Causes of the Separation of East Pakistan: A Dissection under the Federal Paradigm

Abstract

The history of freedom movement in Bengal revealed that the Bengali Muslims were neither willing to be dominated by Hindus nor did they like to share power with Muslims of other regions of India. Furthermore, they disliked the domination of Indian affairs by other provinces; they also complained about the domination of the All-India Muslim League by the non-Bengalis and their interference in the local politics of Bengal. Nevertheless, the 1947 Pakistan comprising two separate wings having only one thing in common, i.e. Islam against many other odds, certainly had a chance of establishing a viable political system, evolving a single statehood turning ultimately to a broad-based common nationhood. Various scholars suggest that the federal solution alone was best suited to the needs of the different provinces of Pakistan and could weld them into a viable and workable nation state since a common nationhood could spring from a federal system operated with care, consideration and full thought in mutual agreement among the federating units. Against that backdrop, the current work examines the causes of the separation of East Pakistan in 1971 while considering the viewpoint of Muslim leadership from United Bengal, the events and developments took place in Pakistan after partition and applying some of the key theoretical aspects of system approach under the framework of federalism and regional autonomy. It concludes that the failure to apply a federal solution properly to the constitutional and political problems of Pakistan was responsible for the events of 1971 and its consequent dismemberment. The study suggests that the resentment and unrest in the smaller provinces (except Punjab) of the present day Pakistan is again caused by an authoritarian rule of civil-military bureaucracy which can be addressed by evolving and implementing a refined and improvised formula of power-sharing among all the constituting units of Pakistan.