News spread on Sunday that one of the assassins of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was hanged to death in Bangladesh, after his arrest on Tuesday last – some 44 years after the heinous deed was perpetrated at the hands of some top military brass there. What was stunning was also that the assassin Abdul Majed, himself a senior military hand, spent all these years in Kolkata. Apparently, neither the Indian intelligence nor the Bangladeshi sleuths could get wind of his presence in Indian soil for so long.
In diplomatic terms, the separation of east Bengal — which came to be known as East Pakistan after Independence – from Pakistani overlordship was a master-stroke from the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. At the same time, fact was principally that the Pakistanis dug their own grave there by seeking to rein in the people through harsh, ham-handed measures. The last straw on a harried camel’s back was the attempt to impose Urdu – the language of the Pakistani establishment – over the Bengali population. Mujibur Rahman was in the forefront of the protest movement, which later turned into an independence movement – the Mukti Bahini.
In the face of repressive steps by the Pakistani army, and faced with a large-scale influx of the harassed people from there to India, Indira Gandhi sent in the Indian Army, forced the Pakistani army to retreat, and helped in the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. A friend of India for ever, Mujibur Rahman ruled Bangladesh for four years before he was assassinated allegedly with covert backing from the Pakistani establishment.
With Mujibur Rahman’s daughter Sheikh Hasina in command of the nation for the past many years and she having neutralized the opposition from former PM Khaleda Zia, India-Bangladesh relations remain in good form. Reason is also that the Bengali population there identified itself more with their brethren in India – and vice versa — and they have a palpable distaste for the Pakistani establishment run by people of a different civilisational and cultural mooring. Attempts by Pakistan to play the religious card and edge closer to Bangladesh have not succeeded so far.
What is surprising, however, is how an assassin of Mujibur Rahman managed to stay incognito in India for so long. He was arrested when he landed in Bangladesh some days ago. This perhaps is a sad commentary on the strength – or the obvious lack of it — of India’s intelligence service. This, unless there’s a different twist to the whole tale!