The day Bangladesh chose the nationalist right over the revolutionary left
Bangladesh's political history has an inconvenient date. It is November 7, 1975. The country's nationalist right marks it as a revolution but for much of the Awami-left intellectual establishment, it represents a military takeover. Both interpretations contain elements of truth. Neither captures the scale of what happened.
November 7, in all good senses, was the beginning of Bangladesh's centre-right political project. It was also the moment when the revolutionary left came closest to power, only to discover that the general it had helped liberate had no intention of surrendering the country to its ideological experiment.
That general was Ziaur Rahman.
Yes, November 7 was also another episode in Bangladesh's catalogue of coups and military intrigues. But the events of that morning did more than rearrange the occupants of the cantonment. They changed the ideological direction of the republic. Just consider what Bangladesh might have become.
In 1975, revolutionary socialism was a governing ambition, frequently accompanied by guns. Ethiopia had its Marxist military junta. Cambodia had fallen to the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam had been reunified under communist rule. Across the developing world, armed revolutionaries promised to replace corrupt political orders with disciplined, egalitarian societies.
The results varied. Cambodia's was catastrophic. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which seized Phnom Penh in April 1975, began transforming the country into an agrarian revolutionary state. Cities were emptied, private life was subordinated to ideological discipline, and nearly two million people would die through execution, starvation, disease and forced labour.
Bangladesh had its own revolutionary dreamers.
The Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, or JSD, had emerged in 1972 from a rupture within the political forces that had fought for independence. Its revolutionary wing rejected the post-liberation political settlement and sought a more radical transformation of society.
Colonel Abu Taher, a decorated liberation-war veteran who had lost a leg fighting Pakistan, stood at the heart of its military ambitions. He was neither an ordinary communist intellectual nor a conventional military conspirator. He believed the existing state machinery had to be dismantled and that revolutionary soldiers, working with radical political forces, could establish a fundamentally different order.
Taher’s vehicle was the Biplobi Sainik Sangstha, a clandestine organisation within the armed forces that mobilised discontent among ordinary soldiers. His opportunity arrived in November 1975.
The country was disintegrating politically. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been assassinated on August 15. On November 3, four senior Awami League leaders were murdered in Dhaka Central Jail. That same day, Major General Khaled Musharraf launched a military coup, forcing army chief Ziaur Rahman from command and placing him under house arrest.
Four days later, the soldiers revolted. Taher's networks played an important role in the uprising that freed Zia. But the alliance between the revolutionary colonel and the nationalist general was unlikely to survive. They wanted different countries.
Taher imagined a radical restructuring of political and military power. Zia would eventually construct a nationalist, market-oriented state, with religion restored to greater prominence in public life and private enterprise given room to grow. One wanted a revolution that would remake the state. The other wanted a state strong enough to contain revolution. That difference would define Bangladesh for decades.
The colonel and the general
Taher's revolutionary programme was not a Cambodian blueprint. There is no credible evidence that he intended to reproduce Pol Pot's genocidal system, abolish urban society or empty Bangladesh's cities. The historical argument against his project is stronger without inventing such intentions.
He wanted to replace the established military hierarchy with a revolutionary people's army. His movement demanded an end to the privileges separating officers from ordinary soldiers, changes to recruitment and the destruction of what it regarded as bourgeois domination of the state.
Historian Willem van Schendel, in A History of Bangladesh, identifies three competing visions in 1975: an increasingly authoritarian state-led model, a revolutionary socialist alternative, and a programme of economic liberalisation supported by the private sector. November's struggle was a contest over the country's future, not simply its leadership.
The danger was not that Taher had prepared a Bangladeshi version of Cambodia's killing fields. It was that his preferred instrument of transformation was an ideologically mobilised military, operating outside constitutional authority, in a country whose institutions were collapsing.
Revolutions conducted by armed committees have a poor record of tolerating disagreement. Once the soldier becomes the political arbiter, the civilian tends to become an inconvenience.
The comparison with Cambodia matters as a warning. Pol Pot demonstrated how revolutionary certainty, freed from institutional restraint, could turn a programme of national salvation into an apparatus of destruction. Taher's ideology was different, but Bangladesh had reason to fear another experiment in which the gun would decide the meaning of political progress.
Zia acted upon a proposition…an army could not remain an army if competing ideological factions were allowed to determine its chain of command. Taher had helped organise the uprising that released Zia. Yet Zia rejected the revolutionary soldiers' principal demands. Taher was arrested within weeks, tried before a military tribunal and executed on July 21, 1976.
The trial was controversial. Its legitimacy has been challenged, and Taher's execution remains one of the darkest episodes of Zia's ascent. The November uprising was not a bloodless national celebration as well. Khaled Musharraf and fellow liberation-war officers were killed. Soldiers attacked officers amid a breakdown of discipline. The subsequent restoration of military authority involved repression and further executions following later mutinies.
These facts cannot be airbrushed away. But neither should they obscure the ideological outcome. Taher lost. The JSD's revolutionary strategy was broken. Zia survived, consolidated authority and began building a political system that would compete with the Awami League's founding conception of the state.
