From embryonic Pakistan to
wounded Bangladesh
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
For the student of Bengal politics, the background leading to the partition of India remains as intriguing as ever. While there is a vast wealth of information on the struggle put up by the workers and leaders of the Indian National Congress to drive the British colonial power from India, there is certainly a paucity of material where the role of Muslim League politicians is concerned. Of course, the movement built up for Pakistan by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his colleagues in the All India Muslim League was eventually to lead to the division of the country in August 1947. But what this rather extraordinary work by Harun-or-Rashid does is to examine the many difficulties, compounded by mutual suspicions and backstabbing, that some senior Muslim politicians found themselves in in the years leading up to the vivisection of the subcontinent. The writer subtitles his work as ‘Unpublished Correspondence of Partition Leaders’, which explains why the book should be a good read.
And there are instances aplenty to demonstrate the frenzy with which Muslim League leaders from Jinnah to Suhrawardy to Fazlul Huq to Maulana Akram Khan moved towards partition. But through all the correspondence it is the role of Jinnah, at once aloof and haughty, that shines through. The future founder of Pakistan is clearly in little mood to listen to anyone offering him advice, a clear hint of the authoritarian tendencies that subsequently were to be the seeds for the long-term instability of the country he would create for India’s Muslims. Jinnah clearly detested Fazlul Huq. When he removed Huq from the League parliamentary board and sought an explanation for his ‘behaviour’, Huq thundered, ‘You have had the impertinence to ask for an explanation from me . . . You are not working for Muslim solidarity at all but seem to be playing a deep game . . . Your conduct in Bengal has surprised everyone . . . I call upon you to explain your conduct . . .’
Harsh words, those that pit a giant against another. And yet as Pakistan looms on the horizon, Huq seems to mellow in his attitude towards Jinnah, almost to a point where he appears to be obsequious to the man beginning to be referred to as Quaid-e-Azam. When Jinnah writes to Huq on 11 December 1940, ‘ . . . I regret to say that you should have adopted this course without reference to me . . .’, Huq’s response is relatively mild. As he writes back to Jinnah, ‘It is far from my intention to bring about a disruption in the Muslim League . . . My only desire has been for peace because I feel that unless there is a unity among all communities on the principle of give and take, there will be no constitutional advance and no prospect of a better India . . .’
The letters in the work reveal the extent to which Fazlul Huq upset Jinnah and his loyalists. One of these loyalists, a Bihari Muslim Leaguer named Raghib Ahsan adopts the palpably fawning when he complains to Jinnah about the perfidy of the Bengali politician. He writes to Jinnah on 16 May 1941, ‘. . . It occurs to my mind that seeing the scandalous character and behaviour of Mr. Fazlul Huq you should no more select him for the Working Committee of the All India Muslim League. In case you decide to drop this rogue of Muslim politics it will be advisable to select Hon. Maulvi Tamizuddin Ahmed in his place.’ Ahsan goes on, in subsequent missives to the Muslim League president, to brand some associates of Huq as conspirators against League policy. On 18 May 1941, he informs Jinnah, ‘Mr. Syed Badruddoja is siding with Mr. Huq . . . Badruddoja is aspiring to be the Leader of the Corporation League Party . . .’
With Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, something of a love-hate relationship is revealed through the letters Jinnah exchanges with the Bengal supremo. The man who was someday to be prime minister of Pakistan and founder of the opposition to the Muslim League writes to Jinnah on 25 April 1942, ‘The Muslims of Bengal have realised that Pakistan means everything to them and they are not prepared to support anyone whose activities may cause its damage . . .’ In his 30 October 1945 response to a Suhrawardy request for funds for the Bengal provincial Muslim League, Jinnah is blunt: ‘I can give you no promise of any financial help. God helps those who help themselves, and you must make every effort to augment your provincial fund. If each Mussalman makes his contribution of one rupee to the Bengal Provincial Muslim League Fund, you will get over three crores . . .’ Not even Suhrawardy can resist the temptation of taking a swipe at Fazlul Huq in his communication with the leading figure of the Pakistan movement. Six months before partition, on 20 February 1947, he writes, ‘Perhaps you would like to know what all the trouble in Bengal has been about. Mr. Fazlul Huq is again out on his nefarious business and is doing everything in his power to undermine the solidarity of the Muslims . . .’ The correspondence in Bengal Politics is fundamentally a picture of the mistrust which defined Muslim League politics insofar as Bengali Muslim participation in the Pakistan movement was concerned. Moreover, the feudal nature of the Muslim League, with Jinnah as the ultimate repository of power, is revealed in all its gaudy colours. The upshot is that the movement for Pakistan stands exposed as essentially a tale of intrigue, of the loaves and fishes to be had out of partition. Suhrawardy, to be lionised by many in a subsequent Bangladesh as a symbol of democracy, is demonstrably upset in May 1947 about the future of Calcutta. As he tells the principal secretary to the viceroy in a letter, ‘Calcutta ought not to go to the non-Muslim area. It has been built up by the British and it is a cosmopolitan city . . .’
