The Birth of Bangladesh

The state of Bangladesh was born in 1971 from one of the bloodiest episodes of the decolonised subcontinent, and one of the gravest fitnas within the Muslim world in the modern age. At the partition of 1947 the Muslim-majority lands had been gathered into Pakistan, but its two wings, west and east, were separated by a thousand miles of India and divided by language, culture and a deepening sense of grievance; the Bengali-speaking east, though it held the larger share of the population, felt itself neglected and dominated by the west, in language policy, in wealth and in power. When the Bengali nationalist movement under the Awami League won the elections of 1970 and was denied office, the Pakistani army launched a crackdown on the east in late March 1971, beginning at Dhaka, which turned into a long and brutal war the Bengalis call the Muktijuddho, the Liberation War. Independence was declared, a guerrilla resistance, the Mukti Bahini, took the field, an enormous number of people were killed, women were violated in great numbers, and as many as ten million fled as refugees into neighbouring India; the year is remembered as one of mass atrocity and immense suffering borne above all by the Bengali Muslims. India intervened toward the end of the year, the Pakistani forces in the east surrendered at Dhaka in December, and the independent People's Republic of Bangladesh emerged, a new Muslim-majority nation in the delta of the eastern Ganges and Brahmaputra, with its capital at Dhaka. The histories of 1971 (the standard South Asian and international accounts) record the partition background, the crackdown, the war and the refugee flight; the exact death toll is debated, from official figures of three million to lower scholarly estimates, but the scale of killing and displacement is not in doubt. The Muslim world did not stand united over this war but was divided and grieved, for it was Muslims who killed and Muslims who fled, may God have mercy on the slain. This scene depicts not the capital under arms but the human cost in the countryside: a small railway halt in the flooded delta under the monsoon sky, families gathered on the platform with their bundles and brass water-pots, a relief table for the displaced, and, on a bamboo pole, the raising of the green-and-red flag of the nation being born. It is shown soberly, without graphic violence; the delta, the flight and the new flag carry the event of a people who won a homeland through catastrophe.