The Finest Hour of Bangabandhu
By Syed Badrul
Ahsan
Mar 7, 2012
IT was his finest
hour.
As Bangaban-dhu Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman rose to speak before the million people gathered at the Race
Course in Dhaka, indeed before the seventy five million people of Bangladesh on
March 7, 1971, something of the electric was in the air. Over the preceding few
days, reports and rumours had been making the rounds about an impending
declaration of independence by the man whose party, the Awami League, had secured
a clear majority of seats (167 out of a total of 313) in Pakistan's national
assembly at the general elections of December 1970.
What should have been
a journey to power as Pakistan's prime minister on Mujib's part had by early
March 1971 been transformed into a movement for Pakistan's eastern province to
prise itself out of the state created through the division of India in 1947.
The reasons were all out there. They had to do with the intrigues which had
already been set in motion to thwart the assumption of power at the centre by
the Awami League.
In the event, the
speech Bangabandhu delivered at the Race Course served the very crucial purpose
of bringing home the truth that Bangladesh was on its way to political freedom.
At an intellectual level, the speech was a masterpiece. Within its parameters,
Mujib deftly negotiated his way out of a bind, one in which he had found
himself since President Yahya Khan had injudiciously deferred the scheduled
March 3 meeting of the new national assembly in a broadcast on the first day of
the month. Almost immediately, the fiery student leaders allied to the Awami
League cause moved miles ahead to demand that Mujib declare Bangladesh free of
Pakistan.
Over the next few
days, such demands began to be echoed in other areas, eventually persuading
everyone that the Bengali leader was actually about to give in to the pressure
for an independence declaration. His rejection of an invitation to a round
table conference called by General Yahya Khan for March 10 was seen as evidence
of his intended action. Besides, there had been no perceptible move by him to
restrain the students of Dhaka University when they decided to hoist the flag
of what they believed would be an independent Bangladesh.
And yet those who
stayed in touch with Bangabandhu, or watched the way he handled the situation
in those tumultuous times, knew of the difficulties he had been pushed into.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, he needed to find an acceptable,
dignified way out of the crisis. On the one hand, a unilateral declaration of
independence would leave him facing the charge of secessionism not only from
the Pakistan authorities but also from nations around the world. He knew that
as the leader of the majority party, he could not have his reputation destroyed
in such cavalier manner. There were before him the poor instances of Rhodesia's
Ian Smith and Biafra's Odumegwu Ojukwu, images he was not enthused by. Besides,
any UDI would swiftly invite the retribution of the Pakistan military, at that
point steadily reinforcing itself in East Pakistan.
On the other hand,
Mujib realised that as undisputed spokesman of the Bengalis he was expected to
provide his people with a sense of direction, one that would reassure them
about the future. A recurring image is of Bangabandhu taking slow, ponderous
steps as he went up to the dais on that March afternoon. It was the picture of
a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. There is every reason to
believe that he was still shaping his ideas, those he would soon give
expression to before that crowd of expectant Bengalis.
And then he began to
speak, in oratory that was to prove once more the reality of why he had over
the years scaled the heights in the politics of Bengal, of Pakistan. In that
one speech he painted the entire history of why Pakistan had failed as a state.
Even as he did so, he laid out his arguments in defence of what the Bengali
nation needed to do. He mocked the conspiracies then afoot to deprive Bengalis
of political power. With prescience, he told his people that even if he were
not around, not amidst them, they should move on to protect the land, its
history, from those who would trifle with it. Every moment bubbled with
excitement. Bangabandhu soared, and we with him, as he defined our path to the
future. The man who only minutes earlier had seemed wracked by deep worry now
offered us a clear path out of the woods and into a very bright blue yonder.
"The struggle
this time is the struggle for our emancipation. The struggle this time is for
independence," declaimed Bangabandhu. We cheered. We whooped for joy. We
knew that he had not declared independence, but we were made aware that he had
set us on the path to freedom. He had refused to be a secessionist; and he had
abjured all ideas of a UDI. He had told us, in precise, unambiguous terms, that
liberation was down the road, that it was a mere matter of time. We were
content. As we went back home, with loud refrains of Joi Bangla around us and
in our souls, we told ourselves that life for us had changed forever.
On March 7, 1971,
Bangabandhu gave us reason to believe in ourselves once again. Because of him,
we remembered our heritage. Because of him, we were Bengalis again. And because
of him, we reached out to one another, to the world outside the one we inhabited,
to build our own brave new world.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star
Source: The Daily Star