The morning Zia walked free

Before dawn on November 3, 1975, inside Dhaka Central Jail, four founding leaders of the Awami League, Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmad, Captain Mansur Ali and AHM Qamaruzzaman, were killed in their cell by officers from the plot that had murdered Sheikh Mujib less than twelve weeks earlier. 

By the evening of November 7, the officer who had ousted those plotters, Khaled Mosharraf, was dead, a retired colonel's followers held the capital, and Major General Ziaur Rahman, four days under house arrest, was again chief of army staff.

Between those dates lay a question nobody had answered since August: whose army was it? Three freedom fighters answered it in three ways. By the following July, only one of them was alive.

Four days, three answers

After August 15, the chain of command survived on paper. The majors behind the killings sat inside Khondakar Mostaq Ahmad's government and took orders from no one they had not chosen. Zia became army chief on August 24, Khaled chief of general staff, and Khaled pressed his superior to bring the majors to heel. Zia did not. 

Whether he could not or would not is still argued: the majors had the tanks and the president's ear, and a cautious man may have preferred that someone else take the risk. Either way, that autumn his caution looked like complicity.

Khaled moved on November 3, with Colonel Khondkar Nazmul Huda, Lieutenant Colonel A.T.M. Haider and Colonel Shafaat Jamil beside him. His answer was the restoration of military hierarchy, and it had the strongest institutional justification of the three, since he acted against the men who had killed Mujib. Its limit was ambiguity. 

He promoted himself to major general, with the air and naval chiefs pinning on the badges, and whether he meant to restore constitutional government or only discipline in the barracks died with him. Leaflets spread among the soldiers accused him of working with India, a charge that needed no proof to travel.

Taher's answer was an army in which the ranks counted. He had lost a leg in 1971 and served in Sector 11. Zia made him a sub-sector commander. Now retired and close to the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, he held secret meetings of enlisted men on each night between November 4 and 6. 

The twelve demands framed mixed barrack grievances, such as pay, quarters and the officers' batmen, with a call for a classless army. He read the barracks accurately. What he could not control was what leaflets and three nights of whispering would do at dawn. 

Khaled, Huda and Haider were killed at 10 Bengal Regiment, a unit of Khaled's own wartime K Force, where they had gone for safety. An eyewitness account in the Daily Sun names two captains of the regiment as giving the order, and Mascarenhas suspected that Taher had influenced one of them. The officer corps drew its own conclusion about who had made it possible.

Zia spent those days in confinement, and not idly. Lifschultz records that before his arrest he telephoned Taher and urged him to act. 

A Daily Star commentary in 2013 called Zia the uprising's key beneficiary, which is fair as far as it goes. But Khaled had taken his post, and the soldiers who were about to free him would arrive with a price. Zia occupied the one position neither Khaled nor Taher could claim: he could appeal to the rank and file without surrendering the confidence of the officer corps.

The price of order

He moved carefully once free. Lifschultz reports that Zia signed a paper endorsing the twelve demands and suggests the signature was tactical. He stayed silent when Taher put them to him. Mascarenhas shows what followed. Zia steered clear of the demands in his broadcasts, and Taher made one more attempt to pin him to a public commitment. 

Instead, Zia bought time with the parts of the list that carried no politics, better pay, quarters and kit and an end to the batman system, while the troublemakers were identified. The heat drained from the cantonments. Within weeks, the leaders were being arrested, Taher on November 24.

On Taher's fate, Moudud Ahmed wrote in his 1995 book Democracy and the Challenge of Development that Zia summoned forty-six senior officers repatriated from Pakistan and that every one of them wanted Taher hanged. Moudud, later a senior BNP leader, read the passage to the High Court in January 2011.

To officers who had seen about forty colleagues killed by their own men in Dhaka and Rangpur, Mascarenhas writes, a living Taher was a risk of a second November 7. 

That pressure is the strongest point Zia's defenders have, and the court did not wave it away. Its verdict, announced in March 2011 and published in full in 2013, cited Moudud's book as showing the tribunal was formed to satisfy the repatriated officers. It also held that Zia had decided on the execution before the tribunal existed, and called it "cold-blooded murder". 

That is a judicial finding, not history's settled verdict. The two accounts can both be true. The officers' pressure explains why Zia could do it, and the court's finding goes to why he did.

The tribunal that sentenced him sat inside Dhaka Central Jail. It ordered his death on July 17, 1976, and four days later, on July 21, Taher was hanged there at thirty-seven. It was the jail where Tajuddin Ahmad and the others had been killed on November 3.

To see what was exchanged for that rope, go back to the morning of November 7. Dhaka had passed into the hands of Taher's men. Soldiers of his organisation were received by the public in the streets, and Lifschultz described the city's mood as "exuberant". At 10 Bengal Regiment, three officers who had fought in 1971 lay dead.

Into that came a general who had been a prisoner a few hours earlier. Lifschultz writes that he embraced Taher and thanked him for saving his life. Justice Sayem, installed as president and chief martial law administrator the day before, stayed in place, with Zia now one of his deputies. 

A man who had waited out four days in a locked house was suddenly the one everybody needed: the soldiers wanted him to keep his promises, and the officers wanted him to keep the army.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer based in Bangladesh.