 Welcome to the School of Oriental and African Studies, or SOAS, as it's called by those of us who work and study here. My name is Edward Simpson and I'm the director of the South Asia Institute at SOAS. It really gives me great pleasure to be able to introduce proceedings this evening. Many people have worked very hard on preparing this event and it's nice to see it eventually come to fruition. After a bit of a false start, which was caused by industrial action, colleagues at UCU. So I'd like to welcome esteemed guests from the High Commission, Mr Kaunin, his Excellency and Mr Talha, his deputy. So welcome to SOAS to you and to distinguished members of the community and to staff and students from SOAS. And I welcome you to the first Sheikh Mujibur Rahman lecture and I hope it's going to be the first of many. Nuruddin Ahmad will introduce the lecture which will be delivered by Professor James Maynor. People who work at SOAS often claim that it's a special place. It's an institution that asks questions that matter, questions that are important to the world. I strongly agree with that sentiment and I think holding events like this are a testimony to that kind of reputation that we work so hard towards. In my role as director of the Institute of South Asia, I represent around 80 or so colleagues who work on South Asia related themes across the school. They work on politics, economics, religion, yoga, ritual and language. My colleagues recognise that the past is very important and that people in the world understand different things, do not all think the same and write and speak importantly in different languages. But we're also aware as a school that the global agenda has shifted since SOAS was founded 101 years ago. The school was originally founded as an institute for the tuition of Oriental and African languages and cultures as part of a colonial mission. Those days have long since gone and we work in a very different way. For me, working in partnership with organisations such as the March 7th Foundation represents a new way of working, a new way of thinking about relations between people and places. It's through working with organisations like the 7th of March Foundation, who we are co-hosting this evening's lecture with, that we can begin to ask new questions and start new kinds of conversations. I would like to think that this lecture is an important step in that direction, as Noor has already said earlier on today, as Brick Lane comes to Bloomsbury. So, I welcome you all to SOAS and to the first Sheikh Qudibur Rahman lecture, which Noor Din Ahmad will now introduce. Thank you very much. Salaam aleykum, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I think every society and every nation has a great moment in their life and the story to tell. And I think for the people of Bangladesh, 7th of March is our greatest story. And because it is a remarkable achievement of courage and people fighting for justice and equalities. We as a from the foundation set up to tell the story, tell the story to inspire people. But we also realise that before telling the story, we need to hear the story and hear objectively. And we think there is no one better place to tell us this story objectively than Professor James Maynard. So, why it is important for us to tell this story, not because of glorifying individual or a nation, but it is because we believe their story is very living. And this story is still need to be shared in order to inspire people across the globe. Because there are things that is still relevant. I will give you one example. Then there was a time, Bangladesh when we see around us that there are so much division in this country, we see rise of racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism. These are the values Sheikh Mujibwaran hold very deeply. He was against it. He made a strong stand saying that we are above all, we are Bengali, and therefore let us not be divided by these religious ethnic divisions. And I think today we are going to hear this story, remarkable story from James Mason. Today is not for me to go on and elaborate further because this is what we want you to hear from Professor James Mason. And he has kindly, we are really honoured that he has kindly agreed to deliver the first inaugural message lecture. So please welcome Professor James Mason. Thank you very much. I'm very grateful to the school and to the foundation for the invitation to speak here. I have a lot of ties and good experiences in Bangladesh and with Bangladeshies over the years. Lots of field research that I have done there in different parts of the country. And I was lucky enough to supervise four PhD students who completed their degrees and have gone back to Bangladesh and are working there now. So, and I keep in touch with them. So there are deep kind of connections and I'm grateful for this opportunity. I want to tell the story of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who I will call Sheikh Mujib for simplicity. Some of you know this story very well. But for some of you it will be a little bit new or some parts of it may be new. So let's go through it and I hope you get something from it, even those of you who know it well. He was a politician and politicians these days are sometimes despised, but he was not just a politician. He was much more, he was the father of his nation, Bangladesh. And more than that he stood out among many other leaders who were also fathers of their nations in several ways as I hope to explain. Sheikh Mujib was not from an elite background. He was born in a village in 1920, the son of a record keeper at a law court in a district town in eastern Bengal. As a 20-year-old student in 1940 at a college in Calcutta he joined the movement for Pakistan. And three years after that in 1943 at the age of 23 while he was still a student he had done enough political work to be elected a member of a municipal council at that tender age. Later while studying law in Dhaka, Dhaka is the, as you know I think the largest city in predominantly Muslim East Bengal. While studying there he founded in the college the Muslim Students League and he joined a movement for Bangla that is the Bengali language. Resisting the imposition of Urdu as the main language of Pakistan. Pakistan was imposing a language which most Bengalis did not understand and this didn't seem fair. It was the first of many things that did not seem fair. Bengalis, if I may change the picture slightly, this is a map of Pakistan and India before the emergence of Bangladesh. Pakistan is in two parts, the green parts east and west of the Indian Peninsula. And for some reason we keep, we're swinging on to the next one. The East Pakistan looks much smaller in terms of square miles than West Pakistan but most of the people of Pakistan lived in East Pakistan. 