19 June 1968 … Before and After

It is time to recall 19 June 1968. Towards the end of December 1967, reports in newspapers in East and West Pakistan spoke of the arrest of a number of individuals in connection with what was given out as a conspiracy they had indulged in against the state. It was not made clear who were the individuals involved and what the nature of the conspiracy was. Neither was it mentioned that the conspiracy, if indeed it was a conspiracy, involved persons all of whom were Bengalis from Pakistan’s eastern province.

Not until mid-January 1968 did matters become a little clearer. On 18 January, the government informed the public that a conspiracy to bring about the secession of East Pakistan from the rest of the country had been spearheaded by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the incarcerated general secretary of the East Pakistan Awami League. As it later emerged, when the conspiracy was ‘exposed’ in December 1967, the name of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman did not figure on the list of those taken into custody by the regime. Therefore, when in January his name was added to the list, suspicions were aroused that the Ayub Khan regime had determined that Mujib’s political career needed to be finished through a portrayal of him as a secessionist.

I recall the reactions of my father and his fellow Bengalis, who were colleagues serving the central government in Quetta, to the report of Bangabandhu’s involvement in the conspiracy. Of course, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not yet Bangabandhu, but he was nevertheless held in the highest esteem by my father’s generation. My father simply made one statement: “Sheikh Shaheb cannot be engaged in any conspiracy.” It was a feeling shared by his colleagues, but none of them spoke out for fear of themselves being regarded as anti-state elements. Already the term ‘ghaddar (traitor)’ was coming into vogue in West Pakistan regarding not only Bangabandhu but Bengalis as well. 

I was a pretty good debater in school and had by then won quite a few prizes at inter-school debates. In April 1968, as I presented my arguments at a new debating competition I was taking part in, a student from a senior class, sitting among the audience, rather audibly accused me of being a ghaddar. I simply lost my temper, raised my fist and told him I would deal with him once the competition ended. Of course my ratings went down as a result of my reaction to that boy, but I was not unhappy. It was my very first experience of being tainted as a traitor, which again was a consequence of the regime’s efforts to vilify Bengalis through the conspiracy case. And the case, which would come to be known as the Agartala Conspiracy Case, was formally presented to the country as State Vs Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Others. The intent was obvious: finish off Mujib.

The year 1968 would become notable for other reasons as well. The regime and its loyalists went into overdrive with plans to observe the Ayub regime’s ten years in power – he had commandeered the country in October 1958 – as a decade of reforms. Newspapers and other media channels focused on what was dubbed as a revolution Ayub Khan had brought about in the country through his coup d’etat. Having seized power, he promoted himself, in less than two years, to field marshal. He introduced a new and pretty strange constitution for the country in 1962. Adult suffrage was ignored, for only 80,000 so-called Basic Democrats would elect the President and the members of the national and provincial assemblies. On 2 January 1965, Ayub defeated Fatima Jinnah, sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, at the Basic Democracy-based presidential election. Nonetheless, reports have continued to this day of his loyalists purloining votes cast for Ms Jinnah, especially in East Pakistan.

Even as it went into celebrating the so-called decade of reforms, the regime finalised plans to bring those arrested under the Agartala Conspiracy Case to trial in the middle of 1968. The trials were to be conducted inside Dhaka cantonment, where all the prisoners had been lodged, before a special tribunal constituted for the purpose. Bangabandhu, who had been imprisoned since 8 May 1966, was swiftly transferred to military custody once his name appeared as the chief accused in the case. All these decades later, I remember the long hours I spent scouring the newspapers for reports on the case. It is a part of history which remains for me as fresh as it was fifty-eight years ago. Justice S A Rahman, Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court till early June 1968, was appointed chairman of the special tribunal. He was to be assisted by two Bengali judges, Justice Mujibur Rahman Khan and Justice Maksumul Hakim. Be it noted that many years later, Justice Hakim served as Bangladesh’s ambassador in a couple of European countries ().

The case galvanised Bengalis in Britain into action. They raised funds to provide for Bangabandhu’s defence. Sir Thomas Williams, Queen’s Counsel, was deputed to Dhaka to defend the imprisoned Bengali leader. Additionally, Abdus Salam Khan, an eminent Bengali lawyer, was appointed counsel for Bangabandhu. One of the accused, Khan Shamsur Rahman, had his legal defence taken up by his brother Ataur Rahman Khan, a former Chief Minister of East Pakistan. The prosecution team comprised T A Khan and a few others, among whom was S M Zafar, Ayub’s law minister. The regime would initially place as many as 1500 Bengalis in detention but release them, though not before they had succeeded in convincing some of them to turn approvers in the case. Interestingly, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at the time chairman of his newly formed Pakistan People’s Party, also made an appearance before the tribunal in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s defence. The proceedings of the Agartala Conspiracy Case appeared on a daily basis in the newspapers, the objective on the part of the regime being to undermine Bangabandhu’s political character before citizens and show him up as a conspirator in league with the Indian authorities to break up Pakistan. In the event, the effort would boomerang on the regime.

As it would later be revealed, the Bengalis arrested in the case had been subjected to various forms of physical and psychological torture before they were finally produced before the tribunal. As for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, he was compelled to sleep in his quarters with high-powered lights switched on. Subsequently it became known that a Bengali colonel of the Pakistan army, who in post-August 1975 circumstances became a minister in a military regime in Bangladesh, made it a point to harass Mujib constantly at night. But such behaviour failed to break Mujib’s resolve to confront the case head-on. On 19 June 1968, when the trial got under way, Bangabandhu reassured the families of the accused present in court that they had nothing to worry. His abundant confidence was remarkable considering that all 35 accused were on trial for treason and could lose their lives on the gallows.

On the same day, when he was asked by a western newsman as he entered the court what he thought of his future, Bangabandhu smiled and informed him, “You know, they can’t keep me here for more than six months.” He was almost correct in his arithmetic. He and his fellow accused would be freed in eight months and the Agartala Conspiracy Case would be withdrawn unconditionally by the regime in the face of an intensifying Mass Upsurge in East Pakistan and large-scale anti-Ayub protests in West Pakistan. On the opening day of the case, Bangabandhu loudly informed a journalist in court that anyone who wished to be in Bangladesh – and Bangladesh, not East Pakistan, was the name he used – “would have to speak to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman”.

Meanwhile, Ayub’s decade of reforms was falling by the wayside. In early November 1968, a young man took potshots at the President at a public meeting in Peshawar. Ayub Khan was not hurt, but his government swiftly went into action. Khan Abdul Wali Khan, chief of his faction of the National Awami Party, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, were placed under arrest. A few days later, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, former commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s air force, and Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed, former chief justice of the East Pakistan High Court, entered politics, clearly in opposition to Ayub Khan. The news was relegated to the back pages of newspapers, as a small item.

The regime was unable to stamp out the growing opposition to it all over the country. By December 1968, politics did not require any more clarity to be explained to the country. The message was simple: Ayub Khan’s end was near. He had only months left in his exercise of power, though power had in realty slipped from him. The Agartala Conspiracy Case, which his regime had instituted to put an end to the career and perhaps life of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, ended up swallowing the regime he had foisted on Pakistan back in October 1958.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history