Shall We Tell The President?

The assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975 & the ouster of his daughter Sheikh Hasina's government in Bangladesh last year are connected elements of an unfolding story of interest to the neighbourhood. While covering Bangladesh's Liberation War and posted in Dhaka till 1975, senior journalist Manash Ghosh saw first-hand the wheels within wheels that turned inexorably to mow down Bangladesh's 'first family'.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

MANASH Ghosh, 82, the author of a new book that peels the power and the plot behind the assassination of the first President of Bangladesh, belongs to that generation of journalists who worked with their backs to the camera. His souvenirs from the Liberation War of Bangladesh (1971), extending up to the first three years of independent Bangladesh, as a 28-year-old journalist with The Statesman posted in Dhaka, are his memories. They are now part of his new book, Mujib's Blunders (Niyogi Books). A highlight of the book is the way it has filled in the shadows that circled the new nation that eventually led to the assassination of its first president and the massacre of 18 members of his family on August 15, 1975, and gives the conspirators, faces.

In realpolitik, it is accepted wisdom that friends are kept close and enemies, closer; the book shows Mujib taking it to ridiculous lengths—exaggerating the capacity for reform of former enemies while antagonising old comrades like Tajuddin [the person who actually directed the Liberation War with Mujib then in Pakistan's jail and who was also the prime minister of Bangladesh's first provisional government], often at the behest of his ambitious nephew Sheikh Moni.

Mujib's immediate predicament after freedom, unlike Jinnah's and Nehru's, hinged on identity—his nation's liberation came with Indian help and he wanted to foreground Bangladesh's identity as a secular Bengali nation. For many Bangladeshis, that was betraying the mandate—they had signed up for a Muslim-Bengali nation with a majority of the elite resentful of the separation from Pakistan. For the defence top and middle brass, for instance, that meant loss of privilege, and starting over in a new nation.