HOW the country’s and the region’s history is intertwined with my family’s personal history was underlined this week when Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s leader Tarique Rahman returned home to Dhaka after 17 years in self-imposed exile in the UK and is now likely to be the country’s next prime minister after the general elections, with the recently deposed Awami League, his arch-enemy, in disarray.

Tarique Rahman’s mother, Khaleda and father Maj-General Ziaur Rahman, both led their country. He was killed by rebellious troops at the Circuit House when he went to Chittagong to placate the local army commander in 1981.

It was just over a decade earlier that my sister arrived in Chittagong after marrying a handsome army captain, an ammunition technical expert, who was serving in the Port’s Embarkation Headquarters in August/September 1970. The handful of army and navy officers and their families who were posted at the Embarkation HQ had flats in the HQ compound.

The young couple met one of his seniors, (then) Major Ziaur Rahman and his spouse at the Chittagong Club. He was serving in Chittagong in the East Bengal Regiment.

So much water has flown under the bridge since 1971 that much of the animus of that period has evaporated.

The situation started to hot up after the general elections in December that year and soon the political stalemate that was rooted in the denial of power to the Shaikh Mujibur Rahman-led Awami League, the election winners, culminated in protest demonstrations that........

© Dawn