Tajuddin Ahmad
Tajuddin Ahmad was a Bangladeshi politician. He led the first government of Bangladesh as its prime minister during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, and is regarded as one of the most instrumental figures in the birth of Bangladesh.
Tajuddin began as a Muslim League youth worker in British India. He belonged to the Dhaka-based pro-democracy, secular Muslim League faction, which broke with the Muslim League's reactionary party line after the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan. As a member of the short-lived youth organisation, the Jubo League, he actively participated in the Language Movement in 1952. In 1953, he joined the Awami Muslim League, a dissident offshoot of the Muslim League. The following year, he was elected a member of the East Pakistan Provincial Assembly. As a close confidant, he assisted Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in revitalising the Awami League into a secular political party during Ayub Khan's regime in the late 1960s.
As the General Secretary of the Awami League from 1966, Tajuddin coordinated the party during the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, suffering imprisonment on several occasions. He formulated the early draft of the historic six-points demand that would eventually lead to the birth of Bangladesh. He coordinated the Awami League's election campaign for the 1970 Pakistani general election, in which the League gained a historic parliamentary majority. He also coordinated the non-cooperation movement of March 1971, precipitated by President Yahya Khan's delay in transferring power to the elected legislators. Tajuddin was among Sheikh Mujib's delegation in the Mujib-Yahya talks to settle the constitutional disputes between East and West Pakistan and transfer power to the elected National Assembly. Following the Pakistani army's crackdown on the Bangladeshi population on 25 March 1971, Tajuddin escaped to India. In the absence of Sheikh Mujib, he initiated the set up of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh in 1971 and headed it, operating in exile in India, as its prime minister.
In independent Bangladesh, Tajuddin served as the Minister of Finance and Planning in Sheikh Mujib's Cabinet from 1972 to 1974. He was also a member of the committee drafting the Constitution of Bangladesh. He resigned from the cabinet in 1974 to live a quiet life. Following Sheikh Mujib's assassination in a coup d'état, Tajuddin was arrested and assassinated on 3 November 1975, along with three senior Awami League leaders in prison.
Early life
Tajuddin Ahmad Khan was born on 23 July 1925 at Dardaria, which is a village in Dhaka District, Bengal Presidency, British India, to Maulavi Muhammad Yasin Khan and Meherunnesa Khanam in a conservative, middle-class Muslim family. He was the eldest of nine siblings—three brothers and six sisters.The Bengal province, the eastern frontier of India, consisted of two conceptual regions: West Bengal had a Hindu majority population and housed the provincial capital, Kolkata, a thriving centre of trade and culture; East Bengal, Tajuddin's home, was an impoverished hinterland of West Bengal, with a mostly poor Muslim peasant population. During Tajuddin's formative years, British rule in India was nearing its end, and Bengal was battered by famines, communal tensions, and other problems. It was a hotbed of anti-British activism. Against this backdrop, his political activism began at a very early age, sometimes interrupting his studies. The anti-British activists of Bengal were his earliest political inspiration.
After attending a few schools in Gazipur, Tajuddin moved to Dhaka, his district headquarters and the principal town in East Bengal, for further studies. In Dhaka, he went to Saint Gregory's High School, where he matriculated in 1944, securing 12th position in undivided Bengal. After matriculation, Tajuddin briefly lost interest in formal education because of his activism, pausing his studies for three years. At his mother's insistence, he resumed his studies and was admitted to Dhaka College. There he attended classes irregularly because of his activism. As a result, he could not take the Intermediate of Arts examination from there; instead, he took it from a private college as an irregular student in 1948 and passed, securing fourth position in East Bengal. He obtained a BA with honours in economics from the University of Dhaka. He also took his law degree from the University of Dhaka.
Tajuddin lost his father at age twenty-two and took over family responsibilities.
Late British India
With British rule in India nearing its end and Hindu-Muslim tensions on the rise, in 1940, the political party, the All-India Muslim League brought about the Pakistan Movement, which demanded a separate state for the Muslims of India. Founded in 1906 in Dhaka, the Muslim League's leadership came mostly from the feudal elites. Headquartered in Kolkata, the Bengal Provincial Muslim League had had little grassroots organisation or activity in Bengal for a long time. Abul Hashim succeeded Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy as the general secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League in 1943. Tajuddin, still a school student in Dhaka, joined the Muslim League in the same year. Hashim envisioned the creation of a 'leftist' faction within the Muslim League against the prevailing leadership. He set out to reform the Muslim League organisation in Bengal. As part of this reform, in 1944, Hashim helped found the Muslim League party office in Dhaka at 150 Moghultuli Lane. The office became a haunt for the party's progressive young dissidents, including Tajuddin, led by Kamruddin Ahmed, a schoolteacher and later a lawyer. As one of the four 'full-time' party workers, Tajuddin helped Kamruddin publish the party newspaper.Traditionally, the Muslim League in Dhaka and East Bengal at large was dominated by the Nawab family of Dhaka; many of its members held high offices in the party. Their residential palace, Ahsan Manzil, served as the de facto party headquarters. A rift developed between the Ahsan Manzil group and the 150 Moghultuli group. Khwaja Nazimuddin and his brother Khwaja Shahabuddin led the Ahsan Manzil group; both held high offices in the provincial government and in the party. Their propaganda, aided by The Azad newspaper, the Muslim League's mouthpiece, labelled Hashim and his followers as communists in disguise. Both groups contested elections in district party committees. In the 1944 Dhaka district committee elections, Tajuddin helped Kamruddin and the Moghultli group win a surprising victory against Shahabuddin's intrigues.
