Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the greatest Bangalee of all times, was born on March 17 in 1920 at Tungipara under the then Gopalganj subdivision in Faridpur district.
His father Sheikh Lutfar Rahman was a ‘serestadar’ in the civil court of Gopalganj.
Mujib, the third among six brothers and sisters, had started his primary education in the local Gimadanga School. His early education suffered for about four years due to eye ailments. He passed his matriculation from Gopalganj Missionary School in 1942, Intermediate of Arts (IA) from Calcutta Islamia College in 1944 and BA from the same college in 1947, according to Banglapedia.
Bangabandhu showed the potential of leadership since his school life.
While he was a student of Gopalganj Missionary School, AK Fazlul Huq, the then Chief Minister of Bengal, came to visit the school in 1938. The young Mujib is told to organize an agitation in order to impress the chief minister about the depressed situation of the region.
While being a student in Islamia College, he was elected general secretary of the College Students Union in 1946.
He was an activist of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League and a member of the All India Muslim League Council from 1943 onwards. In politics, he had been a fervent follower of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a legendary leader in the Indian subcontinent and considered as the champion of democracy.
During the 1946 general elections, Sheikh Mujib was deputed by the Muslim League to work for the party candidates in the Faridpur district.
After partition in 1947, he got himself admitted into the University of Dhaka to study law but was unable to complete it, because he was expelled from the university in early 1949 on the charge of ‘inciting the fourth-class employees’ in their agitation against the university authority’s indifference towards their legitimate demands.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was one of the principal organisers behind the formation of the East Pakistan Muslim Students League in 1948.
In fact, his active political career began with his election to one of the three posts of joint secretaries of the newly established East Pakistan Awami Muslim League in 1949 while being in jail.
In 1953, Sheikh Mujib was elected general secretary of the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League, a post that he held until 1966 when he became president of the party. It was due to Mujib’s initiative that in 1955 the word ‘Muslim’ was dropped from the name of the party to make it sound secular. It is indicative of his secularist attitude to politics that he developed after 1947.
To give full time to the organizational affairs of the Awami League, Sheikh Mujib resigned from the cabinet of Ataur Rahman Khan (1956-58) after serving for only nine months.
During the regime of general Ayub Khan, Mujib had the nerve to revive the Awami League in 1964, though his political mentor (guru), Suhrawardy, was in favour of keeping political parties defunct and work under the political amalgam called National Democratic Front for the restoration of constitutional rule in Pakistan.
Mujib, after all, was already quite disillusioned with the concept of Pakistan.
