The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 1: Land of Broken Maps
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. Before we jump into the show today, I'd like to take a moment to briefly acknowledge an important milestone we've reached here on Conflicted. It's hard to believe, but today's episode is the 50th episode of the show. I started the podcast about five years ago, in September 2019, and in that time, I have been absolutely blown away by the kindness, warmth, and passionate feedback I've received from all of you all over the world.

So, to listeners new and old, near and far, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Your encouragement, support, and constructive feedback is what keeps this train chugging along. I really, truly am grateful. So here's to you, and to many, many more episodes of Conflicted.

As long as y'all keep listening, I'll keep making them. So now with that bit of housekeeping out of the way, we can get down to business and jump right into the good stuff. You are listening to the first episode in a brand new multi-part series on a topic that sits right at the intersection of two of my absolute favorite historical subjects,

the Indian subcontinent, and the Cold War. Today, we're going to be talking about something called the 1971 Bangladesh War. Sometimes it's called the Bangladesh Liberation War or the Third Indo-Pakistani War. Now, truth be told, this is a story that's not very well known outside of South Asia. Hell, even in South Asia, you'd be hard-pressed to find a version of it that isn't drenched in nationalist revisionism or riddled with strategic omissions.

But I have to say, when you patch it all together, it is one of the most captivating, densely layered, and frankly complex topics we've ever covered on this show. At its most basic level, this is a story of how, in 1971, the nation of Pakistan imploded in a vicious, irreconcilable civil war. For the better part of a year, the country tore itself apart.

What started as a simple contested election spiraled out of control and bloomed into a full-blown regional conflict involving two nations, three superpowers, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. After nine months of killing, a new nation came kicking and screaming into the world.

Bangladesh, that troubled, waterlogged republic at the tip of the Bay of Bengal. In a year when most of the Western world was still mourning the breakup of the Beatles, the Indian subcontinent was being violently rearranged into a geopolitical jigsaw that would affect the region for decades to come. And despite its deep-cut status and historical memory, the 1971 Bangladesh War is, in the words of Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal, quote,

the single most important watershed in the subcontinent's post-independence history. "Few contemporary conflicts have been so brief and localized but had such protracted and global ramifications," wrote another historian.

At one swoop, it led to the creation of the large and populous state of Bangladesh and tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of the former. The consequences of the conflict continue to stalk the subcontinent. But one of the most exciting things about this topic, at least for me, is the cast of characters. This story is populated by a fascinating ensemble of historical figures, a motley menagerie of world leaders and freedom fighters, muckraking journalists and political luminaries.

We'll meet subcontinental titans like Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Pakistani leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. We'll spend time with U.S. President Richard Nixon and his loyal attack dog Henry Kissinger, not to mention countless other secondary characters and ordinary eyewitnesses that make this story so unique.

In this first episode, we'll introduce our setting, meet some of the big personalities driving the events, and establish the key themes and threads that will carry us through the series. But before we kick things off, one last little note. In some ways, this series is a kind of sequel to another series we did back in 2022. In that year, we spent about six months exploring the 1947 partition of India in painstaking details.

Now, if you haven't listened to that series yet, I definitely recommend giving it a whirl. A deeper understanding of partition can only enrich your appreciation of the 1971 conflict. Now, that said, you do not need to have listened to that series to understand what's happening in this one. We'll definitely touch on partition and establish the broad strokes.

Because as one historian put it, quote, without an understanding of partition and its effects, it is not possible to make sense of contemporary Bangladesh. But if you need something to pass the time between episodes of this series, the partition of India is a worthy companion to the topic.

So now, with all that preamble out of the way, we can begin our story. And it begins as all good stories do, on a dark and stormy night. Welcome to the 1971 Bangladesh War, Part 1, Land of Broken Maps.

It's the morning of November 8th, 1970. We're in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 450 miles from land. Out here, there's nothing. No ships, no seabirds, no people for as far as the eye can see. Just endless water, an open ocean in every direction. But something is happening out here in the middle of nowhere. Something that will alter the course of history. This morning, the atmosphere is thin, the water is warm, and the waves are as flat as a pane of glass. In

In other words, the conditions are perfect. It starts with a rushing of air, a sudden snap of electricity. Imagine a pair of lungs, a massive, mile-high pair of invisible lungs drawing breath, sucking air into its center. A breeze becomes a gust, becomes a gale. At a molecular level, oxygen and nitrogen congeal into currents of energy, veins of matter flowing back to a restless, hungry heart. The wind gets faster, the air gets hotter, and

and vapor rises like a pillar into the sky. As the warm air soars upward, newer, colder air rushes in to replace it. And this process repeats itself, over and over, faster and faster. Rise and replace, inward and upward. And in a matter of hours, a self-sustaining reaction has been achieved. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how cyclones are born. Above the equator, tropical storms are called hurricanes, or typhoons. But here, in the Indian Ocean, they're called cyclones.

And this cyclone is getting very strong, very fast. By this point, the lungs have formed a body. Thick clouds, black as squid ink, begin to rotate around the epicenter, drawing air in and intensifying the storm. It's barely noon, but visibility is almost non-existent. The power of the cyclone has beaten the sky black and blue. And the only light comes from twitching tendrils of electricity, spasms of lightning that flicker in the gloom.

And as November 8th becomes November 9th, the storm continues to spin like a massive wheel, drawing more wind, more energy, more power into its maelstrom. It is, to borrow a phrase from one writer, a quote, ocean-fed engine. By the third day, it is wider than a thousand football fields, taller than any commercial flight path, and stronger than 10,000 nuclear warheads. And like all wheels, it is on the move.

The Bola Cyclone, as it will become known, B-H-O-L-A, Bola, is heading northeast. In two days, it will make landfall. In two days, it will cross 800 miles of open ocean and slam into the most densely populated region on the planet, a place called Bengal.

For most people west of the prime meridian, Bengal refers to an endangered tiger or a sports team from Cincinnati. But for 250 million people, Bengal means home.

This area, this region, is situated at the very heart of our story. So before we go any further, we need to understand where this place is, what it looks like, who lives there, and why. For me, personally, history only really makes sense when I can picture the geographic space where the action is happening. After all, you can't have a drama without a stage. So let's hit pause on the perfect storm and pull out our maps for a quick, hopefully painless, geography lesson. In your head, picture the Indian subcontinent.

that huge angular landmass that juts down into the Indian Ocean. Now everybody visualizes things differently, but to me, the subcontinent has always resembled a shark's tooth, with India forming the point of the tooth, kind of like an upside-down triangle, and with areas to the north like Pakistan and Nepal forming the gums above it. While Bengal is the area just slightly to the east of that tooth, where

where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers pour down from the Himalayas, fan out into a delta of hundreds of different channels and marches before emptying into the ocean. As the historian Willem van Schindel writes in his Chronicle of the Region, quote, Imagine yourself high in the air over the Himalayas. Look down and you see a forbidding landscape of snow-capped mountains and harsh vegetation. But now look to the southeast and discover an immense floodplain stretching between the mountains and the sea. That shimmering green expanse is

is Bengal. And for any Americans out there grasping for a stateside analog of Bengal, think Louisiana or the Carolina Low Country. It's wet, it's hot, and the food's pretty damn good. Today, of course, Bengal's rivers are clotted with plastics and particulates, choked from above by a level of air pollution that's shaved an average of 6.8 years off the lifespan of its residents. But for most of its history, the Bengal Delta was an undeniably beautiful place. One American diplomat in the 1970s said that the country was, quote,

so emerald green it almost hurt your eyes. There were, quote, wonderful rice paddy fields, rivers with fantastic ships with tattered sails, another remembered. Everything was so flat that you could see what looked like boats sailing through fields. They were actually miles away.

It was, in the words of one historian, quote, a great green Eden of water and vegetation. For thousands of years and hundreds of generations, Bengalis hauled and reaped a living from those abundant waters. Rice and fish, cotton and jute.

And across the long centuries, political realities shifted as often as the fickle waterways themselves. In many ways, the constantly changing geography of Bengal is a perfect metaphor for its political history. Always rearranging, always in a state of flux. Kings coming and going, trade waxing and waning, empires advancing and receding with the regularity of lunar tides. But then, about 400 years ago, everything changed.

Over the years, Bengalis had seen many different ships from many different shores. Trade junks from China, sloops from Sri Lanka, and carracks from North Africa. But in the late 1600s, a new flag fluttered offshore. It was red and white and striped with the cross of St. George. The British East India Trading Company had arrived. Now,

Now, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the arrival of the British in Bengal was a sudden, concerted, or even malicious development, as of a huge armada of greedy colonizers spontaneously assembled on the horizon with sharp knives and dull consciences.

And in reality, the British conquest of India was slower, messier, and in some ways accidental. By the early 16th century, maritime technology in Europe had developed to the point where young, hungry, ethically flexible explorers could sail far and fast in search of lucrative trade opportunities. And in the Bengal Delta, they found a gold mine.

