Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur

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RAHMAN, SHEIKH MUJIBUR

RAHMAN, SHEIKH MUJIBUR (1920–1975), first president and prime minister of Bangladesh (1971–1975). Adored and loved as Bangabandhu ("Bengal's Friend"), Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a charismatic, crowd-inspiring leader. The birth of Bangladesh was bloody; it passed through a nine-month gestation of massacre unleashed by the Pakistanis, and the intervention of the Indian army helped deliver it. The end of the Bangabandhu's colorful and constructive career was equally bloody.

Sheikh Mujib, as he was popularly called, was born in 1920 in the Faridpur district of present-day Bangladesh. The son of a civil court official, Mujib graduated from a local missionary school in Faridpur in 1942, and from the Islamic College in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1947. While attending high school, Mujib emerged as a student activist. In January 1938 he confronted Chief Minister A. K. Fazlul Haq when he came to Gopalganj, Mujib's town, on an official visit. He asked the chief minister to provide funds for upgrading the school and its hostel, and Haq agreed to release funds for the school projects. Mujib was hailed as a local hero. This event marked the beginning of Mujib's increasing entwinement with Bengal politics and with its Muslim leadership. It also marked the beginning of his intermittent run-ins with the police and, later, long spells of imprisonment: he was arrested twice at the age of eighteen for inciting fellow students to protest, and for unruly behavior.

Mujib Rahman joined the Muslim Students' Federation of India in 1940. He was elected a member of the Bengal Muslim League Council in 1943. Soon he found himself in the front ranks of progressive Muslim student leaders who were enjoined by their leaders to oppose the communalists in the Indian Muslim League. Mujib joined with Shahid Suhrawardy against Kwaja Najimuddin. In June 1947 the British announcement of their plan to partition India into two sovereign nations, India and Pakistan, led Mujib to mobilize young Muslim leaders in a secret conclave at the Islamic College in Kolkata to work on a political organization in opposition to the Muslim League. Some consider this development to be the seed of Mujib Rahman's Awami League, which would later lead to the movement for the creation of Bangladesh and the breakup of Pakistan in 1971.

Toward the end of 1947, Rahman left Kolkata for Dhaka and joined the Law College there as a student. He was expelled from the University of Dhaka for "inciting the fourth class employees." In 1948 he helped establish the East Pakistan Muslim Student League, which was enlarged into the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League in 1949. In 1953 he was elected general secretary of the Awami Muslim League and later became its president in 1966. After the 1954 general elections, he joined Fazlul Haq's government, and when it was dismissed by the Pakistani government after two months, he was arrested along with the others in his party, which was renamed the East Pakistan Awami League. The word "Muslim" was dropped to suggest its secular character.

In more ways than one, the genesis of Bangladesh lies in the language movement in which Mujib and his cohorts in the Awami League took an active part, and for which they received prison sentences in the 1950s and 1960s. The demand to make Bengali the official language of the people of Bangladesh was first presented by Dhirendranath Datta in the Pakistan Legislative Council in 1948. He asked for the acceptance of Bengali as a national language, along with Urdu and English. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, governor-general of Pakistan, summarily rejected this demand, declaring Urdu the sole national language of all of Pakistan. The firm rejection only hardened the determination of students, intellectuals, and secular political activists to seek and establish Bengali identity in language rather than religion.

The movement to make Bengali a state language in Pakistan, and the only language of East Pakistan, gained in momentum and quickly enveloped the entire region. Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who had seized power in 1958, ruling all of Pakistan with an iron hand, responded with more repression. He was supported by the Islamists, who saw in Rahman, the language movement, and the Awami League the seeds of the destruction of Pakistan as an Islamic republic. In 1966 Rahman issued a six-point program to reconstitute Pakistan as a parliamentary democracy, leaving the central government with only defense and foreign policy in its jurisdiction, with the rest of the powers to be vested in the states. He asked for a separate currency and armed forces for East Pakistan. Ayub Khan, convinced that Rahman was, in so many words, calling for independence, arrested him on a trumped-up charge. Ayub faced a populist upsurge in West Pakistan and decided to abdicate, handing over the presidency to Yahya Khan, the commander-in-chief of the army. Mujib Rahman was released from prison, and President Yahya Khan called for a general election.

The results surprised Khan. Rahman's party, the Awami League, swept the polls in the East, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party won a majority of the seats in the West. With the plurality of seats in his favor, Rahman now expected an invitation from Yahya Khan to lead and form the new government in Pakistan. Khan decided to call the National Assembly to session on 25 March 1971. Neither Khan nor Bhutto was willing to hand the position of prime minister to Rahman. They invited him to talks, which failed. At midnight on 25 March, the army opened fire on students and faculty at Dhaka University's dormitories and faculty housing complexes. Mujib Rahman was arrested. The die was cast. In his parting message to his people, Rahman declared them citizens of a free country—Bangladesh. The army crack-down continued, causing some 10 million refugees to flee to neighboring West Bengal in India. An inestimable number of men, women, and children were killed and women raped. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after signing a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, sent the Indian army into Pakistan on 23 November; on 15 December 1971, India's chief-of-staff Sam Manekshaw formally accepted Pakistani General Niazi's offer of surrender.

Soon after the army crackdown of 25 March, the Mukti Bahini (Freedom Fighters) had launched a war of liberation and had formed a provisional government, declaring Mujib Rahman as its president. On 10 January 1972, Mujib returned to Dhaka after being released from prison in Pakistan. He became the first prime minister of independent and sovereign Bangladesh.

The birth pangs were, however, extreme. Mujib and his government faced gargantuan tasks of reconstruction and rehabilitation, attempting as well to stem the tide of mass revenge against those who had supported Pakistan. Mujib, the charismatic leader, was not a competent administrator. On 15 August 1975, disaffected members of the Bangladesh army assassinated Mujib Rahman and members of his family at the presidential palace.

Dilip K. Basu

See alsoBangladesh