On 15 August, there was no Mark Antony

On 15 August forty one years ago, the murderers came for Bangabandhu and his family. They left everyone dead and then strutted around in the manner of so many peacocks.

Not a leaf stirred. Not a single twitter of a bird was heard. No one came forth to save the Father of the Nation, no one except Brigadier Jamiluddin Ahmed. He gave up his life to defend his President. Three other officers, driven by a desire to protect the President, made their way towards Road 32, only to be stopped at Kalabagan and subjected to day-long humiliation by the mutinous soldiers.

No one else came. Nor did anyone feel the need to come to the aid of the man who had led the nation to liberty. General K.M. Shafiullah, the last man to whom Bangabandhu spoke on the phone before the life was blown out of him, asked him, 'Can you come out of the house, Sir?' It did not occur to the army chief that presidents do not scale walls to save their lives, that Bangabandhu was the last man to go fugitive in search of extended life.

Moments after the carnage at Road 32, a soldier ran all the way to General Ziaur Rahman's cantonment home, to tell him the President had been assassinated. The deputy chief of army staff was not unduly disturbed. So what? Said he. The vice president was there. He did not know that Syed Nazrul Islam along with other senior figures in the ruling dispensation had by then been placed under house arrest. He did not care. After all, he had known since March of the year that these junior officers were conspiring to murder the nation's founding father. And he had kept his silence, silence that was treason.

Not a single military officer moved out of the cantonment on 15 August and towards Bangabandhu's home to ascertain the nature of the tragedy. Shafaayet Jamil was unable to explain how men of the 46 Brigade he commanded had moved out of the cantonment at night and to Dhanmondi to murder the President of the Republic. In the evening, Khaled Musharraf pored over maps, wondering how many divisions India had on its borders with Bangladesh and what resistance could be shaped in the event of an attack by Delhi. These men shook hands with the assassins, spoke to them many times over in the course of the day, never feeling the need to deal with their criminality in the larger interest of the Republic. They did not do on 15 August what they would do on 3 November. They did not rise to the occasion.

The incongruous and the bizarre were at work on 15 August. The assassin majors and colonels took charge of the cantonment and of Bangabhaban and not a single senior officer thought it necessary to bring them back to discipline. Four hours, perhaps more, went by after the murder and mayhem at 32 Dhanmondi, enough time for the coup to be foiled. Yet the senior figures of the armed forces did not mount any resistance to the coup. They waited in the secure confines of their offices, even as the killers passed out instructions to them on what needed to be done. The top hierarchy of the military could have acted swiftly, once Bangabandhu had fallen, to preserve constitutional government under Vice President Syed Nazrul Islam. They did nothing of the kind. All of them made their meek way to the radio station to declare their allegiance to the usurper regime. All of them thus violated the Constitution. All of them acquiesced in murder being an instrument of political change. All of them violated their sacred oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

On 15 August, intelligence did not fail. It remained eerily silent. It stayed under the rug. It was switched off, the better to facilitate the assassination of the Father of the Nation. The conspiracy to do away with Bangabandhu was in a big way a well-organised affair to keep everything concealed from the President. Every intelligence organ of the state – defence forces intelligence, national security intelligence, et cetera – failed the President or stayed away deliberately from coming to his aid. The conspiracy was vast. Enemies within and enemies without worked away. The communist Abdul Huq, in December of the previous year, sought arms and finance from Pakistan's Bhutto government to overthrow the legally established administration led by Bangabandhu's administration. A happy Bhutto sent him and sent others, Bangladesh's leftists as well as rightists, everything they needed to push Bangladesh and its leadership over the precipice.

Away in Washington, having overseen the fall of Chile's Salvador Allende in September 1973, Henry Kissinger waited for news of the collapse of the Mujib government in Dhaka. On the morning of 15 August, having driven past Road 32, his envoy Davis Eugene Boster was able to confirm that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman now belonged in the past. Kissinger was delighted.

Early in the morning on 15 August 1975, the chief of Pakistan Television in Islamabad repeatedly asked his team if there was any news from Dhaka. He expected some breaking, earth-shattering news. Finally, it came. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali nationalist leader who could not be sent to the gallows by Ayub Khan, whose execution by Yahya Khan had been scuttled by the emergence of Bangladesh, had finally been done in by his own people. Men and women in Pakistan celebrated the tragedy in Dhaka through a distribution of sweets. A jubilant Zulfikar Ali Bhutto recognized the 'Islamic Republic' of Bangladesh and decided to send cloth and rice to the 'brotherly' people in Dhaka as a gesture of 'goodwill'.

In the aftermath of the assassination, Bangabandhu's ministers converged around Khondokar Moshtaq, seemingly unconcerned about their just-murdered President lying sprawled on the stairs of his home in Dhanmondi. Not one of them demanded to know why Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been murdered. Not one of them asked the usurper why the Father of the Nation would not be given a burial in the nation's capital. It was a day of infamy, with Taheruddin Thakur, Mahbubul Alam Chashi and ABS Safdar running the show. HT Imam, as master of ceremonies, saw to it that proper arrangements were in place for Bangabandhu's cabinet to transfer its allegiance to Moshtaq's illegal dispensation.
15 August 1975 saw the brave General MAG Osmany, who had earlier quit parliament because he did not wish to see a Mujib Khan ruling the land in the manner of Ayub Khan (re the adoption of the fourth amendment to the Constitution in January 1975), saw hardly anything wrong in taking upon himself the role of defence advisor to Moshtaq. It was a time when Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani felt no qualms of conscience in welcoming the violent overthrow of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Oli Ahad, the veteran politician, would lose his marbles through proclaiming the day of the killings as Najaat Dibosh — day of deliverance. On 15 August 1975, Joi Bangla was pushed aside to accommodate the notorious old 'zindabad' slogan.

15 August would open the road to unmitigated shame for all Bengalis. An indemnity ordinance would close the door to any prosecution of the assassins under the law, would lead to newer and grosser shame through many of them serving as diplomats at some of the country's missions abroad.

On 15 August 1975, we as a nation stayed quiet and stayed home and did not lift a finger to protest the murder of the Leader. Not one of us emerged on the streets, not one of us organized a demonstration and a march to denounce the killers. All those political elements who had over the years pledged undying loyalty to Bangabandhu went missing on the day. Therein we demonstrated our collective guilt as a nation. Bloody treason reigned supreme.
On 15 August 1975, Brutus and Casca and their fellow conspirators had the land in their vicious grip. Cassius, with his lean and hungry look and therefore dangerous, celebrated his 'triumph' in blood and gore.

Mischief was afoot.

There was no Mark Antony around.