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Wali Khan and Mizan Chowdhury
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
Khan Abdul Wali Khan and Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury have possibly reached the end of their lives. Away in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Wali Khan, when last reports came in, was in a coma. Here in Dhaka, Mizan Chowdhury is in a similar situation. Both men belong gloriously to an era that remains in our collective memory as a defining feature of life and politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh. All his life, Wali Khan has been a brave soldier in the defence of the rights of his people. He never reached the pinnacle of office, for he was either in prison or was leading demonstrations on the streets in defence of human values. It was only natural that Wali Khan would never make it to high office. And it was natural because of the political background that shaped his politics. His father Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, spent the first half of his political career trying to keep India from giving in to the communalism of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He then spent the remaining half either in Ayub Khan’s prisons or in exile in Afghanistan. But Ghaffar Khan never turned his back on principles. He died a proud man, like his younger brother Dr. Khan Saheb, who in his time struggled and failed to hold Pakistan at bay. It was such a spirit that worked in Wali Khan. When the National Awami Party was formed in the 1950s, he showed considerable promise, which promise came to be redefined in the 1960s as the political battle against the Ayub regime intensified in both East and West Pakistan. In November 1968, when the tottering dictatorship then busily celebrating its ‘decade of progress’ clamped down on a handful of powerful men, Wali Khan was among those who were carted off to jail. He re-emerged to freedom early the following year. When the 1970 general elections took place, Wali Khan proved without question the hold he and his party had over the NWFP and Baluchistan.
Khan Abdul Wali Khan has been one of a rare breed in Pakistani politics. He was a wise man who constantly warned his country’s military rulers and its corrupt, grasping civilian politicians about the wrong turns they were always taking in a furtherance of their ambitions. He knew that disaster would descend on the country if Pakistan’s Bengalis were denied the right to ascend to power in Islamabad. He was proved right. An indignant Zulfikar Ali Bhutto implicated him, in the early 1970s, in a case that questioned his and his party’s patriotism. The National Awami Party was banned and Wali Khan went to prison again. When he came out once more, he simply did a bit of tinkering and launched the Awami National Party. And then he grew old gracefully, gently and, of course, sadly because Pakistan never quite came up to his expectations. You could cite a similar story around the life and career of Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury. There was in him, once, the energy and the fire that hinted at a future historical role for him in the context of Bangladesh. He sat in the national assembly of Pakistan in the 1960s and spoke for the Awami League even as the party struggled on the streets of Dhaka to send that legislative body packing in favour of a truly representative one. Those who watched him in those days have never forgotten the commanding tone of his speeches on the floor of the national assembly. But Mizan Chowdhury carved a definitive niche for himself in June 1966 when, together with Amena Begum, he shaped the course of the general strike that would legitimise the Six Points before the Bengalis of Pakistan. With the entire senior leadership of the party in jail, it was his job as organising secretary to fill in for all of them. He did his job remarkably well. The whole of East Pakistan ground to a halt on 7 June. It was said then that Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury had made it to the pantheon of courageous and principled men in whose hands the future of the people, of a Bangladesh-to-be, was safe. When the urge for Baksal seized the broad swathe of imagination in the Awami League, he felt uncomfortable. His opposition to one-party rule, made politely and mildly, was ignored. In the mid-1970s, with the Awami League decimated by the murder of all its top men in a season of murder and treachery, it was Mizan Chowdhury who attempted to keep a shaky party together, keep the cracks engendered by factionalism from showing. There was hope that he would lead the organisation to a new birth. The hope did not quite metamorphose into reality, for younger men and women soon pushed him aside. And then Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury blundered into doing the unthinkable. He joined the military dictatorship of General Ershad and left his admirers trapped in a state of disbelief. When as Ershad’s prime minister he ran from his angry young pursuers at the Shaheed Minar, all Bengalis felt pain, as much for his mistakes as for that demonstration of youthful disrespect. His return to Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, belated though it was, nevertheless made many of us feel good.
With Khan Abdul Wali Khan and Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury oblivious to the world in which they were once bold actors, we know that another big slice of the past will now pass, like a gleam in the dark, and lodge itself somewhere in the depths of history. They have been good men who in their time created in us, in both Pakistan and Bangladesh, the necessary awareness of politics being a matter of service to society and country. Our world will be so much the poorer for their transition to the hereafter.
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