Syed Badrul Ahsan

On the evening of 8 January 1972, the news on the BBC World Service was unmistakable: “The East Bengali political leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, has arrived in London.’
Two days later, a jetliner of Britain’s Royal Air Force landed at Tejgaon airport. Moments later, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman emerged from it. It was from the same airport ten months earlier that he had been whisked away as a prisoner to Pakistan. And here he was again, being welcomed home by a grateful nation as its founding father, its liberator.
There was a sadness that enveloped him in the midst of that cheering crowd. As the truck carrying him and a whole phalanx of politicians and student leaders inched its way out of the old airport, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman seemed tired after all those months in solitary confinement in Pakistan. More than that, he was clearly overwhelmed by the ecstatic manner in which his people, the newly freed Bengalis of his Bangladesh, were welcoming him home.
It could have been a scene right out of an epic tale, of legend. It could have been an image shaped by the imagination. It was neither of those. It was truly happening before us. We had watched history being made in Bangladesh in the nine agonising months of Pakistani repression. And here, right before us, once more stood the man whose inspirational leadership had finally thrown open the doors of freedom for us.
For a few moments, I watched Bangabandhu on that truck. He was leaner than he was when the Pakistan army abducted him and took him to Pakistan in March 1971. His hair was disheveled. There was fatigue written all over him and yet there was the power in those eyes that held you in their confident brilliance. I tried to get on the truck. No luck there, for it was already loaded with people. As the vehicle slowly went past me, truly in the manner of a snail, I thought I would climb aboard at the back.
With one foot on the truck, the other grazing the road and my hands holding on to a chain on the side, I made a huge effort to have all of my sixteen year-old strength push me on to it. It was Colonel Osmany who then told me (he was on the truck) softly, ‘Khoka, neme porho…byatha paabe’. I didn’t get down. With that one foot on the truck and the other dangling along the road, I made it all the way with Bangabandhu to the Race Course.
It was a million-strong crowd which welcomed the Father of the Nation back home that winter afternoon. He spoke of the millions who had been murdered by Pakistan, of the homes and villages and towns ravaged during the war. He bade farewell to Pakistan and wished Zulfikar Ali Bhutto well. He quoted Tagore. And he wept. For the first time in his public career, before the world, Bangabandhu shed tears in remembrance of the terrible ravages Bangladesh had gone through in the preceding nine months. And we in the crowd and across the country remembered, at that instant, how seventy five million Bengalis had worried about his safety, how they had prayed for his life and for him to return home.
For nine months we had no way of knowing where he was or whether he was dead or alive. It was only Pakistan’s defeat in Bangladesh and the surrender of its 93,000 soldiers in December 1971 that perhaps saved him. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, having played a diabolical role throughout the war, nevertheless recognized the folly of keeping the leader of a now free nation imprisoned in alien land.
Late in the evening of 7 January 1972, Bhutto bade goodbye to Bangabandhu at Rawalpindi’s Chaklala airport. As the aircraft took to the skies, Pakistan’s new leader mused, “The nightingale has flown.” Hours later, on a cold dawn in London, Bangladesh’s president, for that was what Bangabandhu had been since April 1971, descended at Heathrow.
For the first time since the beginning of the war for Bangladesh’s liberation, the world knew that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was alive. The Bengali leader cheerfully told a crowded news conference at Claridges later in the day, “As you can see, gentlemen, I am alive and well.” And then he went on to offer a near lyrical account of his sentiments on being a free soul once more:
“Gentlemen of the world press, I am free to share the unbounded joy of freedom won in an epic liberation struggle waged by the people of Bangladesh. No people have had to pay so much in blood for freedom as my people have . . .”
Here at home, in the coldness of a January evening, we laughed and then we wept. Bangabandhu was coming back home. As we leapt and skipped and ran, in that order, all the way home in the twilight glow of 10 January 1972, we knew we now inhabited a land ‘where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free . . . where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection . . .’
It felt good to belong, with Bangabandhu, with the sovereign republic of Bangladesh. ***