Out of prison. Mujib became Suhrawardy's right-hand man within the Awami League, but then destroyed his leader's efforts to compromise and form a coalition with other parties. Mujib's success enabled the Awami League to form a new East Pakistan Provincial Government in 1956, and he served in it for seven months as a Minister of Commerce and Industry. After Suhrawardy died in 1963, Mujib apparently felt less hampered by the older man's principles of moderation. He revived the Awami League, pursued his “instinctive” style of politics, and demanded internal self-rule. When Mohammed Ayub Khan had him arrested again in 1966, on charges of plotting to make East Pakistan independent. East Pakistan came close to open rebellion, and the turmoil forced Ayub to release Mujib and resign. Mujib emerged as a hero to his people.
Tall for a Bengali (he stands 5 feet 11 inches), with a shock of graying hair, a bushy mustache and alert black eyes, Mujib can attract a crowd of a million people to his rallics and hold them spell-bound with great rolling waves of emotional rhetoric. “Even when you are talking alone with him,” says a diplomat, “he talks like he's addressing 60,000 people.” Eloquent in Urdu. Bengali and English, three languages of Pakistan. Mujib does not pretend to be an original thinker. He is a poet of politics, not an engineer, but the Bengalis tend to be more artistic than technical, anyhow, and so his style may be just what was needed to unite all the classes and ideologies of the region.'
A month ago. at a time when he was still publicly refraining from proclaiming independence Mujib privately told NEWS Week's Loren Jenkins that “there is no hope of salvaging the situation. The country, as we know it, is finished.” But he waited for President Mohammad Yahya Khan to make the break. “We are the majority, so we cannot secede. They, the Westerners, are the minority, and it is up to them to secede."
Two weeks later as the crisis deepened, hundreds of Bengalis crowded the yard and hallways of Mujib's home in suburban Dacca, and puffing on a pipe ("the only foreign thing I use"), he cheerfully spoke to them all. After addressing one enthusiastic gathering Sheikh Mujibur Rahman turned to Western newsmen and said: “I have this sort of thing from 5 a.m. on. Do you think anyone can suppress this spirit with machine guns?” A few days later someone was trying.
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