Memories OF Khaled Musharraf

It is November again.

It is November again. It is time to remember the War of Liberation, when Khaled Musharraf perfected the art of guerilla warfare against the occupation Pakistan army. He was a hands-on soldier, in that conventional sense of the meaning, and yet he had quickly proved adept in planning and employing all those hit and run tactics that have historically laid traditional armies low all across the globe.

Anyone who came across Khaled Musharraf in 1971 understood, swiftly and with a tinge of pleasant surprise, the impeccable quality that defined his performance. He was ruthless in his view that the war was all, that the enemy needed to be destroyed, that the friends of the enemy needed to be hunted down and weeded out. In that broad respect, he was far ahead of many of his colleagues in the MuktiBahini. He was articulate; and in his dealings with the foreign media that made their way to liberated zones in Bangladesh, he easily put the message across that the Bengali country of the future was to be a land defined by democracy and liberalism. Bangladesh was to be a people’s republic with secularism as its underpinning.

It was these self-same principles that General Khaled Musharraf sought to put into play in November 1975 as he made his move against the assassin majors and colonels who had in August of that year wiped out Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family in a violent coup. In terms of history, therefore, Musharraf’s place in the Bengali consciousness remains on an elevated scale, for he was the first man in that tumultuous period whose decisiveness eventually brought to an end the darkness that had kept Bangladesh in its grip for close to three months.