Listening to the House of Lords debate on London’s proposed Holocaust memorial, it was not difficult to believe that this is where everything began. Marx’s ponderous research, the running sore of Kashmir, even atrocities against vulnerable women that seem to have become a derelict Calcutta’s forte. Hasina Wazed’s security, which is now India’s sacred responsibility, however irresponsible she may have been as prime minister, is another London legacy. It is rooted in the liberation of Bangladesh which, she says, her father planned while visiting London in 1969.
That’s when I met him. The Hindustan Standard’s Tarapada Basu called to tell me that released from his legal entanglements, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, stormy petrel of East Pakistan politics, was coming to London. He even arranged my meeting with Mujib in another Bengali’s modest East End flat. Basu himself wasn’t there despite the story’s news potential. He was like that. A British editor thought that with his beatific smile and ample spread, Basu, who had lived in Britain since before World War II, could have been the lord mayor of a middling North Country town. There was nothing about him of the “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability” that are supposed to be a foreign correspondent’s hallmarks.
Bare-bodied, a lungi wrapped around his waist, Bangabandhu oozed avuncular charm. “Tell your readers” — I represented The Statesman in London — “that I brought Rabindrasangeet back to Pakistan radio!” It was an affirmation of faith in cultural solidarity transcending borders. There was a second fleeting encounter before a widowed and middle-aged Indira Gandhi went sartorially berserk like a more recent Indian prime minister and presented herself to a mammoth Maidan rally as a Bengali bride in red-bordered garad. Commissioned by All India Radio to cover Mujib’s visit, all I managed was to push and shove in the melee until reaching the great man, I demanded a message for West Bengal. “Amar shubhecchha!” he shot back severely, misty gaze set on the middle distance, very much the hero of the occasion.
He had changed. Cyril Dunn, who covered the sub-continent for London’s Sunday Observer, said that apart from the nose-dive that Mujib’s English had taken, the warmth of their chatty late-night strolls in Dhaka’s Ramna Race Course might never have been. Lawrence Lifschultz discerned moral decline, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review of the “unprecedented” “corruption, malpractices and plunder of national wealth” under Mujib.
What the Sheikh called his “Second Revolution” couldn’t have gladdened the idealistic young warriors I met in Khulna and Jessore in 1971. They had dreamt of ushering in a new civilisation in which Hindus and Muslims were just Bangladeshis. Mujib’s boast of transforming governance for the benefit of farmers, workers and the downtrodden echoed the apologetic rhetoric of generations of absolute rulers the world over. The milestones stood out starkly on the road from democracy to dictatorship. The state of Emergency declared on December 28, 1974, the Special Powers Act, the constitutional amendment of January 25, 1975 authorising a presidential system of government and a single national party under Mujib as president, the Newspaper Ordinance that in effect banned all but four State-owned publications, and — finally — that Stalinist monstrosity, the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League, with all other parties banned. The Fourth Amendment compelled all members of Parliament to join BaKSAL.
India turned a blind eye to this perversion of the hopes that had inspired the liberation war. Having placed all their eggs in one basket, New Delhi’s policymakers feared that the least criticism would play into the hands of Islamist fundamentalists. Suspicions of conspiracy involving George Griffin, an American diplomat, and Khondakar Mustaque Ahmed, the Bangladesh government-in-exile’s foreign minister, to abort the revolution before Bangladesh was born strengthened the feeling that even Awami League loyalists couldn’t be taken for granted. Pakistan and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation could still wreck the nonaligned world’s secular stability.
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was one world leader who knew that popular idols can have feet of clay. His acerbic reference to “the hero who had opposed Pakistan and led East Pakistan to independence as Bangladesh… arriving in style at Ottawa in his own aircraft” for a Commonwealth summit meeting in August, 1973 said as much.
Singapore takes its austerity seriously. When President Sellapan Ramanathan was visiting the Maldives on his first State visit, his young secretary worried himself sick because the octogenarian president and his wife would get no sleep during the long flight. Singapore Airlines didn’t run to First Class, and Business Class seats could not be converted into beds. One of the world’s richest little states denied itself the luxury of special aircraft for its top dignitaries. The extravagance of chartering aircraft was unthinkable.
Michael Richardson of the International Herald Tribune told me he had seen Lee in shorts and a sports shirt at Changi airport late one night. With a single Gurkha guard in attendance, the prime minister checked and re-checked the time it took a newly-installed conveyor belt to deliver baggage from aircraft to arrival hall. Tourism being Singapore’s life’s blood, Lee did not want tourists to start off with a poor impression of local efficiency. Of course, no bhadralok from East or West Bengal could be expected to manually check luggage like him.
Mujib’s Boeing 707 “with ‘Bangladesh’ emblazoned on it” was already parked when Lee reached Ottawa. “When I left, it was still standing on the same spot, idle for eight days, getting obsolescent without earning anything.” Lee also noticed on that last day that “two huge vans were being loaded with packages for the Bangladeshi aircraft.” Shopping? Hearing Mujib ask the Commonwealth for aid, Lee mused that the Bangladeshi Biman 707 idling on the tarmac, frittering away precious flying hours, cannot have helped Dhaka’s cause.
No one understood PR better than him. He knew that benefactors expect meekness in recipients of charity, which was one reason why Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were never popular in the West. “So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore’s Third World status” he wrote, reminding Indian readers of Sarojini Naidu’s jibe about the cost of keeping Mahatma Gandhi in poverty. Lee advised indigent Afro-Asian leaders to put up a show of poverty if they hoped for sympathy.
Even India, which is by no means as wealthy as the mushrooming of billionaires suggests, cannot ignore that advice. But Mrs Wazed’s plight presents the more challenging task of carving out a new strategy for the region. China and Pakistan can’t be wished away. Nor India’s own 200 million Muslims. The 48.42% of the population that was female in 2023, according to the World Bank, must be protected from rapacious males whose bestiality appears to enjoy high-level political support in Calcutta.
Such diverse personalities as Svetlana Alliluyeva, Myanmar’s U Nu and the Dalai Lama can testify that India is not exactly a novice when it comes to extradition. In fact, Tibet’s pontiff once gently reprimanded the BBC for exploiting his plight in a way that might have embarrassed India. A nation’s self-interest comes first; but beyond that, no government can be so lacking in charity and compassion as to deny either to fallen foreign leaders.
Before paying his first official visit to India as Bangladesh’s president, Ziaur Rahman pestered New Delhi for assurance that he would receive every honour and courtesy shown to Mujib. India’s compliance confirmed not only that the stronger party can afford to be generous but that the winner can best save the future by drawing a line under the past. Sadly, Mrs Wazed failed to do so in relation to Salauddin Quader Chowdhury. But that cannot justify throwing her to an inflamed Dhaka mob. Or denying justice to a young girl who may have encountered London’s notorious Jack the Ripper in the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital.
