Fifteen years of peace and tranquillity followed, first under General Ziaur Rahman, then under General Hossain Mohammed Ershad.
Tragically, there are no words for 'demagogue' or 'totalitarianism' in the Bengali language: the former is translated as 'people's leader', the latter as 'all-devouring', according to Google translate. The vocabulary of the minuscule English-speaking elite who are aware of the history of dysfunctional politics includes these words, but they cannot communicate with the people. We have no inner defences against these perversions.
Sheikh Mujib will long be remembered as the Jim Jones of Bangladesh (rather than its Moses).
Jim Jones was a pastor of Peoples Temple in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He set out to create a socialist utopia (just like Sheikh Mujib) in the jungles of Guyana, where brotherhood and tolerance were to replace the materialism and racism of the United States. Unlike the analphabet peasants that rallied to Mujib's call, Jones's followers were literate Americans. Like Mujib, he became an egomaniacal tyrant and ultimately an Angel of Death. It is one thing to kill your neighbour (like Mujib), but a different thing to kill your own children on command. The command was given by Jim Jones to his 900-plus followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Most of them obeyed willingly.
And if people can follow Jim Jones, they can follow anyone.
In retelling the story of the emergence of Bangladesh, one is reminded of Old Major's prophetic song in George Orwell's Animal Farm, Beasts of England.
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
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