It was the, quote, richest, most fertile, and densely populated region in India, writes historian Lawrence James. Not that they were the first to find it. As a conduit between India's inland rivers and the open ocean, the delta had always been an important trade hub, a cultural estuary as well as a literal one. As Von Schindel writes, quote,

It was in the coastal waterways of Bengal that Southeast Asians, North Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Arabs, Central Asians, Persians, Ethiopians, and Tibetans met from very early times. Archaeologists have even dug Greek coins dating back to 300 BC out of the Bengali mud. But these Englishmen were different.

They were not just passing through. They were here to stay. In a few short decades, the East India Company had established fortified outposts at the peripheries of Mughal India, like ticks on a gilded elephant. And the most profitable of these outposts was in Bengal.

the english quickly discovered why dutch pirates called bengal quote the fat meadow it was bursting with wealth opportunity and a fragmented local government that was easily manipulated and once the company wormed its fingers into bengal's guts they squeezed and squeezed hard local laws did not seem to apply to these pale hygiene challenged europeans they

They bullied, bribed, and bankrupted native Bengalis while their ship's hold grew pregnant with riches bound for England. But naturally, the Bengalis were not content to let the East India Company siphon their wealth and starve their children. There were some who resisted the slow crush of English encroachment.

On June 23rd, 1757, a massive army assembled on the floodplains of western Bengal. 50,000 men with a single purpose. Kick the British out for good. After decades of wheeling, dealing, and stealing, the Bengali army was going to cut the East India Company out of their delta like a tumor. And what an army it was. Cannons and cavalry and war elephants, glittering spears swaying like a field of grass. All the might of Mughal India brought to bear.

The battle itself promised to be ugly, but the chosen battlefield was anything but.

Beneath mango trees and monsoon rains, the Bengali forces marched across a, quote, liquid waterscape where islands of land appeared to float amid network of streams and rivers, according to historian William Dalrymple. From a distance, it might have looked as if the entire army was walking on water. On the other side of the battlefield, a tiny force of red-coated company men stood soaking in the rain. English infantry, barely 3,000 of them, dwarfed by a native army 15 times their size. On

On paper, the corporate mercs of the East India Company never stood a chance. The math was immutable, the odds insurmountable. But the notorious EIC had a weapon more powerful than any cannon, musket, or war elephant. They had a traitor on the inside. As they say, the pen is mightier than the sword, especially when it's writing a check.

It was a smart solution to a vexing obstacle. The problem with Indians, the English decided, was that there were just so damn many of them. But if you could turn them against each other, play them off each other, find the fault lines and rip them open, you didn't have to get your hands bloody at all. Let them eat themselves alive and scoop up what was left.

It was a tactic the British would use over and over and over again in the years to come, and on that rainy day in 1757, it worked like a charm. At a key moment in the battle, a large portion of the Bengali army turned their backs on their friends and defected. A general rout ensued, was the way the British commander described it to his superiors back in London.

And just like that, the East India Company achieved full control of India's richest province. Measured in death, the Battle of Plassey, as it came to be known, was only a "skirmish" by European standards, according to one historian. Out of 53,000 men on the battlefield, only 522 were killed. No one who had taken part in the Battle of Plassey imagined for a moment that it had marked a turning point in British and Indian history.

writes historian Lawrence James. For them, it was merely a solution to a local problem, the future security of the company's operations in Bengal. And yet, the consequences of that skirmish changed the course of world history. As Willem van Schindel writes, quote, "...for the British, the victory at Plassey marked not just the fact that it gained commercial, military, and administrative control of an area much larger than Britain and with five times its population,"

It meant the beginning of empire. They used Bengal's riches to conquer the rest of India and other parts of Asia. For the people of Bengal, the British victory at Plassey meant not just the emergence of yet another foreign overlord, it

It meant the beginning of European domination, new forms of capitalist exploitation, a racially ordered society, and profound cultural change. All that to say, British colonial rule was born in Bengal. And for the next 200 years, they shook that mango tree for all it was worth. It was, writes James, quote, "...the key that opened the treasure house."

Perhaps it was fitting, then, that of all the trinkets English sailors hauled back home, one of the first was a simple colloquialism that foretold the subcontinent's fate. As Dalrymple writes, quote, One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder, loot. Now,

Now, the long colonial history of India is tragic, complex, and easily capable of sustaining several years' worth of episodes. We, however, have a schedule to keep. We gotta keep moving. So rather than get bogged down in the myriad intrigues and atrocities of the East India Company or the Raj that replaced it...

We need to head back to the future, all the way to the 20th century. In August of 1947, not long before our story takes place, the British flag was no longer flying over Bengal. The crusty stripes of the Union Jack had been replaced by a white crescent moon and star floating on a field of green. It was the flag of the nation of Pakistan. On August 14th, 1947, a new nation was born.

And several weeks later, the infant country, Pakistan, took its place among the free governments of the world in the family of United Nations. Carved out of the subcontinent of India, Pakistan ranks fifth in population among the countries of the world.

Its land area is split into two non-contiguous geographical units in the eastern and western sections of what had been Britain's Indian Empire. When the British conquered India, they built a bomb. At the Battle of Plassey, rain soaked, smoke choked, Eden Green Plassey, a fuse was lit. And that long, winding wick trailed across the centuries, building and burning, until finally, in the mid-20th century, it went off.

The truth was, the British had never really understood their South Asian colony. Not its land, not its religions, and certainly not its people. To the princelings and politicians back in London, India was a glorified ATM, a subcontinental trust fund. But they quickly discovered that managing an area of 4.4 million square miles, filled with 170 million people, hundreds of languages, and dozens of faiths,

is no simple task. The only way the Brits could make sense of all this dizzying diversity was to think inside the box. Hindus in this box, Muslims in that box, and other little bitty boxes for the Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and all the rest. Contain, catalog, and categorize. 4,000 years of history crammed into a filing cabinet. As William von Schindel writes, quote,

It was under British rule that, for the first time, specific versions of Hindu and Muslim identity became politically acute. This resulted from a combination of factors that were not restricted to Bengal but concerned all of British India. First, British attempts to understand the colonized leaned heavily on categorization by creed. They canonized religious identities in legal practice and in the population censuses, which sought to order society by grouping people according to faith, sect, and caste, as

as well as by race, tribe, and language. Well, over time, those boxes became just as real to the people in them as the colonialists who'd built them. The British certainly did not invent religious tensions in India. After all, Hindus and Muslims had been fighting and killing each other ever since the 8th century. But under the crown, those divisions became inflamed and ossified, made permanent with lawyers' ink. In other words, under a British flag, India's two major religions –

Hinduism, and Islam learned to think of themselves as distinct, separate, and fundamentally adversarial. It's a big subcontinent, they said, but it ain't big enough for the both of us. And as those royal colors went up and down the flagpole, day after day, year after year,

the time bomb kept on ticking and by the summer of 1947 it was ready to blow with its treasuries emptied by the financial strain of world war ii and buckling under pressure from independence activists like the famous mohandas gandhi great britain decided that it had no choice but to give up the colony it had once called its quote crown jewel as one historian put it quote the end of world war ii financially overdrew britain and india was no longer the famous storehouse of rubies and spices

that had helped to finance Britain's rise to world power. After the war, the British government had to beg for a $3.75 billion loan from the United States. After months of difficult negotiations, the money was approved only in May of 1946. Towards the end of World War II, the Indian subcontinent became a thorn and almost impossible to rule by the British Raj. Strikes were incessant and held by everybody from tram drivers and press workers to the

to postmen and industrial workers in cotton mills, potteries, and factories. It didn't seem real that after 200 years the British were finally leaving India, coattails between their legs. But an empty chair never stays empty for long. Naturally, India would need new leadership, a new government to fill that vacuum. And the question on everybody's mind was, who would it be? Who could possibly have a mandate to rule over a region as massive and diverse as the Indian subcontinent?

Well, after decades at the vanguard of the independence movement, the Hindu majority Congress Party seemed poised to inherit the scepter of power from the departing British. And that made the minority religions in India, especially Muslims, very, very nervous. As one man confided to the journalist Anam Zakaria, quote,

The Muslims felt very threatened, especially the young and educated ones. They asked themselves, when the British go away, what will happen to us? They felt that their jobs might become insecure. They might be victimized, discriminated against, their careers in jeopardy. Muslims were a sizable minority in the subcontinent, about 25% of the population, but they were still a minority. In a democratic system dominated by Hindu representatives, Muslim politicians were terrified of becoming second-class citizens.

shoved into the wings and relegated to accessories in a nation that can never truly be theirs. Was democracy even democracy, they asked, if your stake in it was too small to be impactful? The tyranny of the majority loomed large in their minds. Hindus and Muslims were so different, they argued, so incompatible in creed and culture, that the two groups could never hope to live together peacefully. For all intents and purposes, they weren't just two different religions,

but two different nations entirely. This two-nation theory, as it came to be known, was passionately argued by the future founder of Pakistan, the prickly, rail-thin, London-educated demagogue, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. That's J-I-N-N-A-H Jinnah. Hindu India and Muslim India must be separated because the two nations are entirely distinct and different, and in some matters antagonistic to each other.

