Crossing The Rubicon

On 7 March 1971, we turned our backs on a disturbing, debilitating past.

On that afternoon, we followed the lead of our Great Man, the Druid in our lives, and crossed the Rubicon. It was our moment of self-assertion. It was his finest hour. We simply turned the page, found a new leaf on which to write new history, our history.

When Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman rose to speak before that huge crowd of a million people gathered at the Race Course in Dhaka, indeed stood before the seventy five million people of Bangladesh, in formidable political presence, something of the electric coursed through the air. Over the preceding few days, reports and rumours had been making the rounds about an impending declaration of independence by the man whose party, the Awami League, had secured a clear majority of seats (167 out of a total of 313) in Pakistan’s national assembly at the general elections of December 1970. What should have been a journey to power as Pakistan’s prime minister on Mujib’s part had by early March 1971 been transformed into a movement for Pakistan’s eastern province to walk out of the state created through the division of India in 1947 and of which it had been a part for twenty four years. The reasons were all out there. They had to do with the intrigues which had already been set in motion to thwart the assumption of power at the centre by the Awami League.