The Pakistan Movement intensified after the Second World War and the Hindu-Muslim communal riots in Bengal in 1946. In August 1947, India was partitioned, and Pakistan was born as a result, causing mass migration and violence. Pakistan consisted of two geographically non-contiguous wings, thousands of miles apart. The far larger West Wing, adjacent to the western border of India, comprised four provinces, and only East Bengal constituted the much smaller eastern wing, adjacent to the eastern edge of India. Abul Hashim and Shaheed Suhrawardy opposed the partition of Bengal and did not migrate to Pakistan immediately. Even though it was leading the Pakistan cause, the Muslim League's inadequacy to lead Pakistan as a nation was apparent to factions within it. A faction of the 150 Moghultuli Lane-based Muslim League skeptics, led by Kamruddin Ahmed, formed the Gano Azadi League, a civil rights organisation with a small following, in July 1947, a month before the partition of India. In contrast to the Muslim League, the organisation took progressive views on many issues, like the economy, culture, and education. Apart from Tajuddin, other founding members of the Gano Azadi League included Oli Ahad and Mohammad Toaha.
East Pakistan
Early activism
In the newly independent Pakistan, Tajuddin was a resident student of Fazlul Huq Muslim Hall in Dhaka University. The political atmosphere was grim in East Bengal. From the beginning, tensions developed between East and West Pakistan over various issues. The ruling Muslim League provincial government, led by the chief minister Khwaja Nazimuddin, mostly sided with West Pakistan on various issues. The university became an important centre of political activism; as usual Tajuddin became an enthusiastic participant in them. Many Kolkata-based pro-Hashim workers migrated to Dhaka after the Partition and joined the 150 Moghultuli group. Among them, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had enrolled in Dhaka University and a few others, founded the East Pakistan Muslim Students' League on 4 January 1948. Tajuddin joined the party as a founding member.At the same time, as a frequenter of Dhaka's political circles, Tajuddin was drawn increasingly towards the national political arena. He witnessed the marginalization of his 150 Moghultuli faction of the Muslim League at their leader Hashim and Suhrawardy's absence in the political scene of East Bengal and the Ahsan Manzil group's rise. In 1949, the 150 Moghultuli faction cut ties with the Muslim League and founded the Awami Muslim League with Maulana Bhashani, a Muslim cleric turned politician, as its president. Tajuddin admired Maulana Bhashani but showed little interest in his party initially. He and his disillusioned former Muslim League fellows kept meeting regularly at their haunts, speculating on the characteristics and the future of Pakistan, envisioning new political parties. Members of that group, notably Oli Ahad and Mohammad Toaha, founded the Jubo League, a youth organisation, at a youth convention that took place in March 1951. Tajuddin was elected a member of the Jubo League executive committee at its first annual council later that year.
East and West Pakistan came into a major conflict over the state language question within a month of Pakistan's independence in 1947. West Pakistan leaders, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, advocated for Urdu as the only state language of multilingual Pakistan. In response to protests from various intellectual and political bodies of Bengali-speaking East Bengal, the state language decision was postponed for a while. However, as authorities continued efforts to push Urdu in various guises, the simmering dispute resurged in 1951. The ruling Muslim League provincial government, led by Nurul Amin, who succeeded Nazimuddin as the chief minister in 1948, again sided with West Pakistan. Tajuddin, as a Jubo League worker and an early participant in the movement, was elected a member of the University State Language Action Committee to advance for Bengali to be a state language, set up in early 1951 by the students of Dhaka University. The movement got its spark on 27 January 1952, as Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimudduin of Pakistan declared that, “the state language of Pakistan shall be Urdu and no other language.” On 21 February 1952, police opened fire on protest processions at various places, killing several protesters. Police raided the Jubo League's office on 21 and 22 February; Tajuddin, who was residing in the office at that time, barely avoided arrest. As a result of the movement, the government conceded and granted Bengali to be a state language alongside Urdu.
Despite its critical role in the Language Movement, the Jubo League was unsuccessful as a mainstream political organisation. Its members made their way into other established political parties. Many of them joined the Awami Muslim League, which, after the Language Movement of 1952, emerged as East Pakistan's most promising political party.