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 U M. A. RASCHID - A FOUNDING FATHER OF INDEPENDENT BURMA Aung San and Raschid (1947) A very brief biographical sketch by Bilal Raschid U Raschid, a Burmese Muslim, of Indian parentage, was a very dear friend, and close associate, of Gen. Aung San in Burma’s struggle against British Colonial rule in Burma. Their friendship went back to the days when the Rangoon University Students’ Union (RUSU) brought together like-minded people to debate and discuss pressing issues of the day. It was here that the very close bonds developed in the mid 1930s, especially between Raschid, Aung San and U Nu.
These three, along with Kyaw Nyein, Ko Ohn, Tha Hla and others captured the leadership of RUSU in 1935, with Nu becoming President, Raschid Vice-President, and Aung San editor of the Oway (the University Students’ magazine). The next year, Raschid was elected President of RUSU, while Aung San served as Vice- President, and Nyo Mya became editor of the Oway. The historic students’ strike of 1936, which was to become the key element in building the future leaders of independent Burma, took place under the leadership of Nu, Aung San, Raschid, and Kyaw Nyein. Dr. Maung Maung ( the former Attorney General) and for a few weeks President of Burma after the peoples uprising of 1988, in an article in the Guardian Magazine in 1956, wrote: “But the Strike of 1936 was a landmark in the nationalist movement in Burma, a distinct milestone. . . .Yet, ther is not a soul to deny that if Ko Nu was the cause, in part, of the strike, and the inspirer and dreamer in the strike, it was M. A. Raschid who organized it and gave meaning and life to it.  If it was Ko Nu who delivered the speeches, stars shining in his eyes, and moved the masses to anger or to tears, it was Raschid who organized the day to day affairs of the strike and gave sustenance to it after the early emotions and passions had cooled. If it was Ko Nu who thundered mightily against the University act, which was, he said, the very symbol of tyranny under which the students, nay, te peoples of Burma writhed in mortal aginy, it was Raschid who read up the Act at midnight while the strikers slept on.” Further on he writes, in the same article: “Let the historians therefore value the strike as they wish. Let them extol it to the moon. Or let them reduce it to near zero. Let them call it the movement, or a movement; let them call it the beginning, or the culmination, or let them say it was neither, but only a ripple in the ocean of the national struggle. Let the historians say what they wish, and argue wisely and hotly forever. But on one point they must concur: that Raschid was the soul of the Strike.” When the strike ended, Raschid had emerged with a solid reputation. More, he had won good and loyal friends. The autograph book that U Raschid had during that period, has very interesting entries by the future leaders of Burma. U Nu wrote: “I love those who love Burma: I love those who are honourable . . . I have loved, respected and followed you.” Kyaw Nyein, who had strong ethnic prejudices, wrote: “The strikers camp – where Kalah meets Bamah”. And Aung San, who was always sparing in compliments, wrote this: “From M. A. San to M. A. Raschid, but no M.A. after our names. This is one point of resemblance between us – but others too, which you know of course. We two have served together on the University E. C. and perhaps will have to do so till our death.” In his hand written notes to U Raschid, Aung San always started with “My dear Bhai ‘shid”, as an affectionate salutation. He often came to U Raschid’s home in Bow Lane, Rangoon, to discuss matters relating to the struggle against British Colonial rule with him. Aung San cancelled one of his Governor’s Council meeting in