There was consternation among the members of the panel and those attending it, a distinguished coterie of the teachers of the university. I was maneuvered off the stage and the gnomic Dr Mosharrof Hosain of Economics Department, chairing the panel, papered over the cracks with a light touch. The seminar wound along its predictable course. Dr Muzaffer Ahmad sat silently through this, tight-lipped, and did not take the stage. He did not rebuke me, though he could have. Nor did he, in subsequent interactions with me regarding some publications of a research center of the university, ever refer to the incident, or behave with anything less than with his usual distracted politeness. It was a graciousness that was remarkable in the highly hierarchical Bengali world of Dhaka University with its strict gradation of ‘sirs’ and seniors and juniors.

Professor Muzaffer Ahmad was well-known to me by then. He was not only the “Professor of IBA” (not ‘at’ but ‘of’ since he was so tied in with IBA’s founding and functioning) on the campus, where he could be seen strolling out of the institute’s gates in well-tailored clothes towards the Registrar’s Office, but as the co-author with Professor Rehman Sobhan of Public Enterprise in the Intermediate Regime. Younger readers today necessarily will have no idea about the years immediately after independence, in the 1970s, when ideology mattered in public debates, when party manifestos were underpinned by positions taken for or against the Das Kapital. It was a time when the term ‘collective good’ was taken seriously. One of the most hotly debated topics was the kind and degree of socialism adopted by the then Awami League government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The most visible public face of this adoption was the ‘transfer’ of private sector assets to the public sector – springing not only from the necessity of disposing the abandoned assets of fleeing Pakistanis but also from the belief that it would be treasonous of the newly-minted Bangladeshi state to repeat the rampant capitalism of the Pakistani industrialists.

Professor Muzaffer Ahmad, heading the industries division of the Planning Commission of that period, was the sharp end of the policy stick. Having been in the East Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (EPDIC) before that, an organization devoted soulfully towards building up not only an industrial base in East Pakistan but also a capitalist class, he was seen as gamekeeper turned poacher. That is however a simplistic picture of a wholly complex thinker and scholar. The brief romance of Bangladesh with socialism, as everybody knows, failed, and gave way with a vengeance to privatization, to today’s genuflection to the magic of the neo-liberal market, but Professor Muzaffer never ceased to be vitally alive to the full dimensions of that project and ideology.

It was this that drove him and Professor Sobhan to articulate the failure in the elegantly but comprehensively worded Public Enterprise. It is as solid a work of classical political economy of Bangladesh as has ever been written, the narrative laid out in the tightly wound spokes of Kalecki’s conceptual wheel of the ‘intermediate regime’. Used as I was to the dry and barren, as well as poorly written English, textual exegeses of my professors, this encounter with a book whose linguistic and intellectual standards matched the topic they deliberated on left an indelible impression on me. That book, and Professor Rehman Sobhan’s Public Works and Basic Democracy are the two books that have always stood out for me amid the welter of self-serving memoirs and sub-standard academic works that litter the textual landscape of our public policy. I recently re-read the book  after all these many years, and again admired it; to those interested in the broad issue as well as the arcana of our socialist period it is an unforgettable chronicle of an unforgettable time.

There are many of those who deplore the fact that Professor Muzaffer Ahmad joined the Zia administration, but they would be sorely off the mark to attribute that to a yearning for power and status. What must have driven him was another chance to return to his area of personal and academic obsession, to revisit the policymaking associated with the topics of how to bring about large-scale changes in terms of social equality and economic redistribution, but this time from the opposite side. As the public sector was dismantled and the private sector returned triumphant, he must have pondered as he busied himself in the work, who won, one particular class, or society? It is especially remarkable given that his PhD was from Chicago University, famous for Milton Friedman and the monetarist bombing of Chile.

