INDEPENDENCE
As the Indian National Congress continued to press for self-rule for Indian, the British began to map out a path to independence. At the close of map of WWIT it was clear that European colonialism had run its course and Indian independence was inevitable. Moreover, the UK no linger had the desire or power to maintain its vast empire, and a major problem had developed within India itself. The large Muslim minority realized that an independent India would be a nation dominated by Hindus and that despite Mahatma Gandhi’s fair-minded and even-handed approach, others in the Indian National congress would not be so accommodating pr tolerant. The country was divided on purely religious grounds with the Muslim League headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, representing the majority of Muslims, and the Indian Congress Party, led Jawaharlal Nehru, commanding the Hindu population. Indian achieved independence in 1947 but the struggle after the war had been bitter, especially in Bengal where the fight for self-government was complicated by the conflict between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress was impossible, so the victory, Lord Mount-batten, seeing no other option, decided to partition the subcontinent.
EAST PAKISTAN
The two overwhelmingly Muslim regions of pre-partition India were on the exact opposite sides of the subcontinent, in Bengal and the sides of the subcontinent, in Bengal and the Punjab. In Bengali the situation was complicated by Calcutta, with its Hindu majority. There, jute mills and a developed port contrasted with Muslim-dominated East Bengal, also a major jute producer, but with virtually no manufacturing or port facilities.
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Independence in
India 1947.
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The Muslim League’s demand
for an independent Muslim home state was realized in 1947 with the creation if
Pakistan. This was achieved by establishing two separate states, East and west,
on opposite sides of Indian Territory. For months, a huge exodus took place as
Hindus moved to India and Muslims moved to East or West Pakistan. But despite the support for
the creation of Pakistan was based on Islamic solidarity, the two halves of the
new state had little else in common. The instability of the arrangement was
obvious, not only in the geographical sense, but for economic, political and
social reasons as well. The people of West Pakistan
spoke Urdu, Pashtu, Punjabi and Sindhi; the diet of the East Pakistan consisted
mainly of fish and rice while that of the West Pakistanis was meat and wheat. The country was
administered from West Pakistan, which tended to direct foreign aid and other
revenues to itself, even though East Pakistan had more people and produced most
of the cash crops. From early on these differences and inequalities stirred up
a sense of Bengali nationalism that had not been reckoned with in the had not
been reckoned with in the struggle for Muslim independence. The Bengalis of East
Pakistan had no desire to play a subordinate role to the West Pakistanis. The
resentment was exacerbated by the fact that when the British left, most of the
Hindus in the administrative service fled en masse to India, leaving a vacuum
that could only be filled by the trained West Pakistanis and not by the local Muslims.
Nor did West Pakistanis show a great deal of respect for Bengalis-the president
of Pakistan, a West Pakistani, reportedly said that Bengalis ‘have all the
inhibitions of downtrodden races and have not yet found it possible to
adjust…to freedom’. There was dissatisfaction in all spheres of Bengali life. When the Pakistani
government declared that ‘Urdu and only Urdu’ would be the national language, a
language that virtually no one in East Bengal knew, the Bengalis decided this
was the last straw. The primary given to Urdu resulted in the Bangla Language Movement
which rapidly became a beginning of the move towards independence. There were
riots in Dhaka in 1952 during which 12 students were killed by the Pakistan
army. Democracy gave way to military government and marital law. The Awami Party, led
by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, emerged as the national political party in East
Pakistan, and the Language Movement became its ideological underpinning. The catastrophic cyclone of
1970 devastated East Pakistan, killing some half a million people, and while
foreign aid poured in, the Pakistan government appeared to do little. Support
for the Awami League peaked and in the 1971 national elections it won 167 of
the 313 seats, a clear majority. Constitutionally the Awami League should have
formed the government of all Pakistan, but the president, faced with this
unacceptable result, postponed the opening of the National Assembly.Riots and strikes (hartaals) broke out
in East Pakistan. At Chittagong, a class between civilians and soldiers left 55
Bengalis dead. When President Khan secretly returned to West Pakistan after
talks with Sheikh Mujjib in March 1971, Pakistani troops went on the rampage
throughout East Pakistani: burning down villages, looting shops and homes, and
indiscriminately slaughtering civilians.
