Layli Uddin

Introduction

By 1974, the dreams and hopes of liberation in Bangladesh had soured: unemployment, hunger and political repression were in full force. Anthony Mascarenhas, one of the first journalists to alert the world about the scale of massacre committed by the Pakistani army against the Bengali population in 1971, described the Rakkhi Bahini, an elite paramilitary force established after the independence of Bangladesh in the same year, as “a private army of bully boys not far removed from the Nazi Brown Shirts”. They were used by the new regime led by the Awami League to crush opponents and critics. In time, Mascarenhas wrote: “it completely terrorized the people”. By the end of 1973, politically motivated murders committed by the Rakkhi Bahini had crossed the 2000 mark. Many of those killed were said to be Maoist enemy agents, but often on fairly spurious grounds such as “found carrying Chinese wireless sets”. Why was the Awami League so worried? The answer to that goes back before 1971, to stories that hint at the different possibilities that the ruling party in East Pakistan at the time, the Awami League, had been well aware of, and needed to suppress.

One such story emerged in my conversation with a man who was 8-9 years old in 1970-1971. He remembered Maulana Bhashani’s posters and young people carrying the little red book in their pockets in his hometown in the outskirts of Dhaka. Then there are the stories of the strange and cryptic shab-e-namas (night messages) that appeared on the walls of Dhaka and elsewhere just before the war, demanding a North Bengal province. Finally, there are the stories of rallies in early 1971, where young men and women donned red caps and shouted out “jatir pita” (father of the nation) at Bhashani. These stories may seem unremarkable, but they suggest to me that there were multiple “fathers” involved in the unmaking of Pakistan and making of Bangladesh. They suggest that Bhashani inhabited political spaces and constituencies that were not encapsulated or accommodated within the politics practiced by the Awami League or Mujibur Rahman, widely considered the founding father of Bangladesh. On the contrary, these stories suggest Bhashani’s constituencies encroached upon and threatened to overwhelm and overturn the Awami League’s future plans for the new nation-state. The paper will show how Mujib’s nationalism was just one of the currents in East Pakistan over this period, the other provided by Bhashani was the articulation of a radical, progressive and transnational vision of freedom, justice and equality.

Bhashani was a venerated pir, peasant leader and politician of colonial Assam and Bengal and postcolonial East Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Who was Maulana Bhashani?

Maulana Bhashani’s life, hitherto, has received little curiosity or attention from academics, despite having been such a heavy weight figure in South Asian Muslim politics and beyond. Who was Bhashani? Bhashani (1880-1976) was a venerated pir, peasant leader and politician of colonial Assam and Bengal and postcolonial East Pakistan and Bangladesh. He was a scourge of colonial and postcolonial regimes. President of the provincial Assam Muslim League during the colonial years, he went on to form two of the most powerful opposition parties in Pakistan, the Awami Muslim League and the National Awami Party (NAP) – the latter whose birth Ajoy Ghosh, a member of the Communist Party of India, described as an “event of historic import for the Pakistan people”. If there was an all-Pakistan figure after Jinnah, it was perhaps Bhashani. Stories about him come from both wings.

Notwithstanding, Bhashani presents a tricky and complex subject to write about for a number of reasons. How does one write about a leader who has not only left few written traces of his own ideas but appears as a figure of scorn and ridicule in official archives? Archives in the United Kingdom and the United States on East Pakistan are replete with instances of politicians, journalists and members of intelligentsia of both wings of Pakistan offering up information on Bhashani’s illiteracy, ignorance, rusticity, irrationality, on him being crude, vulgar, violent, not really a Maulana or not really a Communist, among many other things. Historians have ended up sharing the same disdain, content with their descriptions of him as a firebrand preacher or agitator.  However, if you listen closely, and I mean closely to other voices – voices that are often choked at the thought and memories of Bhashani – he becomes more than an agitator. He is the Majloom Jononeta or leader of the oppressed in Bangladesh. He is the politician who presided over one of the largest kissan (peasant) conferences in Punjab and who, quoting Iqbal, told the people to burn the land that does not feed them. He is the pir who appeared in the dreams of Bengali farmers after having flown on his boat driven by a pack of tigers to discuss the next struggle. And for the working-class Diasporas in Brick Lane or Jackson height, he is their Che, Rosa, and Malcolm X.

I want to recover Bhashani from the condescension and silence of history. I explore his role in the 1969 uprising in Pakistan, a significant moment in the unmaking of the state, leading to the victory of the Awami League in 1970 elections. I upend the conventional narrative around the 1960s and show that Maulana Bhashani was far from the weakened figure that he was made out to be. Derided by his opponents as “Mao-Lana” for his Maoist inclinations, Bhashani was nonetheless seen as having little political support or teeth.

Bhashani’s political practice

So to begin: on 5 December 1968, the plane carrying Pakistani President Ayub Khan and his entourage landed on the tarmac of Tejgaon airport in Dhaka. Ayub was guest of honor in celebrations marking Pakistan’s “Decade of Development” or as his opponents wryly put it, the “Decade of Dictatorship”. With Mujib in jail, and schools and universities closed for an indefinite period, the president was assured that the main sources of agitation in East Pakistan had been tamed. It was a grave miscalculation. Ayub’s trip was completely overshadowed by the massive protests and hartals (strikes) that besieged Dhaka and the other areas of East Pakistan, and which signaled the first phase of the 1969 uprising in the East Pakistan province. The trouble for the administration had come from different, though not entirely unexpected, quarters.

Bhashani’s call for a hartal on 7th December 1968 was an unprecedented success. Over the next few days as strikes occurred consecutively, the newspapers’ front-page headlines screamed out to its readers, while its content provided blow-by-blow accounts of police firing, deaths and injuries, walkouts at the Legislative Assembly and Bhashani’s spectacular defiance of Section 144. The strikes were also repeated in other parts of the province such as Chittagong, Noakhali, Sylhet, Bogra and Khulna. The scale and swiftness with which they took place and the wholeheartedness with which people responded to them even surprised NAP members. Thus, contrary to impressions of Bhashani as a politically passive and agreeable figure to the regime, who was famously reported to have said to his followers “Do not Disturb Ayub”, a different archive in the 1960s suggest that Bhashani was actually stealthily organizing and mobilizing peasant constituencies in North Bengal and labour constituencies as well through boat tours and political assemblies, building up his network of murids (disciples) and Marxists for the very purpose of mobilizing them to fight for their freedom, equality and dignity. All of which gave him, in December 1968, an advanced insight into the readiness of certain sections of Pakistan’s population for battle.

Over the 1960s, Bhashani engaged in several innovative practices that were intended to organize and mobilize his constituent groups to bring about a form of Islamic Socialism or at least prepare the way for it.  Though I do not want to draw a strong correlation, Bhashani’s encounters with left-leaning activists and leaders in Europe, the World Peace Council, China, and Havana were to leave a strong impression on his politics. Bhashani held Islamic Socialism as the antithesis to imperialist depredations. Unlike Mujib’s Six-Point program, which sought greater freedom for the Bengali populace at large, Bhashani offered the peasants and workers a model that primarily spoke to their material and spiritual emancipation and made them central to its realisation.

Bhashani did this in several ways. First, through the introduction of new relationships and linkages, which brokered the most unlikely of alliances between Bhashani’s murids and the Marxist workers of NAP, Krishak Samiti, and Mazdoor Foundation and legitimated the existence of the “other” in one another’s worlds. This he did through the modification, if not complete innovation, in his relationship with his murids, particularly in the bay’ah (oath of allegiance) that they undertook over this period. The bay’ah demanded alongside the usual articles of belief in God, Prophet and the spiritual lineage, a belief in socialism. The bay’ah made a Marxist of the murid and a murid out of the Marxist.

Their common purpose not only made both groups acceptable to each other but also endowed both with an equal standing and the right to enter into the same spaces and use the language of the other.  With the Marxist workers of NAP and Krishak Samiti more frequently present at religious gatherings and mosque, the murid was to find his world equally transformed during this period. With belief in socialism now naturalised into an article of faith, the murid’s search for that deeper connection with Bhashani and God was to be found in his engagement with the external world of political activism as much as the internal world of dhikrs (chants) and muraqaba (meditation).

The second intervention Maulana Bhashani made over this period came through his introduction of new ideas, language and vocabularies in assemblies and gatherings, intended to impart to the peasant and workers a sense of their own power and dynamism.  Bhashani introduced his constituents to their new selves over this period: they were the sarbahārā (have-nots).  Though sarbahāra itself was not a new term, and regularly used in the Marxist lexicon to refer to the proletariat class, Bhashani opened it to incorporate wider and different histories, futures and icons, both sacred and profane. The sarbahāra for him constituted a class that was not defined by what they lacked, but by their ubiquitous presence across different times, geographies and civilizations, possessing the power to change the course of history.  The sarbahāra found their own champions and heroes contained within these narratives, as varied as Mao Tse Tung and Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, a companion of the Prophet and someone more significant in Shi’a than Sunni historiographies.  When a disgruntled Kazi Mohiduddin declared NAP as the “sarbahāra party, with a sarbahāra programme, holding little value for any other class”, he intended his words to shed light on why he had resigned from Bhashani’s NAP to help form the pro-Moscow NAP. What the resignation actually signaled was that Bhashani had succeeded, at least in his own rhetoric, to project the peasants and workers as constituting a well-defined and powerful class, who were capable of representing their interests and prepared to play an instrumental, if not leading, role to bring about fundamental changes to state and society.

The ghost of Bhashani

While Bhashani’s muted public pronouncements and attitude towards the Ayub regime contributed towards his diminishing importance in the political scene of Dhaka, Bhashani’s activities, particularly in North Bengal, suggest a different story altogether. His attempts to create more powerful, organized and conscious constituencies through the introduction of new alliances, histories and practices were less placatory and more defiant in their attitude to a regime that denied social, political and economic dignity and equality to its people. The success of his tactics can be seen in the desperation of Ayub. On 9th March, just weeks before he resigned, Ayub Khan’s diary entry reads “gangs of communist and terrorists on the prompting of Bhashani are raiding police stations, the houses and properties of Muslim Leaguers, and asking the chairman and members of Basic Democrats to resign (….) in consequence, most of the civil officers have left their posts and so have the local rent collectors, and their records have been burnt.” Bhashani, according to Christopher Jaffrelot, had not only managed to mobilize his Bengali base but also farmers in the Chambar district of Sindh and Hashtnagar in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). His mobilization in both wings for a different world during the 1969 uprising and immediately after gesture to the tensions, aporias and possibilities in the unmaking of Pakistan and making of Bangladesh. Now, Bhashani’s stories either remain untold, or are spoken of in conspiratorial whispers or as the tired and aching memories of a past long gone. What we forget is that these spaces where the ghost of Bhashani lingers – the huts and homes of poor villages and chars in Bangladesh, Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP, and the left circles and working-class Diasporas in the North – are the spaces where dreams continue to breed.

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Dr. Layli Uddin is a historian of modern South Asia and is currently working on a book on the making and unmaking of Pakistan and Bangladesh. She is also the curator of the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project at the British Library.

Courtesy: Jamhoor (Published on May 25, 2018)

The post Mao-Lana Bhashani: Maoism and the Unmaking of Pakistan first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Monitoring Desk

On 19 November 1970, a week after the tragedy, students held a march in Dhaka, the capital of Pakistan’s eastern province, protesting the slowness of the government response. A statement released by eleven political leaders in East Pakistan ten days after the cyclone hit charged the government with “gross neglect, callous and utter indifference”.

Relief work neglected

The Pakistan Red Crescent began to operate independently of the government as the result of a dispute that arose after the Red Crescent took possession of 20 rafts donated by the British Red Cross. A pesticide company had to wait two days before it received permission for two of its crop dusters, which were already in the country, to carry out supply drops in the affected regions.

A reporter for the Pakistan Observer spent a week in the worst hit areas in early January and saw none of the tents supplied by relief agencies being used to house survivors and commented that the grants for building new houses were insufficient. The Pakistan Observer regularly carried front page stories with headlines like “No Relief Coordination”, whilst publishing government statements saying “Relief operations are going smoothly.”

In January (1971), the coldest period of the year in East Pakistan, the National Relief and Rehabilitation Committee, headed by the editor of The Daily Ittefaq (Dainik Ittefaq), said thousands of survivors from the storm were “passing their days under [the] open sky”. A spokesman said families who were made homeless by the cyclone were receiving up to 250 rupees (£30 in 1971, £200 in 2007) to rebuild, but that resources were scarce and he feared the survivors would “eat the cash”.

Maulana’s mass rally attended by 50,000 people

The most scathing Bengali criticism of West Pakistan had in fact emanated not from Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League, but from the 90-year-old veteran NAP leader Maulana Bhashani, known as the “Lal Mullah” (Red Mullah) because of his egalitarian-leftist views. The Maulana declared, as early as September 1970, that if concrete steps were not taken to correct interregional inequalities and provide greater protection for East Pakistan from natural woes, it would be forced to separate and befriend whomever it wanted. He also called for “complete financial autonomy” for East Pakistan.

The Maulana, grievously ill and under treatment at a nursing home in Dhaka, famously ignored his physicians’ advice, dropped his political work and rushed to Manpura, the worst affected part of Bhola, after an arduous journey by train, motor launch, country boat, and sometimes on foot. Here he comforted the bereaved and railed against central government’s hard-heartedness and indifference.

When news of the cyclone and pictures of the dead bodies were published in newspapers, it created a huge uproar in East Pakistan. At that time, Moulana Bhashani was in hospital in Dhanmondi, Dhaka. Bhashani was so sick that the doctors had almost declared him clinically dead.

On 12 November 1970, the same day the cyclone hit the country at night, I went to the hospital to see Moulana. I met Aziz Bhai, (Doctor Aziz, ex Minister) and I asked him about his health and he replied ‘very critical, anything can happen any time’. I stayed there till midnight.

On the morning of 13 November 1970, I rushed to the hospital and stepped into his room to discover the Moulana awoken from deep slumber, as if through a miracle. The attending nurse called the doctor. Bhashani looked at the door and asked for the newspaper, but nobody dare to give it to him.

But when he asked for it repeatedly and looked at me askance, I ultimately gave him the newspaper I was carrying with me. The paper was full of pictures of dead bodies and included the whole story of how the then East Pakistan was neglected by the Pakistani military junta. After reading and seeing it, Moulana Bhashani was so furious that he shouted ‘I will go there to see how cyclone devastated the areas and what the government did’. All the doctors attending to him said ‘you can’t go Huzur; your health condition does not permit that’. He did not listen to anybody and right away told somebody to pack up his personal belongings and then just set about to visit the cyclone-affected areas. We all are God’s creation but Moulana Bhashani was an extraordinarily blessed person who looked younger than his age and could travel great lengths even at old age.

Everywhere he went he delivered fiery speeches against the military junta and provided hope and inspiration to people. All of his speeches were extraordinary. He visited all the affected areas including Barisal, Patuakhali, Sirajganj, Noakhali, Chattragram and Dhaka.

Exposed to the aftermath of the country’s greatest human tragedy caused by nature, the Maulana was reportedly seen ‘weeping like a child’ many times during the tour.

Returning to Dhaka on 22 November 1970, Maulana Bhashani held a press conference to inform the people, both at home and abroad, about the colossal scale of the tragedy. He made emotional appeals to people all around the world to help the afflicted people whilst condemning the Islamabad-based central government for not having “cared to visit the hapless citizens of the East”. The next day (23 November 1970) the no-nonsense Maulana said “Assalamu’alaikum” to West Pakistan in a mammoth public rally held in Paltan Maidan – the traditional forum for public dissent – and attended by 50,000. ‘Assalamu’alaikum’ is an Arabic term meaning ‘Peace be upon you’ and used by Muslims to greet and say goodbye to each other.

During his speech, Maulana Bhashani described graphically the extent of devastation caused by the natural calamity to the public: how 1,000,000 – 1,200,000 human beings had been killed by the cyclone, how their homesteads and livestock had been washed away, how nearly 400,000 mutilated bodies of men, women and children, along with hundreds of mutilated livestock, were still lying under the open sky and, how the survivors were struggling for their lives without food and shelter.

Maulana Bhashani argued that past events and current government indifference to cyclone victims by way of suppressing the news and distancing itself from the miseries of the Bengalis at the time of their greatest misfortune proved Pakistan had by then become ‘anachronistic and pointless’ and thus declared “Independent East Pakistan”.

Swadhin Purbo Pakistan Zindabad (Long live independent East Pakistan)

Maulana Bhashani’s concluding remark in Dhaka’s Paltan Maidan on 23 November 1970

The Maulana also demanded the president’s resignation, and announced that his NAP party would not participate in the upcoming general and provincial elections. He questioned the ethics of election campaigns at a time when people needed aid.

Maulana Bhashani had already boycotted the election. The tragedy of the cyclone only provided an excuse for his pre-existing stance against the election.

His famous speech was epitomized in the poem “Safed Panjabi” (White Panjabi) by notable Bengali poet Shamshur Rahman. The poet was so moved by the tragedy and Bhashani’s speech that it inspired him to write the poem as a reference to the white clothing adorned by the Maulana as he delivered his speech.

Sheikh Mujib’s frustration further intensifies student’s sentiment

Three days after the Maulana’s declaration, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman also voiced his anger in a press conference. Coming back from his trip to the cyclone-torn areas, Sheikh Mujib called a press conference at Hotel Shahbag, Dhaka, on 26 November 1970. He came in and sat on the seat reserved for him, flanked by Tajuddin Ahmad to his right and Syed Nazrul Islam to his left. Dr. Kamal Hossain and other leaders were seated in the back row. He declared that the government’s failure to help cyclone victims represented a failure of Pakistan more than of Yahya Khan’s regime. Asked if he was considering secession, he replied, “Not yet”. His ‘autonomy not independence’ stance was supported by some pro-Awami League newspapers in the eastern wing, which also criticized Maulana Bhashani for his pronouncement of ‘independence’ three days earlier.

As Bangabandhu greeted his audience and began speaking, a storm of flash bulbs went off against the constant clicking of cameras. Bangabandhu expressed his grief for the loss of hundreds of thousands of people and their properties. He went on with great pain, as he described the miserable plight of those who were still alive.

He scathingly criticized the neglect and apathy of the human crisis by the central and provincial governments of Pakistan. He then explained how the Six-Point Charter, drawn by the Awami League, was essential and could have helped the people during such a tragedy. He stressed that if there was autonomy in East Pakistan, this kind of calamity could have been better managed. We wouldn’t have to look for help from a Central Government that rests peacefully thousands of miles away.

I have demanded regional autonomy, not independence.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 26 November 1970 when asked about his stance on the independence of East Pakistan

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East Pakistan must achieve self-rule by ballot if possible, and by bullet, if necessary.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman defiant stance just like Maulana Bhashani

Maulana Bhashani’s and Sheikh Mujib’s public declaration gave the student protest more momentum and on 4 December 1970, few days after their rallying cry, the Chhatro League (Student League) demanded the release of political prisoners and raised two new slogans: “Peasants and workers: take up arms to make Bangladesh independent!” and “Raise a Ganabahini (People’s Force) to make Bangladesh independent!”

The administration has failed. That is the most important thing. And why they fail? I say their intention was not good. Otherwise, why did the Central Government failed to send helicopters from West Pakistan to East Pakistan? Tell me, the helicopters can come from UK, can come from USA, can come from other further countries, why helicopters can’t come from West Pakistan to East Bengal?

Can anybody justify it? Any government can justify it?

Sheikh Mujib criticizes Pakistani government for their failure to provide relief support

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About Maulana Bhashani

Known around the subcontinent for his selflessness character and solidarity with the oppressed people,  Bhashani was the founder and president of the Pakistan Awami Muslim League which later turned into Bangladesh Awami League. He was also founder the National Awami Party (NAP). Some of his fellows called him as ‘The Red Maulana’ due to the involvement of communist and left politics.

Early Life

Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani was born on December 10, 1880, in Sirajganj, British India (Bangladesh) to Haji Sharafat Ali Khan and Ms. Mojiron Bibi. He studied at the Deoband Madrasah between 1907 and 1909. He was the youngest child of five siblings born to his parents. At early childhood, his father died and a few days later mother along with two brothers also died. Following the lost his nearest relatives, he passed a few days under his uncle.

Political Career

Bhashani began his career journey as a primary school teacher at Kagmaree, Tangail. In 1917, he joined the Nationalist party as an activist led by Desbandhu Chittaranjan Das. Two years later, he joined Indian National Congress in 1919. Following the year, he was arrested and imprisoned. He participated in Das’s Non-cooperation movement against British Imperialism eventually suffered imprisonment with numbers of followers. In 1930, he joined Muslim League and elected MLA in Assam Legislative Assembly from Dhubri. He was elected president of Muslim League in 1944.

After separation of India and Pakistan he established Pakistan Muslim League on June 23, 1949, he was the founder president and Shamsul Huq was the first general secretary of the party.  He formed the ‘All Party Language Movement Committee’ demanding of Bangla will be a national language in Pakistan. Removing ‘Muslim’ he renamed the Awami Muslim League as the Awami League in 1953. Following the year, he went to Stockholm and barred returning to East Pakistan by Iskander Mirza branded as a communist. In 1957, at the Kagmaree Conference of Awami League, he clued the separation of Pakistan stated ‘Walakumusalam’.

He protested against government ban against Rabindranath Tagore and to withdraw the Agartala Conspiracy Case and for the release of Sheikh Mujib.

Liberation War

During the liberation war, he requested to China to help in the liberation war of Bangladesh but the county didn’t give an answer. He also requested Russia to take a step against the killing of civilians in Bangladesh by Pakistanis. He was an advisor of the Mujibnagar Government.

Personal Life

Bhashani married Alema Khatun, a daughter of Jamidar Shamsuddin Ahmed Chowdhury, in Joypurhat. He also married more two times due to political purpose. Hamid Khan died on November 17, 1976, in Dhaka aged 96 and resting at Santosh, Tangail.

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Courtesy: Londoni (The Londoni website was officially launched on 26 March 2012 – on the 41st birthday of Bangladesh – with the intention of providing the English-speaking global community with insight into the vibrant culture and mammoth history of Bangladesh –  Abdus Samad (Jaber), Founder of Londoni Worldwide Limited)

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