This was not surprising, as to solve the problems of the Bengali masses required a social revolution. The Awami League started instead to lay the basis for a bourgeois state. Overnight many of its leaders became rich. The lust for money resulted in scenes reminiscent of the Wild West. Gun battles took place between rival gangs of Awami Leaguers on the docks where foreign aid had been unFor a period Mujibur Rehman could posture as the Father of the Nation' and appear to be above the contending gangs inside his own party. But the smell of corruption soon spread to his own family, and his personal position began to be increasingly challenged. In desperation earlier this year he banned all political parties and instituted a one-party state supported by Moscow and the proMoscowgroups. The latter dissolved their parties and liquidated themselves into Mujib's party. The other parties went underground.
Favouritism
But despite the one-party state, unrest continued, and the blatant favouritism which was exercised by Mujib on behalf of his family provided the immediate cause for his overthrow and killing. Let us examine this favouritism more closely:
1. His younger brother, Sheikh Nasir, was the Godfather of North Bengal, and accummulated vast amounts of wealth under his brother's administration by currency smug: gling. When the army was trying to curb smuggling, a Major Salahudin got too close to Nasir. Some days later a group of gangsters entered the Major's office in Jessore and shot him dead. They were not apprehended. Sheikh Nasir is reported to have been killed.
2. Mujib's nephew, Sheikh Moni, also killed, used to be a staff reporter on a weekly paper earning a monthly wage of 300 Taka (£1 = 30 Taka). Under his uncle's administration he became the owner of two daily newspapers worth more than 10 million Takas. Moni was the unofficial boss of many ministries and directorates, and secretary of the country's only legal political party.
3. Another nephew, Sheikh Shahidul Islam, was boss of the student wing of the party. Islam used to regularly terrorise the women's hostels in Dacca, and was well-known as a rapist. He abducted at gunpoint and forcibly married the thirteen-year-old daughter of a senior State Bank official. Presumably to hide the stench of his other activities, he became the boss of the perfume EGYPTIAN 2. The Proletarian Party of East Bengal was the main armed struggle group after the war. On a totally ultra-left position, it decided to continue the war against the