Tajuddin Ahmad . . . and morality-based politics

Syed Badrul AhsanSyed Badrul Ahsan
Published : 22 July 2021, 12:26 PM
Updated : 22 July 2021, 12:26 PM

No matter how beautiful the words and language applied in the making of the constitution of the country, it will all be pointless unless those stated noble aspirations are practically applied in the lives of the people.

— Tajuddin Ahmad

When Tajuddin Ahmad was born in July 1925, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das had been dead for a little over a month. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, arrested by the British colonial authorities in 1924, was in Mandalay jail and would not be freed till 1927. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, with whose political career Tajuddin Ahmad's own politics would be inextricably linked, was five years and three months old.

The trajectory which Tajuddin Ahmad would take in the brief span of life he would live was thus part of the chain of the political history that would in time define the destiny of Bengalis on both sides of the political divide. For Tajuddin, from a very early age, politics was part of his creative imagination, concerned as he was by the iniquities he witnessed in his Bengali ambience. He would be a brilliant student, in school and beyond school. But with the passage of time it would be his sense of politics, his belief that history needed to chart a new course if his fellow Bengalis were to be privy to self-determination as a people that increasingly mattered to him.

Tajuddin Ahmad's diaries between the late 1940s and early 1950s were to be the road markers leading to the many milestones in his political career. The entries in the diaries were brief but to the point, clear hints of his assessment of politics as it was shaping up in those early days of Pakistan. There was his ubiquitous bicycle, the vehicle which had him move around Dhaka, visiting friends and acquaintances, not so much in search of companionship as in his desire to understand their points of view on what was shaping up as a formative stage in the story of his people.

In those early days, Tajuddin Ahmad demonstrated the intellectual dimension that he would bring to bear on politics as he thought it ought to be. He was increasingly convinced that Bengali aspirations and the concept of Pakistan did not go together; and in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman he found, insofar as his expanding political beliefs were concerned, a kindred soul. Together the two men would discover the wherewithal to redefine their nation, which in essence was their conviction that as a first step toward freedom for the Bengali nation, a broad-ranging outline of autonomy within the parameters of Pakistan would be necessary.

Those parameters were put in place by Bangabandhu through the Six Points in 1966. It was in those points that Tajuddin Ahmad envisioned, like his leader, a passage out of the dense woods for the nation. And the degree to which his belief that the Six Points must not be marred by any loopholes was demonstrated early on, in 1965, when he peppered a group of young Bengali economists authorized by Bangabandhu to prepare a draft of the Points with probing queries about each of the Points. Tajuddin's questions gave the economists a hard time. It was also a moment when those young men knew of the breadth of political understanding which defined Tajuddin Ahmad. He appreciated political sloganeering, but beyond that it was substance which mattered to him.

Probity was an integral part of the Tajuddin persona. He would not deprive a bureaucrat of promotion merely because the latter had abandoned his wife Zohra Tajuddin and their little children to the wolves on the perilous night of 25 March 1971. He would forsake the comforts of family life as long as he remained busy in leading the guerrilla struggle to freedom against Pakistan. Basic decency defined the man. Even as a group of Young Turks and party colleagues went out on a limb to remove him from the office of prime minister of the Mujibnagar government, he kept his calm, focused on the job he needed to do.

It was a task the idea of which had worked away in his mind when he and Barrister Amir-Ul Islam made their way out of a burning Dhaka in late March 1971. Tajuddin and Islam knew that beyond the question of personal survival, the paramount need was leadership in the nation's darkest hours. Tajuddin would provide that leadership. With Bangabandhu spirited away by the Yahya Khan junta, it fell to his trusted lieutenant to reassure the nation that the lamp of liberty would light its passage out of the dark.

Socialism was at the core of Tajuddin Ahmad's politics in independent Bangladesh. To his dying day he remained convinced that bourgeois democracy was not equipped to deliver the goods in a country ravaged by war, one that had also been afflicted by poverty and systemic exploitation for generations. But his socialism was not one which derived inspiration from abroad. Having grown into adulthood with an acute comprehension of socio-economic realities in Bangladesh, he knew full well that the nation was in dire need of a political system that would abjure thoughts of assistance other than self-help.

Socialism for Tajuddin  Ahmad would be homegrown. He was not enamoured of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for he knew that a people that had waged war for liberty and emerged triumphant contained in itself the energy to refashion the country to its own sovereign specifications. Foreign aid, he was certain, was no recipe for national development. Indeed, foreign aid was a straitjacket for any self-respecting people.

Governance was a matter of principle with Tajuddin Ahmad. He would not let a group of Bengali government officials returning from a tour abroad get away from the airport without clearing the customs duties attached to the goods they brought home. And he would politely reprimand Khandakar Mushtaque Ahmed when the latter insisted that his personal insurance money dating back to pre-1971 times be given to him. An entire nation had suffered in the course of the war and had not asked to be recompensed for its contributions to the war. Mushtaque, having been a prominent figure in the Mujibnagar leadership, ought not to insist on that money. It was a sign of Tajuddin's abhorrence of political favouritism. Cronyism and nepotism were anathema to him. The people mattered over party loyalty.

Tajuddin Ahmad and Bangabandhu developed, by autumn 1974, serious differences in policy. It is a measure of Tajuddin's loyalty to his leader that when the Father of the Nation instructed him, in October 1974, to submit his resignation from the cabinet, he did so without demur. And then he lapsed into silence, not wanting his loyalty to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to be tainted or scratched by the gulf that had developed between them. Many were the offers from left-wing political parties for him to join them, offers he spurned with disdain. Neither would he be part of BaKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League), the new political formation Bangabandhu gave shape to in early 1975. Tajuddin was unequivocal in his belief that BaKSAL could not be an answer to national political needs.

In terms of history, Tajuddin Ahmad remains a great man, a political logician to the core. Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dreaded his presence, and his arguments, at the abortive political negotiations in Dhaka in March 1971. Bhutto, acutely aware of Tajuddin's intellectual prowess, had backed out of a public debate to which he himself had challenged Bangabandhu on the Six Points in 1966 when Tajuddin offered to take up the challenge.

A student of economics in his younger days and widely read in history and political philosophy, conversant with the place of religion in his life, Tajuddin's personality was of a multi-dimensional nature. He spoke little, for verbosity was not part of his demeanour. Always focused on the job in hand, he had little time for hangers-on and fools. He was no orator, but in discussions around the table he was a formidable performer. Every detail was on his fingertips. Firmly but politely, he informed his colleagues and detractors alike that politics was serious business, that doing good homework was a prerequisite to doing purposeful politics. In the end, the conspiratorial politics of his enemies claimed his life.

Of the four national leaders murdered in prison on 3 November 1975, Tajuddin Ahmad was the last in whom the lights went out. Shot and then bayoneted by the nocturnal assassins, he passed on, to an eternity of silence. His prescient words to his wife Zohra, when she asked him as he was being led away to prison a little over two months earlier how long he expected to be away, must have played in him as he lay dying.

"Take it as forever," he had told Zohra Tajuddin. It would indeed be forever.

(Tajuddin Ahmad — General Secretary of the Awami League (1966-1971); Prime Minister of the Mujibnagar Government (1971-1972); and Finance Minister of Bangladesh (1972-1974) — was born on 23 July 1925 and assassinated on 3 November 1975)