Observer (London)

Although it has taken Sheikh Mujibur Rahman more than 20 years to bring his life to its present stunning climax, the ‘liberation’ of his homeland, East Pakistan, from its status as ‘a colony’ of West Pakistan has always been his aim. Whatever may be said against him, he is not a political opportunist. As a boy he sometimes threw stones at the police of the British Raj. But he was never, in the true sense, a freedom fighter against the British, whose political institutions he admires. His considerable energy has always been directed towards winning internal freedoms - for the Muslims against Hindu dominance in India and then for East Bengal against the Punjabis and Pathans of the west.

The Sheikh belongs to East Bengal; he is not one of the countless refugees who fled from India into Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947. He was born in 1920 at a village called Tungipara, in the Faridpur district, west of Dacca. His family were middle-class land-owners. He matriculated from a mission school at Gopalganj and went on university in Calcutta - his sole link with West Bengal. This was in 1942 and at that point he has already married.

Pakistan was less than a year old when Mujib - as everyone calls him - began fighting for Bengali nationalism. Then a law student at Dacca University, he started organizing student demonstrations against Urdu as the official language of all Pakistan and in favour of Bengali. To this end, he founded the East Pakistan Students’ League, a body which was later to play a major and violent role in the overthrow of President Ayub Khan.

For these activities Mujib was expelled from the university and spent six days in jail - the first in a series of imprisonments all imposed by the Pakistani authorities. As soon as he got out he began to organize strikes in support of the underprivileged workers of East Bengal. For criminal activities, about the exact nature of which is now rather vague, he was sent back to prison, this time for two and a half years. While he was there the flamboyant and politically gifted Suhrawardy, the last Chief Minister of united Bengal, became disillusioned with the dominant Pakistan party, the Muslim League, and formed the Awami League. The Sheikh was elected secretary of the new party while he was still in jail.

His ministerial experience is slight. He went into the East Pakistan Assembly after the 1954 provincial election, in which the Bengalis obliterated the Muslim League. He was given a couple of Ministries during his term, but was always essentially a party organizer. He was a driving spirit behind the mass meeting in Dacca in 1953, and behind the formal resolution passed three years later by the East Pakistan Assembly, both of which demanded precisely the kind of almost total autonomy for East Bengal which has now brought Pakistan to the point of breaking into two.

As soon as Ayub Khan seized power in 1958 he identified the Sheikh as an important enemy threatening what the President called the integrity of Pakistan. The Sheikh was one of the first to be jailed under the dictator’s Public Safety Ordinance and was held without trial for a year and a half. In 1962 he followed Suhrawardy’s brave example and refused to give Ayub an undertaking - readily obtained from most of Pakistan’s other politicians - not to engage in politics for five years. The Sheikh then went inside for another six months.

Released again, he dedicated himself more vehemently than ever to the liberation of Bengal. In a country almost universally cowed by the rigours of the dictatorship, he behaved with startling courage. He went about East Pakistan delivering one ‘seditious’ speech after another. Repeatedly arrested, he used his brief spells of liberty when out on bail to speak with the utmost recklessness to foreign newspaper correspondents about the colonial subjection of East Bengal and his determination to end it. On these occasions he was always immensely cheerful and was plainly supported by the belief that the mass of the Bengalis were behind him.

Ayub applied sterner measures. Emerging in January, 1968 from another brief spell of detention, the Sheikh was seized by soldiers, taken off to the Kurmitola Cantonment and held there in solitary confinement for five months. Nobody outside the regime knew where he was. Then he was formally brought to trial, with 35 others, in the Agaratala conspiracy case. It was alleged against them that, led by the Sheikh, they conspired with Indian accomplices to organize a mutiny in East Pakistan military forces and then overthrow the Ayub regime.

As a result of this trial Mujib’s popularity in East Bengal soared. Until then, in spite of his many activities he was not considered a major leader. The trial made him a Bengali national hero. His release was a main demand shouted by the student mobs whose destructive violence brought about the collapse of Ayub, and under this pressure the trial was abandoned. Meanwhile, back in 1966 the Sheikh had produced his Six-Point Programme, a detailed elaboration on the call for East Bengal autonomy first raised at that Dacca mass meeting in 1953. It is in defence of these points that the Sheikh now confronts General Yahya Khan, Ayub’s successor as military ruler, and exchanges with him ‘the language of weapons.’

In spite of this dramatic background, the Sheikh is not in any sense a wild man, though he can readily rouse the people with his oratory. Talking to foreign newspapermen, and pulling on the Wilsonian pipe he affects, he sounds no more exciting than any leader of the present British Labour Party, whose aims he professes to admire. He is tall and quite handsome, with a slight resemblance in profile to Stalin. He has five children, lives in a suburb of Dacca with no conspicuous signs of wealth, and should make a solidly sensible political leader, if he ever gets the chance, and if the politics of Pakistan ever settle down.