Let me tell you some of the differences. We differ in our history, culture, language, architecture, music, laws, jurisprudence, calendar and our entire social fabric and code of life. One India is impossible to realize. It will inevitably mean that the Muslims will be transferred from the domination of the British to the caste Hindu rule.

a position that Muslims will never accept. As an all-Illya minority, we shall be under the rule of the permanent Hindu majority of about three to one, which will virtually mean one nation ruling another by means of Dalit bombs. The writ and fiat of such a government will neither command respect nor acceptance in religions, and such a government will therefore be impossible.

But what if there was another solution? Jinnah asked. What if Hindus and Muslims didn't have to share a country at all? What if the Muslims could have a chunk of the subcontinent all to themselves? A so-called homeland for Islam and its followers? Well, that idea was the seed that eventually became Pakistan. Pak, writes journalist Declan Walsh, is the Urdu word for clean, so Pakistan translates literally as land of the pure. But in practice, the creation of this new nation was anything but a clean cut. After

After many long months of tortured, table-pounding negotiations, it was decided by the British and their Indian successors that some kind of separation was inevitable. Mr. Jinnah was getting what he wanted. Or at least what he said he wanted. A partition, or split, would have to take place.

The subcontinent would be carved up into two new nations, India and Pakistan, based on religious identity. In theory, any area that was majority Muslim would belong to Pakistan, and any area that was majority Hindu would belong to India. The result was a disaster. Frankly, there is not even an adequate adjective to encapsulate the horrors the partition unleashed. As the Indian writer Shashi Tharoor puts it, Geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied,

minds and hearts torn apart. The Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal agreed, quote, India and Pakistan crossed the threshold from colonial subjection to freedom

amid rivers of blood. The British, anxious to wipe their hands clean of their former colony, organized a partition that was, in the words of writers Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, quote, "...hastily devised and extremely sloppy." Like a party guest who has stopped having fun, the British were itching to leave the problems of India behind. Consequently, what should have been a careful and thoughtful allocation of territory to each nation was rushed and haphazard, completed in weeks rather than years.

The British talked like surgeons, but worked like butchers. The new boarders, drawn by a paper-pushing judge who didn't know Deli from Detroit, zigged and zagged through ancient communities with schizophrenic abandon.

When Independence Day finally arrived on August 15th, 1947, millions of people woke up in the wrong country. According to these new maps, they were on the wrong side of the border, surrounded by people who did not want them there. Hindus in Muslim territory, Muslims in Hindu territory, Sikhs with no territory at all. It was a cartographic catastrophe that sparked ethnic cleansing and a refugee crisis, and in the end, ordinary people paid the price.

It's the monsoon season. Fields are flooded, rivers overflow their banks, and all the time the bloodshed goes on. As the new dominions of Pakistan and India take over their own affairs, communal hatred flares up in the Punjab. Fleeing from their looted, blood-stained towns comes a new exodus, a million displaced persons. Independence has not yet brought them peace. Rejoicing turned quickly into horror and mourning.

Throughout this vast land, Hindus and Muslims seek safety in new surroundings. Peace-loving people, theirs is the real tragedy. All that tension, that fear, that polarization and prejudice, it had to go somewhere. And the time bomb went off.

when the dust finally settled anywhere from half a million to two million people were dead 15 million were displaced at least 75 000 women had been kidnapped and raped and countless families had been destroyed the scale of the misery was almost unimaginable again there was no adjective for it a one bengali poet attempted to capture his feelings in a poem entitled broken bengal quote they shook violently the roots of the land and people were flung about who knows where none kept account of who perished or survived the two

The two parts of the land stretch out their thirsty hands towards each other, and in between the hands stands the man-made filth of religion, barbed wire.

Across India and Pakistan, tens of millions grieved. But in conference rooms in Washington and Moscow, they shrugged their shoulders, sent flowers to the embassies, and put new maps on the wall. And the new map of South Asia looked very odd indeed. The majority of the subcontinent, the shark's tooth, as it were, was claimed by India. In terms of shape, it was solid, it was cohesive, it made sense. But the new nation of Pakistan was a bit more unorthodox. Pakistan, observed the writer Hajari Naseed, would

would be one of the strangest-looking countries on the post-war map of the world. Another writer put it a bit more indelicately, calling Pakistan a, quote, freak of history. Prior to partition, Muslims were scattered all over India, but they were most densely concentrated in the northwestern and northeastern areas of the subcontinent, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, two regions that were a thousand miles apart. But because they were both majority Muslim, they were tethered together and repackaged into one very odd-looking country –

Historian K. M. Panikkar used a simple but memorable metaphor to help visualize the new state of affairs. Quote, Hindustan, or India, is the elephant, and Pakistan the two ears.

Apart from their shared faith, the two halves of Pakistan could not have been more different. As Hajari Naseed explains, "...one half would encompass the fierce northwestern marches of the Indian subcontinent, from the Khyber Pass down to the desert that fringed Karachi. The other half would include the swampy, typhoon-tossed Bengal Delta in the far northeast."

"'Any country born with two parts separated by a thousand miles of a hostile country, formed solely because the two shared a common religion,' wrote another historian, "'would be considered to have a serious birth defect.'" But there was at least one person who wasn't bothered at all by this seemingly dysfunctional geography. And that was the founder and midwife of Pakistan himself, the aforementioned Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Qaidi Asim, or Great Leader as he was called, claimed that God was the glue that would keep the two halves together. Quote,

Yes, West Pakistan is separated from East Pakistan by about a thousand miles of the territory of India. The first question a student from abroad should ask himself is, "How can this be? How can there be unity of government between areas so widely separated?" I can answer this question in one word: It is faith. Faith in Almighty God, in ourselves and in our destiny. Jinnah had no idea how wrong he was.

it's august 1st 1969 22 years after partition we're in the city of lahore in west pakistan lahore that's l-a-h-o-r-e is not the largest or most important metropolis in the subcontinent it's not the oldest or the most culturally significant but today in the summer of 69 it is the center of the universe

Today, its residents are preparing to receive a very, very important guest. Across the city, the atmosphere is tense. The roads are blocked, the cops are out in force, and the pulse of urban activity is more than a little elevated. And if you were to trace all this activity like a thread, if you were to follow the sirens and traffic and men with guns, you would arrive at the gates of the Lahore airport. Normally, it looks like any other airport. Planes landing and departing, people coming and going.

But today, the airport is a fortress. The tarmac has been cleared and the terminals emptied. Only one plane matters today. In a raid on the tarmac, awaiting the arrival of this very important plane, is all the pomp and pageantry the Pakistani army can muster. A bagpipe orchestra has been arranged, silk carpets have been unfurled, and at the head of the procession, standing in full regalia, President Yahya Khan cannot help but look at his watch. This show, this spectacle,

is his responsibility, and he intends for it to go off without a hitch or glitch.

Any moment, any second now, the plane he's waiting for will touch down. President Yahya Khan is the first of many important characters in this story, so I want you to take a second and commit his name to memory. That's Yahya, Y-A-H-Y-A, Khan, K-H-A-N. In 1969, Yahya Khan is the leader and president of Pakistan. Although president is a somewhat charitable descriptor, military dictator would be a more accurate term.

In the 20 or so years since partition, Pakistan's experiments with representative democracy had not gone well. There is a common misconception that democracy blinks into existence fully formed, that it arrives on the doorstep of new nations pre-assembled and ready to use.

In reality, democracies are more like an Ikea table from hell. There are so many parts and pieces, some of them missing from the box entirely. The instruction manual was written long ago by people very far away. It has to be built step by tedious step. And in all probability, it's going to start a fight.

Some nations managed to power through and assemble the IKEA table of democracy, wobbly though it may be. Pakistan, unfortunately, never got past the cover page. In the hangover after partition, Pakistan found itself at a terrible disadvantage compared to its estranged twin, India.

It was smaller, it was poorer, and it was all but bereft of resources. The truth was, Pakistan got a raw deal in the divorce, inheriting only fragments and table scraps of the Raj's treasury, infrastructure, and civil service. Hindustan, muttered the Pakistanis,

had received the lion's share. It was an opinion that was not in dispute, least of all to the architect of partition himself, the last British Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who admitted at the time, quote, "...administratively, it is the difference between putting up a permanent building or a tent."

Initially, Pakistan's leaders promised to build a democracy for their people. National elections would be held, representatives would be chosen, and a parliament in the British style would be assembled. But it never happened. Pakistan was afflicted with what one writer called, quote,

The country's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, died of tuberculosis in 1948. The prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951. And like a sprinter who trips right out of the gate, Pakistan just couldn't ever seem to find its footing. Political uncertainty became political chaos. Protests became riots. And after ten years of assassinations, half-baked constitutions, and postponed elections, the men in khaki decided they had to step in.

