HOW the country’s and the region’s history is intertwined with my family’s personal history was underlined this week when Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s leader Tarique Rahman returned home to Dhaka after 17 years in self-imposed exile in the UK and is now likely to be the country’s next prime minister after the general elections, with the recently deposed Awami League, his arch-enemy, in disarray.
Tarique Rahman’s mother, Khaleda and father Maj-General Ziaur Rahman, both led their country. He was killed by rebellious troops at the Circuit House when he went to Chittagong to placate the local army commander in 1981.
It was just over a decade earlier that my sister arrived in Chittagong after marrying a handsome army captain, an ammunition technical expert, who was serving in the Port’s Embarkation Headquarters in August/September 1970. The handful of army and navy officers and their families who were posted at the Embarkation HQ had flats in the HQ compound.
The young couple met one of his seniors, (then) Major Ziaur Rahman and his spouse at the Chittagong Club. He was serving in Chittagong in the East Bengal Regiment.
So much water has flown under the bridge since 1971 that much of the animus of that period has evaporated.
The situation started to hot up after the general elections in December that year and soon the political stalemate that was rooted in the denial of power to the Shaikh Mujibur Rahman-led Awami League, the election winners, culminated in protest demonstrations that exploded into a full-fledged insurgency.
Major Ziaur Rahman invited some of his fellow officers to the EBR Mess for dinner. This was sometime in March 1971 and coincided with the docking of PNSC’s MV Swat, carrying ammunition and supplies for the troops battling the insurgency that the locals saw as a war of independence.
My brother-in-law declined as he had to make sure the ship was offloaded safely. The few who did go to attend the dinner were never heard of again, as this was when Ziaur Rahman declared switching sides and threw in his lot with the forces battling Pakistani troops.
According to an official citation, my brother-in-law led a heroic action to save the ship after an attempt by the rebel troops to set alight the ammunition. Outnumbered one to three, he saved the ship and many lives. But this operation meant he and my sister who was carrying their first child were separated for several days.
After remaining under fire from the heights overlooking the Embarkation HQ by the ‘Mukti Bahini’ and returning fire from various windows by crawling from one to the other to appear more in number, the families were rescued by reinforcements from the Pak Navy Base Tiger Pass. A kind Bengali worker carried a written message concealed in the sole of his shoe explaining that a handful of families and some dozen male civilians with the most basic of weapons were trapped there.
They were rescued and taken to the Chittagong airport, where for the first time in days my sister learned her husband had survived the shootout at the port. Before they were evacuated by sitting on the floor of the Fokker-turned freighter, her husband came briefly to see her off. She transited in Dhaka before taking a special connecting PIA flight to Karachi.
The sight of my heavily pregnant sister emerging from the airport brought such relief, but we were bemused to see her with a 9mm pistol tucked under her arm in a shoulder holster. She used to tell us how her husband taught her to safely handle the gun as rape, torture and mutilation were widely weaponised in that war. She wouldn’t have needed much instruction. She was the only sister among three brothers, but outswam and outrode them with ease.
My father, himself a retired army officer, who was broken-hearted because his erstwhile Kharian-based IX Div, trained for mountain warfare ‘to take Kashmir’, was despatched to then East Pakistan to fight in the waterlogged terrain, had to convince my sister to part with the gun. A few weeks later my brother-in-law had completed his tour of duty and was transferred back to West Pakistan.
As the 1971 war started he was posted as ADC to Lt-Gen Muhammed Sharif at his wartime HQ in Sahiwal Stadium where his exchanges with the then Multan GOC Maj-Gen Ziaul Haq are for another time. What his colleagues described as a brilliant career was cut short by a heart attack in 1979, the night Z.A. Bhutto was executed in Pindi.
He and my sister witnessed the murder of Bangladesh founder Shaikh Mujibur Rahman by junior coup plotters in 1975 from Quetta. They watched from a distance the rise to power and the murder of Ziaur Rahman, ironically in the city of Chittagong, where he’d ordered the execution of some of his colleagues from the Western wing.
My sister, who insisted on marrying the love of her life at 20, was widowed at 36. She had two young boys and dedicated her life to raising them. She was a force of nature who met adversity head-on and lived life and battled challenges with a zeal and a zest very rarely seen, and with pride. When her husband’s PMA course-mate and old friend, who took over the country as chief executive, graciously inquired if he could do something for her during a course reunion: “Thank you for asking, Bhai. My sons look after me very well. I have everything.” She lived frugally and was adored by all whether they called her Baji, Mamma or Phuppo.
Her laughter defined her as much as the tragedy that struck her so early in life. Her sons have grown up to be fine human beings and sound professionals with wonderful families. She left us this week, after witnessing history at close quarters.
The year 1971 was another country. So much water has flown under the bridge since 1971 and over the past half-century that much of the animus of that period has evaporated. And if Tarique Rahman does indeed become the leader of his country, as things stand, he will extend a hand of friendship which will be and should be clasped. And clasped firmly.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2025
