria put on them. It is unfortunate that kibria put on them. It is given enough of freedom to go after these bad men intent on stealing from the state. That is part of the limitation good, principled men often find themselves in-especially in this country. But that did not deter kibria from carrying on in other areas.

Those who recall his times in the ministry of finance remember the sense of purpose he brought info its administration. His budgets never sent citizens panicking.

My appointment as minister (press) at the High commission in London in early 1997 was a matter of pleasure to Shah AMS Kibria.

Whenever he was in London during my three-year tenure, he would make it a point to borrow the High commissioner's cell phone as they made their way from Heathrow to the hotel where he was putting up to call me and tell me how much he was enjoying the regular write-ups, I was at the time sending to some newspapers in Dhaka. Kibria knew, as did so many others on the administration, that I did not, except in certain special circumstances, visited airports to receive ministers.

Call it a streak of arrogance. Call it my refusal to be at the beck and call it my refusal to be at the beck and call of people who considered themselves pompous. Kibria was not pompous. There was humility about him matched by an equal degree of bluntness. He did not suffer fools, or sycophants. I have seen that quality manifest it sent in him all so often. He once sent back, in sheer anger, a load of food sent to him at his London apartment by a top diplomat.

The food had been unsolicited. Perhaps Kibria knew his unwelcome host was coming to the end of his service and needed an extension. He had no wish to be part of such a shady arrangement. In London sometime in 1998 to inaugurate a conference on banking facilities in Bangladesh, he wished to know from some of our diplomats where I was. Well, I was just outside, talking to some people and not particularly keen on meeting the finance minister till after he had delivered his speech.

In the event, I had to walk in and say hello. He brightened up and told me he and been keen on meeting me. It was their sort of attitude on the part of many politicians towards me which was to help a number of self-important people look upon me with something of awe mixed with surprise. The essential point though is that being the thinking man he was, knew how to expect other men and women who he thought could think of the country.

At a meeting he had organised before the October 2001 elections to plan Awami League campaign strategy, he spotted me at the table, smiled and motioned for me to stay back after the meeting. I did. He came up to me. As we went down the stairs together, he told me had never stopped reading my articles, some of which had been rather critical of the later phase of the Awami League government. And the he said quietly, "We need you to be with us". I asked him, "Have I ever been away?'' He smiled, to tell me, '' No, you haven't''.

My prayers are for Shah AMS Kibria today. And they always will be. He was a good man. He was more than a good man. He had an abundance of self-esteem. He had the ability to look into the future. He thought well and he put his thoughts down eloquently in his writings.  His death leaves this country a whole lot poorer than we can imagine.


The writer is Editor-in-Charge,
The Asian Age