Ziaur Rahman

Ziaur Rahman was born on January 19, 1936, in Bagbari, a village in Bogura District in the north of what was then the Bengal Presidency of British India ^[1]. His father, Mansur Rahman, worked as a chemist for a government department in Calcutta, so the boy divided his childhood between the quiet of rural Bogura and the crowded streets of one of the empire's largest cities ^[2].

The partition of India in 1947 redrew the family's world. Bengal was split, and the Rahmans eventually moved to Karachi in West Pakistan, where the father's job took him after the new state was created. Ziaur Rahman finished his schooling in Karachi and enrolled briefly at a local college before choosing a military career ^[2]. In 1953 he entered the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul, and he received his commission in the Pakistan Army in 1955 ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Ziaur Rahman before 1971 would have found an unremarkable answer: a professional officer from East Bengal serving in an army dominated by West Pakistanis. He served in the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, seeing combat in the Khemkaran sector of Punjab, and was decorated for his conduct in that campaign ^[2]. He later spent time as an instructor at the military academy and attended staff college, the standard path of a career soldier ^[1].

By early 1971 Rahman was a major serving with the 8th East Bengal Regiment in Chittagong. The political crisis between East and West Pakistan had reached its breaking point after the Awami League's election victory in December 1970 was set aside. When the Pakistan Army launched its crackdown on the night of March 25, 1971, Rahman and fellow Bengali officers in Chittagong mutinied rather than obey orders against their own population ^[3].

What made his name was a radio broadcast. On March 27, 1971, speaking from the makeshift Kalurghat transmission station outside Chittagong, Rahman announced the independence of Bangladesh on behalf of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the imprisoned Awami League leader ^[1]. The announcement, heard by listeners along the coast and picked up abroad, gave the scattered resistance an early rallying point. Which man deserves credit as the true proclaimer of independence later became one of the bitterest disputes in Bangladeshi politics, but the broadcast itself is well documented ^[3].

During the nine month liberation war Rahman commanded Sector 1 and then Sector 11 of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladeshi resistance forces, and led a brigade known as the Z Force, named for his initial ^[2]. For his wartime service the new government awarded him the Bir Uttom, the highest gallantry decoration available to a living freedom fighter ^[3]. After victory in December 1971 he continued in the new Bangladesh Army, rising to deputy chief of staff by 1975 ^[1].

The events that carried Rahman to the top of the state began with a catastrophe he did not organize. On August 15, 1975, a group of junior officers assassinated President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman along with most of his family. In the reshuffle that followed, Ziaur Rahman was appointed Chief of Army Staff ^[4].

His hold on the post lasted less than three months before rival officers moved against him. On November 3, 1975, Brigadier Khaled Mosharraf staged a counter coup and placed Rahman under house arrest. Four days later, on November 7, an uprising of ordinary soldiers, encouraged by the leftist Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal and its underground network, freed Rahman and killed Mosharraf ^[4]. The events of that week, remembered in Bangladesh as the sipahi janata revolution, made Rahman the most powerful man in the country, first as deputy and then as chief martial law administrator ^[2].

He assumed the presidency on April 21, 1977, replacing the civilian figurehead Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem, and sought a popular mandate through a referendum that year and a presidential election in June 1978, which he won against a candidate backed by veterans of the wartime government ^[1]. In September 1978 he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which won a parliamentary majority in the February 1979 elections and remains one of the country's two dominant parties ^[4].

Any honest account of Ziaur Rahman achievements has to start with the condition of the country he inherited: a state battered by war, the 1974 famine, and repeated coups. Rahman reversed the one party system that Sheikh Mujib had introduced in early 1975, legalized rival parties including the Awami League, and lifted the ban on political newspapers, restoring a competitive if constrained political arena ^[4].

His economic program emphasized self reliance and rural production. He promoted irrigation and canal digging schemes, often appearing in villages with a spade in hand, and pushed food production, population planning, and primary education under his nineteen point program ^[2]. He encouraged private enterprise and export earnings, including the beginnings of labor migration to the Gulf states, shifting the economy away from the socialist model written into the original constitution ^[5].

