Editorial
Conspiracies and risible conduct
Law Minister Moudud Ahmed informs the nation that the recent bomb blasts reveal a deep-rooted conspiracy against the government as well as the country. He has not chosen, however, to reveal the identity of the conspirators, but he does provide something that looks like a clue by pointing to the attempts made in the past four years to push the government from power. There is hardly anyone who will not agree with the minister about the conspiracy. But precisely who the objects of his derision are is quite something else. Now observe another aspect of the conspiracy factor. Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini of the Islami Oikyo Jote thinks he has stumbled on a discovery of his own. It is at once simple and untenable, for those who have kept watch over politics in the last many months. The IOJ leader sees the hand of the Awami League behind all the explosions that have occurred so far. As he puts it, those who have indulged in the violence have the support of the AL. And it is not only that but a little more. There are, says the leader of the fundamentalist outfit now part of the ruling alliance, forces (probably beyond our frontiers) who clearly wish to destroy Bangladesh through encouraging and inspiring the kind of bomb attacks we have lately been experiencing.
The problem with politics in an underdeveloped country is that it is often reduced to farce at the hands of men who do not see much beyond what their mouths utter. Moudud Ahmed has a point about his idea of the conspiracy all around, one that many will share with him. But it is Amini’s ready and ill-considered assumption of the country’s major opposition political party being behind the violence that is clearly risible. Such political behaviour only undermines the very concept of governance. Indeed, Bangladesh’s history, before and after its liberation, has in many instances been one of parochial politicians coming forth with assessments that have demonstrated their weak grasp of reality. There is hardly any question that some very real conspiracies have literally struck us in the face, that conspirators have knifed us in the back. In this month of December, weighed down as we are by memories of tragic happenings, we can only remember the conspiracies which some of our own people indulged in even as we struggled to make the country free. What the Pakistan army and its local henchmen in the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim League, the al-Shams and al-Badr did in 1971 was to shape a vast conspiracy to render us incapable of governing ourselves as a free people. Later, in the post liberation Bangladesh, the murder of two presidents, the killing of a large number of freedom fighters, et cetera, were all a fulfilment of dark conspiracies hatched by sinister elements while all of us rested complacent. So there have been and there will likely be conspiracies aplenty for the nation yet.
But what Amini suggests is a weak attempt at diversion. There is not much that can be had out of him about the dangerous conspiracy the Islamic terrorists have made us hostage to. He has been vocal, and angry, about the government’s drive to flush out militants from the madrasahs, especially those under the qaumi tent. He ought not to have done that. What he and others like him can now do is cooperate with the country in devising the means by which the terrorists can be flushed out. For far too long, a section of religion-oriented politicians have carefully avoided speaking up for the country. Their silence about the recent bomb explosions in the land is meaningful and worrying. And quixotic is the way they try to shift blame for all bad things on to people and parties they have a visceral hatred for. That is how politics gets a bad mauling in their hands.
No smokers, but the obese?
The world is getting to be an increasingly difficult place for some people. Think here of smokers. The issue of whether people should or should not smoke is not what we intend to deal with because, obviously, we know what our position on smoking is. It is that like everyone else, we appreciate the idea that smoking is bad for health. Smoking kills; it condemns people to a living hell. So much for the passion in the campaign against smoking.
But what is one now to make of the idea that the World Health Organisation will not in future hire people who smoke? Candidates for employment at WHO will be asked if they smoke. An affirmative response will swiftly lead to the person being shown the way out. What if a smoker ends up saying no because he wants or needs that job before him? More tellingly, what happens when a smoker does get the job and then gets caught smoking in some corner of his office? Well, there will be a good chance that he will get thrown out. But could such a situation not also mean that those who have mistakenly employed the smoker could have a great deal to answer for? There are all these questions which keep coming up. There is bound to be resentment, now that WHO has also said it will not penalise serving employees who smoke. Does that mean that these old-timers can keep up the habit without fear of losing their jobs? If they can, why should that be?
Someone asked a WHO official in Geneva the other day if the smoking ban might not in time lead to a ban on employing obese people at the organisation. The official waffled in her response, going only so far as to state that WHO needs to align its employment practices with its principles. Could someone translate that into simple layman’s language, please?