56% of the people as opposed to 44% who lived in West Pakistan. So the majority were Bengalis. Sheikh Mujib's campaigning in the language movement led him to be arrested twice by the newly independent Pakistani government in 1947 just after the British left. Two arrests within six months. After his release from jail in 1949 he led a strike of the lowest paid workers of Dhaka University and staged a sit-in at the vice chancellor's residence. This is the first way in which Sheikh Mujib stands out among other people who were fathers of their nations. On this occasion and on many later occasions he worked for social justice for poor people in Bangladesh, East Pakistan. And that's something which some of the other fathers of other nations never did. That sit-in at the vice chancellor's house did not go down well. It triggered another arrest, his third arrest, and while he was in jail a new political party called the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League was formed and he was made a party secretary while he was still behind bars. He was then released, still a young man and again he started protesting. He led a movement protesting the food crisis in East Pakistan and for that and many other things he was jailed five times. By the Pakistani government in 1948 and 1949. This is a reminder, all these jailings, this is a reminder that he was prepared to make great personal sacrifices. In fact he was arrested at least 22 times in his life for his campaigning. In 1953 he was elected the general secretary of his party and at the first provincial elections in 1954 a front of which his party was a part. Won almost all the seats in East Pakistan and he was made a minister in the provincial government at the age of 34. Now three more of Sheikh Mujib's important qualities as a leader emerge in this period. First in 1955 to stress his commitment to secularism and his openness to all residents of East Bengal including the large Hindu majority minority which was 20% in 1947, 20% of what is now Bangladesh. His party dropped the word Muslim from its name in order to call itself simply the Awami League. Unlike some other fathers of new nations and unlike some populists today in Asia and Europe and even Britain he was not a narrow intolerant ethnic nationalist. He was an open-hearted secularist. Second by the way at the same time as that party label was changed he was re-elected as party general secretary that is he was made the top official of the Awami League in East Pakistan. Now the second thing that stands out emerged in 1956 he resigned as a minister to focus full time as general secretary of his party on building the Awami League's party organization because unlike some other fathers of new nations Sheikh Mujib knew that his party needed a strong organization which went beyond one man rule. He didn't allow his personal ambitions to overcome the need for strong organizations. As a result the Awami League then and long after his death in 1975 had a solid organization capable of capturing power and governing effectively. I myself have seen plain evidence in small towns in Bobra district of the strength of the Awami League organization in much later years. Third while he was always a courageous firebrand a staunch campaigner he was also something more. He was a flexible leader unlike many other fathers of the new nations. Even when small opportunities emerged to make progress by negotiation he was open for talks. We have an eyewitness account from 1957 for example of a dinner at which he met a political adversary. The former governor general of Pakistan who was also the former prime minister of undivided Pakistan. Sheikh Mujib the firebrand who by then controlled the Awami League organization he was very much on top and in command. He arrived at this dinner not looking like an agitator but he arrived formally dressed and he was in the words of somebody else who attended the dinner exceptionally respectful towards the former governor general and he offered any assistance that he could provide to the former governor general every kindness. He showed that he was not simply a hotheaded agitator he was a more mature and rounded leader. He reckoned that for a time it was worth adopting moderate postures moderate attitudes to see if progress was possible with the West Pakistanis. He knew that there might come a time when defiance and resistance became necessary but in his view that moment the moment of the dinner was not the moment. In politics timing is extremely important and Sheikh Mujib had a very fine sense of timing unlike some other fathers of new nations. Before long it became obvious that progress through negotiations was not possible. The power elite in West Pakistan were not open to serious compromise with the majority of their own countrymen the Bengalis. The armed forces which dominated Pakistan were themselves dominated by West the West Pakistani minority. So was the higher civil service and so were the main business houses in East Pakistan. The most powerful business men in East Pakistan were not Bengalis they were from the West. And a huge portion of export earnings from East Pakistan especially the export of jute went to West Pakistan. Living