Up until December 1971, Pakistan was bifurcated into East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and these were separated by 1,600 kilometers of Indian territory. The people of the two areas were further estranged from one another by differences in language and cultural traditions because the Bengali "monsoon Islam" of the West was alien to the "desert Islam" of the West. The East Wing was notable for its ethnic Bengali homogeneity and its collective Bangla cultural and linguistic heritage. It contained over half the population of Pakistan and stood in sharp contrast to the ethnic and linguistic diversity found in the West Wing, where the population consisted of four major ethnic groups--Punjabis, Pakthuns, Sindhis, and Baloch. A fifth important group consisted of the muhajirs, or the immigrants or descendants of immigrant who fled to Pakistan after the 1947 partition. In spite of the obvious differences between the two halves of Pakistan, the political leadership, especially that in the West, declared that the islamic faith and a shared fear of "Hindu India" constituted sufficient glue to hold the two Pakistans together as one nation. This prediction was not correct, and over time a culture of distrust developed between the two areas increased by imbalances in terms of representation in the government and the military. Bengali politicians also argued that the economic "underdevelopment" of East Pakistan came about because of the "internal colonialism" of the "rapacious capitalist class of West Pakistan" (Blood xxxii). Ahmed, Akbar S. Jinnah, Pakistan, and Islamic Identity. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pakistan undertook a nationwide experiment in democracy just before the beginning of the 1971 war, and this experiment was not respected within the area. West Pakistani officials were afraid of Bengali dominance in the political affairs of the nation, so the Pakistan People's Party leader from the West, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, supported by senior army officers (most |
