by GHANI JAFAR
It was politically expedient for Liaquat Ali Khan to force both Islam and Urdu down the throats of his adoptive homeland of Pakistan as only that could provide him with the basis for legitimising his rule as the prime minister
Enter Nurul Amin. This unscrupulous character, born on July 15, 1893 in the village of Shahbazpur in what was then Brahmanbaria District in the Bengal Presidency of the British colony of India, followed an upward path in his political career much like that of our unsung hero, Joginder Nath Mandal — all the way up from a member of the Mymensingh Local Board in 1929 to entering the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1946.
That was the norm in the olden days. Of course, large landowners with enough captive votes of their serfs to make it directly to the local, district, state or central legislatures of India were spared the ordeal of canvassing, as is the case in Pakistan after six decades and more of nominal independence from the British colonial hold.
Anyway, all similarities between Mandal and Amin begin and end with the pattern of their political rise. Mandal was a noble soul (may the great being rest in peace) who dedicated his entire life to the amelioration of the most downtrodden classes — Muslims and Harijans, the maleechh (outer barbarians, out of the caste system) and the achhoot (untouchables), in the prevailing Brahmanic socio-political code in India — of not just his native state of Bengal but of the entire British India.
His democratic struggle was as much against the British colonial power as the mostly upper-class Hindu landlords. This latter lot had large estates in the impoverished riverine Bengal, where these Muslim and Harijan cultivators toiled to enrich the absentee Brahmin Thakurs who preferred to live in the luxury of Calcutta.
Getting back to this despicable fellow Amin, who was a wily, scheming and ruthless butcher. Sure enough, even as Mandal quit the government of Prime Minister Liaquat as a dejected man in October 1950, this characterless rogue rose to the exalted position of Pakistan’s vice president on December 22, 1971. He had duly ‘earned’ this unmatched honour in Pakistan’s history by occupying the country’s second highest position (under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s presidency), though for a brief four months — an office especially crafted in the existing constitutional order to reward him for the ‘services’ rendered to the state over the preceding quarter century.
In a word, he had seen to it that the eastern wing of the ‘Islamic Republic’, as Pakistan came to be designated by the 1956 Constitution, courtesy of Liaquat, was rid of all ‘polluted’ non-Muslim elements through the final solution of death coupled with escape from death to India.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)