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President Ayub Khan hatched a nefarious plan of
quelling the growing movement for the 6-point programme. In January 1968,
a false case infamously known as the Agartala Conspiracy Case was filed and 35 Bangalee civil and military officers were accused of treason and conspiracy against the state of Pakistan. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was made the principal accused and the case itself was officially styled, “State versus Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Others.” President Ayub formed a special tribunal to try the accused. The case caused a great turbulence in East Pakistan. The student community started a united movement against the Ayub regime. They defied the section 144 imposed by the police, broke the barricades put by the East Pakistan Rifles and came out to the streets in thousands. They chanted the slogans - “We’ll break the locks of the jail and free Sheikh Mujib”.

Your leader, my leader, Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Mujib’, etc. A mass-upsurge took place; the Pakistani rulers ordered shooting in different places. Law and order situation worsened to such an extent that the rebellious mob took control of all important points in the Dhaka city. During this movement, a lot of people were killed: Asad, a student leader of Dhaka University, Dr. Shamsuzzoha, a teacher of Rajshahi University and Matiur, a school student of Dhaka and Sgt Zahurul Huq, an accused of the Agartala Conspiracy Case were among them. On February 22, Pakistan Government was forced to grant unconditional release to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and withdraw the Agartala Conspiracy Case. Next day, in a large public rally in the then Race Course Maidan of Dhaka, Mujib was was accorded a grand reception and conferred the title ‘Bangabandhu’ (The Friend of Bengal). On March 25, 1969, Ayub Khan was forced to step down from power. The decade of his autocratic rule came to an end.

On the morning of February 15, 1969, Sergeant Zahurul Haq and Flight Sergeant Fazlul Haq, both Bengalis and charged with anti-state activities in the Agartala Conspiracy Case, were shot by their guards in the Dhaka cantonment. The Pakistan authorities

gave out the disinformation that the two men had tried to escape from military confinement, but had been prevented from making good on their plan by the men who guarded them. Sometime after 9 pm on the same day, Zahurul Haq died of his wounds. Fazlul Haq survived, after marathon efforts were expended by his Bengali doctor to save him.


Four days later, the province erupted in unprecedented agitation. At Dhaka University and other campuses around the province, students deserted the classroom in droves and simply marched out on to the streets. The demand that Ayub Khan resign and that his underlings in East Pakistan, personified by the likes of Governor Abdul Monem Khan, quit office began to acquire the shape and form of a popular revolution in the making. By the time January gave way to February, the options before the government had clearly become limited. On the one hand, the students of Dhaka University, as well as those of other universities across the province, had come to adopt what was in Pakistan's brief history a radical program, alongside the Six Point Program first enunciated by the imprisoned Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in February 1966. The students called it their eleven-point charter of political demands.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his rising Bengali nationalistic politics in
what was regarded as apure Islamic state for the Muslims of the subcontinent. In fact, as the campaign for the 1970 general elections got under-way, Khan Abdus Sabur Khan, a Bengali who had loyally served Ayub as central minister for communications and was leader of the Convention Muslim League in the National Assembly, told the country that he and a few others had advised the president against instituting the case because it could boomerang on the regime.

And boomerang it did. What has eventually emerged in the nearly four decades since the case was dropped is that Mujib was certainly aiming at the independence of East Pakistan, that it was his objective to take the Bengalis out of Pakistan and create a separate, secular, and democratic state. A very early sign of Mujib's dream of Bengali freedom remains his question to Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, back in 1957, regarding the feasibility of political sovereignty for East Pakistan. At the time, Suhrawardy (and he was prime minister of Pakistan) firmly put him in his place. But what has never been in doubt about the Agartala Case, though, is the ugly and rather uncouth way in which the Ayub regime went about building the case.