East Pakistan

The more populous half of a country separated from the other half by sixteen hundred kilometres of India, which seceded after being denied an election it had won. Partition in 1947 created Pakistan out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India, which meant two wings with nothing in common but religion - different languages, dress, diet and history - and the eastern wing, Bengali-speaking, held slightly more than half the total population while the army, the bureaucracy and the capital were in the west. The first quarrel was linguistic: the government declared Urdu the sole national language, and police shot protesting students in Dhaka in 1952, an event Bangladesh commemorates and UNESCO now marks worldwide as International Mother Language Day. Economic transfers ran west. A cyclone in November 1970 killed several hundred thousand people and the federal response was widely seen as indifferent. In the election weeks later the Awami League won an outright majority of the national assembly on eastern seats alone, and the military refused to convene it. The army launched Operation Searchlight in March 1971. The killing that followed is recognised in Bangladesh as genocide, with estimates from several hundred thousand to three million dead and hundreds of thousands of women raped. Ten million refugees crossed into India. India intervened in December and the Pakistani army surrendered in Dhaka. Bangladesh became independent after nine months of war. The province existed from 1955 to 1971 with Dhaka as its capital. It held around 75 million people on a tenth of Pakistan's land area. Jute from the delta was the country's largest export earner. Bangladesh now has around 170 million people.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history