Dhanmondi 32 will rise again

by

 Syed Badrul Ahsan

Out of the ashes Dhanmondi 32 will rise again. Out of the ghostly silence, those vicious agents of the nocturnal put it to,  Dhanmondi 32 will arise anew. For it is and always will be the embodiment of history.

Every time the Ayub Khan regime decided to take Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman into custody in the 1960s, its soldiers turned up at 32 Dhanmondi and took him away. They did nothing that would damage his home.

When Pakistan’s soldiers turned up at Dhanmondi 32 as March 25 gave way to March 26 in 1971, they seized the Father of the Nation and took him away. His family was not touched and neither was his home.

On August 15, 1975, assassins shot their way into Dhanmondi 32, murdered the founder of the Bengali nation and his family and left the residence drenched in a sea of blood. The eerie silence across the residence was all.

It would stay that way for six years, until Sheikh Hasina came home from exile to reclaim the legacy of the Father of the Nation. In time, it would be transformed into a symbol of history, a place of pilgrimage for a nation in grief, wounded through the murder of its founding father.

I have been to 32 Dhanmondi times aplenty. I have recalled and reconnected with the history of our Bengali nationalism on its premises. I have spent days there, back in 1994, contributing my humble bit in informing the world that the greatest man in our country lived and died there, that his presence defined the power of the place even as he slept eternally in Tungipara.

As Sheikh Hasina, at the time leader of the opposition in the Jatiya Sangsad, turned up and engaged in conversation with me, I indulged in what one might today called multi-tasking. I wrote the English captions for all the photographs, images from the history that was Bangabandhu’s life, that would be on display in the museum.

On the landing where the Father of the Nation fell, there where was inscribed the tragic poetry related to his end, it was the English segment of it, as instructed by Sheikh Hasina, that I penned. In the large room on the ground floor, among all those framed photographs was a larger one, that of the truck on which Bangabandhu was accompanied by a grateful nation to the Race Course from Tejgaon airport on January 10, 1972.

I was part of that crowd, I told Sheikh Hasina. I could not be seen because I was hanging on to it at its rear.

It was at Dhanmondi 32 that I spent time on a rainy morning in the later 1980s, in Sheikh Hasina’s company, conversing on politics and my writings on Bangabandhu. In the early 1990s, in Bangabandhu’s library, I briefed Sheikh Hasina on her probable responses to questions the western media would put to her as they sought her views on the issues in the run-up to the general election.

In June 1996, I was part of the cheering crowd welcoming Sheikh Hasina, our new prime minister, to 32 Dhanmondi following her swearing-in at Bangabhaban. The long darkness of 21 years had lifted. We bathed in the light of the stars.

Dhanmondi 32 is a place suffused in history.

The home of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has been a hallowed spot, testimony to the supreme struggle and equally supreme sacrifices which are the legacy of the Father of the Nation and his family.

It was from this home that Bangabandhu directed the non-cooperation movement in March 1971.

It was in the sitting room on the ground floor that he met visitors, among whom were Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Ghaus Bux Bizenjo and so many others. It was also, in those days of creative tumult, the spot where tens of thousands of Bengalis converged day after day, to let the future founding father of the country know that they were behind him in his mission of attaining liberty for the nation.

In the 1960s, it was here that Pakistan’s police turned up with warrants for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s arrest. And those warrants kept coming, one after another. On May 8, 1966, Bangabandhu got into a police van and was taken away to Dhaka Central Jail under the Defence of Pakistan Rules. He was now in detention over his recently announced Six Point Program of regional autonomy for the federating units of the state of Pakistan.

In early 1968, he was transferred to Dhaka cantonment as the leading accused in the Agartala Conspiracy Case initiated by the Ayub Khan regime. On February 22, 1969, free of the case by the force of a mass movement and ready to provide leadership to the nation in the aftermath of the popular triumph against the regime, Mujib returned to 32 Dhanmondi from captivity in the Dhaka cantonment. He would be anointed Bangabandhu by a loving nation the next day.

In the early minutes of March 26, 1971, Dhanmondi 32 came under assault from the Pakistan army. A hail of bullets left holes through the gate. Other bullets went flying up and across, to pierce the doors and windowpanes of the building. At that point Bangabandhu emerged on the balcony and, raising his voice, asked the soldiers to stop firing. “I am here,” he told them.

Minutes later, he was in an army van. The soldiers whisked him off to the cantonment as Dhaka lit up in the murderous glow of tracer fire.  Detained in Adamjee Cantonment College for a few days, Bangabandhu was flown to solitary imprisonment -- with no contact with the outside world, no radio and no newspapers -- in Mianwali in West Pakistan. His family, in detention, was soon moved to Road 18. The army kept Dhanmondi 32 under its control.

Life and all the vibrancy and energy symbolized by it returned to Dhanmondi 32 days after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, freed by a Pakistan defeated in war and now leader of a newly-independent Bangladesh, came home to a free homeland on January 10, 1972. And Dhanmondi 32 would once more be home, the abode to which the Father of the Nation went back every evening after his day’s work had been done at Ganabhaban.

On his final day alive, Bangabandhu welcomed a special representative of South Korean President Park Chung-hee at Ganabhaban. Before going home, he saw to it that arrangements for a farewell for Mohammad Farashuddin, a bright and trusted officer on his staff preparing to go abroad for higher studies, were in place.

He was also briefed by officials about his planned visit to Dhaka University the following morning. As the afternoon began to give way to twilight, Bangabandhu sat on the steps to the lake at Ganabhaban, in the company of Prime Minister M Mansoor Ali. He was serene, relaxed. So was Mansoor Ali.

And then Bangabandhu went home.

In the pre-dawn hours of the next day, at 32 Dhanmondi, he and his family would die. A bunch of assassins, fortified by conspiracy, thus plunged a nation into darkness thick and intense.

And we his people cowered in fear. Not a single minister, till the other day in genuflection before Bangabandhu for favours, went to 32 Dhanmondi to pay respects to their assassinated leader.

And today, in an era of growing intolerance and unbridled hate, ready and willing to put national history to the sword, the merchants of darkness have left Dhanmondi 32 a mere shell of what it used to be. These vandals have walked away with every item of priceless note, every piece of memorabilia, from this monument to history. They have felt no shame.

It is our moment of collective shame. We live in the shadow of our shame.  And yet we know we will reclaim history again, will be witness to the rise of Dhanmondi 32 again.

For 32 Dhanmondi remains, as it will always remain, our claim on the glory that was Bangabandhu’s politics, on the history which Bengalis forged for themselves in the defining era of the 1960s stretching into the 1970s.

We will build Dhanmondi 32 again.