Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

• 1. Introduction

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  Sheikh Mujibur Rahman stood before a million people at the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka on the 7th of March 1971 and told them: "This time the struggle is for our liberation. This time the struggle is for our independence." He stopped short of formally declaring independence, yet everyone in that crowd understood what was coming. Within weeks, Pakistan's army would arrest him, charge him with treason, sentence him to death, and hold him in a prison near Faisalabad while a war was fought in his name. The man known as Bangabandhu, Friend of Bengal, would survive that war only to be assassinated at his own home four years later. His life traces a path from a village in British Bengal to the founding of a nation, through prison cells, parliaments, liberation, and finally a coup that killed him and most of his family in the early hours of the 15th of August 1975. How did a clerk's son from Tungipara become the father of Bangladesh? And why does his legacy remain so bitterly contested among the people he led to independence?

• 2. Roots and Early Formation

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  Tungipara, a village in the Gopalganj sub-division of Faridpur district, is where Mujib was born on the 17th of March 1920. His father, Sheikh Lutfur Rahman, worked as a sheristadar, a law clerk, in the courthouse of Gopalganj, and owned around 100 bighas of cultivable land as a Taluqdar. The family's deeper ancestry traced back through generations of decline from the zamindars of Faridpur Mahakumar to their present middle-class standing. Mujib was an eighth-generation descendant of Sheikh Abdul Awal Dervish, a Sufi missionary believed to have come from Eastern Iran.

  His parents called him Khoka. As a child, he was described as compassionate and very energetic, forever playing or roaming the streets and feeding birds, monkeys, and dogs. In his own autobiography he recalled that he played football, volleyball, and field hockey, and admitted he was not a very good player. When a crop failure brought near-famine conditions to Tungipara, the young Mujib responded by distributing rice to impoverished farmers and students.

  He entered Gimadanga Primary School in 1927. By 1934, eye surgery and a slow recovery kept him out of formal education for four years. He was 18 years old when he married eight-year-old Fazilatunnesa, his second cousin, in an arranged marriage according to local custom. Around this time, his political passion was noticed by the senior politician Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who was visiting Gopalganj with A. K. Fazlul Huq. That encounter planted the seed of a mentorship that would shape Mujib's entire career.

• 3. The Pakistan Movement

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  Mujib moved to Calcutta for higher education in the 1940s, studying liberal arts including political science at Islamia College and living in Baker Hostel. Calcutta was then the capital of British Bengal and the largest city in undivided India, and Islamia College was one of its leading institutions for Muslim students. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1947.

  During those years he threw himself into the politics of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League. In 1943 he was elected as a councillor of the Muslim League, and in 1946 he became General Secretary of the Islamia College Students Union, at the height of the Pakistan movement. Suhrawardy, his mentor, had built 36 trade unions across Bengal covering sailors, railway workers, jute and cotton mill workers, and rickshaw pullers. Mujib worked alongside Suhrawardy in those efforts and helped protect Muslim families during the violence that accompanied partition.

  He also joined the United Bengal Movement of 1947, which sought to create an undivided independent Bengal outside both India and Pakistan. When that failed, he campaigned in the Sylhet referendum for inclusion in Pakistan, travelling from Calcutta with roughly 500 workers. In his autobiography, he recorded his frustration that Karimganj was not incorporated into Pakistan despite the referendum result. The geography of partition disappointed him even before the new state was formed.

  After partition, he enrolled in the Law Department of the University of Dhaka. In 1949 the university expelled him for inciting employees. It took 61 years before the university withdrew that order, in 2010.

• 4. Fighting for Bengali Rights

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  On the 4th of January 1948, Mujib founded the East Pakistan Students' League as the student wing of the Muslim League in East Bengal. That organisation later became the Bangladesh Chhatra League. When Governor General Muhammad Ali Jinnah visited Dhaka and declared that Urdu would be Pakistan's sole national language, the Bengali language movement ignited and Mujib was caught at its centre.