standards were higher in West Pakistan. These injustices kept Sheikh Mujib led Sheikh Mujib to turn necessarily to defiance. In 1958 martial law that his army rule was imposed Sheikh Mujib was jailed on fake charges soon afterwards. He was inside for three years and in 1961 he was released and immediately began building an underground Awami League organization. And then as a result of that in January of 62 he was jailed again. He was ready to face all of these jailings because unlike the other fathers of many other new nations he was ready to make personal sacrifices. The fathers of the new nation of Sri Lanka for example never went to jail. Most of them spent decades comfortably placed as ministers of the crown. And as the British journalist James Cameron once wrote Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore the father of that nation fought the struggle for independence on the golf course. Sheikh Mujib was in jail 22 times. In 1968 a major case legal case was launched against him and some of his allies. The Agartala conspiracy case. This was a false set of accusations trumped up by the Pakistani authorities accusing him and others of compromising with India, conspiring with India to break with Pakistan. This was simply not true. But the charges that he faced carried the death penalty and they named Sheikh Mujib as the main accused. Now in the process they caused him great suffering. He's in jail. He's wondering will I survive this. But they also the West Pakistani leaders unintentionally did him a favor. Because by making him the main accused they confirmed his status as the top leader of the Bengalis. Now after the military regime which had trumped up these charges had governed so badly that it broke down under protests not just in East Pakistan but in West Pakistan as well. After it broke down he was released in 1969 and the charges were dropped. He immediately was taken to the race course in Dhaka and made a defiant speech before a vast crowd. And on that occasion he was given the honorific name or title Bangabandu Sheikh Mujib Araman. Bangabandu means friend of the Bengalis. In December 1970 when the military felt compelled to hold its first genuine national election in the history of undivided Pakistan. Sheikh Mujib's Awami League won all but two of the 169 seats in East Pakistan or what we now call Bangladesh. And this gave the Awami League a majority of the seats in the new national assembly or parliament of Pakistan. The military leaders in West Pakistan did not anticipate such a landslide they did not think. They thought well several different parties will win seats in East Pakistan. The Bengalis will split and some of us in West Pakistan will have more seats and so we can keep the Bengalis under control for more years. But they found themselves facing the prospect that the Awami League could actually rule the whole of Pakistan if this new assembly was brought into being. And then the military leaders had second thoughts. They decided well it might be best if we put off if we postpone the first meeting or any meeting of the new national parliament because we don't really want these people running the country. Sheikh Mujib, who had just been put in a position to be the Prime Minister of the country, replied by calling in East Pakistan or Bangladesh for a non-cooperation movement. This enabled his party, the Awami League, to completely and peacefully take control over the administration of East Pakistan. He became the de facto head of government in East Pakistan or Bangladesh. Civil servants followed his instructions. The police followed his instructions. Businesses, banks, the entire labour force who knew about those policies of his to help poor people, redistribute land and redistribute wealth. The labour force followed his lead. He was in control and the Awami League was clearly in fact ruling what we now call Bangladesh. The only people in East Pakistan who did not follow his instructions were the West Pakistani army units, but they were ordered to enter the barracks and stay there, not intervene for a time. Because the West Pakistani leaders were determined to use the time to strengthen the troops, introduce new troops and weaponry and arms and to reimpose control by force. Now Sheikh Mujib was then needed to respond to this new situation. And on the 7th of March 1971, that's why we are here discussing the 7th of March and the speech on the 7th of March. Before a vast crowd at the Dhaka race course, you can see a photograph of it, get an idea of how many people were there. He made an important speech, the speech of his life. UNESCO, United Nations Agency, has listed that speech as a cultural and political milestone. It has international legendary status. Because it has such status we need to consider the details of the speech very carefully. And this is a very tricky topic, which is the subject of some debate. And for the last six weeks I've been consulting learned colleagues in Bangladesh about their interpretations of that speech. Here is what has emerged. He recalled in the speech first that earlier military actions by the Pakistani army had done great damage. He said, the history of Bengal, of Bangla, is the history of the staining of streets of the streets with the blood of the people of this country. He then said, and these are the important words that are printed on a poster at the top of the stairs as you came down here. He then said, the struggle this time is for our independence. He said that in the middle of the speech and at the very end of the speech he repeated that phrase twice more resoundingly. But flexible as ever he shrewdly stopped short of a unilateral declaration of independence that there and then. And he stopped short for two reasons. In other words, this phrase, the struggle this time is for our independence was not a declaration of independence because the struggle lay in the future. He stopped short for two reasons. First, he had been informed that if he declared independence the Pakistani