On a day in the summer of 1970, I made a dash for the dais from where Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani had seconds earlier finished addressing a crowd in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province. It was an election year and the Moulana was there as part of his party programme necessitating a tour of West Pakistan (as it was at the time) by him. 

As a student of Junior Cambridge at the missionary school where I was being educated, I had already met Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when they visited Quetta as part of their party election campaigns. My interest, as a teenager, was to collect their autographs. Both leaders happily affixed their signatures in my little autograph book. A similar purpose worked in me as I ran toward Moulana Bhashani.

When I stood before him, panting and nearly out of breath, I requested him to give me his autograph. He appeared to be in a hurry and responded thus to my request: ‘Bari te aaisho (come to my residence).’ I was perplexed, for I knew his home was in distant Santosh in Tangail in East Pakistan. There was certainly no way I could meet him, at that point, at his home more than a thousand miles away from Quetta. The end result? I did not get Bhashani’s autograph.

But let that be. As we observe the 49th anniversary of Moulana Bhashani’s death today (he passed away in 1976), it is the prominent role he played in politics which comes to mind for people like myself. Bhashani was a pivotal figure who had made his presence felt in the lead-up to the partition of 1947 through his campaign to have Sylhet become part of Pakistan. It was a time when the struggle for Pakistan overshadowed every other aspect of Muslim politics. Bhashani was keen that East Bengal, home to Muslims in the sense of a majority, needed to be part of Pakistan, albeit with Sylhet included in the proposition.

Bhashani’s agitation paid off. And yet with the establishment of Pakistan he realised, as did so many others, that the democratic structure that had been expected to define the new state was nowhere in sight. The ruling Muslim League was beginning to entrench itself as an autocracy, a condition which called for change. It was Bhashani’s background and charisma which propelled him into the leadership of the Awami Muslim League, the political party that would go on to shake up the political landscape in Pakistan. Bhashani was president of the party (which by the mid-1950s would shed its communal character and become the Awami League).

It was a tribute to Bhashani’s acumen that in the company of Sher-e-Bangla Abul Kashem Fazlul Huq and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy he forged the Jukto Front to challenge the Muslim League at the 1954 provincial elections. The Muslim League was routed, a result the ruling circles in Karachi (Pakistan’s capital at the time) could not accept and therefore decided to undermine barely two months later. But nothing could subdue the Moulana, whose loud denunciations of the ruling class in the country unnerved such shallow political figures as Iskandar Mirza, who threatened, in uncouth language, to shoot Bhashani ‘like a dog.’ 

It was Mirza who was compelled to go into exile within days of the declaration of martial law he and Ayub Khan had made in October 1958. Bhashani would go on to be a personality who simply could not be ignored. To him, politics was serious business. When Suhrawardy opted for such measures as the setting up of One Unit in West Pakistan and then openly practised a pro-western foreign policy through having Pakistan link up with SEATO and CENTO, Bhashani knew what he had to do. The Kagmari conference of 1957 redefined Bhashani’s politics. If Pakistan failed to respond to Bengali concerns, it would be bid ‘assalam-o-alaikum’. 

There was no ambiguity in Bhashani’s assessment of the situation. He made a formal exit from the Awami League, which was a clear rebuke for Suhrawardy, and formed the National Awami Party (NAP). For Bhashani, Pakistan needed to reorient its politics into a leftist mould, and that at a time when socialism and communism were frowned upon by the elite which ruled or dominated the country. The NAP was the vehicle, the Moulana believed, which could engineer the transition to socialism. The reality was something else: Bhashani was years ahead of such a political philosophy taking hold of Pakistan, if at all.

As the years wore on, Bhashani’s politics developed a mercurial aspect that often left people perplexed. With the Ayub Khan regime refashioning foreign policy through developing ties with China in the mid-1960s, Bhashani held the view that the President ought not to be disturbed. That attitude did not go down well with the political quarters then busy campaigning to force the regime from power. In hindsight, though, Bhashani’s understanding of the complexities of diplomacy will be regarded as important, for in that era it was vital that Pakistan move somewhat away from its links with Washington and edge closer to Mao Zedong’s China.

History in both Pakistan and Bangladesh has had Moulana Bhashani occupy space that will always be considered remarkable. In late 1968, as popular discontent gathered pace in Pakistan, specifically in light of demands that the Agartala Conspiracy Case be dropped and all accused in the case, among whom Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, be released without conditions, Bhashani stepped into the scene.

His demand was unequivocal: the case must go and the accused must be freed. It remains a significant moment in Bangladesh’s history that Bhashani advised the incarcerated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who at that point was being pressured by the regime to participate in a Round Table Conference on parole, not to join the talks without securing full and unconditional release.

Any history of the Mass Upsurge of 1969 will record the decisive role Bhashani played in forging a popular movement that was to force the Ayub regime from power. He threatened to march on Dhaka cantonment if the Agartala Case was not withdrawn. He would not join the RTC, along with Bhutto, for he believed it would not lead to any definitive political change for Pakistan. Similarly, his decision to boycott the country’s first general election in December 1970, while considered an unwise move, was perhaps instrumental in ensuring that Bangabandhu’s Awami League swept the election. And yet one does recall Bhashani’s surprising statement, made four days prior to the December election, declaring the ‘independence’ of East Pakistan. Mercurial politics was once again at play.

In 1971, linked to the Mujibnagar government in an advisory capacity, Bhashani was cognisant of the fact that nothing less than a liberated Bangladesh was the need of the hour. He disdainfully turned away a senior NAP leader who tried to convince him to return to occupied Bangladesh, perhaps with the intention of the Moulana joining forces with the Yahya Khan regime in the task of saving Pakistan in its dwindling eastern province. Bhashani was not one for compromise on the issue of national independence.

Post-1971, surprises were in store for the nation around Bhashani’s politics. His sudden veering to the right, particularly with his advocacy of a ‘Muslim Bangla’, as articulated in his public comments and his newspaper Haq Katha, left citizens mystified. It was a shift which clearly pleased the right wing and embarrassed Bangabandhu’s government. In early 1975, the introduction of the Baksal system could not have made him happy. But that his affection for Bangabandhu was not affected by it was manifested when in March the Father of the Nation turned up at Santosh to see him. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been the rising political star who was appointed joint secretary of the Awami Muslim League by Bhashani in the early 1950s. The emotional chords remained undisturbed.

Postscript: at a South Asian media seminar in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the early 2000s, a Pakistani politician, while expressing his happiness that Bangladesh had become a sovereign state, told me that Pakistan’s break-up had deprived the country of two leaders whose voices had been the loudest in the demand for democracy. The two leaders, he said, were Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Moulana Bhashani.  

_____________________________________

Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history