That the killers of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman have been brought to book is the biggest compliment to the judiciary of Bangladesh. First the lower court, then the High Court and finally the Supreme Court have pronounced death sentence on 12 retired and dismissed army men.
Understandably, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed was "overwhelmed with emotion" after the verdict. She was abroad when her father, her mother and her three brothers were killed in a coup on August 15, 1975.
The credit of seeing the case to its ultimate end goes to Hasina and to her party, the Awami League. They retrieved the case from limbo 17 years ago when they came to power for the first time after the Sheikh's assassination. It was a lower court which sentenced the culprits during her regime. Whenever the opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), headed by Begum Khalida Zia, came to power, it saw to it that the case would not move or move at a snail's speed. The prosecution would stall the matter as if it did not want the culprits to be brought to justice.
In fact, BNP secretary-general Khandakar Delwar Hossain confirmed the doubt by his churlish remark on the eve of the Supreme Court's verdict. He said: "People of the country will certainly accept the final verdict of the Supreme Court. Where was the dispute about it?" People of Bangladesh have been waiting for the sentence for the last 34 years when the person who led them to freedom was killed by the army. Hossain unnecessarily revived the debate over the responsibility for the delay in the judgment and showed where he and his party stood.
I was in Dhaka a few days after the assassination of the Sheikh and his family members. I went to the Dhanmandi where they lived. The security men did not allow me to visit his home. But I could see how forlorn the place was. I could relate the tragedy to the killing of Mahatma Gandhi at the hands of a fanatic Hindu. I had then gone to the Birla House where Gandhi lived before the assassination.
Dhanmandi, like Birla House, had an air of asceticism and spiritualism about it. Something touched me deep within. I remembered how only a few years earlier I had interviewed the Sheikh. How buoyant and confident he was about the future of his country and outlined many plans to take Bangladesh forward economically and socially. His emphasis was on the unity of the nation. I recalled the words he uttered at that time - Bangladesh belonged to its people, both Muslims and Hindus. This was the ethos of India's independence movement too. Would the nation follow the Sheikh's voice? Would his mission for unity be completed after sacrifice? At least these questions came to my mind. For the time being I could see that the loss had fused the different religious communities. All constituted a nation in mourning.
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| Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman |
Sheikh Hasina |
Now that the case relating to the Sheikh's assassination is out of the way, the government at Dhaka should hold an inquiry into why the information conveyed by RAW to the Bangladeshi authorities that the Sheikh Sahib faced the danger of assassination was not taken seriously. I believe some officers went from Delhi to discuss with the top officials in Dhaka at that time about the possibility of a coup and the elimination of the Sheikh. Probably, the accomplices of the killers or their influential friends did not want the warning to be taken seriously and did little to protect the Sheikh. Their negligence or complicity took away from Bangladesh the leader it wanted the most at that time.
I told the Bangabhandu what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the President of Pakistan, had said in an interview. "…Our standard of living could rise substantially more than that of East Pakistan or whatever you want to call it and in terms of per capita income even more than India if we make a go of it and control our population. Of course we do not have much of a population problem but we still have to control the population and have an economic policy attuned to modern times; develop our agriculture and industry; and oil-I think we have got oil and I think we are going to make a big search for it. So I think if we make a good go of it that is good enough."
When I conveyed what Bhutto said to the Sheikh, his reaction was: "We have more resources than Pakistan; we have fish, tea, jute, gas, fruits, fertile land and a handy people. We shall soon be on our own. It is Pakistan which will have to mortgage itself to sustain the present level of spending." How prophetic the Sheikh has turned out to be!
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| Mujib’s body lying on the staircase a few hours after the assassination |
However, Hasina has to make his dream about Bangladesh come true.
While holding the probe into the circumstances that led to Sheikh's assassination, one relevant factor that needs to be looked into closely is the supply of tanks to Bangladesh.
India's minister D.P. Dhar, who was the civilian face of India's operation, had told New Delhi not to send tanks to Bangladesh. Who supplied the three tanks to Dhaka? The entire coup was carried out with the help of the three tanks. I believe Cairo sent them. Why? Were the killers, senior army officers, involved in importing the tanks one way or the other?
The chapter does not close with the Supreme Court's laconic judgment: "We find no cogent ground to interfere with the judgment of the high court" that had confirmed the lower court's judgment.
Sheikh Hasina's government must strengthen the democratic forces in the country so that the freedom of people is not snatched away as it happened when the Bangabandhu was killed. Bangladesh had to suffer a long military rule which did its worst to destroy the values that were planted in the minds of people during the liberation struggle.
Hasina has to hark back to those days and reignite the spirit of togetherness which her father had fostered. This requires the participation of the people in the governance. It is not beyond Hasina, who has won this year's Indira Gandhi prize for peace, to do so. |
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