With genuine reverence and deep sincerity, I once visited House No. 32 at Dhanmandi, Dhaka’s grain market. This modest house was where Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, Bangladesh’s ‘father of the nation’, lived and died. ‘Bangabandhu’, the friend of Bengalis, as he was affectionately called, had become an overlord after the liberation of Bangladesh. Brillant as a resistance leader, turned out to be a lousy prime minister, leading his people into deeper wretchedness.
As soon as the post-independence euphoria died down, Mujib’s ratings, sky-high at first, plunged headlong into the flooded paddy fields. Dashed hopes of immediate prosperity evaporated his support. People were still dying of starvation. Unemployment mounted. Prices continued to soar. Corruption flourished. Sycophants prospered. The press was muzzled.
Protesting students were shot by the police. Awami League bully boys clashed on the streets with the left-wingers and crushed all political opposition, Nazi-style. There were over 2,000 political murders within two years. Armed gangs looted granaries and killed innocent people. The charges that Mujib had hurled against the Pakistan government a year earlier were now being thrown at him.
Mujib, the mighty colossus, was looking increasingly vulnerable. He had been fatally weakened by his own vacillations as the country twisted in a cruel cycle of flood and famine. Beyond independence, his vision did not stretch too far. His grip on the economy was tenuous. Personality clashes among the leadership shattered unity. While Mujib wrung his hands, muttered about the difficulties and mused about possible foreign aid, his impatient countrymen were getting more and more frustrated. The charismatic leader suddenly lacked lustre.
He whiled away seven long weeks in London and Geneva on medical treatment and convalescence, indicating that he was more interested in sorting out his own problems than those of the infant nation. Three years ago, the Bangladeshis had been proliferative in their admiration for him. They were now running him down.
Big political sharks were already on the prowl, encircling him, waiting for the right moment to strike. The army, emasculated by Mujib, plotted revenge.
Mujib thought that there were too many distractions that did not allow him to concentrate his energies on nation-building. Instead of fighting poverty, he was fighting to stay in power. He had never shown much interest in the patient compromises of democracy. The parliamentary system was hampering his style. He hit upon a not-so-novel idea that every head of state flirts with. He declared a state of emergency, suspended fundamental rights and stripped the courts of their powers. He changed the Constitution to a presidential form of government, and, in January 1975, had himself sworn in as president.
But that was also not good enough for him. In August of that year, he was going to make a breathtaking declaration – of making himself the president of Bangladesh for life. Mujib wanted Bangladesh to be a one-man show. But the show was in trouble. The army was in no mood to stomach the political monopoly of a leader, whose creditworthiness had been downgraded to junk. His enemies struck on 15 August 1975.
A handful of junior army officers, disillusioned by Mujib’s support to anti-social elements, and by his failure to dispense justice, masterminded a highly secret and successful coup. A little after five in the morning, a killer team of 120 men, led by three majors, fired their way into Mujib’s house at Dhanmandi, killing and wounding his bodyguards. Mujib’s two sons, Kamal and Jamal, held off the murderers with their sten guns.
Outnumbered and outgunned, Kamal fell to a spray of bullets. Meanwhile, Mujib was making frantic phone calls for help. The killers ran from room to room, hungry to eliminate the man they had once lionised. As Major Mohiuddin turned to rush up the staircase, he found Mujib standing at the top of the landing. Dressed in a lungi and kurta, and holding his trademark pipe in one hand, Mujib looked down at his assassin. Cowed by Mujib’s overpowering presence, Mohiuddin could only nervously mutter in a lame and broken voice.
“Sir, apni ashun,” stuttered the major, unable to command his fear. Sir, please come, he requested in Bengali.
As always, Mujib had his head in the clouds. “What do you want?” he bellowed. “Have you come to kill me? Forget it! The Pakistan army couldn’t do it. Who are you to think you can?” He was trying to engage the killer in a conversation, playing for time till help arrived. The results were promising at first. Mohiuddin, overawed by the great leader, kept stammering, “Sir, apni ashun.” And Mujib continued to lash Major Mohiuddin with his tongue. At that moment Major Noor arrived.
He sensed Mohiuddin’s cold feet and Mujib’s stalling tactics. Elbowing aside Mohiuddin, Noor fired a burst from his sten gun, ripping Mujib’s right side. Mujib’s body jerked backwards, collapsed in a heap, and then slid, face down, towards the bottom of the stairs, the pipe still gripped tightly in his right hand. Bangladeshi’s man of destiny, whose titanic efforts brought them freedom, lay dead, sprawled on the stairs of his own house. Another South Asian idol had been killed by his own people.
The killings continued. Mujib’s wife, second son Jamal, two daughters-in-law, younger brother and youngest son – the ten-year-old Russell – were all blasted to smithereens by sprays of bullets, fired from automatic weapons. One of the assailants, who had never had a close look at Mujib, slid his military boot under the leader’s corpse and flipped it over to see the face.
The house has been preserved the way it was during the merciless killings. Bloodstains, bone and muscle tissue, bullets and bullet holes, and ransacked cupboards can still be seen. I lingered pensively in the macabre quarters, wondering if a glimmer of light could ever be found in the gritty darkness of Bangladesh politics.
(Akhil Bakshi, an author and explorer, is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club USA, and Editor of ‘Indian Mountaineer’. He is also the founder of Bharatiya Yuva Shakti, an organisation that ensures good leadership at the village level. He tweets @AkhilBakshi1. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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