early 1947, when he was informed that U Raschid had returned to Burma, and was in Aung San’s office at the Secretariat to see him. Aung San had even written to Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru (one of India’s founding fathers, and its first Prime Minister) asking him to find U Raschid, and send him back to Burma. U Raschid was elected the first President of the All Burma Students Union at its founding in 1936; and he had the unique distinction of being the only student leader to have served as president of both RUSU and the ABSU at the same time. After the 1936 strike, he was also elected to serve as the very first students’ representative on the governing University Council. He served in this capacity for many years after Burma became independent. Later, he became the first Chancellor of the University of Mandalay. His scholastic achievements were also distinctive. He matriculated from the Randeria High School in Rangoon, and stood first in the whole of Burma. He repeated this academic distinction when he graduated in Law from the University of Rangoon, standing first in the whole country. He was also a drafter of the first Constitution of Burma (1947); and was instrumental in getting Aung San to agree to amendments to certain sections, to ensure equal rights for all minorities. While he had refused Aung San’s request to serve on the Governor’s Council, he was brought into successive Cabinets of Prime Minister U Nu. He was an acknowledged expert on labor matters, and while other portfolios varied, he was always the Minister in charge of the Labor Ministry. And because of his expertise in this field he was elected President of the International Labor Conference in Geneva, in 1961. He had the distinction of also being the father of the Trade Union movement in Burma, having founded the very first labor union during the British days, called the Shop Assistants Union. During Burma’s democratic period he also became active in Muslim affairs. He was elected, and served for many years, as the President of the Burma Muslim Organization (BMO). However, like Aung San, he did not believe that politics and religion should be mixed. So the BMO was set up as a purely religious and social organization for the betterment of the Muslims of Burma. While his political affiliation and work took place as a part of the top leadership of the Anti-Fascist Peoples’ Freedom League (AFPFL). Through the BMO he set up a separate committee comprised of some of the top Muslim scholars to translate the Holy Quran into the Burmese language. This work took twenty-five years to complete. When he presented Prime Minister U Nu with a copy of Volume 1 of the newly translated Holy Quran, the Prime Minister, who was a Burmese scholar of some note himself, said after reading it, that the translation was a “landmark in the history of Burmese literature”. After the military coup of 1962, U Raschid went through a six year period of detention. His “cell mate” at that time was U Myint Thein, the former Chief Justice of Burma. He was arrested again in 1974, and was released after 18 months, without any charge. The reason of his arrest being that there were some Muslim young men caught in a group that was planning to assassinate General Ne Win; and the Military Intelligence thought that U Raschid might be involved. U Raschid died in 1978, of prostate cancer, in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had gone to visit his son, Bilal, who had settled there with his family; and is buried there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
အျခားသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ရန္ကုန္ တကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းသားအသင္းအပင္းမ်ားတြင္ ပါ၀င္ လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၃၁ တြင္ ရန္ကုန္တကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းသားသမၼဂၢ၏ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမႈးခ်ဳပ္ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ မြတ္စလင္မ္ျဖစ္၍ တေၾကာင္း၊ အိႏၵိယ သားျဖစ္၍ တစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ အမ်ား၏ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးအႏွိမ္ခံမႈကို ခံခဲ့ရလင့္ကစားလည္း သူက တက္ၾကြ မပ်က္ ပါ၀င္လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့သည္။ တကၠသိုလ္တြင္ေနခဲ့သည့္ႏွစ္မ်ား တေလ်ာက္လံုးမွာလည္း ကုလားဆိုျပီး အႏွိမ္ ခံခဲ့ရသည္။ သူႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ျပီး ေျခပုန္းခတ္ခ်က္မ်ားကို ခံခဲ့ရသည္။ အစဥ္သျဖင့္ ဦးႏုအေပၚ သစၥာေသြမပ်က္သူျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သက္ေသထူျပႏိုင္ခဲ့ျပီး အဓိက ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ၾကီးမ်ားဖက္က လက္ခံမႈကိုပါ ရယူႏုိင္ခဲ့သည္ ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္ ျဖစ္သည္တြင္ မိဘမ်ားက အိႏၵိယသို႔ထြက္ေျပးခဲ့ရာ စစ္အျပီးတြင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ေအာင္ဆန္း က သူ႔အားျပန္လာရန္ေခၚခဲ့သည္။ ဦးႏုက သူအားကက္ဘိနက္တြင္ ပါ၀င္ေစခဲ့သည္။ ၁၉၅၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အိုးအိမ္ႏွင့္ အလုပ္သမား၀န္ၾကီး အျဖစ္ လ်ာထားျခင္း ခံရျပီး ၁၉၅၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သတၳဳတြင္း၀န္ၾကီး၊ ၁၉၆၀ ျပည့္တြင္ စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ စက္မႈ၀န္ၾကီး အျဖစ္ႏိုင္ငံတာ၀န္မ်ားကို ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ရာ ၁၉၆၂ ခုႏွစ္၌ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးေကာင္စီ အစိုးရ ဗိုလ္္ခ်ဳပ္ေန၀င္းက သူ႔အား အေရးယူခ်ိန္ တိုင္ေအာင္ပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ ဖဆပလႏွစ္ျခမ္းမကြဲခင္ ၁၉၅၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သူသည္ TUCB ( Trade Union Council of Burma – ဗမာ့ကုန္သြယ္ေရး သမဂၢေကာင္စီ ) တြင္ ဒု ဥကၠဌ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ေသးသည္။ ဦးႏု၏ သံမဏိဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ႏွင့္ စဥ္ဆက္မျပတ္ေထာက္ခံခ်က္အရ သူ႔ေနရာက ျမဲခဲ့ သည္။ အိႏၵိယေသြးပါသူ ဦးရာရွစ္အားေနရာေပးမႈအေပၚ ၾသဇာအၾကီးဆံုး အသိုင္း အ၀ိုင္းက အျပင္းအထန္ဖိအားေပးလင့္ ကစား သူ၏မဆုတ္မနစ္ ေခါင္းမာ မႈေၾကာင့္ အရာမက်ခဲ့ေပ။ ဦးႏုက (အတိုက္အခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ရန္ရွင္းသြားေအာင္) သူ႔နာမည္အား ဦးရန္ရွင္းဟု ေျပာင္းရန္တိုက္တြန္းခဲ့ရာ အမာခံမြတ္စလင္မ္ျဖစ္သူ ဦးရာရွစ္က လက္မခံပဲပယ္ခ်ခဲ့ျပီး ၊ သူ႔နာမည္ေရွ႕တြင္ “ဦး”ကိုသာတပ္ခဲ့သည္။ ဤနာမည္ ေျပာင္းေရး ကိစၥ အပါအ၀င္ မြတ္စလင္လူ႕အစုအေ၀း၏ ဘ၀ႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ရာ အျခားေသာ ကိစၥမ်ားတြင္ …..........သေဘာထားကြဲလြဲမႈမ်ားရွိခဲ့သည္။ Maung Maung, 'M.A.Rashid,'' Guardian Monthly. III, {Dec, 1956},27-34;Tinker, ညႊန္းခဲ့ျပီး၊ႏွာ-၆၊ ၆၅၊ ၈၂၊ ၃၉၆) ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္ျပည္သူမ်ားဖက္မွ ဗမာ့ကက္ဘိနက္တြင္ သူလိုအိႏၵိယသား မြတ္စလင္ တစ္ဦး ဘာေၾကာင့္္လိုရမွာလဲဆိုျပီး ဦးရာရွစ္အားမၾကခဏ ပစ္မွတ္ျပဳျခင္းခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ဦးရာရွစ္၏အစ္ကိုျဖစ္သူ ေဒါက္တာ အမ္၊ ေအ၊ ရအူးဖ္မွာ အိႏၵိယ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဌာနတြင္ သံအမတ္တစ္ဦးျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ ငါးဆယ္ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ေစာေစာပိုင္းကာလ မ်ားတံုးက ဗမာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ သူ႔ႏိုင္ငံကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳျပီးတာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္သြားခဲ့သည္။ တစ္ၾကိမ္တြင္ ျပည္သူသို႔ပင္ဦးႏုက မိမိအေနျဖင့္ ဤႏိုင္ငံသားလည္းျဖစ္ျပီး ႏိုင္ငံကို အက်ိဳးျပဳေနသူလည္းျဖစ္သည့္ ဦးရာရွစ္ကို အိႏၵိယေသြးပါသူ ျဖစ္၍ဆိုျပီး ဤတာ၀န္ ေပးမႈ မွမဟန္႔တားႏိုင္ပါဟုဆိုျပီး ေၾကျငာခဲ့ေသးသည္။ { Ferdinand Kuhn, “Commentary, in Nationalism and Progress in Free Asia, ed-Phillip W. Thayer { Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1956}, p – 247. MOSHE YEGAR ၏ THE MUSLIMS OF BURMA ( A Study of A Minority Group) စာအုပ္မွ ကူးယူေဖၚျပပါသည္။
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