Bangladesh

A country that seceded from the state it had helped create, over language before politics. East Bengal became East Pakistan in 1947 on the strength of a Muslim majority, and within a year the central government declared Urdu the sole national language of a country where most people spoke Bengali; students shot dead at Dhaka in February 1952 during the language movement are commemorated by Unesco as International Mother Language Day. The east held the larger population, produced the jute that earned much of the foreign exchange, and received a fraction of the spending. When the Awami League won an outright national majority in 1970, weeks after a cyclone that killed several hundred thousand people and drew a visibly inadequate response, the army moved instead of transferring power. The war of 1971 involved mass killing and rape on a scale still disputed in numbers but not in kind, ten million refugees into India, and Indian intervention that ended it in twelve days. Independence came in December 1971. Garment manufacturing now employs millions, mostly women, and the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 killed over eleven hundred. Grameen Bank's microcredit model won a Nobel prize. The delta is acutely exposed to rising seas. The country has about 173 million people in a hundred and forty-eight thousand square kilometres, among the densest populations on earth. It sits on the world's largest river delta, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra meet. The Sundarbans mangrove forest holds the largest tiger population in the region. Bengali is spoken by almost everyone. It hosts around a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

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