In 1958, the Pakistani army pulled a coup d'etat and declared martial law. Enough pretending, they said. This representative democracy thing is a nice idea, but clearly not working out. Maybe someday, if you've all been good boys and girls, we can try it again. Once we're secure and stable and back on our feet, but for now, just for a little while. The men with guns need to be in charge.

Besides, who else can protect you? Who else can keep you safe? Not only from yourselves, but from those bloodthirsty Hindus across the border. You need us. You will always need us. And there were millions of Pakistanis who were less than thrilled about having their lives dictated from a military base, but counter-arguments tend to fall apart when someone shoves a gun in your mouth.

And so, the die was cast. In the two decades after partition, Pakistan was transformed into what historian Ayesha Jalal called a, quote, sprawling military barrack.

The coup leaders were confident that the army was the only institution in the country that could provide the firm hand that Pakistan needed to put it on the right track, writes Willem van Schindel. To this end, they abolished parliamentary democracy, locked up troublesome politicians, curtailed the judiciary, muzzled the press, suspended citizens' rights, and introduced martial law. Now army men took control of the civil service, and the executive branch of the state became all-powerful.

And in the summer of 1969, the apex of that all-powerful executive branch was our new friend, President Yahya Khan. Yahya was not just Pakistan's president, writes journalist Gary J. Bass, but also its foreign minister, defense minister, and chief martial law administrator. In other words, Yahya Khan was the face of the entire military regime. And what a face it was.

Carved in a stone tablet somewhere, there's a rule that all dictators must have some iconic piece of facial hair. And Yahya Khan was no exception. The 52-year-old president was very proud of his, quote, impossibly bushy eyebrows, which curled skyward above the sides of his eyes, according to writers Scott Carney and Jason Miklian. Yahya loved his eyebrows. He felt they were the true source of his strength, just like Samson's hair. So he twisted the center of each brow up to a point, thinking it gave him a distinguished air.

Yes, Yaya was, in the words of Gary J. Bass, a quote, beefy man with amazing spiky black eyebrows and slicked black-gray hair cut with a white streak. Once upon a waistline, Yaya had been a slim, trim soldier. As a young officer in World War II, he'd driven tanks for the British and killed Nazis in North Africa.

After the war and partition, he rose through the ranks, paid his dues, and got in good with the junta. And like so many strongmen before him, Yaya failed upward with astonishing velocity. And by 1969, he looked around and found himself at the top of the pile. It was his turn to be president, and he relished the privileges that came along with it.

Time and vice take their toll on us all, and they exacted a heavy price from Yahya. The svelte soldier had become a middle-aged man with a bad memory and a beer gut. Pakistan's president was, in the words of Ayesha Jalal, a quote, determined drunkard who loved cheap scotch and cold beer. And when the cold beer ran out, room temp would do just fine.

And the sad truth was, Yaya's mental faculties didn't need any additional dulling. The open secret of the military regime was that the man in charge wasn't the brightest bayonet in the armory. He was, according to one historian, quote, "...equipped with an uncluttered, some would say vacant, mind. His powers of understanding and taking imaginative decisions," remembered one close advisor, "...were extremely limited." U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would later refer to Yaya as a, quote, "...big, honorable, stupid man."

Indeed, it is an old truism of statecraft that sometimes the man at the top doesn't have to be a genius or a visionary. He just needs to stand up straight, smile for the cameras, and keep the right people rich. Yaya Khan. Simple, drunk, dutiful Yaya Khan would never mess up a good thing.

But history had other plans. Yaya knew that people called him stupid. He heard the whispers, the little jokes at his expense. He saw the way foreign dignitaries smirked at him, noticed how journalists simplified their questions for him. And for a proud soldier like Yaya, it was a sting that no amount of scotch could numb.

But someday soon, he promised himself he would prove them all wrong. Because Yahya Khan was a man with ideas. And he had big ideas for Pakistan. His predecessors in the junta had been content to prolong the military's unquestioned stewardship over Pakistan's government indefinitely. But Yahya, writes Von Schindel, chose a different path.

No leader in Pakistan's history had ever been able to bring democracy, real democracy, to its people. Not even Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the beloved Qaidi Assam. Well, Yahya Khan decided that he would be the one to succeed where they had all failed. He would ease his benevolent boot from the nation's neck and organize the first free and fair elections in Pakistan's history. He could practically see it written in the textbooks. Yahya Khan, the great liberator, the peacemaker,

the people's general. It would be his legacy. No one would dare call him stupid then. And so, in March of 1969, Yaya got in front of a microphone and made a promise to 125 million people. Quote, I promise to bring representative, full, free, and impartial democracy and that is all. And once that is done, I will go. After

After many long years of avoidance and false starts, it was time to bite the ballot. National elections, Yahya declared, would be held in 18 months. From Lahore to Dhaka, Baluchistan to Bengal, tens of millions of Pakistanis would go to the polls and elect their representatives for a national parliament. Once convened, that parliament would draft a constitution, which would serve as the blueprint for a democratic Pakistan. It was a long process with many, many steps.

but Yahya had taken the first and arguably most difficult one. It would make Yahya something akin to George Washington, write Carney and McLian, who famously gave up the presidency at the end of his second term in order to enshrine the peaceful transition of power into the lifeblood of the United States. Pakistan's military, of course, would remain as a protector of the new government and help usher in the transition, but the day-to-day running of the country would fall to the politicians, not soldiers.

Yaya explained his intentions to a Western journalist in the following exchange. After these elections, is it your intention to remain as president or will you, as you said many times, get back to being an army man? Well, my intention of remaining a president has nothing to do with me. In the process of democracy, the government will elect their president. And unless I offer myself for that election, I can't remain a president.

And I'm not offering myself to be president. You are not? No, I'm not offering myself to be president. I'm not... My temperament is not this way. My makeup is not that way. I joined the army as a professional soldier. I remain so. And my biggest aim is to go back to my army. I have only two, three years left of service before I retire. So, in the process, if I happen to be in charge of running this country for a year and a half or two years,

That perhaps will be an additional satisfaction to me that I have done some service to the nation also in restoring democracy back to them as a soldier. But apart from that I have, I'm quite clear on the subject.

And now, five months after his historic announcement, President Yahya Khan is at the Lahore airport, waiting on a windy tarmac for a very important guest. As he stands at attention, glancing at his watch, Yahya's bushy eyebrows are twisted into perfect points. He's even less hungover than usual. Needless to say, he wants to look his best for this occasion. After all, it's not every day you receive a personal visit from the most powerful man in the world.

Suddenly, Yaya hears the squawk of a radio and the roar of jet engines overhead. The plane he has been waiting for all morning is making its approach. Air Force One, personal aircraft of the President of the United States, has arrived.

With a bump and a hiss, the gangway scrapes against the asphalt. Secret service agents swarm like baby spiders from the hatch of the plane. And a few minutes later, the guest of honor struts out onto the tarmac. U.S. President Richard Nixon, Tricky Dick himself, is finally here. In the cutthroat, unsentimental world of international politics, it's not easy to make friends.

There are alliances and agreements and partnerships of convenience, but very rarely do heads of state truly click. Well, Richard Nixon and Yahya Khan most definitely clicked.

To paraphrase writer Gary J. Bass, quote, Nixon liked very few people, but he did like Yahya Khan. It doesn't come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy, Nixon once said, but it did come natural with Yahya. Nixon liked the ruddy, rotund general for the same reasons he liked most Pakistanis. They were strong, straightforward, and best of all, they were not Indian. Nixon did not like Indians at all. He felt that they were arrogant, duplicitous, and no friends of the United States.

Pakistan, on the other hand, is quote "a country I would like to do everything for." The people have less complexes than the Indians.

The Pakistanis are completely frank, even when it hurts. Yahya liked Nixon for reasons that were more... tangible. In 1969, the United States was, in the words of one historian, quote, the planet's biggest weapons manufacturer. Yahya Khan was certainly no political savant, but he had a soldier's intuition. He was well aware that by holding national elections and extending universal suffrage to 125 million people overnight, he was pushing his country out on a very wobbly limb.

If something went wrong, if things went bad, if civic duty became civil unrest, he wanted his boys in khakis strapped with all the best American toys. Ammunition, artillery, bombs and planes. The very same hardware that was pulping villagers in Vietnam and manning the checkpoints in West Germany. Pakistan's people had never had democracy before. Who knows what they might try and do with it? Maybe, yet again, the firm hand of the military would be regrettably required.

So, with guns glittering behind his eyes, President Yahya Khan rolled out the red carpet for President Richard Nixon. Gifts were exchanged, martinis were drained, and after a brief obligatory tour around Lahore, the two heads of state retired to Yahya's personal office. Like a vanishing sunset, Nixon's trademark rictus grin faded and an expression of grave seriousness crept upon his face. He ordered his Secret Service detail to leave the room immediately and close the door. He wanted to speak with Yahya.

his friend.

Alone. Well, the agents obeyed without a word and left Yaya and Nixon in solitude. The security detail stood outside the heavy wooden door for about an hour, thinking about whatever Secret Service agents think about. And eventually, that door opened back up again. And when it did, Yaya had his guns. President Nixon had agreed to sell Pakistan a brand new batch of American-made weapons, including B-57 bombers and armored personnel carriers. But nothing in politics is free, even among friends.

