This is not the first time the Awami League has virtually been banished in Bangladesh.In the early hours of August 15, 1975, a group of young soldiers entered the home of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first President of Bangladesh, and killed him along with his entire family (except his two daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, who were travelling in Europe). The assassins then dashed to the radio station and announced Khandkar Moshtaque Ahmed as President. Around 200 people were killed that day after a nationwide curfew was imposed. The killings paved the way for the first military coup in Bangladesh and marked a dangerous turn in regional geopolitics.
Shortly after the assassination, India realised that the Bangladeshi army established border posts at the Khowai border between Agartala and Brahmanbaria. Then, it sealed these borders, and no one, including passport and visa holders, was allowed to enter or leave Bangladesh. The Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (JRB) was disbanded, and its cadres disarmed within days. JRB and Awami League offices were being ‘guarded’ by the army, photos of Mujib were being ‘forcibly’ removed, and people were told not to discuss Mujib or listen to the All India Radio. To win sympathy, the army released old stocks of rice to ‘abnormally’ reduce the price, with informal surveys indicating that ‘90 percent of people of Sylhet are happy with the present government’. Hindus were threatened, allegedly, by ‘pro Pak’ groups, making the community ‘panicky’. Gandhi Ashram officials in Noakhali corroborated such incidents.
On 3 September, [acting high commissioner of India] AK Das met with Moshtaque. Protection to Hindus topped the agenda. Moshtaque agreed that some ‘Mullahs taught communalism’ and promised action in Noakhali, but ‘did not make any commitment’ on the overall situation. When Das complained about increased police and military surveillance against the high commission, Moshtaque displayed understanding and asked Das to bring ‘any specific complaint’ to his attention. On JRB’s future, Moshtaque was blunt. The checks and balances against the JRB ‘could never work’, but he had not made up his mind on how best to integrate its cadre in the military and paramilitary.
In September–October, the situation clarified itself for India to reconsider the approach. Appointments of India critics and Pakistan sympathisers were coupled with enthusiastic welcome of the new regime by Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia. This increased Indian anxiety about losing Bangladesh for good. Bhutto quickly shipped large quantities of food grain to Dacca after the coup, just as Indian officials in Peking noted China’s reaction of ‘approbation punctuated with caution’. Chinese media reportage of Moshtaque was positive throughout. But trouble came when Riyadh sent a congratulatory telegram to Moshtaque of the ‘Islamic Republic of Bangladesh’ on 17 August. Editorials in Arabic and English Saudi newspapers eulogised Islamic unity and hoped for closer ties between Pakistan and Bangladesh.
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India’s caution didn’t win it allies. The decision to not formally recognise the new regime drew suspicion, with even senior Hindu leaders informing India that people viewed the silence as ‘having a deeper meaning’. On 9 October, Bangladeshi law minister Manoranjan Dhar visited Calcutta. He debriefed Indian officials that while army officers were not interfering in day-to-day governance, they were sitting in policymaking committees. Pro-Pakistan elements were ‘jubilant’ at Mujib’s death and ‘stirring up communal and anti-India propaganda’.
Deeply religious, Moshtaque opened his office to clerics, which never happened under Mujib. Dhar believed that the secret of Moshtaque’s presidency lay in the ‘balancing trick’ between intra-army factions. But the opening of Pakistani and Chinese embassies, he warned, could give anti-India elements an upper hand and the Hindus could ‘suffer’. Regardless of whether such reports were curated for an Indian audience or reflective of what ministers truly thought, the emergent theme was that the anti-India, pro-Pakistan lobbies had strengthened in Dacca.
By now, resistance against the coup was brewing both inside and outside the army. Within days of Mujib’s killing, Indian intelligence reported that student leaders of the Baksal-sponsored Jatiya Chhatra League held a secret meeting in Brahmanbaria, near the Tripura border. The students decided to ‘oust the present Khandkar govt’, and were convinced that pro-Pakistan Moshtaque got Mujib killed. Baksal student units reached Brahmanbaria despite army firing on 18–20 August. Disbanded Baksal central committee members who had escaped arrest went underground. India expected that most rebels would ‘come to Agartala for shelter’. Shortly after this meeting, posters and wall writings demanding punishment for Mujib’s killers appeared in several places in Brahmanbaria.
The Chhatra League was making its presence felt. In the Mymensingh-Tangail region, a pro-Mujib militia led by Kader ‘Tiger’ Siddique was active. The core of this militia, R&AW assessed, stood between 1,000 and 3,000, with the lower figure being more realistic, from its erstwhile maximum strength of 17,000 in 1971. Though not a force that could withstand pressure from the army, the Kader Bahini tied down sections of 72nd brigade from Rangpur and the Tangail-based 77th brigade. Siddique was joined by the former operations chief of JRB who fled four days before Mujib’s assassination, and Chittaranjan Suttar, a Hindu parliamentarian close to Mujib and India. Suttar had been in solitary confinement in a cell opposite Mujib’s when both were imprisoned in the 1950s. Shanti Bahini, the militant wing of the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS), also intensified recruitment and training. Created in 1972 to represent the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ (CHT) indigenous communities, the PCJSS is still active.
These aspects were coupled with unease in the army with the turn of events and implications for institutional discipline. Baksal dissidents realised that several officers of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) and the Reserve Police were willing to offer clandestine or open support to the resistance. Dissenters who were in touch with R&AW informed that they expected an ‘armed revolution’. Some BDR and JRB personnel planned a ‘surprise raid’ on Moshtaque himself.
It was against the backdrop of this evolving situation that Das met a ‘depressed’ [Anwar Hossain] Manju. The Ittefaq editor argued that the coup-makers and their supporters in the army didn’t amount to more than 200 persons, and ‘could be easily disciplined if a determined effort was made’. When Das countered that the coup-makers had tanks in their possession, Manju responded: ‘tanks could be captured at night or destroyed by the Air Force’. Manju fed into New Delhi’s debate on whether and how to use force to arrest Dacca’s slide away from India. The Bangladeshi foreign minister hinted in Peru about the ‘uncertainty of the stability of the new regime’, and concerns of whether he was too quick to join government sharpened this debate.
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Two options emerged. The first was to activate large-scale covert military and financial support for anti-regime dissidents seeking refuge in India and those still inside Bangladesh. The second was to continue with the low-risk policy of diplomatic engagement in the hope that Dacca would not cross India’s red lines by becoming an Islamic republic, entering into defence pacts with China and Pakistan, or systematically persecuting minorities.
The R&AW wanted to opt for the coercive option. According to fleeing Awami Leaguers, thousands of pro-Mujiib leaders and workers sought Indian support for a ‘democratic national government’.
Reproduced courtesy of Penguin India from India’s Near East: A New History of Statecraft in Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Indian North-east by Avinash Paliwal.
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