  He was arrested many times during this period. During a conference in Fazlul Huq Muslim Hall he helped establish the All-Party State Language Action Committee. He announced a nationwide student strike on the 17th of March 1948. Imprisoned again in 1952, he organised protests from inside his cell. He went on hunger strike from the 14th of February 1952, a fast that lasted 13 days. He was released on the 26th of February, shortly after police killed protesters including Salam, Rafiq, Barkat, and Jabbar on the 21st of February. The Bengali language movement succeeded: the 1956 constitution recognized Urdu, Bengali, and English as national languages.

  In the East Bengali legislative election of 1954, Mujib won a seat in the provincial assembly for the first time, defeating his Muslim League rival Wahiduzzaman in Gopalganj by a margin of 13,000 votes. The United Front coalition, which included Mujib's Awami League and A. K. Fazlul Huq's Krishak Praja Party, won 223 of the 237 seats in the provincial assembly. Mujib served as minister of agriculture and forestry, and later as minister of commerce and industries, portfolios that brought him closer to the working class. He was elected to the reconstituted Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on the 5th of June 1955, and on the 25th of August 1955 he delivered a speech opposing the government's plan to rename East Bengal as East Pakistan, insisting the people must be consulted by referendum.

  By 1958, Muhammad Ayub Khan's military coup ended Pakistan's first era of parliamentary democracy and imprisoned many politicians. Mujib spent 1,153 consecutive days in prison after his arrest on the 11th of October 1958. In 1966, having become president of the Awami League, he put forward a six-point plan at a national opposition conference in Lahore, chosen deliberately because the Lahore Resolution of 1940 was adopted there. The six points called for restoring universal suffrage, devolving federal power to the provinces, separate fiscal and monetary policies for East and West Pakistan, and a separate security force for East Pakistan. East Pakistan generated most of Pakistan's export earnings and customs revenue yet received a smaller budget allocation. Economists at Dhaka University, including Rehman Sobhan, argued that East and West Pakistan were in effect two fundamentally distinct economies. The six-point movement became the turning point toward eventual separation.

• 5. Election, War, and Imprisonment

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  Before the scheduled general election of 1970, one of the most powerful cyclones on record devastated East Pakistan, killing half a million people and displacing millions more. The ruling military junta was slow to send relief. Newspapers in East Pakistan accused the federal government of gross neglect, callous inattention, and bitter indifference. Mujib remarked that "we have a large army but it is left to the British Marines to bury our dead".

  In the elections held on the 7th of December 1970, the Awami League won 167 of the 169 seats allocated to East Pakistan in the National Assembly, surpassing the 150-seat majority needed to form a government on its own. The Pakistan Peoples Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came second with 86 seats. Bhutto declared his party would boycott parliament if Mujib formed the government, and threatened to break the legs of any West Pakistani MP who accepted Mujib's mandate. The military junta indefinitely postponed the parliament's first sitting, scheduled for the 3rd of March 1971, which set off an uprising across East Pakistan.

  On the 7th of March 1971 at the Ramna Race Course, Mujib addressed the assembled crowds and called on the people to turn every house into a fortress. Seventeen days of civil disobedience followed, with the Awami League collecting taxes and suspending monetary transfers to West Pakistan. Talks collapsed on the 25th of March 1971 when President Yahya Khan left Dhaka, banned the Awami League, and ordered the army to arrest Mujib. Operation Searchlight began. Mujib sent telegrams to Chittagong where Major Ziaur Rahman broadcast the Bangladeshi declaration of independence on his behalf. Pakistan Army's SSG 3 Commando Battalion led by Lt Col Z A Khan arrested Mujib from his Dhanmondi 32 residence.