Nixon had also gotten something out of the deal. Something very near and dear to his heart. A state secret that he could only trust with a handful of people. But the answer to that particular mystery will have to wait until later in the series. For now, all that matters is that Yahya Khan had gotten what he wanted. And that night, as he sank back into a warm bath of boozy tranquility, Pakistan's president could not help but admire his own ingenuity. In the space of six months, he had secured a democratic future for his country and a weapons deal to protect it.

Yes, Yahya Khan was feeling very, very content. But a thousand miles away from Lahore, in the other half of Pakistan, East Pakistan, things were not so sanguine. We will not be able to get out of the assembly. We will not be able to get out of the assembly.

It's the summer of 1970, one year after Richard Nixon's big visit to West Pakistan. We, however, are in East Pakistan, a thousand miles away from the smoke-filled rooms in Lahore. We're in Dhaka, the largest city and de facto capital of Pakistan's eastern wing. That's D-A-C-C-A Dhaka. All

Although sometimes you'll see it spelled D-H-A-K-A. Back in 1947, when independence from the British had been achieved after many long years of struggle, Dhaka had been a beacon of optimism, where hopes for a brighter future outweighed the humiliations of the past. Euphoric crowds in Dhaka had gathered to celebrate with abandon the first Independence Day, wrote one historian. Visible was a sea of green-colored Pakistani flags with crescent and star.

Festivities included march past and gun salutes. They showed desperately poor people hugging each other, wiping tears from their eyes. At the time of independence, Pakistan was more than a new nation. It was a promise. After all the trauma Bengalis had suffered under British rule, the bigotry, the exploitation, the famines and the poverty, things were going to change. Now that they ruled over themselves, the bad old days were behind them.

But, as you can probably guess, that is not what happened. Two decades after independence, in 1970, the crowds are anything but euphoric. No one is waving green flags anymore, not in Bengal. For them, the star and crescent is nothing but an empty, broken promise.

A lie. 23 years in the telling. The voice you heard a moment ago is the voice of a man named Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Although from this point on, we'll refer to him by his popular nickname, Mujib. That's M-U-J-I-B, Mujib. Like Yahya Khan, Mujib is another very important character in our story. He is the loudest, angriest voice in a place full of loud and angry voices. He is the leader of a new and rapidly growing political movement in East Pakistan. I'm going to be such a tech!

Among Bengalis, Mujib is a giant.

Literally. Standing a full foot taller than the average Bengali, Mujib looms over the podium. He dresses all in white, except for a black vest and a black mustache and a pair of black glasses with lenses a quarter inch thick. As a teenager, Mujib had almost lost his sight to glaucoma, but a risky surgery had been able to save his eyes. And now, at the age of 51, those eyes are wide open to the inequities he sees every day in Pakistan's long-neglected eastern wing.

Like most people in East Pakistan, Mujib is pissed off. And he has a lot to be pissed off about. Now, to understand the root of the unrest in East Pakistan, we have to once again consider the bizarre geography of the country, circa 1970. As Gary J. Bass writes, quote, Pakistan was in those days a country divided. The British, leaving India, had decided to create a single Muslim state in the subcontinent.

To do so, they had to lump together Punjabis, Pashtuns, Balukis, and Sindhis in the northwest, with Bengalis far away in the east. Out of the bloody chaos of partition, Pakistan was born as a cartographic oddity, a unitary state whose two territories did not connect.

The country was, as the novelist Salman Rushdie put it, quote, a fantastic bird of a place, two wings without a body, sundered by the landmass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God. But Islam, writes historian Aisha Jalal, proved to be dubious cement. From the very beginning, writes the academic Nitish Singh Gupta, the people of East Bengal found themselves in a dilemma.

They had become part of Pakistan by giving primacy to their Muslim identity. But culturally, they were very different from the people of what came to be known as West Pakistan. Geographically, East and West Pakistan were about as far from each other as Berlin and Moscow, or

or New York City and Tampa, Florida. But culturally, the Gulf was even wider. As a contemporary journalist from the New York Times commented, It is hard to imagine two races or regions any more different. They speak different languages, Urdu in the West, Bengali in the East, eat different foods, meat and grain in the West, fish and rice in the East, and have almost contradictory cultures. For the Bengalis are volatile.

and love politics and literature, while the Punjabis are more stolid and prefer governing and soldiering.

Granted, those are sweeping, simplistic generalizations from a foreigner, but the differences were indeed stark. West Pakistanis and East Pakistanis looked different, talked different, even worshipped different. It was as if these two incompatible populations had been stuffed into a single t-shirt by a strict mother and told to get along. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had assured his anxious followers that these sharp differences – what he euphemistically called, quote, "angularities"

would eventually smooth themselves out. Jinnah thought that the, quote, humps and bumps of religion, language, and culture, as one historian put it, would simply disappear as Pakistan consolidated itself. In the course of time, Jinnah prophesied, all these angularities of the majority and minority communities will vanish.

But those angularities only cut deeper with every passing year. The truth was, West Pakistanis tended to look down on their countrymen in East Pakistan. As one historian from West Pakistan remembered shamefully, quote, Even as a schoolchild in Karachi of the 1950s, my friends and I somewhat resented calling East Pakistan and West Pakistan by one name, Pakistan.

As a thoughtless young boy, I had felt quite embarrassed about the few short and dark Bengali boys among my schoolmates. "Hey, hey, son of a rickshaw-pooler!" we would taunt one boy, until he burst into tears and then we'd all run away laughing. We knew that all good Muslims and Pakistanis were tall, fair, and speak chaste Urdu. Though I am Sindhi by ethnicity, my value system was thoroughly that of Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis.

Bengalis were stereotyped as fish eaters, which is a somewhat strange kind of slur because we Sindhis are also notoriously fond of fish. My friends and I would double up in laughter at the strange sounding Bangla news broadcast from Radio Pakistan. In our macho world of 14 year olds, they sounded so terribly feminine. To West Pakistanis, Bengalis were not only weak and cowardly, they were Muslims in name only. Their Islam was not real Islam.

It was fake, corrupted, tainted in some way. As Willem van Schindel writes, quote, There was a widespread perception in West Pakistan that Bengali Muslims were not only socially inferior but also lesser Muslims because they did not adhere to many of the cultural practices that northern Indians considered properly Islamic. The message from West Pakistan was that however passionately Bengalis might think of themselves as Muslims, they

They fell short of the mark, and they could not be fully fledged Pakistanis unless they shed much of their Bengali-ness. But it begs the question, what exactly made "Bengali-ness" so offensive to the West Pakistanis?

What was the actual issue? What was the deal? Well, in the words of one historian, Muslim Bengalis had "cultural, linguistic and social affiliations with Hindu Bengalis" and there was a perception that their Islam was "contaminated by its long coexistence with Hindu cultural and social practices." Hindu India, of course, was the great enemy, the arch-nemesis of Pakistan.

the twin that had tried to strangle it in the womb and almost succeeded. In the eyes of West Pakistanis, their cousins in the East were little more than Hindus themselves, a fifth column, or a Trojan horse that could be used and manipulated to undermine the nation. There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis, remembered one American consulate officer in Dhaka.

you'd hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers. But what West Pakistanis hated about Bengalis most of all were their large numbers. In 1947, at the moment of independence, 6 out of 10 people in Pakistan were Bengali, and they were all concentrated in the eastern wing of the country, about 75 million people in a country of 125 million. That meant that East Pakistan had a clear-cut democracy.

unassailable majority, capable of asserting its political will and shaping the nation as it saw fit. Think of Pakistan as two rooms: a very large room and a very small room, far apart but connected by a thin hallway. The large room is West Pakistan,

and the small room is East Pakistan. And if there are 10 people between these rooms, four of them live in the big spacious room and six live in the tiny cramped room. In a representative democracy, these six people in that tiny room can band together and use their vote to affect change.

So when the issue of deciding what Pakistan's national language should be came up on the to-do list, East Pakistanis assumed that it would be the language spoken by most people in Pakistan, Bengali. At the time, 56% of Pakistan's population spoke Bengali. But that was unacceptable to the elites and power brokers in West Pakistan. Pakistan was a Muslim country, a

A true Muslim country, and Bengali, in their estimation, was not a true Muslim language. After all, tens of millions of Hindus spoke Bengali, therefore it could never be the mother tongue of Pakistan.

Ever. Since Bengali is derived from Sanskrit and written in a similar script, it was considered a Hindu language, equated with Hindu culture, writes historian Anam Zakaria. It was an unpopular position that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Qaidi Assam himself, delivered to an angry crowd in Dhaka in 1948. Quote, "'Let me be clear to you that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan.'"

Without one state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the state language is concerned, Pakistan's language shall be Urdu.