WOODLAND WANDERINGS
The politics of Huseyn
Shaheed Suhrawardy
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was the modern, enlightened face of a country that defined itself through its Islamic basis. That was the irony. And of interest remains the fact of Suhrawardy’s having transformed himself from a provincial Muslim leader not averse to an employment of communalism to further his ends into a secular leader for Pakistan, writes Syed Badrul Ahsan
When Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy died in Beirut in December 1963, the general feeling in both East and West Pakistan was that a staunch defender of democracy had passed on, that the country was so much the poorer by his departure. It was a time when Field Marshal Ayub Khan ruled Pakistan in unquestionably unchallenged form. Having decreed a new constitution for the country the previous year in lieu of the one crafted with such patience in 1956, the man who had placed Pakistan under the first of what would be many spells of martial law was clearly in his element. He had manipulated a section of the old Muslim League into defecting to his side and then, having taken it over, declared himself a politician. That was nonsense and everyone except his hangers-on and flunkies knew it. For Suhrawardy, democratic politics in the country having become untenable, it was not particularly a shrewd thing to be in Pakistan at the time. The shock generated by his arrest by the military regime was an episode that had riled not only him but Pakistan’s people as well. Over the years, Suhrawardy, suave, experienced and cosmopolitan, had come to epitomise modernity in a country still struggling for its moorings. It was the appealing nature of his personality and politics which led him to play an instrumental role in the forging of the National Democratic Front, a combine of political parties opposed to Ayub Khan and his quixotically defined politics of Basic Democracy. Many of the men who joined Suhrawardy in his endeavour were men who had undermined him, and the other way round, in the raucous days before the army stepped in in 1958. But by 1962, with the regime showing no sign of fatigue and instead seeming to grow increasingly consolidated in power, it was for Suhrawardy and his friends and enemies to come together in the job of freeing Pakistan from the clutches of its army.
In the years since his death, Suhrawardy has been celebrated by some of his more enthusiastic acolytes as a symbol of democracy, indeed as a child of political pluralism. There is little question that in Pakistan, a state he helped Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League to cobble into shape through his untiring efforts for the Muslim cause in the 1940s, Suhrawardy was one of the political heavyweights once Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan had passed from the scene. Men like Choudhry Mohammad Ali, Ghulam Mohammad, I.I. Chundrigar and all the others stood in awe of him. Not even Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq could quite ignore the fact of how much of a national appeal Suhrawardy held in Pakistan. For all the important roles he had played in the crucial days before and after the creation of Pakistan, Huq had not quite been able to step out of the mould of a provincial Bengali politician, and that despite his having occupied the position of Pakistan’s interior minister at one point. It remains an unalterable fact of history that while Fazlul Huq was consciously focused, sometimes erratically, on politics in East Pakistan and demonstrated no perceptible ambitions about seeking a larger role for himself at the centre, Suhrawardy was not satisfied with anything less than a chair at the head of an all-Pakistan table. He was an ambitious man and all his actions after he came to Pakistan, or was allowed to come to it, speak of the conscious moves he made to be in power or around it. It was a masterstroke he employed in 1956 when he finally managed to become the country’s prime minister. His party, the Awami League, was badly in the minority in parliament. But his negotiating skills convinced parties stronger than his that with him as head of government, they would need to fear nothing. In the event, Suhrawardy was prime minister for no more than over a year. The fall was to put an end to his future. He never regained the political high ground.
In historical terms, Suhrawardy’s relevance to Bangladesh comes through a study of the politics he pursued between the establishment of the Awami League in 1949 and the army take-over of 1958. The record, as one observes it in hindsight, was not one that upheld the Bengali cause. The late politician, forever glued to the idea of politics being played out on a national canvas, was not interested in what he saw was provincialism in the exercise of power. But that attitude, as one would have cause to observe, was as deeply flawed as his earlier approach to the Pakistan issue in the 1940s. In Pakistan, even as people thought that Suhrawardy was finally beginning to shed the bad image of having been the man behind the Calcutta riots of August 1946 and transforming himself into a democratic politician in the real meaning of the term, he began to do all those things which in time were to complicate the lives of Bengalis in Pakistan. His belief, one he pronounced with a sense of pride, that the constitution of 1956 had guaranteed ninety eight percent autonomy to East Pakistan was wrong and he knew it. Indeed, the very reality of the same constitution having eroded the status of Bengalis as Pakistan’s majority population seemed to have escaped Suhrawardy. The decision to promote East-West links through introducing parity was to provide the perfect ground for Pakistan’s rulers, right up to 1971, to extend the process of Bengali political and economic exploitation. It was strange, even bizarre, that Suhrawardy was unable to foresee the consequences of the move. It was one of the blunders that would in time need to be set right by his most loyal follower Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and in clearly radical fashion.
