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Chief Justice Syed J.R. Mudassir Husain’s worry is also that of the nation as a whole. When he speaks of the culture of intolerance and impatience which has come to define the behaviour of politicians in Bangladesh, he speaks of a situation we have watched develop ominously over the years. Indeed, when Justice Husain points out the grave damage that such behaviour is inflicting on the development of democracy and human rights in the country, no one in the country can or will disagree with him. But what is clearly more shocking for us is the realisation, now reinforced by the observations of the Chief Justice, that politics has in the last two decades undergone some very bad decline in Bangladesh. Where a pursuit of politics in the past was essentially and quite rightly considered an act truly geared to the promotion of the public weal, today it has come to be regarded with suspicion that can only mar the reputation of political leaders and workers further. The clear indifference which the general masses have in recent times demonstrated toward politics and politicians is a clear consequence of the behavioural patterns which have been manifesting themselves in our political classes.
   When one considers the nature and appeal of politics as they used to be decades ago and then proceeds to observe conditions today, one cannot but agree with the Chief Justice that the state of disrespect which politicians have developed toward one another and indeed toward the nation has corroded many of the values we have always upheld as pillars of society. In Parliament these days, lawmakers have little time or inclination to listen to the other side with respect and due attention. But why must one blame them only? After all, they take their cue from their senior leaders, the men and women they consider, quite wrongly under the circumstances, as symbols of national leadership. The bigger fact of politics today is that the country remains in an elusive search for figures who can truly be termed as national leaders as distinct from people whose partisanship has prevented them from scaling the heights that can give them a commanding view of national perspectives. A simple instance of how democracy takes a beating in our times should suffice. Every time a Chhatra Dal or Chhatra League worker is killed or injured in political disturbances, the senior leaders of the major parties, including their chairman or president, make it a point to portray the situation in a partisan light. And so what emerges is an image of the political class consciously carving out for itself territory that surely is not reflective of the overall national scene. Now, when the matter is one of intolerance, the fact that the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have deliberately chosen not to acknowledge each other’s presence in national life speaks of the depths to which politics has sunk in this country. If that is the reality, what grounds are there for citizens to think that national interests can be served by or will be safe in the hands of the political generation which today presumes to speak for the nation? The biggest damage that an intolerant and impatient political class can do is to reduce politics to a state of tribalism. That is precisely what has been happening in Bangladesh. And that is one very potent reason why we as a people have been held back from making our contributions to the world of which we are a part.
   But, seriously speaking, how much of an impact will the observations of the Chief Justice have on our political leaders? There is the pretty strong likelihood of his comments being dismissed by them as interference in the political process. That will be tragic. On the positive side, the observations just might persuade the politicians to sit back and rethink their approach to one another and to the issues. One simple truth that they cannot overlook is that their growing lack of respect for dissent and for one another has by now percolated down to the larger areas of social life, to a point where the overall principle of respect governing relations between individuals has become virtually non-existent. It is a malady that has been worming its way into our social fabric, built around our long-held tradition as a civilised nation, and eating it up from within.

In memoriam: Haider and Mukul

In the week gone by, the country has lost two journalists to mortality. The passing away of Shafiqul Aziz Mukul is a loss that we will for quite sometime be unable to bear with any sense of equanimity, especially since Mukul was in his career emblematic of the values we have all held dear in politics and journalism. Mukul’s biggest appeal was his strict adherence to principles, those which shaped his political beliefs in the run-up to the national struggle for liberty and secular nationhood. He saw little reason to have those beliefs subsumed to political partisanship despite his clear identification with people and policies he considered home ground. He had a clear sense of individual perspectives, which helped him stay away from any display of sycophancy (which many politicians we identify with often expect from us) towards those he respected. And therein he deserves and gets our respect.
   In the week which brought us tidings of the death of Mukul, we were further shaken by the report of the passing away of A.Z.M. Haider. Anyone who has had the opportunity to work with Haider or make his acquaintance (and there are whole groups of such people in the media) cannot easily forget the idealism that drove him as he pursued a long journalistic career. A principled, secular individual, Haider belonged to a generation of newsmen whose ideas were shaped in the crucible of radical and nationalistic politics, which is why it was always a pleasure taking lessons in history from him. A thorough gentleman, he was a prolific commentator on national politics and remained so until illness finally came between him and his work. He was soft-spoken and was forever respectful towards others, a trait that has lately been turning conspicuous by its absence in our social conditions. His death only reduces the ranks of decent men in journalism a little more.