Well, Jinnah's case for Urdu seemed shaky at best and insulting at worst. "Pakistani spoke dozens of languages," writes Willem van Schindel, "and Urdu was spoken only by 3% of them." But, as the rationale went, Urdu had closer ties to the Arabic and Persian roots of Islam. Therefore, it was considered a more valid choice for the state language. Of course, it also didn't hurt that it was the preferred language of the Punjabi establishment.

The nation's prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, reiterated Jinnah's proclamation, if in a more mediated tone. Quote,

the language which would be used between the different parts of Pakistan for interprovincial communications. Urdu can be the only language which can keep the people of East Bengal or the Eastern Zone and the people of the Western Zone joined together. It is necessary for a nation to have one language and that language can only be Urdu

and no other language. Well, less than four years later, both Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan were dead, one from tuberculosis and the other from a bullet. But the anger their decision had stoked was very much alive and well. The language issue, writes Nitish Singh Gupta, became a, quote, festering wound. For Bengalis, this was about more than cultural pride. This was about daily life. As a Bengali politician explained in 1948, quote,

Say a poor cultivator, who has got his son as a student in Dhaka University and who wants to send money to him, goes to a village post office and asks for a money order form, then finds that the money order form is printed in Urdu language. He cannot send the money order, but shall have to rush to a distant town and have his money order form translated for him, and then the money order that is necessary for his boy can be sent.

Say a poor cultivator sells a certain plot of land, or purchases a plot of land, and goes to the stamp vendor and pays him money, but cannot say whether he has received the value of the money. The value of the stamp is written not in Bengali, but in Urdu or English. These are the difficulties experienced by the common man of our state. The language of the state should be such which can be understood by the common man of the state.

Well, in February of 1952, only five years after partition and the nation's founding, it all came to a head.

Thousands of angry protesters poured into the streets of Dhaka, enraged at the rejection of their language, their majority, their culture, their very identity. It was as if the central government far away in West Pakistan did not even consider them Pakistanis at all. And with tempers running that hot, violence seemed inevitable. But luckily, the West Pakistani troops and police sent in to contain the protests kept their cool, held their fire, and de-escalated the situation.

Oh, wait, sorry, no they didn't. They actually fired into the crowd. There was blood and screaming and begging, and when the smoke cleared, four college kids were dead. Now back in West Pakistan, four dead students was nothing, a rounding error in the daily briefing. But when those four hearts stopped, millions of Bengali hearts turned against their government forever. It was, writes von Schindel, a quote, defining moment that marked a sharp psychological rupture. For many in the Bengal Delta, it signified the shattering of the dream of Pakistan.

Now when a dog barks, you throw some scraps to shut it up. At least that was the philosophy in West Pakistan, when in 1956 two national languages were finally enshrined. Both Urdu and Bengali, they grudgingly agreed, would be the lingua francae of the land. No poor, confused farmers would have to send money orders in a language they didn't understand. Surely that would satiate the little brown brothers in Bengal.

And it might have. But in the years to come, the dream of Pakistan only became more nightmarish. When it came to Bengal, West Pakistan could not help but squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. It is a known fact that all infant nations need one thing to survive: money. And after partition, Pakistan had precious few sources of that.

Gutted in the subcontinental divorce, they'd lost all the mills, factories, and refineries that could support a healthy economy. But Pakistan did have one last marketable resource, one thing that the world wanted. And it just happened to grow in abundance in the swampy Bengal Delta. "Jute is the most important non-food crop, the principal source of financial income to East Pakistan."

Called the golden fiber of Pakistan, jute is used for sacking and in carpets, linoleum and upholstery. More than three quarters of the world's supply of jute is raised in East Pakistan. Because the nation was left without a jute mill when British India was partitioned, the fiber could not be processed in Pakistan.

Pending the construction of mills, Pakistan exports the raw fiber. Jute, that's J-U-T-E, jute, was the one and only cash crop of Pakistan. But that cash seemed to go to one and only part of Pakistan. And I'll give you a hint, it was not the half that grew it. As Nitish Sengupta writes, quote, East Bengal became poorer, West Pakistan richer.

East Bengal earned much more foreign exchange through its jute, and yet most of it was spent for the Western Wing's development. Of the total foreign aid received by Pakistan, 80% was spent in West Pakistan. The government of Pakistan built considerable infrastructure in West Pakistan, wrote another historian, including roads, schools, universities, and hospitals, while the East remained vastly underdeveloped.

A Pakistani man named Asif, who was a teenager at the time, told a journalist, quote, The East Pakistanis wondered why all that money wasn't being invested in their cities, which had poor infrastructure, bad roads, waterways, airports. They would ask, why are we treated like stepchildren?

And the financial disparity between East and West was most cruelly expressed in one mundane, but evocative little metric. According to a prominent Bengali politician, West Pakistan had 36,200 hospital beds for its people. In the East, there were only 6,900.

And to add insult to injury, unemployment in East Pakistan seemed to climb higher and higher every year, thanks in no small part to West Pakistani business owners' preference for hiring workers that looked and acted like them. One young man remembered the bigotry he saw in his own family's business. Quote,

There was immense unemployment, and this was mostly because the Bengalis were being discriminated against. In my own company, I found that 80% of the people employed were West Pakistanis. My family preferred taking people from there. And I'm not only talking about highly skilled professionals like engineers or doctors, but also carpenters, blacksmiths, laborers, plasterers, and tilemakers.

All this racism, for lack of a better word, took its toll. By the late 1960s, per capita income in the West was almost 40% higher than in the East. Between 1950 and 1970, West Pakistan accounted for 77% of private sector development expenditure, according to Nitish Singh Gupta. A feeling is growing, complained one contemporary Bengali politician, that Eastern Pakistan is being neglected and treated as a colony of West Pakistan.

I mean, the Bengalis were looking around thinking, "Okay, so we're being ruled by a central government very far away that doesn't seem to like us or respect us very much. They exploit our resources, take away our jobs, and funnel the profits to finance their own development." This feels a little familiar. Did we just trade one colonizer for another? The British were bad, sure, but being part of Pakistan doesn't feel all that different.

Is this what self-determination is supposed to look like? Is exploitation by more familiar hands supposed to feel better? When I spoke to Bengali contractors, one Pakistani man remembered, they would say, you know, when the British were here, every decision was taken in London. They had one puppet sitting here, the Viceroy, who would rule the whole subcontinent sitting in Delhi. After partition, not much has changed. All decisions are made in Rawalpindi or Islamabad.

The problem started in 1947 when our language was attacked, our culture was attacked, another Bengali man told a journalist. We realized it was another colonial system after the British. Our money from jute exports was spent in West Pakistan to develop Islamabad. Islamabad should be called Judabad. It was built from the hard work of Bengalis. By the late 1960s, Bengalis had had enough. According to Nitish Singh Gupta, quote,

Slowly but surely, a distinct national identity was evolving among the Bengali Muslims based on their own language and their feeling of being discriminated against by West Pakistan. For most of the people of East Bengal, there was no true freedom, only a change of rulers, from the white men to the rich families and landed aristocracy of West Pakistan, especially of Punjab. The Bengali Muslims, who in their frenzy for a Muslim homeland had struggled hard, did not take long to realize that they had only second-class status in Pakistan.

and that the West Pakistanis gave scant regard for Islam as a binding force between the two wings. A growing disillusionment soon set in among the people. It grew stronger and stronger every passing year. This disillusionment soon turned the people to avowed fighters for their right to self-determination.

At this point, East Pakistanis didn't just want equality, they wanted autonomy. No more taking orders from military dictators in Islamabad. No more working for pennies and begging for scraps. For 20 long years they had been trapped in the tiny room, deferring to a handful of people in the big room. And now they wanted to spruce things up a bit.

to paint the walls, hang some drapes, and crack a window for a little fresh clean air. And they wanted to do it without asking for permission. They wanted to rule themselves for once in 300 years. And this burning, irrepressible need for self-determination coalesced around a single personality in East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the bespectacled political revolutionary we heard a few minutes ago, known to his millions of supporters as Mujib.

Sheikh Mujibar Rahman is the spokesman for East Pakistan, divided from the West by a thousand miles of India, held to the West only by a common Muslim faith. He has come to the talks this week to gain at least a large measure of home rule for the East. If it is not granted, he threatens complete withdrawal from the Union. No West Pakistani politician can rule without his support.

The English author Alan Moore has famously described the act of writing, say a speech or an essay or a political poem, as virtually indistinguishable from magic. It is a method of combining words and symbols, sounds and meaning into precise sequences of conceptual force that can literally change the brainwaves of an audience. Spells, in other words, chains of rhetoric that alter reality and sharpen perceptions.

They can heal or hurt, calm or enrage. And if words are magic, Mujib was a wizard. As one contemporary journalist wrote, quote,

and to arouse and articulate them with resounding eloquence. He had a fantastic ability to relate to crowds. Because of this, his opponents derided him as a rabble-rouser. However that may be, time and circumstance put a high premium on his talent, and at a crucial moment he became the symbol and supreme spokesman of a gigantic human upsurge against discrimination and tyranny.

