Ground Realities
The men Ershad raised to heights of glory
NAZIUR RAHMAN was for a long number of years a confidant of General Hussein Muhammad Ershad. There were a number of others who simply built their careers, or climbed to bigger heights of glory, by the grace of the man we know as Bangladesh's second military dictator. If you recall the turbulent 1980s, a time an entire nation spent in trying to run the Ershad dictatorship out of town, you will have cause to remember as well the men and women who joined the Ershad bandwagon and thereby helped an unscrupulous regime preside over our collective destiny for close to a decade.
Men like Naziur Rahman, it is safe to argue, perhaps would never have had a chance to rise to prominence on their own had they not drawn the attention of those who made a career of coups d'etat and unconstitutional seizure of power. And yet there has been the other truth, which is that many of these men (and women), in the years after 1990, ditched their benefactor one after the other and began to look for greener pastures.
But, of course, there have been quite a few who abandoned Ershad even as he remained in control of the state. And that was in the approaching twilight of the regime. Anwar Zahid, once thrilled to be allied to the general, joined Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury in making his way out of the cabinet. Since that time, Zahid has stayed away from active politics. But Chowdhury has gone through newer rites of passage, eventually to find himself in the corridors of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
Those of you who remember the revolving chairs that passed for government in the 1980s cannot but recall how, at a point, Justice B.A. Siddiky, having led the Muslim League for sometime, accepted with alacrity Ershad's offer to be the nation's permanent representative at the United Nations. Not much later, it was rather unceremoniously that Siddiky was called away from New York, having earned for some reason the displeasure of the president.
Indeed, General Ershad's ire often fell on men some of us thought would last a long time in his shadow. He sent Enayetullah Khan to Beijing and then to Rangoon as ambassador. And then came a time when Khan came back home, to resume his journalism. To what extent a newsman has his professionalism damaged by association with an unconstitutional regime is a question we have tried to answer ever since Altaf Hussain of Dawn cheerfully made his way into the government of Ayub Khan in the mid-1960s.
Anwar Hossain Manju surprised us hugely when he found a slot in Ershad's cabinet and truly began to play an influential role, especially when it came to developing and maintaining links with the major political parties. Ershad's gain was the country's loss, for Manju could have gone on to transform himself into a powerful editor of the Ittefaq.
The bigger irony came, though, when Manju at one point decided to jettison his leader and, Sheikh Shahidul Islam in tow, branch out on his own as leader of his own faction of the Jatiyo Party. And let us recall that Sheikh Shahid, Bangabandhu's nephew, appeared before us for the first time after his eclipse in the 1970s when General Ershad pulled him into his camp. He would end up being a minister.
And that raises the interesting and intriguing question of why a certain category of individuals are so desperate about finding berths in a dispensation that has little or nothing of morality about it. You do not any more come by the likes of Justice Ibrahim who, having discerned early on that the military regime they are part of has motives that push the possibility of a return to democracy into the shade, swiftly walk out of the arrangement. And you respect them for their judgement.
The tragedy in our lives, though, is that we have a rarity of Ibrahims. There always seems to be a plenitude of people like Justice Munir or Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, all too willing to uphold an illegal regime and the rest of the world be damned. It was precisely such images in the mirror we spotted in the Ershad years. Shah Moazzam Hossain, once a good student leader and then a loyal follower of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, found his true calling in the Ershad dispensation.
His loud denunciations of Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia, in language we have always abhorred, are remembered. If there ever was a true defender of the House of Ershad, it was Moazzam. And yet, in the final days of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-Jamaat government, he appeared before Begum Zia (in company with Syeda Razia Faiz), placed a bouquet in her hands and formally joined the BNP. Only days later, the BNP wallahs were gone. Shah Moazzam has said not a word since then.
A particular feature of the Ershad years was the diverse ways in which some people saw their careers made, or broken, as the case may be. The respected Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, having played a pioneering role in the June 7, 1966 general strike in support of the Six Point program and then as part, however briefly, of Bangabandhu's government, had no business linking up with a military dictatorship. Yet he found little reason to decline Ershad's invitation into government; and he went up to being prime minister in a system that was as pointless as it was hollow.
You could sound much a similar sentiment about the veteran Ataur Rahman Khan. He joined Ershad, in the naïve belief that he could cajole the general into restoring democracy in Bangladesh. His eventual bitterness at the discovery that he did not count led to his departure from the regime. And the bitterness was bared in Prodhanmontritter Noy Maash, the last book he wrote at the end of what had been a long, tortuous career.
There have been others who took full advantage of the Ershad era to burrow their own way to prominence. Civil servants dabbling in poetry cheerfully became part of a charmed circle in which the military leader was the North Star. Men noted for their intellectual prowess became envoys abroad and cabinet ministers at home. Prominent freedom fighters served in Ershad's government, as did some notorious collaborators of the Pakistan army.
Bengali academics, happily employed abroad, came all the way home to help the general devise economic policy. Men who, in the post-1990 period, tripped over one another to castigate Ershad's rule as having been authoritarian had earlier demonstrated little willingness to walk away from the cushy jobs they held at home and abroad when the general had his long shadow cast across the land.
Is that a feature of life? Or is it sometimes in the nature of history to be home to hypocrisy and self-aggrandisement? Zulfikar Ali Bhutto turned his back on Ayub Khan when his ambitions got the better of him. Jagjivan Ram ditched Indira Gandhi at the moment she had most need of his support. Kazi Zafar Ahmed, loyal to Begum Zia, one day simply walked into the Ershad tent, and saw his fortunes, if not his politics, soar. Abdul Halim Chowdhury and Korban Ali turned their backs on their parties and simply went into oblivion.
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