BANGLADESH: MUJIB’S ROAD FROM PRISON TO POWER

TIME Magazine January 17, 1972
To some Western observers, the scene stirred thoughts of Pontius Pilate deciding the fates of Jesus and Barabbas. “Do you want Mujib freed ?” cried Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at a rally of more than 100,000 supporters in Karachi. The crowd roared its assent, as audiences often do when subjected to Bhutto’s powerful oratory. Bowing his head, the President answered: “You have relieved me of a great burden.”
Thus last week Bhutto publicly announced what he had previously told TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin: his decision to release his celebrated prisoner, Sheikh Mujibur (“Mujib”) Rahman, the undisputed political leader of what was once East Pakistan, and President of what is now the independent country of Bangladesh.

Five days later, after two meetings with Mujib, Bhutto lived up to his promise. He drove to Islamabad Airport to Sheikh Mujib off for London abroad a chartered Pakistani jetliner. To maintain the utmost secrecy, the flight left at 3 a.m. The secret departure was not announced to newsmen in Pakistan until ten hours later, just before the arrival of the Shah of Iran at the same airport for a six-hour visit with Bhutto. By that time Mujib had reached London tired but seemingly in good health. “As you can see, I am very much alive and well,” said Mujib, jauntily puffing on a brier pipe. “At this stage I only want to be seen and not heard.”
A few hours later, however, after talking by telephone with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi and with the acting President of Bangladesh, Syed Nazrul Islam in Dacca, Mujib held a press conference in the ballroom of Claridge’s Hotel. While scores of jubilant East Bengalis gathered outside the hotel, Mujib called for world recognition of Bangladesh which he described as “an unchallengeable reality,” and asked that it be admitted to the United Nations.
Clearly seething with rage, Mujib described his life “in a condemned cell in a desert area in the scorching heat,” for nine months without news of his family or the outside world. He was ready to be executed, he said. “And a man who is ready to die, nobody can kill.” He knew of the war, he said, because “army planes were moving, and there was the blackout.” Only after his first meeting with Bhutto did he know that Bangladesh had formed its own government. Of the Pakistani army’s slaughter of East Bengalis, Mujib declared: “If Hitler could have been alive today, he would be ashamed.”
Mujib spoke well of Bhutto, however, but emphasized that he had made no promise that Bangladesh and Pakistan would maintain a link that Bhutto anxiously wants to have. “I told him I could only answer that after I returned to my people,” said the Sheikh. Why had he flown to London instead of to Dacca or some closer neutral point? “Don’t you know I was the prisoner?” Mujib snapped. “It was the Pakistan government’s will, not mine”. Mujib’s stay in London lasted only 24 hours. On Sunday he flew off in an R.A.F. jet to New Delhi and then to a triumphal welcome in Dacca.
Little Choice
Although Mujib’s flight to London rather than to Dacca was something of a surprise, his release from house arrest was not. In truth, Bhutto had little choice but to set him free. A Mujib imprisoned, Bhutto evidently decided, was of no real benefit to Pakistan; a Mujib dead and martyred would only have deepened the East Bengalis’ hatred of their former countrymen. But a Mujib allowed to return to his rejoicing people might perhaps be used to coax Bangladesh into forming some sort of loose association with Pakistan.
In the light of Mujib’s angry words about Pakistan at the London press conference, Bhutto’s dream of reconciliation with Bangladesh appeared unreal. Yet some form of association may not be entirely beyond hope of achievement. For the time being, Bangladesh will be dependent upon India for financial, military and other aid. Bhutto may well have been reasoning that sooner or later the Bangladesh leaders will tire of the presence of Indian troops and civil servants, and be willing to consider a new relation with their humbled Moslem brothers. Bangladesh, moreover, may find it profitable and even necessary to re-establish some of the old trade ties with Pakistan. As Bhutto put it: “The existing realities do not. constitute the permanent realities.”
Stupendous Homecoming
One existing reality that Bhutto could hardly ignore was Bangladesh’s euphoric sense of well-being after independence. When the news reached Bangladesh that Mujib had been freed, Dacca began preparing a stupendous homecoming for its national hero. All week long the capital had been electric with expectation.In the wake of the first reports that his arrival was imminent, Bengalis poured into the streets of Dacca, shouting, dancing, singing, firing rifles into the air and roaring the now-familiar cry of liberation “Joy Bangla.
Many of the rejoicing citizens made a pilgrimage to the small bungalow where Mujib’s wife and children had been held captive by the Pakistani army. The Begum had spent the day fasting. “When I heard the gunfire in March it was to kill the people of Bangladesh,” she tearfully told the well- wishers. “Now it is to demonstrate their joy.”
The people of Bangladesh will need all the joy that they can muster in the next few months. The world’s newest nation is also one of its poorest. In the aftermath of the Pakistani army’s rampage last March, a special team of inspectors from the World Bank observed that some cities looked “like the morning after a nuclear attack.” Since then, the destruction has only been magnified. An estimated 6,000,000 homes have been destroyed, and nearly 1,400,000 farm families have been left without tools or animals to work their lands. Transportation and communications systems are totally disrupted. Roads are damaged, bridges out and inland waterways blocked.
The rape of the country continued right up until the Pakistani army surrendered a month ago. In the last days1 of the war, West Pakistani-owned businesses which included nearly every commercial enterprise in the country remitted virtually all their funds to the West. Pakistan International Airlines left exact 117 rupees ($16) in its account at the port city of Chittagong. The army also destroyed bank notes and coins, so that many areas now suffer from a severe shortage of ready cash. Private cars were picked up off the streets or confiscated from auto-dealers and shipped to the West before the ports were closed.
Ruined Gardens
The principal source of foreign exchange in Bangladesh $ 207 million in 1969-70 is jute ; it cannot be moved from mills to markets until inland transportation is restored. Repairing vital industrial machinery smashed by the Pakistanis will not take nearly as long as making Bangladesh’s ruined tea gardens productive again. Beyond that, the growers, whose poor-quality, lowland tea was sold almost exclusively to West Pakistan, must find alternative markets for their product. Bangladesh must also print its own currency and, more Important, find gold reserves to back it up. “We need foreign exchange, that In, hard currency," says one Dacca banker. “That menus moving the Jute that la already at the mills. It means selling fur cash, not In exchange for Indian rupees or East European machinery. Its means gel ling foreign aid, food relief, and fixing the transportation system, all at the same time. It also means chopping Imports,"
The Bangladesh Planning Commission In more precise. It will take $ 3 billion just to get the country back to its 1969-70 economic level (when the per capita annual Income wan still an abysmally inadequate $ 30). in the wake of Independence, the government of Bangladesh, headed by Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam and Prime Minister Tajuddln Ahmed, has instituted stringent measures to control inflation, including a devaluation of the rupee in terms of! the pound sterling (from 15 to 18), imposing a ceiling of $ 140 a month on all salaries and limiting the amount of money that Bengalis can draw from bank. Such measures hit hardest at the urban, middle-class base of the dominant Awami League, but, there has been little opposition, largely because most Bengalis seem to approve of the moderately socialist course laid out by the government. Last week Nazrul Islam announced that the government will soon nationalist the banking, insurance, foreign trade and basic industries as a step toward creating an “exploitation-free economy.”
Not the least of the new nation’s problems is the repatriation of the 10 million refugees who fled to India. As of last week, Indian officials said that more than 1,000,000 had already returned, most of them from the states of West Bengal and Tripura. To encourage the refugees, camp officials gave each returning family a small gift consisting of a new set of aluminum kitchen utensils, some oil, charcoal, a piece of chocolate, two weeks’ rations of rice and grain and the equivalent of 50c in cash.
Within Bangladesh, transit camps have been set up to provide overnight sleeping facilities. The government acknowledges that it will need foreign aid and United Nations assistance. Some UN. Supplies are already stockpiled in the ports, awaiting restoration of distribution facilities.
The political future of Bangladesh is equally uncertain. For the moment, there is all but universal devotion to the words and wisdom of Mujib, but whether he can institute reforms quickly enough to maintain his total hold on his countrymen is another question. Many of the more radical young guerrillas who fought with the Mukti Bahini (liberation forces) may not be content with the moderate course charted by the middle-aged politicians of the Awami League. Moreover, the present Dacca government is a very remote power in country villages where the local cadres of the Mukti Bahini are highly visible.
Already the guerrillas have split into factions, according to India’s Sunanda Datta-Ray in the Statesman. The elite Mujib Bahini, named after the Sheikh, has now begun to call itself the “Mission,” and one of its commanders, Ali Ashraf Chowdhury, 22, told Datta-Ray: “We will never lay down our arms until our social ideals have been realized”. Another guerrilla put the matter more bluntly: “For us the revolution is not over. It has only begun.” So far the Mujib Bahini has done a commendable job of protecting the Biharis, the non-Bengali Moslems who earned Bengali wrath by siding with the Pakistani army. But the government is anxious to disarm the Mujib Bahini, and has plans to organist it into a constabulary that would carry out both police and militia duties.

