How Moudud Ahmed Changed Bangladesh’s Politics Forever
A former prime minister, who crossed floors thrice, was one of the country’s most consequential politicians.
Moudud Ahmed was an all-encompassing figure in Bangladesh’s politics. A UK-trained lawyer, he was a calm orator who handled the press and diplomats very well, a shrewd politician, and a rare scholarly mind in Bangladesh’s messy world of politics. He died on March 16, 2021, at the age of 81.
He witnessed Bangladesh’s ups and downs like no other.
Always politically relevant, Moudud was close to Bangladesh’s founding father and Awami League (AL) leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, widely known as Sheikh Mujib, and part of his legal team that successfully fought against the monumental Agartala Conspiracy Case in ‘69.
The fall and rise of Moudud Ahmed
In 1971, Moudud was part of the wartime interim government, which appointed him as the country’s first postmaster general. But when Bangladesh came into being, his relationship with Sheikh Mujib soured as he started providing legal assistance to leftwing dissenters opposed to Mujib’s rule. He soon ended up in jail on espionage and corruption charges but was released shortly thereafter, thanks to the lobbying of his father-in-law and noted poet Jashimuddin.
When Lt. General Ziaur Rahman came to power and decided to form what now is Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Moudud eagerly signed up. He also became the deputy prime minister (only to be fired subsequently) — the same role he would serve under Lt. General Hussein Mohammad Ershad (Zia’s successor) as well. Ershad would later promote him as the prime minister and vice president.
In the early ‘90s, when AL and BNP were waging a unified democratic movement against Ershad’s military regime, Moudud aggressively pushed back against his former parties. On the last day of Ershad’s rule, he was on the radio dismissing and playing down protests and reassuring supporters. He had to go to the radio station again on that fateful night — to announce Ershad’s resignation.
Reunion with BNP begets unholy ideas
Following Ershad’s fall, Moudud Ahmed landed in jail, like many of his comrades.
It took three years for him to realize that languishing in jail was pointless.
So he returned to BNP, the party he helped found, in 1996 and remained loyal to it until his demise, despite numerous suggestions to the contrary.
In 2001, he became the law minister of the BNP government.
It was during that period that he undertook certain actions and manoeuvres that would be profoundly consequential to contemporary Bangladesh and change its political course forever.
He was viewed as an architect of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), especially the legal immunity it enjoys to date.
Unlike today’s government machinery, he acknowledged the extrajudicial nature of the deaths caused by RAB. “Although technically you may call it extrajudicial - I will not say killing - but extrajudicial deaths,” he conceded to Philip Reeves of National Public Radio.
He, nonetheless, defended RAB from a populist point of view (that its way of dealing with criminals has public support) rather than a legal perspective. “...they say all those who have been killed so far have been killed or dead on encounter or whatever crossfire, whatever you call it - people are happy,” he said in the same interview.
It was also his idea to alter the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, so as to have a retired justice favoured by BNP become the next chief of the caretaker government, which was to oversee the 2006 election.
Following fierce and violent reactions by the opposition AL, the retired justice relinquished, announcing he did not wish to head the interim government. But BNP would not give up: the president (appointed by the party) took over, violating rules of succession. The opposition protests resumed as a result, leading the army to intervene.
Despite his long association with the military, Moudud Ahmed was not spared when the military-dominated caretaker government put numerous politicians and businessmen behind bars. This bitter episode led him to write two books on that regime, both highly critical.
The Awami League won the next election and soon repealed the provision of the caretaker government citing scopes to manipulate the system. While AL’s motivation was no better than BNP’s, which was to cling on to power at any cost, Moudud’s actions had lent credence to its argument that the caretaker system was exploitable.
That was the story of how he triggered a chain of events that destroyed Bangladesh’s imperfect but fairly effective electoral government system, ending up costing his own party pretty badly.
And, RAB, the brutal force he helped create and protect from legal accountability, affected activists of his own party, perhaps more than anyone else.
Post-power period
As a politician, he was seen as an opportunist who switched parties and crossed floors too many times. Whenever there were rumours of a split within BNP, his name would surface, almost unmistakably.
He was not trusted blindly by his BNP colleagues, who blamed him for many blunders of the party. One example was when Moudud convinced Khaleda Zia to mount a legal challenge, which eventually would fail, to override the government’s order to vacate her cantonment house.
Some BNP insiders argued that when the legal case ultimately failed, as was expected, BNP could not be seen driving a political challenge against the order of the Supreme Court.
But by losing his own house several years later, Moudud proved that he had given Khaleda Zia his best advice.
Legal avenues were the only kind of recourses he was familiar with. He went all the way up to the Supreme Court when he was asked to vacate his Gulshan house, where he had lived for the past 36 years.
He finally lost, just like he did with Khaleda Zia’s case.
On the day of his eviction, he refused to let go of the house ‘without a fight’.
Wearing the traditional black-white advocates’ gown, he argued not before a judge but officials who were merely carrying out the eviction order. For a moment, it felt as if he finally recognized that political protests, not courts, are the ultimate recourse in a country like Bangladesh.
“I had been living in this house for 36 years,” he told reporters that day. “I am undone now. I have no choice but to live on footpaths like street people.”
For sure, he was sad.
But he was also greatly depreciating his finances.
He was among the highest-paid lawyers of his time. He liked money even if it risked putting him in ethically conflicting situations.
According to one of his loyal clients who took his service on a number of occasions at a discount, Moudud would charge USD 6,000 for per a quarter of an hour of legal advice — that too, in 2010 when his party was no longer in power, thus he did not have much clout in courts.
Like a posh elite, Moudud loathed traditional muscle power politics in Bangladesh: in his constituency, Companyganj of Noakhali, he never maintained close contacts with local BNP leaders.
A Western diplomat who met him a few times described him as “a pompous jerk”, who “lived 81 years of privilege and died in a fancy hospital in Singapore.”
He taught in Georgetown and was a fellow at Harvard. John Pilger, the famed Australian journalist who knew him since 1971, was among his friends.
Moudud also wrote some of the most credible political history books on Bangladesh. He was careful to not let his politics influence his academic works, where he often severely criticized his own party, Khaleda Zia and even Ziaur Rahman.
That made him unique among his peers and earned him admiration from his rivals.
“My spoken words will no longer survive when I die,” he told one of my acquittances who inquired him of the duplicity between his political and academic personae. “But my written words will survive,” he said.
Surely, more than anything else, Moudud Ahmed wanted to be judged by his books. But history will probably never fail to adjudge him as who he really was: a tactful strategist, a brilliant lawyer, a respected scholar, but a cunning, manipulative politician.