Raise Your Hands and Join Me – Monday 05 April 1971 – Time Magazine
Raise Your Hands and Join Me
Monday 05 April 1971
Time Magazine
MuktiJuddho e-Archive Collection
WHEN West Pakistani soldiers arrested Sheik Mujibur (“Mujib”) Rahman last week, they gave him a chance to add to an unenviable record. Mujib has already spent more time in prison than any other major Pakistani politician: nine years and eight months.
What makes the Sheik so unpopular with West Pakistanis is the fact that for more than 23 years he has been the leading advocate of purbodesh (regional autonomy) for East Pakistan. In last December’s elections, purbodesh was Mujib’s chief issue. After visiting the cyclone-devastated Ganges Delta region just before the general elections, he declared: “If the polls bring us frustration, we will owe it to the million who have died in the cyclone to make the supreme sacrifice of another million lives, if need be, so that we can live as free people.” –
Gray-haired, stocky and tall for a Bengali (6 ft.), the bespectacled Mujib always wears a loose white shirt with a black, sleeveless, vestlike jacket. A moody man, he tends to scold Bengalis like so many children. He was born in the East Bengal village of Tongipara 51 years ago to a middle-class landowner (his landlord status accounts for the title of sheik). Mujib studied liberal arts at Calcutta’s Islamia College and law at Dacca University. He lives with his wife Fazil-itunessa, three sons and two daughters in a modest two-story house in Dacca’s well-to-do Dhanmandi section. Except for a brief stint as an insurance salesman, he has devoted most of his time to politics. First he opposed British rule in India. After the subcontinent’s partition in 1947, he denounced West Pakistan’s dominance of East Pakistan with every bit as much vehemence. “Brothers,” he would say to his Bengali followers, “do you know that the streets of Karachi are lined with gold? Do you want to take back that gold? Then raise your hands and join me.” He was first jailed in 1948, when he demonstrated against Pakistan Founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah for proclaiming Urdu the new nation’s lingua franca.
Yet he has remained, in many respects, a political moderate. He is a social democrat who favors nationalizing major industries, banks and insurance companies. In foreign policy too he follows a middle course. Where West Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto favors closer ties with China and the Soviet Union and is stridently anti-Indian, Mujib would like to trade with India and is regarded as moderately pro-Western.