In foreign policy Rahman moved Bangladesh away from its early closeness to India and the Soviet Union. He built ties with China, the United States, and the oil producing Muslim countries, and he is widely credited with proposing the regional grouping that became the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), formally launched in 1985 after his death ^[1]. At home he promoted the idea of Bangladeshi nationalism, an identity grounded in territory and religion as well as language, in deliberate contrast to the Bengali linguistic nationalism of the Awami League, and constitutional amendments under his rule inserted Islamic phrasing into the state's founding document ^[5].

The record has a darker side that historians weigh against these gains. Rahman's years in power saw around twenty coup and mutiny attempts, and military tribunals sentenced large numbers of soldiers and airmen to death, most notoriously after the October 1977 mutiny in Dhaka ^[5]. Rights advocates and later investigations have argued that many of those trials were summary and unjust, and the executions remain a serious stain on his rule ^[4].

In 1960 Rahman married Khaleda Khanam Putul, a schoolgirl from Dinajpur later known as Khaleda Zia. During the 1971 war she was held in Dhaka under Pakistani military watch while her husband fought in the field ^[2]. The couple had two sons, Tarique Rahman and Arafat Rahman ^[4].

Contemporaries described the president as austere and driven. He worked long days, traveled constantly to district towns and villages, and cultivated a reputation for personal honesty in a political culture where corruption charges were routine ^[5]. He wore his uniform for much of his rule and retired from the army only in 1978, when he stood for election as a civilian ^[1].

His family's story did not end with him. Khaleda Zia took over the leadership of the BNP in the 1980s and served as prime minister of Bangladesh three times, making the household he left behind one of the two political dynasties that have defined the country ever since ^[4].

Rahman's presidency ended the way so many chapters of Bangladeshi politics in that decade did, with gunfire inside the army. In the early hours of May 30, 1981, a group of officers attacked the Chittagong Circuit House, the government rest house where the president was staying during a visit to the port city, and shot him dead ^[6]. The plot was linked to Major General Muhammad Abul Manzoor, the regional commander in Chittagong, who was himself killed within days as loyal forces put down the revolt ^[6].

The assassination did not topple the state. Vice President Abdus Sattar took over under the constitution and won a presidential election later that year, though the army under General Hussain Muhammad Ershad seized power in March 1982 ^[4]. Rahman's funeral in Dhaka drew one of the largest crowds the capital had seen, and he was buried at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, where his mausoleum at Chandrima Udyan became a site of political pilgrimage ^[2].

A military tribunal quickly tried and hanged twelve officers for the killing. Questions about the trial's fairness, and about who beyond the immediate conspirators may have wanted the president dead, have never been fully settled ^[5].

Few figures divide Bangladeshi opinion as sharply. To his party and its supporters, Ziaur Rahman is the shaheed president, the soldier who announced independence, saved the country from chaos after 1975, and opened the economy. To supporters of the Awami League he is the man who profited from Sheikh Mujib's murder, rehabilitated collaborators of 1971, and pushed religion into a secular constitution ^[5]. Textbooks, street names, and even the airport in Dhaka have changed with each shift in power, reflecting the unresolved argument over his place in history ^[4].

Some of the basic Ziaur Rahman facts are beyond dispute: the Kalurghat broadcast, the sector command, the founding of the BNP, the restoration of multiparty elections, the SAARC proposal, and the assassination in Chittagong. Scholars who study the period generally credit him with a measure of stabilization and economic pragmatism while faulting the violence used to secure military discipline and the manipulation that accompanied his elections ^[5].

Any full Ziaur Rahman biography also has to reckon with his afterlife in politics. His widow and his son have led the BNP for four decades, and disputes over his role in 1971 still produce court cases, textbook revisions, and parliamentary shouting matches. Nearly half a century after his death, arguments about Ziaur Rahman are still, in large part, arguments about what kind of country Bangladesh should be ^[4].