A.L. Khatib paints Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as a father-figure of Bangladesh politics

WHO KILLED MUJIB?
By A.L. KHATIB
Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd
Price: Rs 50: Pages 216

BANGLADESH IN BLOOD AND TEARS
By JYOTI SENGUPTA
Naya Prokash
Price: library edition, Rs 40; Popular edition,
Rs 18: Pages 158

Who killed Mujib? The question is sure to sound a trifle anachronistic, coming as it does six years after the incident, and four months after yet another president of the country was slain. Bang... bang... Bangladesh. Like a Chinese box of violence, the milestones of blood-spilling keep recurring in the country with sickening regularity.

No record can be gorier for a nation born 10 years ago at a cost of 3.5 million lives. Since then two elected presidents, a vice-president, two prime ministers, two cabinet rank ministers and a chief of staff have been assassinated, not to speak of about 4,000 men of the armed forces who were killed while taking part in the country's most popular industry - coup d'etat.

For author Khatib, who is a Bangladeshi journalist, the question in the book's title should normally have been asked, and answered, years ago. The fact that it wasn't may perhaps be attributed to the limitations of having to work within a closed, maladjusted and intolerant society-a society which is still dogged by the memory of 19 years of army rule. Also-a journalistic reflex which was slightly slow? Perhaps.

But by focussing on just one page in the Bangladeshi chronicle of death, Khatib has been able to re-create some of the psychological atmosphere in the country. It is a world in which terror, like a thin film of oil on a machine, permeates everything. The men in power do not know at which precise moment the cordon of security personnel will turn the guns around against them and tighten like a noose. The saga of Mujib's murder, with the accompanying side-shows of bureaucratic bungling, weakness and treachery, symbolises the fate of incipient democracy in most of the Third- World countries.

Candid Features: The anatomy of the August 15, 1975 coup itself has a host of revealing features. It was not an assassination bid involving one underground organisation, a hit man and plethora of sophisticated gadgetry-a plot that a movie maker is likely to select if he is planning a re-make of The Day of the Jackal.

On the contrary, it was a tale of unbelievable official callousness of an armed coterie, egged on by dark forces operating in the background, confronting the nation with a fait accompli. Later on, the same coterie overpowered far superior forces in a game of bluff; still later, they were bluffed themselves into handing over power to the forces that used it as a cat's paw.

Khatib informs his readers that when Major Huda, one of the "six majors" who had spearheaded the coup, entered Mujib's house in the early hours of August 15, the guards saluted him. In fact there was little or no resistance from the President's praetorian guards.

The whole psychological battle of numbing into inaction the 3,000 Rakshi Bahini soldiers was clinched by parading through the streets of Dacca 28 obsolete Soviet tanks which did not contain a single piece of ammunition. Khatib says that the information that the tanks were "dry" must have been known to at least 700 people in Dacca. He talks of men in authority darkly hinting much before the assassination of something "drastic" being in the offing, of "radical changes" and "terrible happenings in the near future".

Apparently, the main conspirators behind the assassination, whom Khatib identifies as Khondakar Mushtaq Ahmed, Mahbub Alam Chashi and Taheruddin Thakur (all with excellent US contacts), had cast their net wide. Junior army officers, special guards, intelligence men, journalists-all were involved in the plot, directly or indirectly. All of them had their private grouses, which converged at the assassin's gun sight.

Yet, Mujib himself either ignored the danger signals or was blissfully unaware of the plot. In the three-and-a-half years that he ruled, he had made pardon the cheapest commodity in Bangladesh, stuffing even the most sensitive wings of his bureaucracy with the same officers who had collaborated with Yahya Khan's hordes.

Mujib's Portrait: Khatib's account paints Mujib as a father-figure of Bangladesh politics, a bad judge of people, and too ready to offer clemency to anyone who sought it. He beefs up this portrait of Mujib with material, culled from the international press, that suggests Mujib was not just the victim of some locally hatched intrigue but of a plot that was precision - honed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lawrence Lifschultz, in his pace-setting book Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution has already come up with a detailed exposition of the cosy nexus between the CIA and the ambitious politicians who grabbed power in Bangladesh in the wake of Mujib's assassination.

The firsthand material in Khatib's book is the intimate account of the Dacca high society (which is not so high, really) which buckled under terrorism at the time of Mujib's death and, to an extent, acquiesced in it. Mujib could not change the course of events because of his own weakness. Who killed Mujib? The answer is: Mujib himself.

However, Jyoti Sengupta's badly printed but better documented book stretches to a broader canvas and tries to identify the pattern that runs like a black border around the rough and tumble of coups and counter-coups. His strength: a capacity to judiciously string together available accounts, and then to drive them to a conclusion.

Sengupta quotes at length from an interview with Lt Colonels Farooq and Rashid - members of the gang that killed Mujib - by the ITV network. They were interviewed by Anthony Mascarenhas of the London Sunday Times. Some of it makes spine-chilling reading even now. Excerpts: Farooq: I left the garage with 28 tanks, but when I actually came out of the second capital I had only one tank following me.

Mascarenhas: You lost the other 27?