IT is most healthy remembering men who have created history. It is necessary that men who have tried subverting history be remembered as well, for it is these men who have through the ages made life difficult for people across the world. Harry Truman pushed tens of thousands to death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Yahya Khan ended his career through presiding over the annihilation of three million Bengalis. Pol Pot pushed Cambodia back into the dark ages. The Mujahideen and the Taliban destroyed, in serial manner, a proud country called Afghanistan. George W. Bush and Tony Blair lied through their teeth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then proceeded to invade and destroy the country.
Back in August 1975, Khondokar Moshtaq Ahmed, minister for commerce in the government of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, turned up as the president of Bangladesh through a bloody military coup’ etat that left most members of the family of the Father of the Nation dead. In that sordid job of liquidating Bangabandhu, he had been helped enormously by a band of majors and colonels of the Bangladesh army. Following the coup, Moshtaq publicly called these assassins heroes, indeed as children of the sun. Images of the new ‘president,’ in the company of the killers, soon appeared in the media. Those images were a powerful hint of the darkness Bangladesh had passed into.
Moshtaq died of natural causes in March 1996, a few months before the Awami League, after twenty one years in the wilderness, returned to power under the leadership of the daughter of the man he had caused to be murdered on August 15, 1975. Towards the end of his life, he was given to much ranting. He had had nothing to do with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s death, he said. Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana were like his daughters, he said. And then he died.
When it was suspected that his remains had been taken to Baitul Mukarram mosque, the faithful gathered there for prayers made it clear to the muezzin that Moshtaq’s namaz-e-janaza could not take place there. Only when they were satisfied that Moshtaq’s body had not been brought there did the normal prayers go ahead. Moshtaq’s remains were transported, in secretive fashion, to his village and buried in brisk manner. No reports have, in all these years, been forthcoming of people visiting his grave and offering prayers for the salvation of his soul.
In what remains an uncomfortable mystery for the nation, Moshtaq was not charged with complicity in the murder of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or the assassination of the four Mujibnagar leaders. The military officers who led the killing mission were, but Moshtaq, Taheruddin Thakur, Mahbubul Alam Chashi and ABS Safdar — all of whom were ensconced for the three days prior to the coup at Comilla BARD and turned up in Dhaka once they were sure that Mujib was dead — were never cited for the significant role they had played in the making of the August 15 tragedy.
Individuals linked to Sheikh Hasina’s first government gave out the lame excuse that Moshtaq’s name had not been included on the list of those charged with the 1975 killings because he was already dead. These individuals or the government they served perhaps did not know that there was something called posthumous trials.
A particular tragedy for this nation is that no one checked Moshtaq as he went about giving shape to his ambitions once liberation came to Bangladesh. Only one man — and that was Tajuddin Ahmed — knew of the mischief Moshtaq was capable of making. Had Tajuddin not stopped Moshtaq from proceeding to the United Nations in September 1971, the course of Bangladesh’s history would be well be different, and unsettling for all of us. Had Moshtaq gone to New York, Bengalis would be pushed into a confederal arrangement with Pakistan, the Liberation War would be subverted and a painful conflict would leave our nationalist aspirations into pieces.
And yet Moshtaq was the man to whose help Bangabandhu’s administration came when he faced certain defeat at the general elections of March 1973. It was Moshtaq who planted a kiss on Bangabandhu’s cheeks the moment the Father of the Nation stepped off the plane in Dhaka on January 10, 1972. It was Moshtaq who shadowed Bangabandhu every step of the way. In contrast, Tajuddin Ahmed hardly ever could get in a word edgeways as he tried giving Bangabandhu the background to the formation of the Mujibnagar government in April 1971.
Moshtaq was inconsolable at the funeral of Bangabandhu’s father in 1974, to a point where the latter was left wondering why his commerce minister was weeping so profusely. Only months later, the weeping man would push his leader to a gory death. And at his first cabinet meeting, Moshtaq had only a single piece of business to discuss. A national dress code — and that meant the achkan and topi he always wore — would be adopted by the nation. Moshtaq smiled a lot that day.
And the smiling went on for nearly three months, until Khaled Musharraf forced him out. But not before Moshtaq had committed one more crime. On the night between November 2-3, 1975, he ordered officials at Dhaka central jail to allow a band of soldiers in and have them do whatever they had come to do. The soldiers went in, killed four of the nation’s heroes and marched off in blood-soaked triumph.
On the morning of November 7, a cheerful Moshtaq arrived at the Radio Bangladesh office in Shahbagh. Convinced that in the new situation would be restored to power, he had a speech ready to read out before the nation. He waited there for hours, until Colonel Taher made it clear he was not welcome, he was not going to be president.
That was effectively Moshtaq’s demise as a politician and as a man. He hung on for a few more years with his Democratic League, where a band of unsavoury characters joined him in their hatred of Bangabandhu. In early 1979, a public rally his followers organised in Dhaka ended in bedlam when someone released a snake into the crowd. Convicted on charges of corruption by the Zia regime, he spent months in jail.
Postscript: In October 1974, at a lunch for the visiting Henry Kissinger in Dhaka, the American stepped out of the banquet hall. A minute or so later, Moshtaq did the same. Curious, Syed Najmuddin Hashim stepped out as well. He spotted the two men talking outside the washroom. They quickly separated when they saw him.
Source: The Daily Star
