In May 1975, a paan exporter from India took a walk around the presidential palace gardens in Dhaka with President Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the national hero of the 1971 war of Bangladeshi liberation. He warned the Bangabandhu that officers of the Bangladesh military were going to remove him. Three months later, on the morning of August 15, as Mrs Gandhi prepared to deliver the 28th Independence Day speech in Delhi, in Dhaka Mujib lay dead at the bottom of the Bangabhaban stairwell in his customary Bengali lungi and white kurta. In truth, Mujib had never met a paan exporter, at least not on that May day. The Bangabandhu had met RN Kao in disguise. “These are my own children and they will not harm me,” Mujib had told a concerned Kao that day, according to the first declassified tranche of Kao’s autobiographical recordings. Mujib paid for ignoring the RAW chief’s warning with his life and the lives of his wife, sons, brother and hundreds of officials. His private secretary and some servants lived to tell the tale. 

On the morning of August 15 1975, Mujib awoke to the opening scenes of a full-fledged military assault on his house and other government buildings by the Bangladesh army, complete with 105mm howitzers and Soviet-made tanks of the Bengal Lancers, commanded by Major Farooq Rahman. Before he met his end, Mujib had likely known his eldest son and intended heir Sheikh Kamal had died. Mercifully, Mujib was already dead from point-blank automatic weapons fire to the front of his body when his youngest, the 10 year old Sheikh Russel, was led to a room on the second floor and shot. His wife and three sons died with him that day. Some accounts say that Lieutenant Sheikh Jamal, Mujib’s second son, abandoned a game of snooker at the house next door to save Rosy, his wife of one month who was also present at the Bangabhaban with most of the Mujib clan. He couldn’t. The 21 year old second lieutenant had just returned from Sandhurst when he died, and Rosy was all of 19 when a Bangladesh Army hawaldar shot her in the face. Mujib’s two daughters, Sheikh Haseena Wajed and Sheikh Rehana survived the coup abroad. Arriving on the scene and being informed the job is done, Major Farooq promoted one of the men who shot Mujib, Bazlul Huda, to major on the spot. Haseena’s survival would cost the coup plotters dearly. The prodigal daughter had her retribution in 2010, hanging Major Farooq and others for their part in the massacre of her family. 

But for the intervening period, Farooq, Huda, and other killers involved in the August coup were granted immunity by the man chosen to replace Mujib, his commerce minister Khondekar Mustaq Ahmad. An ugly game of musical chairs ensued in Dhaka over the next few months. Mustaq was removed on November 3 by an officer named Khaled Mosharraf, and Mosharraf was removed and killed on November 7 after declaring himself Major General and serving as Chief of Staff of the Bangladesh military for all of two days. And the man who orchestrated Mosharraf’s removal, a retired lieutenant colonel commanding a socialist militia called Abu Taher, was jailed on November 24. 

The man who finally took over Bangladesh and executed Colonel Taher, a decorated veteran turned socialist agitator who had lost a leg in the 1971 war,  was Ziaur Rahman. Rahman had been the post-coup Chief of Staff for Khondekar Mustaq Ahmed and was jailed in the immediate aftermath of the first coup. After orchestrating the third coup (November 7) Taher saw fit to free Zia, his commanding officer in ‘71, and also to make him the army chief. Zia returned the favour by executing Taher as a traitor. The first General Zia to become dictator on the Indian continent, Ziaur Rehman was the invisible thread that ran through the entire sordid affair of coups and counter-coups in Bangladesh, continually benefitting from the turmoil without implicating himself in any direct action until that last opportunity to sweep the board and take complete control. After he took over at last, Zia’s first act was to ratify the Mustaq-era “Indemnity Ordnance” that had granted immunity to Farooq, Huda, Aziz Pasha, Noor Chowdhury and other plotters and killers. Pasha, Huda and Noor had been the men on the spot who had variously shot or ordered the shooting of Mujib and his family, including the 10 year old Russel as he had begged to be spared and to see his mother. The child had wrapped his small body around Mujib’s secretary Mohitul Islam’s leg before being reassured of his safety and being led to a room to be killed alone. Zia either despatched or confirmed the killers to diplomatic posts abroad where they could evade the consequences of their actions. 

According to Farooq’s confession in court, Ziaur Rehman had encouraged him to “do something” about Mujib, who had alienated elements of the military with his heavy-handed leadership and protection of corrupt Awami League politicians. 

Anger within the military and government apathy toward famine conditions and poverty in the country are the reasons most commonly cited for the massacre of August 15. According to at least one journalist, the coup went ahead with the foreknowledge of US embassy officials. Lawrence Lifschultz has repeatedly claimed in his book and articles that the coup plotters had been in contact with the US embassy in the months preceding the fateful day, including with the CIA station chief embedded with the embassy, even after the ambassador, Eugene Boster had ordered his staff to cease engagement with anti-Mujib Bangladesh army officers, having sensed that matters may soon come to a head and wanting the US to not be implicated in any decisive action to follow. The US Congress had only recently been the scene of the explosive Church and Pike Committee hearings, which had brought into the open the CIA’s involvement in similar assassinations and attempts across the world. Lifschultz later revealed Ambassador Boster himself to have been his source for information about the embassy meetings, having chosen to wait until Boster’s death to do so per the latter’s wish. Boster’s son has denied any relationship between Lifschultz and Boster beyond a couple of brief meetings decades apart. During a later hearing in the US Congress, the State Department (America’s foreign ministry) accepted the meetings took place. “The Embassy meetings in the November 1974–January 1975 period with opponents of the Rahman regime… the State Department… does not deny that the meetings took place,” read the State Department reply to a written Congressional inquiry. And Mustaq himself revealed in a 1976 interview with Lifschultz that prior knowledge of the coup had gone right up the flagpole to Secretary of State (foreign minister) Kissinger and President Nixon, who had been deeply humiliated by the Indian action in 1971 and the liberation of East Pakistan. 

To return to Ziaur Rehman, per Lifschultz’s account he had likely known of the officers’ plot against Mujib since its inception, and according to Farooq’s 1996 confession he had come up with the idea. Now, his son Tarique Rehman is in power in coalition with Islamic fundamentalists. It is not hard to imagine that “Khamba Tarique,” as the younger Rahman is known in Bangladesh for his alleged involvement in an electricity pole scam, would enjoy support within the Bangladesh military as the president of the Bangladesh National Party, which his father founded. As such, Rahman the arch-establishment figure, the military dictator’s son mired in corruption scandals, appears an unlikely choice for prime minister after what was supposed to have been a popular uprising against a repressive and corrupt autocratic regime. One could be forgiven for not understanding why Bangladesh seems to have chosen more of the same for itself. What people in the subcontinent cannot afford to do is to uncritically accept the media-friendly story of a hopeful youth uprising coming out of Bangladesh, particularly if they know some of what has gone on in that country over the decades. Dhaka, after all, is not as distant from Delhi, Kathmandu or Colombo as we may like to believe.