Rokan's Journal

Maj Gen HRM Rokan Uddin (Retd)

The question of whether Sheikh Mujibur Rahman genuinely desired independence for Bangladesh or was primarily chasing the prime ministership of a unified Pakistan, is one that has haunted the country’s political discourse for decades. It is a question that deserves honest examination, free from both the hagiography of his admirers and the crude demonization of his detractors. The historical record is neither as clean as his defenders insist, nor as damning as his harshest critics’ claim – but there are enough documented ambiguities to make the question worth taking seriously.

After the 1970 general election, neither Mujib nor the Awami League had explicitly advocated political independence for East Pakistan. Smaller nationalist groups were demanding independence for Bangladesh, but Mujib’s platform was built on the Six Points – a demand for maximum autonomy within Pakistan, not secession from it. This is not a minor footnote. A man who had spent decades organizing a movement for full independence would not have entered the most consequential election in Pakistan’s history on a platform of provincial autonomy. That detail alone is worth pausing over.

After the election victory, Mujib was celebrated as “Sher-e-Pakistan” – Lion of Pakistan – in a newspaper advertisement published in The Daily Ittefaq on 3 January 1971. That title was not ironic or forced. It reflected how Mujib and the Awami League were projecting themselves now of their greatest electoral triumph: as Pakistani victors, not Bangladeshi separatists. The prize they were reaching for was power at the center of Pakistan, not a new nation carved out of its eastern wing.

The political crisis emerged when PPP leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared his party would boycott parliament if Mujib formed the next government. Many in Pakistan’s establishment were opposed to Mujib becoming Pakistan’s prime minister. This is the crux of the matter. The Pakistani military-political establishment’s refusal to hand power to the democratically elected majority is what radicalized the Bengali position. Had Yahya Khan honored the election results and allowed Mujib to take his rightful seat as Prime Minister of Pakistan, it is genuinely unclear whether the events of 1971 would have unfolded as they did. Mujib’s ambition, at least as expressed through the democratic process, was to rule Pakistan — not to dissolve it.

As late as March 10, 1971, Mujib’s aide Alamgir Rahman communicated to US Consulate General Archer K. Blood that Mujib “wanted very much to work out with Yahya some political settlement that would avoid bloodshed, satisfy Bengali aspirations, and preserve some vestige of link with Pakistan.” The aide even floated the idea of a confederation with separate constitutions but a shared army and foreign ministry. This was weeks after the election results were being suppressed. If Mujib were a committed independence fighter who had been secretly planning Bangladesh all along, these back-channel negotiations seeking “some vestige of link with Pakistan” would make no sense.

Mujib himself carefully avoided an unqualified declaration of independence even in the charged atmosphere of March 1971, framing his actions on the “democratic voice of the people as expressed in the December election” rather than on any separatist ideology. Even his famous March 7 speech, which millions experienced as a clarion call to freedom, fell deliberately short of a formal declaration of independence. Millions held their breath waiting to see if Mujib would declare independence, breaking all ties with West Pakistan once and for all – and he did not.

Once independence was forced upon him by Operation Searchlight and the Pakistani military’s decision to launch a genocide rather than surrender power, Mujib’s role necessarily transformed. The liberation war was real, the suffering was real, and the nation that emerged was real. But the genesis of that war lay as much in the Pakistani establishment’s refusal to accept a Bengali prime minister as it did in any independence movement that Mujib had been leading. As late as March 24, Mujib’s negotiating team was still proposing a confederal arrangement to the Yahya junta and it was Yahya’s secret departure from Dhaka that same evening, followed by the launch of Operation Searchlight, that terminated all possibility of a negotiated settlement.

Where the post-independence record becomes genuinely troubling is in the institutional choices Mujib made once he returned to Dhaka in January 1972. The Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini was formed in February 1972, and its allegiance was formally to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh and the Awami League – not to the state of Bangladesh itself. Many within the Bangladeshi military viewed the new paramilitary force with deep suspicion. A national army that had just bled to liberate the country was being systematically sidelined in favor of a parallel force loyal to one party and one man. This was not the behavior of a statesman consolidating a new nation – it was the behavior of a politician protecting a personal power base.

Professor Ghulam Murshid compared the Rakkhi Bahini to the Gestapo, while journalist Anthony Mascarenhas noted there were few meaningful differences between the force and Hitler’s Nazi apparatus. These are not fringe comparisons. The force was involved in extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and political repression on a wide scale. The thousands of young men killed under suspicion of leftist sympathies were not enemies of Bangladesh – many of them were freedom fighters who had laid down their lives for the country’s birth and then found themselves hunted by the government they had helped create.

The deeper question the Rakkhi Bahini raises is not merely human rights abuse, serious as that is. It is a question about sovereignty itself. A paramilitary force trained by foreign officers, drawing its doctrine from foreign institutions, and owing its organizational origins to an intelligence apparatus of a neighboring state is not a neutral instrument of domestic order. It is a structural penetration of the state. Whether this reflects Mujib’s conscious treachery or his dangerous political dependence on India to maintain power is a distinction that matters – but the outcome for Bangladesh’s sovereignty was damaging either way.

The most honest reading of the historical record suggests that Mujib was first and foremost a political animal whose primary ambition was power. In 1970, that power was the prime ministership of Pakistan. When Pakistan denied him that prize through military force, circumstances – and Indian strategic interests – channeled that ambition toward an independent Bangladesh. He did not originate in the liberation movement so much as he became its inevitable figurehead. Once in power, he governed not as a founding father securing a new nation’s institutions but as a party boss securing his own position, with tools that compromised the very sovereignty the liberation war had been fought to establish.

None of this erases the genuine popular movement behind 1971, the mass sacrifices of ordinary Bengalis, or the historical significance of Bangladesh’s independence. But it does complicate the mythologized narrative in which Mujib was always a freedom fighter, always working toward an inevitable national destiny. The evidence suggests a more conflicted figure – a man who wanted to rule, who reached first for Pakistan’s throne, and who shaped Bangladesh into something that bore the marks of how it was born: through violence, foreign entanglement, and a political logic that prioritized loyalty to a leader over loyalty to a state.

hrmrokan@hotmail.com