The U.S. Consul General in East Pakistan, a man named Archer Blood, agreed with that assessment, saying, quote, "...in private meetings he is charming, calm, and confident."

On the rostrum, he is a fiery orator who can mesmerize hundreds of thousands in pouring rain. As a party leader, he is tough and authoritative, often arrogant. Mujib has something of a messianic complex, which has been reinforced by the heady experience of mass adulation. He talks of "my people, my lands, my forests, my rivers." It seems clear that he views himself as the personification of Bengali aspiration. But to Bengalis, Mujib was more than a politician.

He was a savior, a great and eloquent avatar for all the pain and anger and grievance and rage they were feeling. And here's Mujib himself making the case for East Pakistani autonomy in an emotional interview. Naturally, these 23 years you have seen that East Pakistan, particularly Bengal, is nothing but a colonial market. If you want to save debts...

No man in the entire history of the modern world, except Mao, for different reasons, has hypnotized his people as Mujib did.

wrote one historian. So when Pakistan's military dictator and would-be father of democracy, our old bushy-eyebrowed friend Yahya Khan, sat down in front of a microphone and announced that he was organizing national elections, most Bengalis knew exactly who they would be voting for. Election day was set for December 7, 1970. On that day, 56 million registered voters, men and women, would go to the polls.

and over 31 million of them were in East Pakistan. Mujib and his political party, the Awami League, that's A-W-A-M-I, were the number one choice for many of those voters. And the possibilities of a big Awami League win were dizzying. If Mujib's party got enough seats in the National Assembly, they could use their coalition to right the wrongs of the last 20 years. They could force new spending priorities, new infrastructure projects, new worker protections, and anti-discrimination laws. They

They could make life better in East Pakistan. And as election day got closer and closer, Bengalis dared to hope that maybe, just maybe, the winds were shifting in their favor. Unfortunately, the winds were indeed shifting. Out in the Bay of Bengal...

hot air was rushing over open ocean. It evaporated water, pulling currents of vapor high into the atmosphere. Air pressure dropped like a rock, sucking in cold air, feeding on an endless and inexhaustible supply of water. While campaign posters were being painted in Dhaka, a massive once-in-a-century storm was forming, a churning wheel of black clouds and crackling lightning hundreds of miles wide. As Scott Carney and Jason Mickley write, quote,

The vortex cast a wide disk of clouds, spanning almost the entirety of the Bay of Bengal, an expanse of water about the same size as Texas. The swirling storm gathered strength from warm waters and conjured winds that screamed across the sea at 140 miles an hour. The system swirled around a perfectly still eye.

Clouds spun like the hands of a clock turning backward. Yet inside the eye, the winds fell to a whisper. Here, an impenetrable cloud wall touched the sky as it rotated slowly. This gyre fed on the power of the Earth itself, dragging the ocean along its rotation so that the sea formed a gigantic whirlpool, pulling everything toward one ultimate point. Right at the moment when the future seemed brightest for East Pakistan, the Bengal Delta was hit by the deadliest cyclone in modern history.

It's November 11th, 1970. We're in the Bengal Delta, on a tiny island called Manpura. Manpura, write Scott Carney and Jason Micklian, was just one of hundreds of islands clinging to the southern third of East Pakistan. The very last spit of land before the open water of the Bay of Bengal, Manpura was a pencil-shaped splotch of snake-filled mangrove swamps that maxed out at four miles wide and five feet above sea level.

But despite its small size, 50,000 people live on this remote island. Most of them make a living as fishermen, pulling catfish or eel up from the coffee-colored water. It's a difficult occupation, although not a lucrative one. Most people on Manpura are not even dirt poor. Because to be dirt poor, you have to actually have dirt. But despite all the mud and river sludge, Manpura has its charms.

In the fall, you could see huge flocks of migratory birds taking a brief rest in the delta before flying onto China or Nepal. "If only it were that easy," Saman Manpura thought. "If only I could just flap my wings and get the hell out of this boring backwater." But that was certainly what 18-year-old Muhammad Hai was thinking as a red sun dipped beneath the waves on the evening of November 11th. Like most teenagers,

"Hai" wanted to be anywhere but here. Born and raised on Manpura, Hai spent the long, languid days playing soccer with his friends, fishing with his uncles, or cramming for exams at Manpura High School. The latter occupied most of his time. Hai's mom, an official on the local school board, had stressed to him over and over again how important his education was. "Use your brain," she told him. "It's the only way out of here."

Well, Hai certainly had no intention of wasting his life away on a fishing boat in Manpura. His real passion was politics. Far away in the regional capital of Dhaka, crowds were marching and protests were raging. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the man they called Mujib, was the angry spear tip of a movement that would change everything in East Pakistan. An 18-year-old Hai desperately wanted to be a part of it.

As he listened to the fuzzy speeches on the family's shortwave radio, Hai imagined himself marching alongside Mujib himself, casting a vote for the Awami League in the upcoming election and prying power from the snobs in Punjab. And if he studied hard enough, got good enough grades, he could enroll at Dhaka University and be at the beating heart of the movement. Like a Bengali Luke Skywalker, Hai wanted to leave the homestead behind, travel to the center of the universe and fight the good fight.

But until then, he'd have to settle for the thrill of catching carp in a pontoon boat under a clear blue sky.

But today, the sky wasn't blue at all. It was a nauseous shade of green, as if the clouds were about to retch something down on them. When High tied up the boat and returned to his family's house that evening, the ominous signs continued to mount. As he walked through the yard, he noticed the ground itself was spongy and saturated, muddy water bubbled up between his toes. But most unnerving of all, the neighborhood dogs would not stop barking. They were whining and whimpering and howling at the sickly sky.

Hai and the other 50,000 residents of Manpura could do the math. All these signs could only mean one thing: a cyclone was on the way. A big one, by the looks of it. Hai had lived through cyclones before, of course, write Carney and Miklian. One came nearly every year of his life. Usually they made a mess of things, but it wasn't anything a hard day's work couldn't fix. For the Delta Islanders, there was only one thing to do when a cyclone came: huddle up, hunker down, and ride it out.

So Hai tied up the family animals, the cows, the dogs, the goats, and helped his mom make room for the relatives that would be coming over soon. Their two-story, three-bedroom house was one of the larger homes in the area, and it wasn't long before 19 people, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, were crammed into the living room, seeking safety from the storm.

By 10 o'clock that night, it has become clear that this is not a normal cyclone. Water drops are ricocheting off the tin roof like bullets. The wind is so loud, no one can hear themselves pray or cry or think. Salt water is seeping, flowing under the door, submerging toes, then ankles, then calves, then thighs. In a matter of minutes, it's chest-high.

and the ocean is pouring through the downstairs windows. High's uncles put the children on their shoulders, and everyone claws their way up the staircase to the second floor. Outside, write Carney and McLean, the ropes around the cows' necks became nooses. The wind blew so strong that it dragged the cows sideways until they strangled to death.

The waves then pushed the silent, floating beast against the house with sickening thuds. At this point, the electricity is gone. All the lights are out. No one can see anything in the blackness, but they can feel the water rising up, inch by inch. They can feel panicked fingers grasping for stability, or comfort, or both.

Now downstairs, the family Quran is bobbing on the waves like a wet little raft, following them up, up, up the stairs as the water gets higher and higher. At some point, Hai realizes that the high ground is not high enough. 20 feet of water has completely submerged the first and second floor, leaving only 3 feet below the ceiling for them to breathe. If they don't figure something out and fast, everyone in the house is going to die.

As Carney and Mickley write, quote, "Grasping at whatever ideas his mind could conjure, High had a eureka moment. The tallest thing around was their old coconut palm tree, a 50-foot giant that had weathered dozens of cyclones. It was tall and sturdy enough to save everyone, if they could get to it. High yelled his frenzied strategy to the room. He'd climb back up to the roof and jump onto the tree, which was just a couple feet from the house. It was an easy feat under clear skies. From there, he could help the rest of his family follow."

High scrambles up to the roof, takes a deep breath, and trying not to imagine what will happen if he falls, flings himself across empty air towards the palm tree. His body slams into the trunk and he wraps his arms around it. "I made it!" High yells back at the roof. He can't see anything, he can't hear anything, but he knows that one by one, his nineteen family members will be making the short jump to safety. His mom, his brother, his uncles, his cousins, they're all gonna be safe.

"For the next hour," write Carney and McLian, "Hi held on to the violently swaying palm, grinding his forearm flesh into the bark. He held on while the winds tattered and then ripped the clothes off his body. He held on, bleeding from his arms and legs, though his exhausted muscles begged to give up. He held on through the howling darkness." And after what seemed like hours, days, weeks, years, the storm finally dies down. The wind subsides and the air is still, and through the muscle spasms and a haze of adrenaline,

High looks down. He is all alone on the palm tree. When he paddles back to the roof of his house, High discovers the awful truth. All 19 of his family members are gone. No one made it out of the house. Not his mom, not his brother, not his cousins. They're all just floating, clumped together in a silent gray pile like human driftwood.