Air Force had orders to bomb the meeting hundreds of thousands of people. Have a look at that picture, look at the number of people and imagine what would have happened if a bombing raid had come in low over the meeting. He didn't want thousands killed on the spot. Second, Sheikh Mujib wanted to leave the door open for talks with the West Pakistani military and the elites of West Pakistan to try to produce an agreement which would avoid widespread violence as Bangladesh pursued what he called the struggle for our independence. And he then addressed in the speech the Pakistani armed forces by saying, you are my brothers, do not make this country a hell and destroy it. And he repeated that sentence twice. If we can solve things in a peaceful manner we can at least live as brothers. Now the two leading political analysts in Bangladesh today have written to me that they and I think they're correct that this speech was a master stroke. Not because it was a declaration of independence because it was not that but because it was ambiguous because it left the door open for discussions that might avoid massive bloodshed. And the discussions he sought then followed. This speech was on the 7th of March and between the 7th and the 23rd of March, a little over two weeks, 1971, Mujib participated daily in extensive talks with Pakistani leaders including the military dictator of the country. And also Zulfikar Ali Buto, who was the most popular politician in West Pakistan. Although Buto had a lot fewer seats than Mujib did. But the West Pakistani leaders did not negotiate in good faith. They were basically putting on a show. They went so far as to signal to the press and to others on the 24th of March that an agreement with Sheikh Mujib had been reached. 24th of March. That was a lie because the next morning Buto and the military dictator flew back to West Pakistan. They had used the period of the talks to build up military forces and they were preparing for a crackdown which began on the 25th of March, the day after the phony announcement that an agreement had been reached. Mujib could see this coming. So could his colleagues in the Awami League. So he urged other Awami League leaders to go into hiding so they wouldn't be killed, so the organization wouldn't be completely decapitated that it could carry on. But when the crackdown began on the night of the 25th of March, at great risk to himself, Sheikh Mujib remained in his house and awaited a rest. He did not go into hiding. As he later said to explain this, he offered himself for arrest in order to minimize death and destruction. He reckoned that if the military found it impossible to subdue the Bengalis, and that's how it turned out, the people were too wide awake and ready to struggle for their freedom. If the Pakistani army could not subdue them, the army would need somebody close at hand with whom to negotiate a peaceful way out. And if that meant he would be in jail for a while awaiting that moment, fine. But he was also prepared to pay with his life. As he said at the time to a close colleague, if the Pakistani military ruler thinks that he can crush the movement by killing me, well he is seriously mistaken. An independent Bangladesh will be built on my grave. So he was prepared once again to risk his life. And in the early hours just after midnight on the 26th of March 1971 he was arrested in his home. He was put on a plane, flown to West Pakistan and thrown in jail. A familiar experience. But instead of negotiating with him, the West Pakistani authorities put him on trial for treason. The trial did not last long. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. In East Pakistan or Bangladesh, as we now call it, the Pakistani army unleashed a brutal campaign to subdue the Bengalis. It committed massacres of Bengali police. Bengali soldiers who had left the Pakistani army to resist a massacre of students and staff at Dhaka University and elsewhere. Some of the buildings in Dhaka University ran with blood, piled up with corpses. The army massacred intellectuals and other civilians. Many consider this campaign to have been to add up to an act of genocide. But the resistance from the Bengalis could not be overcome. A civil war followed over the next nine months with poorly armed Bengalis resisting as best they could and resisting quite successfully in many parts of the country. Finally, after nine months on the 3rd of December 1971, the Indian army joined in the struggle, entered East Bengal, Bangladesh, and 13 days later, on the 16th of December 1971, the Pakistani army surrendered to Bangladeshi and Indian forces, and a new nation emerged. The death sentence on Sheikh Mujib was never carried out. On the 8th of January 1972, a little while later, he was released. He flew to London, then Delhi, then on to Dhaka where he arrived on the 10th of January 1972 to become the leader and the father of a new nation. Later in 1972, he introduced a new constitution, and the year after that a democratic election gave the Awami League a huge landslide victory. But it was not easy governing this country after the landslide victory. Bangladesh had been badly ravaged by civil war. Many leading Bengalis who might have helped to rebuild had been murdered. There were major problems as a result of that and of dislocation reviving the economy and restoring law and order. All of this created major problems for Sheikh Mujib as Prime Minister of Pakistan. Discontent developed, and on the 15th of August 1975, a group of discontented middle-ranking soldiers staged a military coup. And astonishingly, they murdered Sheikh Mujib and 16 members of his family. All the members of his family they could locate, including children. Only two of his children were absent from the area around where he lived, and they survived. One of whom you probably know this, one of whom Sheikh Hajjina Wajid is Prime Minister of Bangladesh today. Three months after that coup and the murders of the family, two more coups took place. The place was in