The Story up to March 1971

How the 1970 elections sowed the seeds of the Bangladesh liberation war. An extract

This chapter follows the early years of Pakistan, the challenges of governance in a state constituted by two widely separated and culturally distinct territories, and some of the failures that led to separatism in the Eastern wing. It covers the general elections of 1970, the victory of the Eastern-based Awami League and the Pakistani refusal to honour the election result.

In Pakistan

The roots of what is now Bangladesh’s desire to separate from what was originally West Pakistan go back to the time of Partition itself, to 1947. Pakistan was created in two geographically separated and culturally distinct regions, at the time West Pakistan and East Pakistan, nearly two thousand kilometres apart, with post-Partition India squarely in between. The population of East Pakistan was actually greater than that of West Pakistan; during Independence, there were around forty-two million people in the East against thirty four million in the West. But political power and major institutions of the government were concentrated in West Pakistan and dominated by its people.

These unpromising factors were the starting point for many genuine challenges of governance, but there was no shortage of man made and self-inflicted challenges as well. Budgetary discrimination began almost immediately after Independence, as the federal government of Pakistan invariably allocated well over 50 per cent of spending to West Pakistan. East Pakistan, with 55 per cent of the population, never received more than around 45 per cent of government spending, and in some years, only a little over 30 per cent. And even beyond the skewed allocation of spending, there was a structural lop-sidedness to the economy. Industrialization in West Pakistan was disproportionately dependent on the exploitation of raw materials such as jute and cotton from East Pakistan.

There was also severe language discrimination. In 1948, the federal government of Pakistan proclaimed Urdu to be the sole federal language of the country, and began to remove the Bengali