Tajuddin Ahmad: Bangladesh’s lost leader
Syed Badrul Ahsan
The War of Liberation was a turning point for Tajuddin Ahmad in a couple of ways. It brought out the best in him in terms of leadership. And then, in a few years’ time, it left him lonely and disillusioned.
For the very first time, during the war, Tajuddin was able to demonstrate his abilities in running the show in the absence of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In very many ways, Tajuddin had been schooled in the politics pursued by Bangabandhu, who himself had been a disciple of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Both men were essentially politicians who had grown in the liberal shadow of their mentors. Both men were also in certain ways individualistic in some of the positions they adopted, as the stories of Bangladesh’s struggle have consistently shown.
In his youth, Mujib obviously did not share Suhrawardy’s enthusiasm about democracy in Pakistan, especially where the latter’s pronouncements regarding autonomy for East Pakistan were concerned. Suhrawardy’s assertion that under Pakistan’s 1956 constitution Bengalis had obtained ninety-eight per cent of autonomy ran counter to reality and Mujib knew it. Even so, he was unwilling to publicly disagree with the man in whosetutelage he had made his mark in politics. But the future founder of Bangladesh knew too that when the time came, a change in politics would be called for. That opportunity arose in late 1963 with Suhrawardy’s death in Beirut. Mujib lost little time in pulling the Awami League, the East Pakistan segment of it, out of the National Democratic Front Suhrawardy had played a leading role in shaping in 1962 to check Ayub Khan’s military regime.
For Tajuddin, it was the politics of commitment he shared with Bangabandhu. The two men came particularly close in 1966 through Mujib’s public announcement of the Six Point plan for regional autonomy in February of the year. Tajuddin was present at the Lahore press conference where Mujib revealed the plan on 5 February. Beginning with the announcement of the Six Points, Tajuddin coordinated programmes with Mujib, with the two men going on an offensive within the Awami League and without to gain support for the programme. Within the Awami League they inaugurated a campaign to have the Six Points adopted as policy over the reservations as also objections of the senior leadership of the party. The two men carried the day and between February 1966 and March 1971 it was unique teamwork they engaged in. The Mujib-Tajuddin combination was at the time often likened to similar combinations elsewhere in modern history. The result was the emergence of Bangladesh. In simple terms, with Mujib taken into custody by the Pakistan army in late March 1971, it was left to Tajuddin to pick up the torch and move on. And move on he did.
The war, then, was decisive for Tajuddin in another way. Much of his energy was spent warding off the attacks made on him by Sheikh Moni and his followers on the one hand and by Khondokar Moshtaque on the other. These would be the very men who would go on with their campaign against Tajuddin well into the liberation of Bangladesh and especially throughout the time Tajuddin served as Finance Minister in Bangabandhu’s government. The warmth and camaraderie which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad shared till their last meeting before war broke out in March 1971 went through quick dissipation in January 1972 within days of Bangabandhu’s return home from incarceration in Pakistan. Tajuddin did not have the chance, despite his best efforts, to explain to Bangabandhu the developments leading to the formation of the Mujibnagar government. What was certainly painful for him was the whispering campaign which went on against him even after the war ended. His detractors were not just the young men who had cobbled the Mujib Bahini into shape during the war and refused to have it placed under the authority of the Mujibnagar government.
Similar detractors were in the rightwing camp led by Khondokar Moshtaque as well. Moshtaque, Commerce Minister in the Mujib government, had a good number of reasons to complain about Tajuddin to Bangabandhu. And, of course, it still rankled with Moni and his band of supporters that Tajuddin Ahmad had on his own formed the government-in-exile and named himself Prime Minister. As they put it, during and after the war, Tajuddin’s actions were a direct contradiction of what they called Bangabandhu’s directives about the national political course to be followed in his absence.
Tajuddin Ahmad and his Mujibnagar colleagues looked forward to a visit by Bangabandhu to the village in Meherpur, Chuadanga, where the Mujibnagar government had taken formal shape in April 1971. The anticipated visited never took place, which again is cited by observers of Awami League politics as a hint of the rift which was increasingly widening the chasm between the Father of the Nation and the country’s wartime leader. On top of everything, Tajuddin’s frustrations grew as the country lurched from one crisis to another. His concept of socialism was being pushed to the sidelines; the famine of 1974 embarrassed the government before the world; and corruption and administrative inefficiency were a scourge both Tajuddin and Bangabandhu tried desperately to stem and roll back.
Meanwhile, the extreme, and violent, Left, personified by the likes of Siraj Sikdar and Abdul Haq, had begun to carry on a sustained campaign against the government. The newly formed Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) in little time went into radical mode, with men like Major Jalil and Col. Abu Taher making it clear to their followers that the constitutionally elected Mujib government needed to be removed through force of arms. The JSD’s adventurism led predictably to violence on the streets when its activists tried to storm the residence of Home Minister Mansoor Ali in March 1974. The resultant police action led to casualties, which again impelled the government into taking tough action against the JSD.
By 1974, the government of Bangladesh was in an embattled state. Within, it was the widening gap on a wide range of issues between Bangabandhu and Tajuddin which weakened the ruling party as well as the government.