Front Windshields
Despite its ravaged past and troubled future, Bangladesh is still a lovely land to behold, according to Time’s William Stewart. “There is little direct evidence of the fighting along the main highway from Calcutta to Dacca,” he cabled from Dacca last week, “although in some areas there are artillery-shell craters and the blackened skeletons of houses. Local markets do a brisk business in fruit and staple goods, but by Bengali standards many of the villages are all but deserted.
“Dacca has all the friendliness of a provincial town, its streets filled with hundreds of bicycle-driven rickshaws, each one painted with flowers and proudly flying the new flag of Bangladesh. In fact, every single car in Dacca flies the national flag, and many have Mujib’s photo on the front wind¬shield. The city is dotted with half-completed construction projects, including the new capital buildings designed by U.S. Architect Louis Kahn. Some day, when and if they are (miss one page)-------
Even his detractors concede that Mujib has the personal qualifications to become an extremely effective popular leader. He is gregarious, highly emotional and remarkably attuned to the needs and moods of his supporters. He has an uncanny ability to remember names and faces. Mujib is also a spell¬binding orator with a simplistic message and a pungent,, fervent style.
It is not yet clear whether Mujib is more profound than his stirring rhetoric. His political success so far is due largely to his1 ability to marshal public opinion in East Bengal by blaming all of its troubles on its former rulers in West Pakistan. He has a tendency to make extravagant promises,, and to oversimplify complex economic and agricultural problems. “My brothers,” he once told a gathering of East Pakistani jute farmers, “do you know that the streets of Karachi are paved with gold, and that it is done with your money earned from exporting jute?”
Mujib’s supporters insist that he has shown a capacity for growth. He was born 51 years ago, one of six children of a milled class family that lived on a farm in Tongipara, a village about 60 miles southwest of Dacca. At ten, Mujib displayed the first signs of a social conscience by distributing rice from the family supplies to tenant farmers who helped work the property. “They were hungry, and we have all these things,” the boy explained to his irate father, an official of the local district court.
As a youth, Mujib developed a strong antipathy to British rule. While a seventh-grader, he was jailed for six days for agitating in favor of India’s independence. A long bout with beriberi left his eyes weakened, and Mujib belatedly finished high school when he was 22.
After earning a B.A. in history and political science at Calcutta’s Islamia College. where he developed a taste for the writings of Bernard Shaw and Indian Poet Rabindranath Tagore—Mujib enrolled as a law student at Dacca University. He supported a strike by the university’s menial workers, and quickly found himself in jail once again. He indignantly rejected an offer to be set free on bail. “I did not come to the university to bow my head to injustice,” he said grandly. When he got out of jail, Mujib discovered that he had been expelled from the university. He promptly set out on a turbulent political career and spent 10i of the next 23 years -behind bars. “Prison is my other home,” he once shrugged.
Between jail terms, Mujib helped found the progressive Awami (People’s) League of East Pakistan, and in 1954 briefly served as the provincial minister in charge of industry and fighting corruption. Mujib had long been disillusioned by the exploitation of poorer East Pakistan by the more dominant western half of the divided nation. He was further disenchanted by the 1965 war with India. Like many other Bengalis, he was appalled to discover that the West Pakistanis had left the country’s eastern sector virtually undefended. The next year, Mujib propounded his now famous six points, which demanded domestic autonomy for East Pakistan within a confederation with the West. Field-Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan rejected the demands as a secessionist conspiracy, and had Mujib and other Awami League officials arrested and taken to West Pakistan. When Mujib was released for lack of evidence in 1969, more than 1,000,000 people turned out to greet him at a home-coming rally at Dacca’s Race Course. By then East and West Pakistan already were drifting toward the course that led to Mujib’s imprisonment in West Pakistan—and to last month’s war.
As was customary in East Bengali villages, Mujib was pledged to his wife in an arranged marriage when she was three and he 14. They have five children ranging from a & year old son to a 25 year old married daughter, who recently gave birth to a boy. Soon after his return to Bangladesh, Mujib will get his first look at the new grandchild, whose name, Joi, was taken from the new country’s wartime rallying cry, Joi Bangla!—Victory to Bengal!