also called Sheikh Mujib Bengali leader and first prime minister (1972–75) and later president (1975) of Bangladesh.
Mujib, the son of a middle-class landowner, studied law and political science at the Universities of Calcutta and Dacca. Although jailed briefly as a teenager for agitating for Indian independence, he began his formal political career as a cofounder of the Awami League in 1949. The league advocated political autonomy for East Pakistan, the detached eastern part of the nation of Pakistan. Mujib's arrest in the late 1960s incited mob violence that eroded the Pakistani president's authority in East Pakistan. In the elections of December 1970, Mujib's Awami League secured a majority of the seats in the National Assembly, and Mujib demanded independence for East Pakistan. Troops from West Pakistan were sent to regain control of the eastern province but were defeated with the help of India. East Pakistan, renamed Bangladesh, was proclaimed an independent republic in 1971, and in January 1972 Mujib, recently released from prison, became the country's first prime minister. With increasing problems, Mujib took tighter control and assumed the presidency in January 1975. He, along with most of his family, was killed in a coup d'état just seven months later. His daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, who was out of the country at the time of the overthrow, served as prime minister of Bangladesh from 1996 to 2001.
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