   Our prayers go out for A.Z.M. Haider and Shafiqul Aziz Mukul. They will be missed, for all the good reasons for which good men are missed everywhere.

Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan is a largely forgotten figure these days. There have not been very many people who in the last three decades, or perhaps more, have cared to remember the man. Disgrace and defeat, as the Yahya Khan story has proved all these years, are the very stuff that makes people forget the individuals who come by these signs of shame. Or if they are recalled at all, it is because of the notoriety they once demonstrated in their days of false glory. By all historical accounts, Yahya Khan was a notorious man, and not just because he seized political power in an unconstitutional manner in Pakistan in March 1969. The greater and bigger shades of mischievous behaviour would come later, through his brutal attempt to suppress the struggle for Bangladesh. It was a struggle Yahya Khan would lose, but in the nine months in which he had his army destroy life and property in occupied Bangladesh he left little to be imagined about the nature in him, the characteristics that were to destroy him. Only nine years after his supervision of the destruction of Pakistan in Bangladesh, he died a forlorn man in Rawalpindi. Quite a natural thing to happen, considering everything he had destroyed in the nearly three years in which he was president of Pakistan.
   General Yahya Khan went into oblivion minutes after he handed over power to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on 20 December 1971. Almost immediately he was placed under house arrest by the new leader of a country that only four days earlier had lost its eastern province to the Mukti Bahini and the Indian army. If we are to believe Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the disgraced president made a point of asking his successor, before surrendering presidential authority, to be allowed the chance of executing the sentence of death served on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bhutto, in his own explanation of the situation, would later relate the story of how he had prevailed upon the dictator to desist from such action because of the emergent new realities in the subcontinent. With 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war in Bangladesh, he explained to Yahya, it would be a terrible blunder to have the leader of the Bengali nationalist movement, then imprisoned in Mianwali, executed. Not a single soldier of the defeated Pakistan army would be able to return home alive from Bangladesh, if at all. As Bhutto informed everyone back then, including Mujib when they first met in late December, it was his efforts that had prevented Yahya Khan from carrying out the threat of finishing off the Bangladesh leader. When Mujib came back home to Dhaka in January 1972, he made particular note of the fact that Bhutto had saved him from Yahya and that therefore he was grateful to the new president of Pakistan. But was that quite the way things happened? If you go by what the respected Pakistani columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee has to report (and he reported in 2000), General Yahya Khan had his own perspectives on the exchanges between him and Bhutto on the Mujib issue in 1971. Yahya seems to have maintained a journal in 1976, when he was still under house arrest and Bhutto was still in power, the goal being to present his version of events as they occurred in the year the Pakistan army murdered three million Bengalis in Bangladesh.
   There is, of course, a caveat here. Both Yahya and Bhutto being extremely economical with the truth, especially in relation to 1971, it would not be appropriate to take the words of either man at face value. And here is the reason why. The leader of the Pakistan People’s Party made it increasingly clear, once he found himself in second place after the elections of December 1970, that he was not willing to play second fiddle to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the centre in Islamabad. And then there was more. On the night of 25 March 1971, Bhutto watched Dhaka burn from his suite in the Intercontinental. As a key ally of the army in the abortive negotiations with the Awami League, he was surely aware of the genocide the military had planned against the Bengalis. And yet he pretended to have been caught unawares by Yahya Khan’s departure for Rawalpindi from Dhaka only hours before the launch of military operations in Bangladesh. As for Yahya Khan, the defence he put up for himself after the defeat of 1971 was one that dangerous men beaten in war generally resort to as a way of explaining away their own incompetence or bad judgement. The fact of the matter is that Yahya Khan and his team simply sneaked out of Dhaka even though they knew the Awami League was waiting to hear from them about the nature of the transfer of power they expected to take place as a way of resolving the crisis. All along the course of the negotiations, the president of Pakistan misled Mujib and his colleagues and clearly utilised all that time to reinforce the military presence in the province. On 26 March, when Yahya Khan addressed the nation in the evening, he gave Pakistanis to understand that the Awami League chief had been engaged in a conspiracy to break up Pakistan through suggesting a political solution bordering on secessionism. In fact, the reality was quite the opposite. Yahya and Bhutto had themselves suggested to Mujib that the national assembly sit in truncated form, in Rawalpindi and Dhaka, to draft their own versions of a probable constitution for the country before they could re-link as one body to hammer out a solution through studying both documents.
