June Chronicles and the Idea of Bangladesh

The month of June occupies an important place in modern history. On 19 June 1965, the Algerian military led by Defence Minister Houari Boumeddiene overthrew Ahmed Ben Bella, the country’s first President and a staunch nationalist who had struggled for years to free his country from French colonial rule. Ben Bella then endured imprisonment for years before he was freed.
On 5 June 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, having just won the California primary for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States, was shot and died a day later from his wounds. Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was earlier assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.
On 1 June 1969, Tofazzal Hossain Manik Mia, reputed editor and insightful columnist of the Bengali daily Ittefaq, passed away in Rawalpindi, where he had been on a visit. Manik Mia, who had been arrested twice by the Ayub Khan regime, first in 1959 and then in 1962, was a bold voice in support of the Bengali demand for regional autonomy in Pakistan. His support for the Six Points of the Awami League considerably energised the movement for democracy in the country.
June 1949: That was June away from our shores. For the people of Bangladesh, June remains an indelible part of history. Indeed, it transformed Bengali history and with that Pakistani history when the Awami Muslim League emerged as a powerful opposition to the ruling Muslim League on 23 June 1949. The stalwarts behind the arrival of the new party were Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ataur Rahman Khan, Shamsul Haq and a young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
It goes to the credit of the party leadership that in the mid-1950s they made a bold move to reconfigure the organisation as a secular political party that would be home to citizens of all religious and cultural denominations in the two wings of Pakistan. Thus did the Awami League assert itself and in the years that followed played a pivotal role in undertaking an arduous struggle for democracy to take roots in Pakistan. In the mid-1960s, on 5 February 1966 to be exact, the Awami League planted the seeds of a future, sovereign Bangladesh when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman outlined his Six-Point Plan for regional autonomy in Pakistan. Circumstances would soon arise, in the aftermath of the general election of 1970, that would propel the Awami League towards an armed struggle for Bangladesh’s freedom from Pakistan in 1971.
June 1966: The rise of the Awami League to a pre-eminent perch in Pakistani politics was assured through the general strike or hartal called by its leadership in support of the Six Points on 7 June 1966. The Six Points had already aroused the ire of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan, and the Pakistani establishment since they detected in the programme a conspiracy to have East Pakistan break away from the rest of the country and become an independent state. In early May, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would less than three years later be anointed Bangabandhu by a nation grateful for his principled leadership, was placed in detention under the Defence of Pakistan Rules (DPR). Other senior leaders of the party were also placed under arrest and a wholesale offensive was initiated against the party by the Ayub regime in cahoots with the provincial government headed by Governor Abdul Monem Khan. 
In such straitened circumstances, the younger group of Awami League leaders, among whom were MIzanur Rahman Chowdhury and Amena Begum, criss-crossed the province to garner support for the 7 June general strike. The hartal was a resounding success despite the Ayub regime’s efforts to intimidate the Awami League leadership into silence. All manner of repression was let loose against the party and yet the Bengalis observed the strike in its totality. A number of citizens were killed in police firing on the day. However, newspapers appearing the next day, 8 June, carried only the government’s sanitised version of what had transpired during the strike. Predictably, the regime put the blame on the Awami League for what it called the violence resorted to by the party while enforcing the hartal.
The 7 June general strike was the very first instance of an entire province of Pakistan observing without question the directives of the incarcerated leaders of a major political party. Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury and Professor Yusuf Ali, members of the Pakistan National Assembly from the Awami League, raised the issue of the repressive measures adopted by the regime on the floor of the House, thereby giving the issue a countrywide dimension. The hartal and the regime’s knee-jerk response helped hugely in publicising the Six Points across the country, especially in West Pakistan. 
June 1968: Close to two years after the 7 June general strike, the Ayub Khan regime instituted a case of sedition against thirty-five Bengalis, who were accused of engaging in a conspiracy to bring about the secession of East Pakistan from the rest of Pakistan. The charges were framed in January 1968 against the thirty-five men, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman named as accused number one. The regime constituted a special tribunal headed by Justice S.A. Rahman, a West Pakistani, to try the accused. With him on the bench were two Bengali judges of the East Pakistan High Court, Justice Mujibur Rahman Khan and Justice Maksumul Hakim. 
Proceedings of the case, officially known as State Vs Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Others and popularly referred to as the Agartala Conspiracy Case, commenced at Dhaka cantonment on 19 June 1968. As part of its plan to finish off Bangabandhu as a significant Bengali political figure, the regime decided to have the trial conducted openly, with newspapers free to report on the case as it was argued by prosecution and defence before the tribunal. A good number of approvers were presented before the tribunal, among whom were individuals informing the judges of the inhuman torture they had been subjected to before they agreed to provide ‘evidence’ about the seditious activities of the accused.
The opening day of the Agartala Conspiracy Case remains remarkable in Bangladesh’s history. The thirty-five accused were seen in public for the first time since they were arrested towards the end of 1967. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had been lodged in Dhaka Central Jail following his arrest on 8 May 1966, was transferred to Dhaka cantonment once he was named as the principal accused in the Agartala Case. Those who were present in court on 19 June 1968 -- judges, lawyers, media people, the families of the accused and visitors -- noted a confident Bangabandhu reassuring everyone that nothing would happen to him and his fellow prisoners. 
At one point, Bangabandhu tried to draw the attention of a journalist he knew well. When the journalist appeared intimidated by the presence of military and civil intelligence agents in the room, the future Father of the Bengali Nation loudly proclaimed before the tribunal, ‘Bangladesh-e thakte holey Sheikh Mujibur Rahman-er shathe kotha bolte hobe’ (to be in Bangladesh one has to talk to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman). 
June 1996: The Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, returned to power at the 12 June 1996 general election. The development was crucial, for it brought the party back to government twenty-one years after the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family in August 1975 and the murder of the four national leaders -- Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, M. Mansoor Ali, A.H.M. Kamruzzaman -- in prison in November 1975.
The new government moved swiftly to repeal the notorious Indemnity Act issued by the illegitimate Moshtaq regime in September 1975 and incorporated infamously in the fifth amendment to the Constitution by the Jatiyo Sangsad elected at the February 1979 election. The government also took steps to bring the local collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army in 1971 to justice. 
In unmistakable terms, Bangladesh’s history, distorted in the aftermath of the assassinations of 1975, was restored and reaffirmed in June 1996, to the relief of the nation.
That is the appeal of June in Bangladesh’s history, for June encapsulates some of the seminal moments in the rise of Bengali nationalism and the growth of the resultant movement for the liberation of the land. In very many ways, June has embodied, always, a resurgence of the spirit of Bengali nationalism, of the core principles of Bengali political and cultural heritage. 
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history