I left for the United States in the mid-1980s. When I came back in 2003 he had undergone a more remarkable transformation. Professor Muzaffer had become a public and institutional (with his chairmanship of Transparency International Bangladesh) force against not only the specific corruptions in our public sector, but a voice of dissent against the many social corruptions that pervaded our larger society. Back in Dhaka, I saw him again at a lecture on Freedom of Information Act by an Indian expert and activist in the field. He looked frail, and gone was the old sartorial sharpness; he was far more simply dressed in kurta and sandals. It seemed that he had shed everything extraneous in his life and manner except for his work and values – simple clothes, simple house, plain furniture, plain speaking. But the intelligence was keener than ever, the social conscience honed sharper than ever, a reminder of which was the depth and breadth with which he engaged the Indian speaker. At one point they veered off into a discussion of corruption and public accountability of the water sector in Kerala, and the not-so-young professor displayed an agility and nimbleness with an arcane topic that would have left many a much younger and ‘well-read’ academic eating his dust. The Prof who guided generations of IBA students through the maze of corporate and public sector ethics, I saw, had not lost his old reading habits.

I approached him after the talk and introduced myself. It had been a long time, but eventually he recognized me. I told him tongue-in-cheek that I kept meeting him in seminars. He smiled slightly at this, no doubt his memory now more fully jogged about that old seminar in the distant past, and said I was free to join him on the streets too. No doubt beneath banners and hot suns in protests and demos against the swift slide of our public life into theft, illiteracy, looting and small-mindedness. I said I would but I never did. It is too hard, too damn hot, and I am too lazy, my active civic sense too shrunken. But not Professor Muzzafer Ahmad, as I kept seeing on television, with his frail body and his steel mind, the simple clothes, the vigil under a hot sun, in mild-mannered protest against the depredations of the looters, the scholar with his sense that man is a social animal, and unless every woman and man cares enough about the society which she or he claims to be a part of, things fester and decay, and democracy and civil society and human rights and respect for each other then become the Orwellian slogans of the rapacious-minded.

Professor Muzaffer Ahmad’s like will not be seen again in Bangladesh.

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Khademul Islam is editor, Bengal Lights (www.bengallights.com) and is on the editorial board of Bangladesh Business.

After Pakistan split apart like an overripe fruit in 1971 we Bengalis trapped in Pakistan had to get out. Official repatriation to Bangladesh seemed remote and in Pakistan there was increasing talk of herding Bengalis into detention camps. In this climate of fear and uncertainty Bengalis began to flee from Pakistan to a friendly India, from where they could head for Bangladesh. One escape route was to cross the highly dangerous India-Pakistan border either from Punjab or across the marshy Rann of Kutch in Sind. The other way was across the Durand Line into Afghanistan. We chose the latter route.

One wintry night our family of five slipped out of our government colony flat and took a taxi to Rahimbhai’s house in the narrow alleys of Karachi’s old town. Rahimbhai was a businessman friend of my uncle who had arranged for a Pathan smuggler – Fazl Khan – to take us across the border. Rahimbhai was fat and sharp-eyed. Crates of foreign, black-market cigarettes and soaps were stacked in the back rooms of his warren-like house. Soon, about forty of us had assembled, including two infants in swaddling clothes. We boarded the train for Rohri Junction. It was in the opposite direction to the border town of Quetta, which was our real destination. The move was to throw off the Pakistan police, who were now capturing and jailing escaping Bengalis.

We reached Rohri Junction at noon the next day. That afternoon we boarded the train for Quetta, chugging steadily through a bleak Baluchistan. Around 10:00 the following night we rolled into a spookily quiet Quetta railway station. Rough-looking Pathans appeared out of nowhere and hustled us to a huge lorry parked outside a side entrance, its engine running. After we and our suitcases had literally been thrown into the back, the truck gunned out of there like a bat out of hell. We heard shouts. Beams from car headlights lighted up the tailgate. Rifle shots rang out and bullets ricocheted off the truck’s sides. Chased by jeeps, we roared through the town’s dark streets until we heard a train, and could see its headlamp boring down on us. Just when it seemed it was on top of us we raced across the tracks, leaving our pursuers on the other side.

