As we recall with a profound sense of grief the tragedy which claimed Bangabandhu's life as also the lives of nearly his entire family in August 1975, it is only proper that we recall the qualities of statesmanship that made him a giant on the global stage in his years in power.
Bangabandhu's statesmanship was quite removed from the pretences and hypocrisy which generally characterize diplomacy in the modern world. He was polite in dealing with the leaders of other nations and yet he remained keenly aware of what he needed to tell them about his people and their travails.
In Delhi, on his way back home to Bangladesh on 10 January 1972, he rather surprised Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by asking her when she would withdraw her soldiers from Bangladesh. By 17 March, Bangabandhu's birthday, India had taken its soldiers back home.
Pragmatism was a huge motivational factor in Bangabandhu's attitude to the United States and China. Both these countries, insofar as their governments were concerned, had overtly opposed Bangladesh's war of liberation and had publicly upheld Pakistan's cause in 1971.
The Chinese made their pro-Pakistan attitude clearer when, after December 1971, they vetoed Bangladesh's attempts to enter the United Nations. And yet Sheikh Mujibur Rahman exercised restraint, saying not a word against Washington and Beijing.
He knew he would need to interact with them in future. It was a classic case of a national leader forgiving the sins of people he needed to turn into friends. Bangabandhu travelled to New York and then to Washington, where he apprised President Gerald Ford in unambiguous manner of the difficulties his country was up against. He spoke to Henry Kissinger, who would later visit Dhaka, despite knowing that Kissinger's had been a strident voice in the Nixon administration's tilt toward Pakistan in 1971.
In his rather short-lived administration of slightly over three years, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was instrumental in taking his new country into the important councils of global diplomacy.
It was his sheer force of personality, his charisma, which earned Bangladesh's people respect and sympathy across the world. There clearly was the perception in him that while Bengalis inhabited a small state, they were privy to a culture that was as spacious as the long distances of time between generations.
That was why they needed to make themselves heard among other nations. Bangabandhu personified this ambition in his people, through choosing to join the summit of Islamic nations in Lahore in February 1974 once Pakistan had officially acknowledged Bangladesh as an independent nation.
Bangabandhu was a larger than life individual. Edward Heath and Harold Wilson were happy in his company. Fidel Castro was mesmerized by him, by the fact that a nation had fought and won a war in his name even as he languished in prison.
Muammar Gaddafi, Pakistan's friend, was awed by Bangladesh's leader. Marshal Tito respected him hugely and Anwar Sadat thought of him as a brother. The United Arab Emirates' Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahiyan was cheered at the discovery that he and Mujib were both sheikhs.
There was the quintessential diplomat in Bangabandhu; and it was in evidence as far back as the heady days of early 1972. Asked by a newsman if he contemplated West Bengal someday joining his free country to create a greater Bangladesh, he looked the newsman in the eye, let out a puff of smoke from his ubiquitous pipe and said gently, with that trademark smile playing on his lips, "I am happy with my Bangladesh."
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