  He was flown to a prison near Faisalabad and later moved to Central Jail Mianwali, where he remained in solitary confinement for the entire duration of the war. Pakistani general Rahimuddin Khan presided over his court-martial trial, whose proceedings have never been made public. Mujib was sentenced to death, but execution was deferred on three occasions. After Indian military intervention in December, Pakistan surrendered. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, now Pakistan's president, released Mujib on the 8th of January 1972 under international pressure.

• 6. Building a Nation

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  Mujib was flown from Pakistan to London, where he stayed at Claridge's Hotel and met British prime minister Edward Heath at 10 Downing Street to discuss Bangladesh's Commonwealth membership. An RAF plane flew him onward; during that flight, Indian Bengali diplomat Shashank Banerjee recalled Mujib smoking his trademark pipe filled with Erinmore tobacco. The two men agreed that Bangladesh would adopt a Westminster-style parliamentary system. The RAF de Havilland Comet stopped in New Delhi, where Mujib was received by Indian president V. V. Giri, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and the entire Indian cabinet. The plane then flew toward Dhaka, circling the city so Mujib could see the million people who had converged on Tejgaon Airport to greet him.

  The country Mujib inherited had been devastated. A January 1972 report in Time magazine, citing World Bank inspectors, described some cities as looking like the morning after a nuclear attack. An estimated 6 million homes had been destroyed. Pakistan International Airlines had left exactly 117 rupees, equivalent to 16 US dollars, in its Chittagong bank account before abandoning the country.

  The Constitution Drafting Committee led by Kamal Hossain produced a draft constitution that was adopted on the 4th of November 1972 and came into force on the 16th of December 1972. Bangladesh became the first constitutionally secular state in South Asia when its constitution used the word secularism, though Mujib simultaneously banned gambling, horse racing, and alcohol as anti-Islamic activities and established the Islamic Foundation. He nationalised all banks, insurance companies, and 580 industrial plants. He established 11,000 new primary schools and nationalised 40,000 more. His land reforms capped ownership at 25 bighas, effectively ending the zamindari system. The Soviet Navy conducted a mine-clearing operation in the Port of Chittagong that allowed shipping to resume. The Ghorashal Fertilizer Factory was built and work began on the Ashuganj Power Station.

  Mujib's foreign policy maxim was friendship to all and malice to none. The United States recognized Bangladesh on the 4th of April 1972 and pledged 300 million US dollars in aid. China initially blocked Bangladesh's UN membership in 1972 but withdrew its veto in 1974. Mujib gave the first Bengali-language speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974, condemning apartheid and the occupation of Arab lands. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat gifted 30 tanks to the Bangladeshi military. Algerian president Houari Boumediene brought Mujib to the OIC Summit in Lahore on his personal plane.

• 7. Authoritarianism and Assassination

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  To fight a left-wing insurgency led by the Gonobahini, Mujib formed the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini paramilitary force on the 8th of February 1972. Its members were granted immunity from prosecution and swore personal loyalty to Mujib rather than to the state. The force was accused of extrajudicial killings, shootings by death squads, enforced disappearances, and rape. Critics compared it to the Gestapo.

  A famine struck in 1974 when the price of rice rose sharply, with widespread starvation concentrated in Rangpur district. Government mismanagement was widely blamed. The famine's death toll became one of the most damning legacies of Mujib's time in power.

  With elections approaching in 1977 and dissatisfaction growing, Mujib moved to consolidate power. In 1975 he changed the constitution, abolished civil liberties and democratic institutions, declared himself president for what was effectively a permanent term, and established a single-party state. One historian described this period as the institutionalization of autocracy. The one-party regime lasted six months and twenty days.

  On the 15th of August 1975, a group of military officers carried out a coup. Mujib was assassinated at his Dhanmondi 32 residence, along with most of his family members. His the 7th of March 1971 speech was later added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. In a 2004 BBC opinion poll he was voted the Greatest Bengali of All Time. Many of his diaries and travelogues, written across his years in prison and in power, were published long after his death and translated into several languages. Those prison notebooks are among the most direct evidence of the man behind the myth.