Soon we were deep in the Chaman badlands. In the pitch dark the truck bucked and swayed over trackless smugglers’ trails like a camel on amphetamines. We clung on for dear life amid tumbling suitcases. As the night wore on, the sweet smell of hash mixed with the stink of vomit. Finally, near dawn, the truck stopped. We clambered out, dazed, into floating clumps of fog. Nearby, a hole in the ground glowed orange. It was the mouth of a large, round underground cave, into which we descended via a wooden ladder. The orange glow turned out to be a campfire, with a kettle of kava – Afghani tea – bubbling on top of it. Crates of luxury foreign soaps and cigarettes were stacked on the floor. Naan bread was nailed to the mud walls. Fazl Khan turned out to be a rangy Pathan with a rifle slung on his shoulders. In the morning my brother and I ventured out above and the desert’s stark golden beauty was a sight never to be forgotten.

We set off in another truck for Kandahar, then a town with lanes of cypress trees silvery beneath a full moon. There we stayed at the Spozmai hotel, and breakfasted next morning on poached eggs, real English jam and toast beneath a huge portrait of King Zahir Shah. Later that day, nervous about the police, Fazl Khan moved us to a brothel, a mud-walled building in the more crowded part of town. Plump Pathan women in various states of undress shot out from the rooms assigned to us. When I and my brother were lugging our two suitcases up a short flight of stairs from the pile of luggage dumped at its foot, Fazl Khan stood at the top looking down at us. “Bring the other ones too,” he commanded. “But they are not ours,” I protested. In a flash he came down the steps, eyes spitting fire, drew the heavy knife from his belt and said menacingly “Bring up the other ones.” We let go of our suitcases, which clattered down the stairs. Bile and tears of rage rose in my throat and eyes, but there was nothing to do except obey him.

But he kept his word to Rahimbhai. He got us out of Pakistan, without robbing us or letting us be robbed. We went to Kabul by bus, winding our way at times through snowy mountain roads. A Pathan boy walked in front of the bus during the most treacherous stretches in his sandals, bulletproof against the bitter cold. Kabul at night was a stunning valley of lights. We stayed at a rambling wooden hotel whose boozed-out owner was a dead ringer for George Harrison. Everybody gathered in our room for afternoon tea, with the men playing low-stakes poker long into the night. We shopped for winter coats in Kabul’s used-clothes market and ate pomegranates bursting with crimson juice. The Indian embassy stamped visas on our Pakistani passports and arranged for Air India tickets to Delhi.

In Delhi the Bangladesh High Commission housed us in rented accommodations in Greater Kailash, a tony neighbourhood. The first evening I ventured out to see a huge, ornate temple at the end of the road with boys in whites playing cricket in its shadow. India was startlingly normal, nothing like what we had imagined growing up in Pakistan. We toured Delhi, standing on the ramparts of the Red Fort overlooking the bazaar-lanes of Chandni Chowk. This was where the denizens of old Karachi had come from, fleeing in their turn to Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. Food coupons issued by the high commission were redeemable at the Muslim restaurant in the market, where we ate stupendous bowls of beef keema and naan.

We took the Rajdhani Express train to Calcutta, which flat out covered the distance in a little over twenty-four hours. Our fellow passengers were Hindu Bengalis, whose accents were profoundly foreign to my Muslim Bengali ear. The train’s menu was also a surprise, a watery mix of rice and fish curry. We landed in a ghostly Calcutta during its nightly brownout. With cash running low, we bunked down at a cheap hotel near Chinatown. Men slept on pavements tightly packed together, and around 4:00 in the morning a powerful blast sent shock waves through our room. “Naxalite revolutionaries,” explained the sad-eyed hotel manager the next day as we checked out. We hired an Ambassador taxi and rode through an iridescently green countryside to the Indo-Bangladesh border crossing of Benapole.

Our passports were stamped by the Indian guards. Lugging our suitcases we walked across the no-man’s land and presented our passports to the Bangladeshi border guards. They stamped them. We stepped out of the sentry box and onto Bangladeshi soil.

We had made it!
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Khademul Islam is a Bangladeshi writer and translator.