   Going back to the issue of what might or would likely have happened to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in December 1971, we have (thanks to Ardeshir Cowasjee again) Yahya Khan’s version of the circumstances as they prevailed at the time. The general, who appears to have begun to loathe Bhutto at some point in that year but especially after he was detained by his successor, refers to the latter as ‘Shora’, meaning ‘hanging upper lip’, as it appears on the face of a camel. Yahya Khan writes thus in his 1976 journal:
   ‘Mujibur Rahman: Shora loathed him to such an extent that when I was going to Iran in October 1971 to attend the 2500th anniversary of Iran’s monarchy he told me to wind up the military court’s proceedings quickly and finish off Mujib. I told him that until the proceedings of the court are finalised I cannot make a decision. He said that in Iran all sorts of pressures would be brought against me by heads of state to let off Mujib, so I must act at once and hang him.’
   There could be a good deal of plausibility here, for by September 1971 Bhutto had already rushed out, in the form of a book he called The Great Tragedy, his version of what had transpired at the Dhaka negotiations in March. It was a hurriedly, badly written book, made worse by the People’s Party leader’s brazen attempt to depict Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the villain of the piece. Bhutto did not have anything negative to say about Yahya Khan, for Yahya was still in power and Bhutto needed to continue currying favour with him. For himself, his book made him look like the only dominant political figure in whom burned intensely the fire of patriotism. With Mujib alive, Bhutto could not be sure that the power he had craved so badly since the election would actually come to him. It was clearly in his interest to have Yahya Khan hang the Bengali leader. And then with Yahya gone in the aftermath of the uproar such an act would in turn create, nationally and globally, he would take charge without any taint coming to him over the death of the leader of the majority party in the national assembly.
   Yahya Khan then moves on to his December 1971 conversation with Bhutto, moments before the transfer of power:
   ‘Then again, when I was handing over to him on December 20, 1971, I told him that the proceedings of the military court have been received and are being examined by the law ministry before I could take a final decision. The way he told the nation that I had ordered the execution of Mujib and that he had saved him! Lies! Lies! Lies! But then what else could be expected from a master liar? It can be checked up with the proceedings of the military court and the dates and timings of the case which was being processed by the central government offices. The funny thing was that good Mujib believed him when he told him that Yahya wanted to hang him but Bhutto saved him.’
   Note the ‘good Mujib’ sentiment. And this from a man who had throughout the Bangladesh struggle done all he could to leave the jailed Bengali leader’s reputation in tatters. Out of power, like all other men before him in similar conditions in various spots around the world, Yahya Khan was, in his own estimation, a victim and a much-maligned figure. Everyone but he had to be responsible for the bad treatment Mujib had received and would receive in future. But, of course, to a very significant extent, Yahya Khan’s account of how some others, particularly collaborationist Bengali politicians, wanted Mujib destroyed, would be hard to discount. In the same part of the journal, General Yahya Khan notes:
   ‘Incidentally, he was not the only one who wanted to finish off Mujib. Earlier, in one of my meetings with that cripple Nurul Amin and Mahmood Ali, they both told me that they cannot control the Pakistan Pasand and Islam Pasand Bengalis unless I finish off Mujib. My reply was that if this was the thinking of Pakistan’s politicians --- that they wish to finish each other off --- God help Pakistan from such politicians.’
   Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan was freed from detention by General Ziaul Haq in 1977. For the remaining three years of his life, the former dictator was shunned by his country and his friends, all of which pushed him into increasing loneliness. When he died in 1980, General Zia ordered an official funeral for him. No one has spoken of Yahya Khan, not really, since he was interred in his grave.
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk