Bangabandhu, Tajuddin...And Our Sad History

There is a whole raft of reasons why Tajuddin Ahmad will not be forgotten by this nation. And it is particularly in October when memories of the man who led the battlefield struggle for national liberation are reignited, enough to make us ponder whether the chaos we wallowed through between August 1975 and June 1996 would have come to pass had Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad not fallen out with each other.

- Syed Badrul Ahsan

And yet there is a need to rephrase that statement. Did they really fall out? Or was their parting of ways more a result of the machinations against the alliance of two of Bangladesh’s historic figures by self-seekers than a conscious divergence of opinion between the Father of the Nation and the wartime prime minister? One needs to look back at history, to understand the nature of the winning combination that was the Mujib-Tajuddin team as the Awami League hit the highway seeking broad political change for Bengalis even as the state of Pakistan militated against such change.

In Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali nation for the first time perceived dedicated and principled leadership. Not in him was there anything of the pointless pragmatism of his mentor Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawady. Neither was there any of the flipflops that Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq demonstrated, particularly in the post-Jugto Front period in Pakistan. Mujib was never willing to compromise. And he did not compromise. His soulmate in that gigantic task of reinventing Bengali politics and turning the nation away from Pakistan towards a new, liberal secular goal was Tajuddin Ahmad. More than anyone else in the Awami League, it was the MujibTajuddin team which powered the drive for political change.