chaos and Bangladesh remained under military rule from then 1975 until 1991, when the incapacity of military governments to govern adequately finally brought an end to military rule and a return to democracy in Pakistan. This is a sad end. The killing of the family and of Sheikh Mujib is a sad end to a remarkable struggle led by a remarkable man. This account of that grim struggle plus certain other things remind us of how important it is that Bangladesh be studied seriously here at the School of Oriental and African Studies and elsewhere. What are the other things that make that important? The brutal crackdown in 1971 by the Pakistani military killed many of the people who could have served as capable government officials. They could have helped the government to work well in Bangladesh, but they were missing dead. And then after the 1975 coup when Sheikh Mujib was killed, the country suffered a quarter century of inept military rule. We have learned time and again that armies are hopeless at governing complex Asian societies and that certainly was true of Bangladesh after 1975. Now the ineptitude of the army and the murders of so many capable people have made it difficult for governments in Bangladesh even up to the present day to achieve great things. But in spite of that, and in part because the government was somewhat incapacitated, Bangladesh has developed some of the most constructive non-governmental organizations on earth to compensate for the limitations of government institutions. When you consider an institution like BRAC, which is as accomplished as any non-governmental organization of promoting development as any in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Or when you consider the Grameen Bank and the idea that launched it, Grameen Bank has won the Nobel Prize. And when you consider also many more organizations, less famous but quite formidable, what you see is a group of organizations that add up to a more potent set of civil society organizations than we find in almost any other country in Asia, Africa or Latin America. I can only think of two other countries on those continents which compare with Bangladesh. Now those organizations that make Bangladesh an important place that needs serious study. How did they do it and what do these organizations do and how do they work with government? Those organizations together with government have achieved a great deal. For example, and this I find quite astonishing, Bangladesh has done better than India which has superior human and financial resources in promoting family planning and in tackling malnutrition. Malnutrition is a scourge across India. It means that about 37% of Indian people are less intelligent than they might be because in the first five years of their lives malnutrition prevents their brains from developing fully and you cannot do anything about it after the first five years. 37% of Indians, to put it bluntly, are more stupid than they might be because of malnutrition. This kind of problem is much less serious in Bangladesh even though Bangladesh has less financial resources. The achievements of Bangladesh, governmental and non-governmental together, are remarkable in many ways and deserve serious study. Other countries can learn from this. And while Bangladesh is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, it has coped reasonably well with Islamic extremism and of course it has sustained democratic politics since 1991 when the military finally gave up power. So, those of us who study South Asia, although we often focus on a gigantic, Bangladesh's gigantic neighbor India for understandable reasons, we need to pay attention to Bangladesh. To Bangladesh, it's not just a huge country in its own right, but it's an extremely important country in ways that even India is not. So, we need to pay Bangladesh and the legacy of Sheikh Mujib, the attention that they deserve. Thank you. Well, after having meeting Professor James Mason first time sometime in January, we asked him to send us an extract of his speech and he gave us the extract and there he said, especially the young people born after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, need to hear his story. And I think he has tell that incredible story today and he told us very beautifully. Therefore, I will ask everyone to give him a good clap. And it is also true that this was going to be one of our first lecture to open the door to have more debate about life and work of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman trying to find about Bangladesh and the contemporary politics, not just in Bangladesh, but in Asia and Africa. And I personally believe that Professor Mason has opened the debate once again very nicely and eloquently. And I think now it is for us, all of us around in this room, is to go back and carry on the debate. And we need more debate we have. Frankly and openly is better. Sometime debate can be little and discomforting, but nonetheless we need to continue this debate. So I would like to thank you all for coming, but I think also it would be quite good to remember that we have a number of people who made this even very successful. I think probably we all noticed that there was quite a few people sitting upstairs welcoming us, registering our names. And I think we should thank these two people. I think Nadia Ahmad and Muktar Ahmad there. I think it will be far too long to mention all of my colleagues here. I think some of them we have listed their names. So I would repeat they will know how deeply we value their services. We also thank some of our distinguished guests for coming here. His Excellency Bangladesh High Commissioner, Deputy High Commissioner, and Rashi Swaraddi, Husain Swaraddi. And also amongst us we have Presence Sultan Muhammad Sharif who was one of the key organizers of the independent movement. I know I can go on, but I think best that we should retire here and go upstairs and enjoy ourselves. Thank you very much once again for coming and see you soon.