Suhrawardy’s goal of keeping Pakistan intact as a state was as serious a proposition as that of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s in encouraging Bengalis to move away from it. The judgement of history has over the decades made it fairly clear that Suhrawardy’s death in 1963 was also an opportunity for the Awami League to revive itself through breaking out of the NDF and developing radical new political strategy for Bengalis. There was hardly any doubt in the public mind about where Mujib intended to take the party. Even as early as 1957, Mujib saw Pakistan as an eventually untenable idea for the country’s eastern province. When he broached the subject before Suhrawardy, he was swiftly put down. With the imposition of martial law in 1958 and the Tagore centenary celebrations of 1961, Mujib was clearly mulling over the concept of a Bengal enjoying either a confederal link with the rest of the state or breaking away altogether. But his thoughts remained just that, thoughts. It was in 1964 that Mujib felt free to move out into the sun on his own. The Awami League was never quite the same after that. And yet it remains part of history that the energy which has for more than fifty years sustained the organisation was provided by Suhrawardy at a time when politics was a matter of great risk-taking. His was the image politicians depended on for Pakistan to develop an effective opposition to the increasingly corrupt coterie rule of the Muslim League in the late 1940s. His long association with politics in undivided Bengal was in itself an assertion of his appeal; and it was this appeal which in time would lead him to the position of Pakistan’s law minister. There remains the question of why he agreed to serve under Mohammad Ali Bogra or, as prime minister, have Ayub Khan on board as defence minister. The answer can only come through an observation of the objective political realities prevailing at the time. Suhrawardy was not one to be ignored or left out of the political process. It was obvious the idea of Pakistan being in the hands of lesser men (and nearly everyone on the political scene at the time was lesser than he) was deeply abhorrent to him. Beyond such calculations, Suhrawardy was an ambitious man not unwilling to stamp his image on Pakistan. It is a misfortune that he could not go far.
Pakistan’s foreign policy under Prime Minister Suhrawardy was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was unabashed pro-Americanism he espoused, a reality made obvious by the rapturous welcome he received from the Eisenhower administration during his official visit to Washington in 1957. On the other, it was his government that made the first serious move, at the height of the Cold War, for Pakistan to make an opening to China. Zhou En-lai’s visit to Pakistan during Suhrawardy’s period in office was to serve as an important stepping stone to what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would seek to develop in the 1960s as foreign minister in the Ayub Khan government. With the Arab world, however, Suhrawardy caused immeasurable damage for Pakistan through clearly failing to offer support to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Suez crisis. It was a mistake that would keep Pakistan out of Arab affection for years on end.
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was the modern, enlightened face of a country that defined itself through its Islamic basis. That was the irony. And of interest remains the fact of Suhrawardy’s having transformed himself from a provincial Muslim leader not averse to an employment of communalism to further his ends into a secular leader for Pakistan. He looked at the wider world in the way a modern man would. And yet, curiously and inexplicably, he was never able to bring himself to acknowledge the darkness beginning to descend on the Bengalis of his country. Suhrawardy’s passing was a tragedy for Pakistan. In a larger sense, it signified a new beginning for Bengalis. In time, it would be for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to overtake his mentor on the historical canvas and emerge as the father of a nation which Suhrawardy thought should logically remain part of Pakistan. Suhrawardy was, of course, wrong. And Mujib, as usual, was right in his reading of history.
(Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, former prime minister of undivided Bengal, former prime minister of Pakistan and founder of the Awami League, died on 5 December 1963 in Beirut).
E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk
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