Before his assassination, there was an attempt on Mujib’s life

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

An attempt was made to kill Bangladesh President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman a few months before he was assassinated on August 15, 1975.

The bid on Mujib’s life has come to light in a U.S Embassy cable from Dhaka to Washington, part of the Kissinger cables obtained and recently published by WikiLeaks.

According to the cable, the Bangladeshi press was under government orders not to report it.

“We have received two reports that President Mujibur Rahman was target of assassination attempt on evening of May 21,” the cable, sent on May 23, 1975, (1975dacca02535_b, confidential) noted.

“Attempt occurred as Mujib was returning to his residence after visiting new tv station on outskirts of Dacca.”

The “primary source” of the information was the embassy’s “Bangalee political assistant who says he was told by deputy superintendent of police assigned to President’s security unit. Other is journalist who told information officer Alpern. Both accounts say grenade used. According [to] pressman’s report, Mujib escaped uninjured but two unidentified persons were injured. He adds press given strict instructions by press information department to suppress story.”

India needs a federal foreign policy

Since most States share an international boundary, they need to be involved and consulted on external affairs that affect them

The competitive populism in Tamil Nadu over the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka has generated a great deal of alarm in New Delhi over the manner in which political issues relating to a State have begun impinging on India’s foreign and security policies. Though somewhat over the top, the Dravidian parties have a point, but a general one rather than the specific case they are advocating.

The general point is that in any country, the people have a right to advocate and push for a particular foreign and security policy. Given our linguistic, ethnic, religious and ideological divisions, these views often come across as those belonging to this or that section. That, too, is legitimate. But at the end of the day, this diverse country must have a single policy and its execution must be the responsibility of its federal government.

Sectional interests

The government structure as such does not cater to these sectional interests; in other words, there are no constitutional or institutional mechanisms to relay those interests. So, with Union governments taking the form of coalitions, they have become vulnerable to party or sectional pressure which often takes the form of pure blackmail.

A dangerous connivance

It is worrying that West Bengal’s political class remai ned tactical spectators to the Kolkata rally organised by Muslim groups in support of Bangladeshi war criminals

West Bengal looked to the Shahbag protests in Dhaka with hope. In 1971, a massive relief and solidarity effort was undertaken in West Bengal for the millions trying to escape a veritable genocide. The then leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami in East Bengal and its students wing organised murder and rape squads in collaboration with the Pakistani forces. Their crimes included mass murder, rape as a weapon of war, arson and forced conversions. Post-1975, generals used them to cast an Islamic veneer of legitimacy over their illegal capture of power. Their immunity lasted until the present Bangladesh government restarted the legal proceedings in the War Crimes tribunal. The Shahbag protests demanded maximum punishment for the guilty.

SHOCKING

In West Bengal, a few meetings have happened around Shahbag, mostly expressing support. But, shockingly, the largest was a massive rally held in Kolkata on March 30, explicitly against the Shahbag protests and in support of the war criminals already convicted. Various Muslim groups, including the All Bengal Minority Council, the All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, the Madrassa Students Union, the Muslim Think Tank and the All Bengal Imam Muazzin Association, organised the rally. People arrived in buses from distant districts of Murshidabad and Nadia, as well as from neighbouring districts. Students of madrassas and the new Aliah Madrassa University were conspicuous at the gathering.

အစၥလာမ္မစ္ Long March တြင္ ပူးေပါင္းပါဝင္ရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းသည့္ ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၈၀ ဘဂၤလားေဒခ်္႕တြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရ

ဒကၠားၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္သို႔ ခ်ီတက္ၾကမည့္ ဘဂၤလာေဒခ်္႕မွ အစၥလာမ္မစ္ ဘာသာေရးအဖြဲ႕တစ္ခု ျဖစ္ေသာ Hefazate Islam Bangladesh (HIB) အဖြဲ႕၏  Long March အစီအစဥ္တြင္ ပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္ရန္ ႀကိဳးပမ္းသည့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၈၀ ကုိ ဘဂၤလာေဒခ်္႕ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕က ေကာ့စ္ ဘဇားခရုိင္တြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးလိုက္သည္။

သူတို႔အား အဆိုပါ ခရီးရွည္ ခ်ီတက္ပြဲတြင္ ပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္ရန္ လာေရာက္စဥ္ ေကာ့စ္ဘဇားခရိုင္ အိုးကီးယားႏွင့့္ တက္ကနက္ အေ၀းေျပးလမ္းေပၚရွိ ေနရာအမ်ားအျပားမွ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာၾကာသပေတး ညေနမွ ေသာၾကာေန႔ ေန႔လည္ပိုင္းအတြင္း ဖမ္းဆီးမိခဲ့ သည္ဟု ဘဂၤလာရဲတပ္ဖဲြ႕ကို ကိုးကားၿပီး ယေန႔ထုတ္ The Independent သတင္းစာတြင္ ေဖၚျပသည္။

အစၥလာမ္မစ္ အဖြဲ႕ HIB မွ အခ်က္ (၁၃) ခ်က္္ပါ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္မ်ားကို အစိုးရမွ လိုက္ေလ်ာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးရန္အတြက္ ဘဂၤလာ ေဒခ်္႕ တႏို္င္ငံလံုးရွိ ၿမိဳ႕ႀကီးမ်ားမွ ဒကၠားၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္သို႔ ခ်ီတက္ရန္ အစီအစဥ္ တစ္ခုအား ေက်ညာၿပီးေနာက္ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ေသာ အဆိုပါအဖြဲ႕ကို ေထာက္ခံသူမ်ားသည္ လမ္းမမ်ားေပၚသို႔ ထြက္လာခဲ့ၾကသည္။