They perished in the land they liberated

The darkness of 15 August was not the end of Bangladesh’s tragedy. Barely three months after the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family, it was the four national leaders, those instrumental in the prosecution of the guerrilla war against the Pakistan occupation army through the formation of the Mujibnagar government, who were done to death in foul conspiracy. November 3, 1975 remains our day of collective shame and grief. Today, fifty-one years after the assassination in incarceration of Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmad, M Mansoor Ali and AHM Kamruzzaman, the nation recalls the sinister moments in the nocturnal hours when bloody treason reigned supreme, when the denizens of the dark seized the land.

A major blow was inflicted on the People’s Republic of Bangladesh when the renegade soldiers who had gunned down the Father of the Nation and his family swooped on the four national leaders in the putatively secure confines of prison. These four men had played pivotal roles in the formation of the Mujibnagar government, the very first Bengali national government in history, in 1971 and had decisively steered the nation to victory over Pakistan at the end of the year. 

In a free Bangladesh, they would form the core of the government under the leadership of the Father of the Nation. With the assassination of Bangabandhu on 15 August 1975, the clique which seized hold of the country under Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed and the assassins took these four liberation leaders into custody and lodged them in Dhaka Central Jail. It was an irony of fate, for these leaders were placed in incarceration in the very country they had provided guidance to in the War of Liberation.

The murder of these men occurred amidst the confusion in which Bangladesh was plunged on November 3. On the day, Brigadier Khaled Musharraf, a hero of the War of Liberation, launched his own coup fundamentally as a move to restore the chain of command broken in the army when the rogue majors and colonels propping up the usurper Moshtaque regime violently dislodged Bangabandhu’s government in August. 

One of the first acts undertaken by Musharraf was to place Major General Ziaur Rahman, chief of army staff since late August, under house arrest. With Colonel Shafaat Jamil, Colonel Najmul Huda and Major A.T.M. Haider, Musharraf moved swiftly to remove the Moshtaque cabal from office. In the face of his coup, the assassins capitulated. It was decided --- it is yet unclear who made the assassins leave the country --- that all of them would be flown out of Bangladesh before the new regime entered upon its responsibilities. 

Unbeknownst to Musharraf or to the nation, the assassins had made up their minds before they went off into exile that they needed to eliminate the four national leaders then in prison. Their fear was palpable: that these men would soon emerge free to restore constitutional government in the country. Meanwhile, the lie was spread by rabid right-wing journalists that the Indian government meant to spring Tajuddin and his friends from jail and have them set up a new government. They based their ‘assessment’ on a supposed, and fictitious, letter to Tajuddin from the Indian authorities that had been ‘intercepted’ (years later, the elderly journalist who had first produced this canard lamely noted that the letter had been ‘lost’). The journalist was never prosecuted.

Within hours of this ‘revelation’, the four leaders were brought together in a cell of the prison and shot and bayoneted to death. The killers had gained entry into the jail thanks to a call from Bangabhaban. The police officer who received the call was quite certain that it was Khondokar Moshtaque at the other end of the line. And once the gate was thrown open, the assassins swiftly marched into the prison compound and were soon seen to leave after having their murderous mission accomplished.

There are reasons to believe, all these five decades-plus after the tragedy, that Khaled Musharraf and his fellow officers were not aware, as they went about sending the Moshtaque cabal into the wilderness, of the outrage that had been committed in the central jail. The assassins were permitted to fly out to Bangkok along with their families. It would not be dawn until the full macabre reality of the night descended on the nation. The calamity was complete. The Father of the Nation was already dead. And now the four men who had shaped political strategy with him in the 1960s and early 1970s had been eliminated.

The four days between 3 November and 7 November would prolong the nation’s agony. On 6 November, Brigadier Khaled Musharraf was promoted to the rank of major general and appointed chief of staff of the army, succeeding General Ziaur Rahman. On the same day, Moshtaque was forced out of the presidency and replaced by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem. Meanwhile, instigated by Col. Taher, soldiers in the cantonment went around distributing leaflets against Musharraf, deliberately casting doubts on his patriotism. 

This morning, heads bowed and hearts in deep prayer for the four great leaders who shaped the guerrilla struggle for freedom against the Pakistani occupation forces in 1971, the nation pays homage to Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, M Mansoor Ali and AHM Kamruzzaman.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a senior journalist, columnist and writer.