Since the war in 1971 and well into the early days of Bangladesh’s independent nationhood, it was Tajuddin’s belief that the country should maintain close ties with nations and governments which had come to Bangladesh’s aid in its hour of peril. He of course had India and the Soviet Union in mind. Added to such a position was Tajuddin’s unqualified opinion in the new country’s requirement of a socialistic political structure. For many observers of the Awami League, it was rather intriguing that Tajuddin was advocating policies which did not or could resonate with the largely middle class section — and this class was in the majority — of the party.
For his part, Bangabandhu was conscious of the need for Bangladesh to have all the friends it needed in the international community. He remained aware of the Nixon administration’s hostility toward Bangladesh’s struggle in 1971. He was also unhappy that China and Saudi Arabia had not sympathized with the plight of the Bengalis during the war. Despite all these realities, though, Mujib remained convinced that sooner rather than later Bangladesh would need the support of these countries, and also the other way round, on issues of a strategic nature. He made it a point in the speeches he made around the country to refrain from voicing any public criticism of these countries or their governments. He agreed with Tajuddin that Delhi and Moscow were natural recipients of Bangladesh’s goodwill for the immense contributions they had made to the Bengali cause. But he also believed that Dhaka needed strategic expansion in its diplomatic dealings with the wider world out there. A strict adherence to socialism would only come in the way of a broader role for Bangladesh across the globe.
The differences between the two men, then, punctuated their relations in the post-1971 circumstances. For Tajuddin, there were the other areas where he did not, indeed could not, see eye to eye with his leader. He was troubled when the Awami League went into an alliance with the Communist Party of Bangladesh led by Moni Singh and Professor Muzaffar Ahmed’s National Awami Party. His reasoning was basic — that the country was in need of a strong, credible political opposition that could be provided by the CPB and NAP. The moment when these partiesdecided to join a bandwagon led by the Awami League, he knew, sounded the pretty ominous message that little chance of educated political discourse remained in the political arena. He told the CPB and NAP leadership in no uncertain terms that their move would destroy Bangabandhu and then would destroy everyone else.
Tajuddin’s discomfort with politics, which only grew more intense following his departure from the government, received a bad jolt with the passage of the fourth amendment to the constitution in January 1975 and the subsequent imposition of a single-party system of government on the country. As droves of individuals — in politics, journalism, the civil service, the armed forces and other professional bodies — made a beeline for membership of Baksal, Tajuddin Ahmad scrupulously stayed away. He would not be persuaded to be part of it even as a member of its central committee. The constitutional changes made in early 1975 were for Tajuddin a portent of disaster, a point of view he put across to Bangabandhu. Unfortunately for him, there were few takers for his opinions on the Baksal issue.
Tajuddin Ahmad was not receptive to the idea of Bangabandhu’s participation at the summit of OIC leaders in Lahore in February 1974. If he had reservations about Bangladesh becoming a member of an organization whose principles ran counter to the secularism the country had enshrined in its constitution, he kept them to himself. But it was Bangabandhu’s trip to Pakistan he was uncomfortable with, a feeling he made clear to the Father of the Nation. For his part, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was in little position to entertain Tajuddin’s argument, for the simple reason that the OIC leaders then present in Lahore had gone out of their way to convince Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to accord diplomatic recognition to Bangladesh and invite its leader to the summit. Mujib did not wish to be seen as arrogant or indifferent. He decided to go to the city from where he and Tajuddin had eight years earlier launched the Six Point programme.
The last straw came in October 1974. Tajuddin Ahmad returned home after a long official tour of various western nations, in the course of which he met American administration officials as well as World Bank President Robert McNamara in Washington. Speaking to newsmen at Tejgaon airport on 13 October, an unusually agitated Tajuddin noted that misguided policies had pushed Bangladesh’s economy into a vulnerable state. The statement was not only an acknowledgment of failure on his and the government’s part but was also considered to be an unprecedented instance of public indictment of the way Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was presiding over the country from a leadingplayer in his government. Having expressed his views thus — and that despite being an important cog in the wheel of government — Tajuddin must have known that he could not expect to survive much longer in the administration.
Over the next thirteen days, observers of national politics expected Tajuddin Ahmad to resign from the government on his own. He appeared unwilling to make such a move and instead waited for Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to act.
On 26 October 1974, the head of government acted. In a terse letter to the Finance Minister, he asked him to submit, in the public interest, his resignation from the cabinet. Tajuddin complied.
The break-up was complete.
Over the next eight months, Tajuddin Ahmad said not a word, did not respond to appeals from other parties of the leftwing brand to join them, did not ever explain why he and Bangabandhu had moved away so far from each other. He remained loyal to his leader all the way till the end. But his departure spurred his enemies and the foes of the Father of the Nation into increased activities against Bangabandhu himself.
As Tajuddin remained at home, a deeply sad political being often observed to be taking walks outside his home, Bangabandhu’s isolation was being ensured by conspirators who had gone to work against his government. Men like Khondokar Moshtaque, Taheruddin Thakur and ABS Safdar were closing in on him. They would soon deploy a band of assassins, in the sinister shapes of a group of majors and colonels, to strike him down. 15 August would come to pass. And then would come the tragedy of 3 November. A long litany of coups, counter-coups and violent deaths would follow.
The wounds inflicted on Bangladesh in 1975 would never quite heal.
(Tajuddin Ahmad, Bangladesh’s wartime Prime Minister and later Finance Minister in independent Bangladesh, was born on 23 July 1925 and assassinated in Dhaka Central Jail on 3 November 1975)
Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history.