Stripped naked by the storm, exhausted, physically and emotionally numb, High does the only thing he can think to do. He starts digging in the mud with his hands until he's made a large, shallow hole. One down, eighteen to go.

Hai's story, horrific as it is, was only a fragment of the devastation inflicted on East Pakistan on the night of November 12th, 1970. One little dot of tragedy in a pointillist nightmare. The Great Bhola Cyclone, as it was called, came and went in a matter of hours.

Deprived of its main source of energy, warm ocean water, the storm disintegrated over the delta. By daybreak, the water retreated into the sea, like someone had pulled a plug out of a giant bathtub, write Carney and Miklian. But the pain it left behind was not so easily forgotten. Bengal had weathered many cyclones in its long, meteorologically unfortunate history, but the storm of 1970 was the worst in living memory. Possibly the worst in historical memory.

It was as if the cyclone had been designed in a lab to maximize its destructive effect. All the wrong things happened at exactly the right time, as Carney and Mickley and Wright quote,

Bola made landfall at high tide during a full moon, two events that dragged water upward and inward to land. This amplified the storm surge. A tidal wave over 30 feet high, lashed by cyclonic winds of 120 miles per hour, wrecked five of East Pakistan's coastal districts, explains writer Faisal Khosa. It was called the worst natural catastrophe in modern history. Casualties were estimated to be between 200,000 and half a million.

More pictures from the ravaged areas of East Pakistan. Pictures which bring home to us all the extent of this overwhelming tragedy. The wonder is that anything survived a flood of such biblical proportions. Areas as big as Scotland have become vast graveyards. Many carcasses will have to remain unburied for weeks to come. Day by day, the stench, the disease and the contamination increase.

As foreign relief workers ventured into the area to assess the damage, what they found shocked many into silence. As one volunteer remembered, quote,

The smell came first, then the tops of coconut palms floating on tiny stalks above the placid bay, and at last the low mudbank with its horrendous burden of decaying bodies. I had to run the dinghy down the coast for over a mile before I could find a spot to land without stepping on one of the luckless victims of the cyclone. I scrambled up the slippery bank, nearly retching, and stood on a dirt mound that only last week had been a home. There before me was a beautiful, golden, flattened, and utterly desolate land.

Silence. No crows cackle, no cows rumble, no palm leaves rustle. It is as if all life has been snuffed out. The people who had survived, like Muhammad Hai, were in very bad shape. As one volunteer physician remembered, quote,

The major problem we faced was palm tree syndrome, the severe laceration of flesh on the chest, inner arms, and thighs from clinging to the coarse tops of palms through the hours of battering by the voracious sea. There were amazingly few health problems in the survivors, for the young and old, the weak and infirm,

were washed away first. Sinuwee men sobbed as they recounted the loss of their entire families. One by one picked off the treetops and swallowed in the maelstrom. For many survivors, the worst wounds were invisible. As a man named Abdul told a journalist, quote, "'I am the only one left. "'The world was black and the wind was wild, "'so wild that everything flew around us. "'I clung to the trunk as tightly as I could. "'My arms ached terribly. "'I could hardly feel them "'because the rain was cold and stung me.'

I tried to hold my son against my chest with my arm around him, but the wind became so fierce I couldn't hang on to him anymore, and he slipped out of my grip. I could still see my wife and baby on the tree next to me, but the water kept rising around us. It grew higher than the palm tree she was clinging to. It crashed over the tree with dreadful force, and she swept right past me. I could hear her shrieking, and I could do nothing.

Though the international community was quick to respond to the immensity of the tragedy. Supply trucks from India, British soldiers from Singapore, American expats from Dhaka. A small army of bleeding hearts marched into the delta to distribute food, water, and basic necessities. But there was one source of help that was conspicuously absent from the parade of altruism. The Pakistani government itself. Pakistan President Yahya Khan has rejected the criticism that West Pakistan didn't do enough soon enough.

Aid has been pouring in from all over the world, but there are still many places where none has yet arrived. Survivors were lighting bonfires to signal their desperate needs. Hundreds of thousands are known to be dead or missing, but those who survived should be starving is nothing short of scandalous.

After the natural disaster, writes Gary J. Bass, came the man-made disaster. Help from the Pakistani government was slow to arrive in East Pakistan. As New York Times journalist Sidney Schoenberg reported at the time, quote, survivors lived through that grim first week drinking polluted water, clawing rice out of the mud, finding an occasional coconut whose milk and white meat they carefully divided,

And sometimes, when their bellies were so empty they were in pain, eating the roots of banana trees. No national mobilization was visible, and there was no government commitment on the scale that was necessary. Even for an undeveloped country with limited human and technical resources, the effort seemed deficient.

It was yet another infuriating example of how deeply the government far away in West Pakistan had failed them, how little they cared. Of course, President Yahya Khan resented the insinuation that his government was not doing enough to help the Little Brown Brothers in East Pakistan. As he explained in a press conference two weeks after the cyclone, "The resources that my country has, within the capacity and capability that my people have, everything

possible has been done is being done and will be done. It's not ideal, but I would like to know a country which can achieve an ideal. A government can do a lot of things, Yaya was saying, but it cannot stop an act of God. Yes, it was very sad. Yes, his heart wept for the poor, unfortunate people in Bengal, but life goes on, okay? Cut me some slack. People died. Not my fault. My fault would begin to take shape when I...

do nothing for the survivors. And to that extent, towards that end, I explained to you that I and my government have done that candice to see that the survivors survived.

Back in East Pakistan, Yahya's performative pity fell flat. When it did eventually come, relief from the Pakistani government tended to cause more chaos than it solved. Military helicopters delivered supplies to the survivors with all the compassion of a zookeeper tossing meat into a cage. As Carney and Mickley write in this anecdote about a supply drop, quote, "...the helicopter crew pushed out three tiny specks and zipped away."

Everyone tried to figure out which speck they could be closest to when it landed. The crowd dispersed into three groups and the specks got bigger, slowly then quickly. The 50-pound rice bags slammed into the earth at terminal velocity, 120 miles per hour. Two landed on hungry men, killing both instantly. The helicopter was long gone.

The police rushed in, ignoring the bodies they commandeered the bag that didn't kill anyone, saying it was official government property. Well, Yahya did eventually make it out to East Pakistan for a photo op, but it rang false and insincere. As Sidney Schoenberg remembered, quote, There were still bodies floating in inland rivers, mass graves being dug with backhoes, everyone wearing masks because of the smell, throwing lime on it. And he was walking through with polished boots and a walking stick with a gold knob.

These people didn't have gold anything. We asked a couple of questions, and he brushed us off with blah blah."

then went home. And to add insult to injury, Yahya spoke to the despondent crowds in Urdu, a language which most of them did not even speak. For the people of East Pakistan, it was all too little, too late. The army does not care for us, one farmer said. Where were they in our time of need? Now they come, after 21 days. Even American diplomats in Dhaka noted the tepid response from West Pakistan. As one remembered, quote, it was almost as if they just didn't care.

In the weeks following the cyclone, the misery in East Pakistan calcified into a raw, red anger that could not be assuaged by blankets and bags of rice. Dying from an act of God was one thing, write Carney and Mickleyan. Death from a government's callous and willful incompetence was something different. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman,

Mujib could barely contain his incandescence at the scale of West Pakistan's failure. The depth of their apathy went beyond insult. It was all but a war on East Pakistan's people, a bureaucratic offensive of inaction and casual contempt, what Mujib called, quote, criminal negligence. The rift between the two wings had grown so great, remembered one American diplomat, that any display of real empathy between East and West Pakistan was no longer possible.

The two ears of the elephant had grown deaf to one another. In Mujib's words, the response to the cyclone had revealed, "...the basic truth that every Bengali has felt in his bones, that we have been treated so long as a colony and a market. We must attain full regional autonomy."

But how? How could East Pakistan possibly hope to assert itself with the deck so stacked against it? Half a million people were dead, and millions more were starving. The storm had taken everything from them. Their homes, their families, their livelihoods. But they did have one thing left. One last precious possession that not even a cyclone could rip away.

Their right to vote. The big national election, the political contest that would decide the future of Pakistan, was only a few weeks away. On December 7th, 1970, 50 million people would go to the polls and vent 23 years of pent-up frustration and rage.

The fate of the state of Pakistan depended entirely upon the upcoming general elections, writes Faisal Khosa, where it would be decided at last exactly what the position of Bengalis was in Pakistani society.

Well, folks, that is all the time we have for today. Normally, I try to keep the first episode in a new series relatively short, but there was so much ground to cover today and so much political nuance to parse through that this one had to be a little bit longer. So thanks for sticking with me. Next time, in part two, we'll see what happens on Pakistan's big election day and how the drama it sparked would eventually culminate in a full-blown civil war. We'll also expand our cast a bit and meet some new faces who will have a big impact on the events to come.

So, as always, thanks for spending your valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day. This has been Conflicted. I'll see you next time. I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.