As we prepare to observe the 49th anniversary of the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, it is only fitting and proper that we dwell yet once more on the larger than life individual Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was and will always be in our lives, in history. Unflinching in courage, committed to principles, on the day he appeared in court in connection with the Agartala Case in June 1968, he made it clear that he was our voice. Boldly did he proclaim in court, ‘Anyone who wishes to live in Bangladesh will have to talk to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.’
And indeed everyone did talk to him. He was dauntless in his struggle to free his nation from colonial rule. His enemies, for all their viciousness toward him, could not hold him or defeat his struggle. On 19 June 1968, before his tormentors in the so-called special tribunal set up in Dhaka cantonment to try him and thirty four other Bengalis in the Agartala Conspiracy Case, he exuded confidence and convinced the world he was on his way to being our spokesman at home and abroad. He would be our liberator, our statesman.
An early instance of Bangabandhu’s statesmanship came on 8 January 1972 as he addressed the world’s media in London only hours after his arrival from incarceration in Pakistan. He bore no ill will toward Pakistan, he said, and he wished President Bhutto well. It was a sentiment he would restate in Dhaka a couple of days later, when he told a rapturous crowd that he was happy with his Bangladesh and he expected Pakistan’s new leader to be content with what remained of his country. For a political leader who had been in solitary confinement in an undisclosed location in Pakistan for nine months even as his people were being put to the sword and the gun in an unprecedented genocide, it was remarkable restraint on his part.
Bangabandhu’s statesmanship was quite removed from the pretences and hypocrisy which generally characterized 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 blocked 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.
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, that 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 commanding presence. 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 inasmuch as there was the accomplished politician in him. It is a truth which remains unassailable and which shapes our worldview.
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