Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman

Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman is the East Wing leader whose break with Pakistan’s West Wing becomes the political hinge between the country’s promised election and military repression. The narrative first places him among the leaders whose futures flicker through a compressed calendar, then identifies the collapse of talks with Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as the immediate background to his declaration of Bangladesh. During the March 25, 1971 operation in Dacca, troops find and arrest him; he is taken to the airport and flown into West Wing captivity. His arrest is also the moment when Saleem Sinai’s narrator acknowledges his own involuntary role in the military action.

Political Setting

The novel introduces Mujib amid the rapid succession of events that Saleem Sinai presents as a montage: street unrest, the fall of Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan’s assumption of the presidency, and the approach of elections. The sequence does not linger on the public contest between Bhutto and Mujib; instead, the calendar settles in late 1970, before the election that will split the country. The narrative thus places Mujib at the point where Pakistan’s political future is still contested, while foreshadowing the division that will turn political rivalry into war between the West and East Wings.

The CUTIA recruits initially misunderstand their assignment. Ayooba Baloch imagines that they will be sent against India, and predicts war in the wake of the election, repeating Bhutto’s promise of land to peasants as a pretext for territorial conquest. Their confident talk treats politics as a coming military adventure. The actual target, however, is not India: the unit is sent to Dacca as the conflict between Pakistan’s political leaders reaches its breaking point. This contrast exposes how the soldiers’ expectations have been shaped by nationalist bravado rather than by an understanding of the crisis unfolding inside the country.

Breakdown and Declaration

On March 25, Yahya Khan and Bhutto break off their talks with Mujib and return to the West Wing. The narrator also records that Mujib proclaimed Bangladesh after the talks broke down. These events place the declaration within a failed political negotiation, rather than presenting it as an isolated act: the West Wing’s leadership withdraws from talks, and the East Wing’s leader declares an independent state.

The military operation begins that night. Brigadier Iskandar arrives at the CUTIA barracks with uniforms and dog-collars, and the recruits, who had been travelling as civilian airline passengers, are ordered into uniform and armed. Iskandar tells them that Mujib is the target and that the operation will make him yield. At midnight, sixty thousand troops leave their barracks, while tanks set out. The scale of the mobilization turns the breakdown between leaders into a coordinated military assault; patriotic songs by Jamila Singer play over the base loudspeakers as the units depart.

Arrest in Dacca

Saleem’s account gives him a particular part in Mujib’s capture. The soldiers provide him with one of Mujib’s old shirts, and Saleem says that he tracks the leader by its smell. He tells Padma that he found Mujib; her distressed response makes the disclosure a crisis within the act of narration. Saleem insists that he has sworn to conceal nothing, presenting the confession as one more part of the painful history he has promised to tell.

At midnight on March 25, Saleem leads troops past the University, which is being shelled, toward Mujib’s hiding place. Students and lecturers emerge from the hostels into gunfire. Mujib is not shot: he is arrested and led away, with Ayooba Baloch taking him to a waiting van. From there the soldiers drive through Dacca. Saleem’s attention is drawn to the wider violence around the arrest: military forces enter women’s hostels and drag women into the streets; newspaper offices burn, trade-union offices are destroyed, and bodies lie in roadside ditches. The assault is therefore not confined to the seizure of one political leader. It spreads through the city’s institutions and civilian population as troops use lethal force in the name of holding Pakistan together.

The convoy takes Mujib to the airport. Ayooba forces him aboard a plane, which carries him into captivity in the West Wing. The novel thereby marks a sharp difference between the two leaders’ fates in this scene: Mujib survives the immediate operation but is removed from Dacca, while the city around him is subjected to extensive military violence. His transfer to the West Wing makes the arrest both a personal capture and a political act of containment.

Narration and Significance

The arrest is narrated by Saleem as a compromised participant. He has been rendered a detached “buddha” by amnesia, unable to recall his family or the significance of midnight, and he follows orders without understanding how he has been brought into the operation. Saleem later acknowledges that this amnesia offers an excuse, not an absolution: his apparent withdrawal from responsibility does not prevent him from taking part in events. The narrative links his ability to track Mujib to a history that he claims connects him, metaphorically, to Pakistan’s political violence.

Mujib’s capture also gives concrete form to the split that Saleem has described in the country and in personal consciousness. India’s landmass separates Pakistan’s East and West Wings; the narrator compares that geographical division with the gulf between past and present, which he treats as a threat to a coherent sense of self. In that interpretation, the attempt to suppress political separation by force reveals rather than repairs the fracture. Mujib’s arrest becomes the scene in which failed negotiations, the declaration of Bangladesh, and the military’s campaign converge, while Saleem’s confession prevents the event from being narrated as distant history alone.