ISAS Working Papers

The year 1971 witnessed a major redrawing of the map of South Asia. It saw the emergence of a new nation, which a few decades down the line became the world’s sixth largest country in terms of population, the third largest Muslim State, a democracy, albeit a volatile one: Bangladesh. It was a bipolar world in those Cold War days, with two preponderantly dominant superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. After years of perceived exploitation by Pakistan of its eastern wing, East Pakistan, a rebellion, or a ‘struggle for liberation’ as the latter liked to call it, had flared up, with initially tacit and later overt support from the regional pre-eminent power, India. It obtained the backing of the Soviet Union. Pakistan, led by its military ruler, President Yahya Khan, a General, endeavoured to suppress the uprising which eventually led it into a war with India. The ‘Bangladesh Movement’ was being led by the Awami League (which had massively won the 1970 elections but was being denied transfer of power by a combination of Yahya and the Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), whose head Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was incarcerated in Pakistani prison. Despite many predictions, its superpower ally the United States did not come down in its support unlike India’s superpower ally the Soviet Union.