August 15, 2025, marks 50 years since Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding leader, and 18 of his family members were assassinated. Ironically, it will also mark the completion of one year since the ouster of his daughter, Sheikh Hasina.
Abroad during the 1975 massacre, Hasina continued her father’s political legacy and served as her country’s longest-serving prime minister till street protests overwhelmed her government and ousted her on August 5, 2024.
A detailed and insightful recall of the twin events is contained in a new book by veteran journalist Manash Ghosh, titled “Mujib’s Blunders.”
A legacy reversed
Like she was when Mujib was assassinated (1975-81), Hasina is again exiled in India. It marks the reversal of a legacy that had hugely contributed to the social and political sinews of a people who cherished Tagore and Nazrul. They fought for their language and culture, which were distinct from Pakistan. Although historically its part, they had felt alienated and neglected.
Ghosh records how Mujib’s inefficient, corrupt and needlessly patriarchal government slid into its biggest ‘blunder’, a single-party rule. Fifteen years of military rule, directly or with a civilian fig leaf, followed. The return of democracy saw arch rivals Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia fighting for power in a zero-sum game. Today, Hasina is out and the Zia family is back in the reckoning.
All this has impacted India, which invested, in blood, sweat and money, to gain a friendly eastern neighbour, where minority Hindus are relatively safe, only to be jolted, not once but twice. Ghosh narrates how and why India relied on the Awami League against hostile Zia and Jamaat-e-Islami. It now threatens to be worse. With or without Zia, it marks the return of Islamist forces that Mujib and Hasina had held back, however imperfectly.
Ghosh covered the 1971 independence war from “Ground Zero” for The Statesman newspaper and was its Dhaka Bureau Chief. He writes with a deep understanding of the people and various players who initially built the new nation. Incidentally, this reviewer moved to Bangladesh barely three days after Ghosh departed, and reported Mujib’s murder and subsequent turmoil during 1974-76. This facilitates a measure of continuity in viewing the domestic, regional and global power play.
The book’s sting lies in its tail. Its Epilogue reveals little-known details of the United States’ efforts, during the Kissinger years and the recent Joe Biden administration, in hobnobbing with opposition forces, influencing the state’s institutions and conducting a vocal campaign to destabilise the Hasina regime. If the US, in collaboration with Pakistan, worked quietly to oust Mujib, the campaign against Hasina, part of the same animus that harks back to 1971, was upfront.
Ghosh seeks to establish links between the two regime changes, 49 years apart, caused by Mujib’s murder and Hasina’s ouster. She could have met the same fate but for a last-minute escape. He stresses that the global (America and Britain) and regional (China-Pakistan) interests are the same, whatever the ‘temperature’ the current tie-ups and tussles may currently record in this already-overheated world. Only, few have the time and patience to look at 1975 because the lexicon has changed in the new century. And all regime changes are engineered in the name of democracy.
Ghosh points out that the Subcontinent has increasingly become a playground of conflicting geopolitical and geostrategic interests between the US and China. Together, in opposing Bangladesh’s independence then, today they are rivals.
Engineered through a military-led coup d’état in which Pakistan played a big role, Mujib’s assassination was part of the Cold War politics of those times. Ghosh names British and American diplomats who were actively involved in 1975 and 2024.
But what about Hasina’s ouster? Is it then, the new Cold War with China, unlike in 1975, emerging as the new global/regional player? Unmistakably, in Bangladesh, Pakistan rides more than just piggyback on China, into its erstwhile eastern province, definitely at the cost of India, its principal adversary.
There are “some eerie similarities in the two conspiracies,” Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, former Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, says in the book’s foreword.
Painting a South Asian picture, Ghosh alleges that the same foreign interests fanned the anti-Hasina street protests after engineering Imran Khan’s ouster in Pakistan, public revolt in Sri Lanka and the revolving-door government changes among Nepal’s communists. Worse, one of the world’s most volatile regions may witness the creation of yet another hotspot of Islamist extremism.
Bangladesh rose from an “international basket case” on independence and emerged, largely during the Hasina years, as a middle-income nation with some sterling human development indicators. But ‘blunders’ – corruption, violence and the winner-takes-all politics -- did it in. Ghosh laments that the ‘blunders’ of internecine political warfare and repression of critics were common to both regimes. The rot began under Mujib, who distrusted his most able and loyal aide, Tajuddin Ahmed, and trusted those who eventually did him in.
Ghosh avers that Bangladesh is destined to see more powerplay, domestic, regional and global. There will be many experiments with democracy as elections determine Bangladesh’s dynamics. The Awami League, banned and kept out of reckoning, is no pushover and can bounce back in future, provided it sheds its factionalism and works to a purpose, if and when the Mohammed Yunus regime holds the promised elections. That is a tall order.
(Mahendra Ved is a veteran Indian journalist who did a stint in Bangladesh in the ‘70s. He is President Emeritus, Commonwealth Journalists Association (CJA))
Check out the book on Amazon.
