The ancient civilisational region beyond the Indus River was variously known as the Indos, the Indian land and al-Hind to the Persians and Greeks. By the time of the Mughal Empire, the subcontinent had become India for the Europeans. When the British subjugated the land, they retained the English name. The political unit that Article 1 of the Indian Constitution calls “India, that is Bharat”, was carved out of a civilisational entity almost as old as human history.

With his much-acclaimed “A tryst with destiny” speech on August 15, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared independence. The process of self-rule began with the Government of India Act 1919. It was almost concluded with the Indian Independence Act 1947, that decided to create two independent dominions India and Pakistan.

Premier Nehru unfurled the Tricolour at Roshanara Bagh and proclaimed himself the “Pratham sevak.” In his desire to be like Nehru, Prime Minister Narendra Modi prefers to present himself as the “Pradhan sevak” and loves to project a similar image. With his Independence Day address on August 15, 2024, Modi will match the record of his glamorous idol Nehru and the authoritarian ideal Indira Gandhi.

It was not practical for Lord Mountbatten to be present simultaneously for handing over ceremonies in cities as far apart as Karachi and New Delhi. He first travelled to Karachi to transfer power to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Pakistan became an independent country on August 14, 1947. It is said that Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah was so jubilant that he hosted a lunch for Lord Mountbatten when many Muslims of the newly created Islamic country were observing Ramzan fast.

The paradox of pre-1971 Pakistan was that its most populous flank in Bengal never got its due share in the power structure. The All-India Muslim League (AIML) was conceptualised in 1906 at the initiative of the Khwaja Salimullah Bahadur, the Nawab of Dhaka. The amalgamation of two distant territories with their different cultures within one union, based purely on shared religion, must have appeared incongruous even to the founders of Pakistan.

The poet and philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal tried to encapsulate the idea of an independent Islamic country in South Asia in the early 1930s. The portmanteau that he came up with had five components—Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan—but Bengal was conspicuous by its absence from the imagination of Pakistan, the holy territory of and for Muslims.

It is possible to argue that had Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Prime Minister of Bengal in 1946-47, shown some foresight and tenacity, his United Bengal Scheme could have succeeded. He succumbed to the pressure of religious fanatics and is mostly remembered for taking Pakistan firmly into the Western alliances of Cold War, such as the Baghdad Pact and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, as its Prime Minister in 1956-57. It took almost a quarter of a century for his mentee in the Awami League, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to win the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 at the cost of nearly 3 million lives lost in its struggle against the genocidal campaigns of the Pakistani Army.

Intense antecedents

The British first divided Bengal into several governance units and then created a united Bengali province in 1911 after further reorganisation. The economic and cultural elite of Bengal were predominantly Hindus. They chose the relatively cosmopolitan Calcutta to reside, and large parts outside of Dhaka in the eastern region remained rural and impoverished. The seeds of self-rule for Bengal had been sown in the minds of an emergent middle class in the early 20th century. The AIML succeeded in deflecting popular aspirations towards Muslim emancipation.

Perhaps it’s fatalism that makes South Asians overlook their tragedies and the forgotten disaster of the Bengal Famine during World War II remains to be well documented. Conservative estimates of death due to hunger and deprivation stand between 3 to 5 million, most of it in the eastern part of the province. When told about the catastrophe brought about by colonial policies of denial and neglect, Churchill is reported to have blamed the victims for “breeding like rabbits”. Little wonder, the stirring call of Bengali Subhas Chandra Bose—"Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom”—starkly contrasted to the pacifist exhortations of Gujrati Mahatma Gandhi.

Once the British decided to leave India, behind-the-scenes manoeuvring between the princely states that wanted to become independent rulers, the Indian National Congress that desired to be the inheritors of the outgoing Empire, and the Muslim League that refused to accept anything less than a separate state ensued. Perhaps what forced everyone’s hand to accept the inevitability of partition was the gruesome violence in the month of Ramzan in 1946.

Responding to Jinnah’s call for the Direct Action Day on August 16, almost entire Bengal and parts of Bihar erupted into brutal confrontations between Hindus and Muslims. Estimates of casualties vary from 5,000 to 20,000 deaths and an unaccounted number of injured. After the Bihar Massacre of 1946, Bihari and Bengali Muslims, along with the Sikhs of Punjab, became some of the biggest losers of power games played out in New Delhi.

Violent upheavals

The colonial attitude of West Pakistan towards its eastern wing—the imposition of Urdu as its national language, the vicious suppression of the Bengali language movement in the 1950s and the neglect of devastation wrought by Cyclone Bhola in 1970—forced Bengalis of East Pakistan envisage an independent future despite its attendant uncertainties in the geopolitical reality of South Asia. Atrocities committed by the Pakistani Army under the “Butcher of Bengal”, Gen. Tikka Khan, left them no choice but to organise, resist and fight for freedom.

At its independence in 1971, Bangladeshis had nothing except a dream and the song of Rabindranath Tagore Amar Sonar Bangla on their lips. It was audacious for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to sell the vision that an independent country based on the ideals of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism could be built from the ruins of a land repeatedly ravaged by the British and Pakistani oppressors.

It’s easy to decry the totalitarian ambitions expressed through instruments such as the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini and later the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (Baksal), but Bangabandhu perhaps deserves the benefit of doubt in the light of forces that were constantly conspiring against him. The Bangladesh military succeeded in eliminating his entire family, save his two daughters—Sheikh Hasina and Rehana—who happened to be abroad on the night of August 15, 1971.

Another August in 2024, another uprising, and yet another regime change in Dhaka through means that constitutionalist BR Ambedkar had called the “Grammar of Anarchy” and the future of the “Sonar Bangla” dream still hangs in the balance.

Prayers for the “second liberation” of Bangladesh that has begun with the defilement of memorials of its founding father and targeted violence against Hindu minorities and supporters of the Awami League.

Independence Day greetings to Pakistan and India. May Islamabad mature out of its infantile addiction to hybrid regimes. May New Delhi revive the Nehruvian idea of secular India. And may the civilisational twins of August 1947 grow out of their founding enmities.