When on January 20, 1969, Asaduzzaman, a student of the department of history at Dhaka University, was shot by security forces while leading a procession demanding a restoration of democracy in Pakistan, history changed forever in our part of the world.
On Tuesday this week, historians and history aficionados certainly could not have forgotten Asad’s sacrifice, for it was a sacrifice that would provide impetus to the movement for democracy in what was then Pakistan’s eastern province. Asad’s death in time would have the poet Shamsur Rahman pen an elegy he called Asad-er Shirt, a theme based on the bloodstains on the garment Asad wore when he was riddled with bullets.
Asad’s martyrdom marked the beginning of what would shape up to be a mass upsurge against the dictatorship of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan. The regime had just gone through with the observance of what its defenders called a decade of development, a sycophantic celebration of the ten years between 1958 and 1968 in which Ayub held Pakistan in his grip. But even as the regime went all-out to sing paeans to itself, cracks were beginning to develop in the Pakistani body politic.
How did the rest of the world fare when Asad’s life was brought to an end? On the day Asad died, Richard Nixon was being sworn in as the 37th president of the United States. It was a time of ferment in America brought on by an endless, indeed escalating war in Vietnam. Nixon’s predecessor Lyndon Johnson had forfeited a second term as President owing to the growing divisions in US politics over the war. In China, the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966 continued unabated, with all the resultant upheaval.
Within Pakistan, indeed in both wings of it, popular expressions of disapproval of the Ayub regime began to register in the days and weeks leading up to Asad’s murder. The trial of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and 34 other Bengalis in the Agartala Conspiracy Case went on before a special tribunal in Dhaka cantonment.
A ramification of Asad’s death was the steady raising of voices against the trial and the demand for the release of all the accused. Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani went on the warpath against the regime, exhorting people to go all the way into resisting the regime.
In West Pakistan, a students’ revolt against the regime gathered steam in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar. Increasingly loud demands were made for the release of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub Khan’s erstwhile Foreign Minister and founder of the Pakistan People’s Party. Similar demands were voiced for the release of Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the chief of his faction of the National Awami Party (NAP).
Bhutto and Wali had been arrested within days of a youth taking potshots at President Ayub Khan at a public meeting in Peshawar in November 1968. The regime was further shaken by the entry into politics of Air Marshal Asghar Khan, a former commander-in-chief of the Pakistan air force, and Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed, a former chief justice of the East Pakistan High Court.
Both Asghar Khan and Justice Murshed linked up with the opposition, which naturally led to the Ayub regime’s discomfiture. In East Pakistan, the tempo of public protests increased exponentially, with security forces firing into protest demonstrations at random.
A young schoolboy named Motiur was shot on January 24. In Rajshahi, Professor Shamsuzzoha was gunned down on February 18, becoming the first academic in the country to be murdered by the army. The provincial government headed by Governor Abdul Monem Khan was helpless before the mass protests against the regime. Similar was the situation in West Pakistan, where efforts by the government to restore order failed spectacularly.
Asad’s martyrdom galvanized the masses in a way that was unprecedented in the, till then, brief history of Pakistan. Throughout January 1969 protests in East Pakistan gathered speed and expanded swiftly to cover the entire province. The fiery student leader Tofail Ahmed was singularly instrumental in leading the students’ community to a situation where they were ready and willing to force the regime into capitulation. Asad’s death brought students of schools, colleges and universities along with Bengalis across the spectrum together, with the consequence that the government became dysfunctional. The regime of Ayub Khan began to totter.
Asad’s killing was the beginning of a countdown to a denouement across East and West Pakistan. The countdown was simply a measure by which citizens began to gauge the time it would take for the regime to collapse. By February, Ayub Khan and his ministers were a humbled bunch of men unable to govern. The Agartala Conspiracy Case was withdrawn on February 22, though one of the accused, Sergeant Zahurul Haq, had been killed in military custody on February 15.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was swiftly anointed, on February 23, as “Bangabandhu” by Tofail Ahmed at a million-strong mass rally at the Race Course in Dhaka. The honorific had initially been penned by Rezaul Haq Chowdhury Mushtaq, a student of Dhaka College, in an article he wrote for the college magazine in 1968 at the height of the Agartala Case trial.
Bhutto and Wali Khan were freed in mid-February by the regime. Toward the end of the month, Mujib travelled to Rawalpindi to be part of the opposition delegation at the Round Table Conference called by an enervated Ayub regime. Bhutto and Bhashani boycotted the RTC, which in the end was unable to devise a way out of the crisis for Pakistan.
Ayub Khan fell on March 25 and was replaced by General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army. Martial law was clamped on the country for the second time in its history. Political activities were suspended but unlike the coup d’etat of October 1958 political parties were not banned, and political leaders were not arrested. Yahya Khan promised to organise general elections on the basis of universal suffrage.
It took Asad’s death and the death of scores of others, particularly in East Pakistan, to drive a seemingly entrenched military regime from power. In death, Asad, Motiur and Shamsuzzoha joined the growing queue of Bengalis murdered by the state, beginning with the killings at the Khapra Ward in Rajshahi in 1950 and the murder of students in Dhaka on February 21, 1952.
On December 5, 1969, Mujib informed a memorial meeting on Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in Dhaka that henceforth the province of East Pakistan would be known as Bangladesh.
Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics and history.
