An Analyis of the of Poisition of the Bangalis Under Pakistani Rule in the 1950s
The Muslim League, the first ruling party of Pakistan, lacked a mass base. The Muslim League came into power in Pakistan after having succeeded in dividing the subcontinent into two, following the departure of British. The central government of the state of Pakistan was set up in the Western wing of the state primarily because most of the upper class of "Musalman" aristocrats migrated to the western wing. The fundamental difficulties facing the Pakistani ruling class were: one, to construct a viable polity, and two, to integrate the various nationalities into this bizarre state, separated into two wings.
Throughout the history of Pakistan, the province of East Bengal had a greater population than all the other provinces of Pakistan combined, as the following table shows:
The central state apparatus, the military and the civil service, was dominated by the Muslim immigrants from North India and by the Punjabis. The North Indian Muslims were involved in the British administration in Delhi. Hence, they dominated the civilian administration in Pakistan. The Punjab had served as the garrison of the British Indian Army. Hence, the Punjabis dominated the military in Pakistan.
The Muslim League decided to make Urdu the sole state language of Pakistan, although only 3 per cent of the population of Pakistan spoke Urdu and over 56 per cent spoke Bangla. Since Urdu was the language of the dominant class in Pakistan and hence the language of upper echelons of the Muslim League leadership, the ruling party decided that Urdu was to be the sole state language of Pakistan. The explanation provided by the Pakistani ruling elite was that, since Urdu had more similarity with Arabic and Persian, it was a more "Islamic" language and since Bangla was derived from pre-existing Indian languages, primarily Sanskrit, it was a "Hindu" language.
The Pakistani ruling elite's language proposal did not meet any organized and serious challenge in the Western wing because the languages of West Pakistanis had an affinity in nature, structure, and vocabulary with Urdu. However, for Bangalis, Urdu was an alien and unrelated language. Thus, the Bangali intelligentsia and political leadership proposed that both Urdu and Bangla be declared as the state languages. On March 11, 1948 a province-wide strike was held to protest the central government's chauvinist policy of rejecting the language of the majority of the people as unfit to be a state language.Student demonstrations took place all across East Bengal. In his first trip to East Bengal on March 21, 1948 at Dhaka (then Dacca) the Governor-General "Quaid-I-Azam" (literally, the Great Leader) Jinnah declared (in English!):
"Let me make it 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...so far as the State Language is concerned Pakistan's language shall be Urdu."
The Bangalis did not accept Jinnah's claim and continued their resistance to the imposition of Urdu language. Subsequent attempts by the Pakistani rulers to replace Bangla script, first with Arabic scripts, and later with Roman scripts, failed due to the public outcry and popular mobilization led by the students and the intellectuals, supported by the middle class and by some sections of the workers and the peasants.
The protests on the language issue culminated on February 21, 1952, when police fired on a student demonstration and killed several students and bystanders. Politically, the killings led to the formation of the United Front. The killings also led to the emergence of a new literary and cultural tradition of protests and secularism among the Bangali bourgeoisie. The cultural tradition that arose was "sigh of oppressed" against Pakistani elite's use of religious nationalism. We cannot underestimate the importance of this event in emergence of the Bangali nationalism. The Bangalis viewed the Pakistani elite's attempt to impose Urdu as the state language as a design to prevent them from full participation in the state rule. Hence, the death of students while protesting the language policy became an event to rally public support for the Bangali cause. This day was, and still is, celebrated by Bangalis as Eukushey February (martyr's day on February 21). Indeed, this event has become ingrained in the Bangali national political consciousness.
Meanwhile, the economic colonization and the expropriation of wealth of East Bengal by the West Pakistani ruling elite had already begun. East Bengal was the world's largest producer of raw jute (a fiber), which was Pakistan's main foreign exchange earner. The foreign trade statistics in its first decade for Pakistan were as follows:
Foreign Trade Figures (millions of rupees) While East Bengal was earning a larger share of Pakistan's exports, West Pakistan had the greater share in imports of consumer goods, industrial machineries, and raw materials. Thus, the embryonic nature of exploitative relation was formulated in early the days of Pakistan. The inter-wing trade policy was designed to allow the West Pakistani manufacturing sector to dispose its commodities in East Bengal at a price higher than world market. In spite of rhetoric of the "national unity," the export earnings of East Bengal were being used to finance the development of Karachi, the major commercial city of West Pakistan, and the Punjab, the dominant province of West Pakistan.
In financial year 1948-49, the allocation for provincial development expenditure was as the following table indicates:
| Province | Amount Allocated (millions rps) |
| East Bengal | 40 |
| Punjab | 50 |
| Sind | 25 |
| NWFP | 5 |
As the above table shows, the Pakistani ruling elite was interested more in the development of provinces of West Pakistan, though the majority of the country's population lived in East Bengal.
Up to 1951, total expenditure on development projects of Pakistan was 1,126 million Rs., out of which only 28 million was for East Bengal (1986, 20). The Pakistani ruling elite, instead of remedying inequities that existed between the development of productive forces of the two wings, chose an economic policy that benefited the interests of West Pakistan based manufacturing sector that sold its commodities in East Bengal. Later, I will examine the intensification of the economic exploitation of East Bengal during the era of the military regime.
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