Book Review | Mujib Didn’t Know Foe From Friend
Mujib’s tragic flaw, Ghosh writes, was his inability to distinguish between true comrades and opportunists
Veteran journalist Manash Ghosh’s book, Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and the Plot Behind His Killing, is a breathless 467-page read spanning the tumultuous five years between the birth of Bangladesh and the death by assassination of its founder Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and concluding with a riveting epilogue on the foreign hand/s that forced the flight of his daughter Sheikh Hasina, from Dhaka last August. The parallels in the father-daughter duo’s political fortunes are uncanny, except that she has something he never had: a second chance.
The book could not be better timed, given the flux in Bangladesh for the last one year and the 50th anniversary of Mujib’s assassination this August 15. What gives it an unmatched edge is the first-hand immediacy the author brings to it. As a journalist with The Statesman in Kolkata, Ghosh was eyewitness to the Liberation War of 1971, something he recounts in his 2021 book, Bangladesh War: Reports from Ground Zero. After the war, Ghosh was posted to Dhaka as the newspaper’s bureau chief for three years and reported first-hand on the meteoric rise of Mujib and the series of tragic decisions he took to sow the seeds of his murder. That experience is packaged into Mujib’s Blunders.
Mujib’s tragic flaw, Ghosh writes, was his inability to distinguish between true comrades and opportunists. So he dumped loyalists like Tajuddin Ahmed who helmed the Liberation War while he was in jail in Pakistan and instead promoted pro-Pakistan elements like Khondokar Mushtaq Ahmed who conspired in his murder and, after Mujib’s death, became President.
Mujib also desperately sought recognition by Pakistan, China and the West, often at the risk of offending India, which explains why he accommodated in his government several Bengali officers who had been repatriated from Pakistan but were still loyal to Islamabad. Some of them plotted his killing with officials who came to Dhaka with President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in June 1974.
Under pressure, Mujib even decided to drop the trial of Pakistan prisoners of war accused of murder and rape during the Liberation War. Ghosh broke news and was summoned to the Indian high commissioner’s house in Dhaka at 6.30 am because Mrs Indira Gandhi had read the scoop in Delhi at 5.30 am, was angry Mujib took such a key decision without consulting her and had called him and told him so. Next thing Ghosh knew, Mujib summoned him to tick him off for getting him into trouble with Mrs G.
Ultimately, Mujib’s fate was determined by the Great Game between global powers that put Bangladesh in a geopolitical centre-stage. That same Great Game is behind his daughter’s plight. Mujib was its victim, paying with his life. Will his inheritor meet the same fate or chart a different course? Ghosh leaves readers hedging their bets.
PS: Mujib’s Blunders is a rich resource and begs a detailed index of events and characters in its future editions.
Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and the Plot Behind his Killing
By Manash Ghosh
Niyogi Books
pp. 467; Rs 795