This was the end of the revolutionary left's most plausible opportunity to capture Bangladesh's central institutions. It was not the end of left-wing politics, nor did every socialist ambition disappear. The thing that collapsed was the prospect of a JSD-led transformation of the republic through a soldiers' uprising. The consequences were substantial.
The birth of Bangladeshi nationalism
Zia's first achievement was political rather than economic. He recognised that the nationalism of 1971, built around Bengali language and culture, could be recast around the territorial identity of Bangladesh. Bangladeshi nationalism became the organising idea of his political project.
It distinguished the country from the wider Bengali cultural world, particularly West Bengal, while offering a common national identity to citizens of different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. It also made greater room for the Muslim identity of the majority population.
This was a deliberate ideological departure from the Awami League's secular Bengali nationalism. Its critics regarded the change as an erosion of the principles of independence. Its supporters saw a more territorially grounded, culturally conservative national identity.
Zia's constitutional changes gave religion a more prominent place in state language. He removed secularism as an operative founding principle and permitted religion-based political activity, including the eventual return of Jamaat-e-Islami.
That decision complicates any celebration of his legacy, given Jamaat's opposition to Bangladesh's independence in 1971. It also demonstrates that Zia's centre-right settlement was a political bargain rather than an immaculate philosophical construction.
Yet his nationalism was not confined to religion. It combined sovereignty, territorial identity, political conservatism, economic pragmatism and an insistence on reducing dependence on any single foreign power. Zia also widened Bangladesh's diplomatic relationships, strengthening engagement with China, the United States, Muslim-majority countries and international institutions.
He understood the geopolitical predicament of a small country surrounded on three sides by India. Sovereignty required more than a flag and a national anthem. It required diplomatic alternatives and an economy capable of sustaining political independence.
His domestic programme followed the same logic. Where the post-independence state had relied heavily on nationalisation, Zia promoted private investment, restored some nationalised enterprises to private ownership and encouraged export-oriented industry.
He placed agricultural production at the centre of economic policy. Irrigation, canal excavation, rural infrastructure, food production and population planning became priorities. His 19-point programme offered a vocabulary of self-reliance, decentralisation and rural development. Village government initiatives and mass literacy campaigns were intended to connect national policy with ordinary households.
The programme had weaknesses. State direction remained important, and many ambitions exceeded administrative capacity. But the economic direction had changed. Bangladesh would no longer pursue development primarily through state ownership and socialist planning. Private enterprise would become an increasingly important engine of growth.
This was the economic foundation of Zia's centre-right dream.
From the barracks to the ballot
Zia understood that a military ruler could command obedience but could not manufacture lasting consent through barracks alone. In September 1978, he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. It brought together conservatives, nationalists, former leftists, religious political figures and assorted opponents of Awami League dominance.
The coalition was ideologically untidy. That was partly its strength. A party built to govern a complicated country could not afford the doctrinal purity of a revolutionary study circle. The BNP became the institutional expression of the new settlement. Its appeal gradually extended into rural communities, trading networks, professional groups and sections of the working population.
Zia won the 1978 presidential election. Parliamentary elections followed in 1979, when the BNP secured 207 of 300 seats. Martial law was subsequently lifted.
Cambridge's institutional history of Bangladesh identifies this period as the transition from one-party rule and military government to a multiparty system, accompanied by a fundamental shift towards private-sector-led development. Zia's most durable political achievement was the creation of an alternative governing tradition.
There is an irony at the heart of Ziaur Rahman's career. A soldier who owed his rise to an uprising eventually built a political party that survived his assassination. He was killed in Chittagong on May 30, 1981, during another military rebellion. His career as the country's dominant political figure had lasted less than six years.
Yet the BNP endured.
That differentiates Zia's political experiment from many military-sponsored parties whose fortunes disappear with their founders. The BNP survived subsequent military rule, returned to government under Khaleda Zia and became one of the two principal forces in Bangladesh's competitive electoral politics.
Its survival does not vindicate every decision Zia made. It does establish that the political identity he constructed answered a demand extending beyond the officer corps.
That demand was for a Bangladesh comfortable with its Muslim-majority social character, protective of national sovereignty, receptive to private enterprise and sceptical of revolutionary schemes for remaking society. There is nothing inherently contradictory about combining those positions with democratic pluralism.
The difficulty, as Bangladesh's subsequent history demonstrated, lies in ensuring that nationalism does not become an excuse for excluding political opponents.The centre-right tradition Zia founded has struggled with that distinction in recent times.
But the centre-right tradition born from Zia's political settlement has an opportunity to define itself under the new leadership of BNP. Its contemporary test is whether the state can create productive employment, improve education, protect investment, strengthen institutions and offer a generation of young Bangladeshis a credible route towards economic independence.
For all its violence and contradictions, November 7 settled one question. Bangladesh would not be governed by the revolutionary soldiers who had imagined that a new social order could be constructed through the destruction of the old military hierarchy.
Instead, Ziaur Rahman began assembling a different political bargain: nationalism rather than internationalist class revolution, private initiative rather than comprehensive state ownership, and a broad conservative electoral coalition rather than a revolutionary vanguard.
The settlement was imperfect and the road towards representative government was neither straight nor bloodless. The revolutionaries opened the prison door. Zia walked through it and built a different country. That is November 7's historical irony. It is also its enduring significance.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa