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February is replete with history. And this history revolves around Bangladesh, around the incidents and events which have shaped its ethos. This morning, we recall Sergeant Zahurul Haque, one of the 35 accused in the Agartala Conspiracy Case who was killed in Dhaka cantonment by the Pakistan army. It was given out that he had been attempting, with a co-accused, to escape from confinement and hence was shot.
That was an untruth. Security arrangements in the cantonment were stringent and would not allow any prisoner there to think of going beyond its parameters and making a dash for freedom. Zahurul Haque was simply murdered. Which reminds us that around that time, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, accused number one in the case, was repeatedly urged by his jailors to take a walk outside his cell, on the road in the cantonment. He declined out of the very legitimate suspicion that some soldier could shoot him in the back on the pretext that he had attempted to escape.
As we remember Zahurul Haque this morning, we recall with sadness that of the 35 accused in the case, only he could not be freed. Life had already been taken from him. In February 1969, it was a whole nation of Bengalis in a state of resistance, of rebellion. The mass upsurge which erupted all across East Pakistan was a precursor to the defining events of the future, of the eventual emergence of a sovereign Bangladesh.
The upsurge, spearheaded as it was by the students’ community as also the political classes, was too potent to permit the Ayub Khan regime to go on with the charade of the Agartala Case. Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, playing a pivotal role through his demand that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman be freed, simply let the regime know that if things did not change, his jalao-gherao movement would go on.
February 1969 was a watershed moment in Bangladesh’s history. It was a time when the world of a dictator crumbled and a new dawn beckoned. The special tribunal that had been set up to try the Agartala Case accused disintegrated when the presiding judge, Justice S.A. Rahman, fled to West Pakistan. That left the two Bengali judges, Justice M.R. Khan and Justice Maksumul Hakim, sliding into irrelevance. The trial collapsed and it remained for Vice Admiral A.R. Khan, defence minister in the Ayub Khan regime, to announce on 22 February a withdrawal of the Agartala Case and an unconditional release of all 34 accused.
Bangladesh’s people had made a point. On 22 February, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in prison since he was arrested on 8 May 1966, returned home as the undisputed leader of the nation. The next day, 23 February, a new dimension was added to history when he was anointed as Bangabandhu at a million-strong rally at the Race Course, today’s Suhrawardy Udyan, in Dhaka. It was only a matter of time before the regime would collapse. On 24 February, Bangabandhu flew to West Pakistan at the head of a strong Awami League delegation to take part in the Round Table Conference called by President Ayub Khan.
Through sheer coincidence, on the flight from Dhaka to Lahore was a Pakistan People’s Party team led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bangabandhu’s team was in the economy class, while Bhutto’s had seats in the business class. At Lahore, Bangabandhu and his party colleagues alighted first, to a rapturous welcome. When the Awami League team left the tarmac, Bhutto and his people emerged from the aircraft. Bangabandhu moved on to Rawalpindi, where in response to newsmen’s questions of how he felt as a free man, he quipped, ‘Yesterday a traitor, today a hero.’ At the RTC, he was warmly welcomed by Air Marshal Asghar Khan, who months earlier had joined politics. At the conference, a visibly weakened Ayub Khan welcomed him.
Irony underscored Bangabandhu’s presence at the Round Table Conference. He was among the very opposition politicians —- Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Maulana Maududi, Choudhry Mohammad Ali, Mian Mumtaz Daultana —- who in February 1966 had not permitted him to raise the Six Points at a conference of opposition leaders in Lahore. At the RTC, despite the reservations of the opposition politicians and despite the discomfiture of the regime, the pre-eminent Bengali leader argued for a reconfiguration of the state of Pakistan on the basis of his Six Points.
Mujib had been thrown into prison, been tried by a special tribunal, condemned as a secessionist because of the Six Points. And yet here he was in Rawalpindi, emphatically arguing that Pakistan’s survival rested on an acceptance of the Six Points as its constitutional basis.
If February 1969 was a seminal moment in Bangladesh’s history, February 1971 was a step toward solidifying that history. On 13 February, General Yahya Khan called the newly elected National Assembly into session in Dhaka on 3 March. Two days later, Z.A. Bhutto, the minority leader in the assembly, made it known that he would not attend the session unless there was a modification of the Six Points. He also held out the threat that any West Pakistani lawmaker travelling to Dhaka would have his legs broken. It was the first overt indication of an intrigue being shaped to deprive the majority Awami League of power in Islamabad.
On 23 February 1974, flanked by Pakistan’s President Fazle Elahi Chaudhry and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bangabandhu stood on the rostrum at Lahore airport as a Pakistan army band played Amar Shonar Bangla. A day earlier, Pakistan had accorded formal recognition to Bangladesh’s sovereignty as a state. Bangabandhu was in Lahore to take part in the summit of Islamic nations.
Today, a sense of history fills our souls, fills our rooms as sunlight filters in. We mourn, in all this journey back to the past, the sacrifice of Sergeant Zahurul Haque. We remember too the brutality with which Commander Moazzam Hossain, another Agartala Case accused, was murdered by the Pakistan army on 26 March 1971.
And we do not forget Col Khandaker Najmul Huda, another accused in the Agartala Case and valiant freedom fighter, done to death on 7 November 1975 by renegade soldiers in the land he helped to free in 1971.
It is history we need to preserve. It is a narrative generations of Bengalis, now and those yet to be, are required to keep alive in the soul. It is an epic the world must be enlightened on.