Inside Bengal Politics
1936-1947
Unpublished Correspondence of
Partition Leaders
Harun-or-Rashid
The University Press Limited
ISBN 984 05 1668 X
Tk. 300/-
Those who have had occasion to read Rounaq Jahan’s Pakistan: Failure in National Integration in the early 1970s cannot but recall the forensic approach she brings to her survey of politics in this part of the world. It is an attitude she adopts once more in the work under review, though there must be the caveat that Bangladesh Politics is an expanded — and updated — edition of the original as it was published in 1980. The newness of this edition consists, as it must, in its handling of the last phase of the Ziaur Rahman regime as also, in a flash, the Ershad administration and the stretch of time straddling the period between the first government led by Khaleda Zia and her second that ascended to power in October 2001. In effect, therefore, the work is a story in progress of a nation which has gone through some of the roughest of patches in modern times.
Jahan’s work examines in historical detail the political and social issues Bengalis have confronted since they decided to opt for Pakistan in the later part of the 1940s. Her coverage of the twenty four years in which Bangladesh served as the eastern province of Pakistan takes within its range not merely the history of politics as we have known it but also the realities that had to do with the subsequent liberation of Bengalis. Jahan traces the chaos which defined Pakistan as a state between its emergence on the global stage in 1947 right up to the first general elections held in the country in December 1970. Within the ambit of the period, the author recaptures some of the crucial moments in Pakistan’s history, an effort which clearly points to the crisis building up within the body politic of the Muslim state. There is the very powerful feeling running through her description of events that the advent of Ayub Khan in October 1958 was a defining, in a very narrow sense of the meaning, moment for Pakistan. That was owing particularly to the degradation of politics at the hands of the regime. The rudeness with which the constitution enacted by Pakistan’s constituent assembly in 1956 was abrogated by the military in 1958 was to serve as the path to a degeneration of the country’s social system. Worse, the Ayub period, for all its role in the economic development of Pakistan, was basically a time when economic as well as political inequality between the two wings of Pakistan became pretty much a well-pronounced affair. In brief, the decade that Ayub spent presiding over the fortunes of Pakistanis was ironically the time when the road to its eventual disintegration was actually smoothened.
One might then be provoked into raising the issue of the 1970 elections, an exercise which many in both East and West Pakistan believed would create a new, healthy political order for all citizens. An answer to such a question can only be that many of the expectations that came to be attached to the elections ultimately foundered on the rock of reality. For one thing, the Islamabad-based military junta of Yahya Khan had never entertained the thought, not even for a moment, that the Bengalis of East Pakistan would vote in a bloc for the Awami League, enough to turn it into Pakistan’s majority political party. For another, those who looked forward to a peaceful, happy transfer of power to the Awami League at the centre were soon left shaken by the unholy coalition forged by the junta and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, the purpose being a refusal to allow Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to take charge of the country. These and related events only made things harder for Mujib, who could not logically abandon the constitutional politics he had long espoused and at the same time was not in a position to ignore the rising demands from his younger followers for a unilateral declaration of independence. Rounaq Jahan recreates, like many others before and after her, the procession of events which were to lead to the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation-state in December 1971. The next stage she covers in her observation of Bengali politics begins with the return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangabandhu and Father of the Nation to his ecstatic Bengalis, from solitary confinement in Pakistan. Her evaluation of political developments in the new state is essentially as we have known it to be. The charisma of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, enough to calm the fears of his people about their future, was soon to go through an eerie process of decline, to a point where the founding father of Bangladesh found himself compelled to go for drastic measures. Along the way, his government made mistakes, many of them in its dealings with Bhutto’s Pakistan. Promising to place as many as 1500 senior Pakistani military officers on trial for genocide, the Mujib administration soon whittled the figure down to a mere 195 officers. Even that left Bhutto upset, with the result that Dhaka could not but let every Pakistani soldier go home in return for all its Bengalis to make their own way home to Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh Politics, the story is, all things considered, one of the slow decline of a state founded on the values inherent in an upholding of democracy. The very problems which have left Pakistan crippled since its establishment in 1947 are much the same issues that have prevented Bangladesh from moving on. The rise of the military regimes of General Ziaur Rahman and General Hussein Muhammad Ershad followed the pattern set in Pakistan by Field Marshal Ayub Khan and General Yahya Khan (as also, subsequently, General Ziaul Haq and General Pervez Musharraf). The military, in the free state of Bangladesh, has replicated the role that once originated in the Pakistani armed forces. All that, and a lot more besides, is what you get in this analytical account of the history of Bangladesh from Rounaq Jahan.
The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh
Memoirs of an American Diplomat
Archer K. Blood
The University Press Limited
ISBN 984 05 1650 7
Tk. 450/-
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