BENGALURU: The differences between East and West Pakistan were evident from the time Pakistan came into being. The span of India physically separated the two wings of the Islamic country. The western wing was made from parts of colonial-era Punjab, Sind, Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province. East Bengal, as it was then called, was built by merging parts of Assam and Tripura into East Bengal.
Before Partition, several of the prominent political leaders in East Bengal had been part of the Muslim League, one of the main actors that supported the division of British India along religious lines. However, within two years of the formation of Pakistan, the Bengali politicians found that they had different political goals from those of their Islamist colleagues in the western wing.
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the last prime minister of undivided Bengal, joined with other Bengali politicians to form the Awami Muslim League in 1949. The founding president of the Awami Muslim League was Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, popularly known as Maulana Bhashani. ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, or Mujib, was one of the many Bengali youngsters who joined the party.
While Suhrawardy and a few other Bengali leaders led Pakistan and were in top positions, it did not benefit the Bengali population of Pakistan, who felt that, despite being the majority, the welfare of East Pakistanis was low on the priority list. The lion’s share of economic benefits, tax dollars and aid went to West Pakistan.
The core issue that caused a difference between the two provinces had to do with the linguistic and cultural differences between East and West Pakistan. There were several attempts by West Pakistani leaders to homogenize the language and culture of Pakistan over the years. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was not an Urdu speaker but wanted to impose the language throughout the land. In 1948, during his sole visit to East Pakistan, he refused to make Bengali a federal language of Pakistan.
The inhabitants of West Pakistan themselves spoke multiple languages. In the eastern province of Pakistan, the majority spoke Bengali. There was a minority Hindi-speaking population of Muslims who had migrated from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar following Partition. Upon its creation in 1947, Pakistan had dropped Bengali from the list of national languages. The student community started a wave of protests from March 1948. Their protests were ignored by Jinnah and subsequent rulers of Pakistan, who overlooked the fact that 55 per cent of Pakistanis spoke Bengali and only 7 per cent spoke Urdu.
The conflict over language culminated into a disaster when police gunned down five protesting students in Dacca University on 21 February 1952. This spurred a mass movement called the Ekushe (literally, ‘Twenty-First’) movement, to honour the date when the students were martyred. The West Pakistani-dominated leadership of Pakistan reacted by changing the name of East Bengal to East Pakistan.
Despite the tensions, political leaders of East Pakistan continued to participate in the nation-building process of Pakistan, and the two wings managed to put together a constitution in 1956 that promised a parliamentary democracy.
However, there were no elections; instead, in October 1958, the Pakistani military chief, General Ayub Khan, seized power from the then president, Iskander Mirza, in Pakistan’s first military coup d’état. Mirza had himself suspended the constitution and seized power a few weeks before that. A Bengali-origin soldier-turned-bureaucrat, Major General Mirza was a direct descendant of Mir Jafar, who secretly allied with the British East India Company during the Battle of Plassey.
Excerpted from the India’s Secret War by Ushinor Majumdar with permission from Penguin Random House