Sayed Anwar | Dr. Muhammad Akram Zaheer
Pakistan is set to celebrate its Independence Day on 14 August, marking 79 years since the country emerged from the partition of British India, with a heavy heart over the legacy of 1971 but with renewed possibilities ahead.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, in a 2024 speech in Indian Lok Sabha, said that Indira Gandhi never bent to Washington, that she “divided Pakistan into two parts and created Bangladesh.” The sequence deserves more attention than it has received in Dhaka or Islamabad. Division came first. Creation came second. For fifty years the subcontinent has been taught that 1971 was a rescue mission, that India bled for Bengali freedom out of moral conviction. Congress’s own commemorative language, repeated in Parliament and on social media this year, tells a plainer story. The goal was to break Pakistan. Bangladesh’s independence was the instrument, not the purpose.
This is not a call to relitigate the Liberation War or diminish the sacrifice of Bengalis who paid for their freedom with their lives. It is a call to stop outsourcing the memory of that war to New Delhi’s script. Every time an Indian politician boasts of having split Pakistan, Dhaka should hear it for what it is: an admission that Bangladesh’s birth was, from India’s chair, a strategic amputation of a regional rival, dressed up afterward as an act of charity. Bengalis fought for their own liberty. India saw an opening to cut its rival in half and took it, then spent fifty years insisting the second motive was the only one. Both Dhaka and Islamabad have paid the price for believing that story, because it kept them looking at each other through India’s frame instead of their own.
Pakistan and Bangladesh share a birth certificate. In 1947, Bengali Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League and for a homeland built on faith, not language or geography. That union came apart within a generation, weakened by an unequal distribution of power between the two wings, by the delay in recognizing Bengali as a state language, and by the political deadlock that followed the Awami League’s outright victory in the 1970 election. The 1971 war was tragic for everyone caught in it, Bengali and non-Bengali alike, and it remains a wound that both nations still carry in different ways. But the war’s end did not have to mean the end of the relationship. It produced two neighbors with a shared origin and, for decades, a shared reluctance to move past it.
Pakistan recognized Bangladesh in 1974, under the shadow of the Simla Agreement and the Delhi Tripartite Accord, and diplomatic ties resumed. Relations moved in cycles ever since, warmer when Dhaka’s government leaned nationalist, colder when it leaned toward New Delhi. Ziaur Rahman and later Khaleda Zia’s BNP treated Islamabad as a natural counterweight to Indian dominance. Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, by contrast, built its legitimacy on a version of 1971 that required permanent distance from Pakistan and permanent gratitude toward India. Fifteen years of her uninterrupted rule froze the relationship into near irrelevance, even as trade, defense cooperation, and people-to-people contact withered.
What is striking is how much both countries have thrown away in the process, not through malice but through inertia. Call them superstitions, because that is what they have become: inherited habits repeated without fresh scrutiny, treated as permanent facts of geopolitics rather than choices that can be unmade.
Bangladesh, for years, let its education system teach a single-lens history of the region that left little room for a mature, forward-looking relationship with Islamabad, even as it built extensive trade and connectivity with India despite the shorter, more natural maritime and air routes to Karachi and beyond. Dhaka slow-walked visa processing for Pakistani businessmen and academics long after 1971 had ceased to be an urgent security question. Pakistan, for its part, allowed Bangladesh to slip to the margins of its foreign policy, consumed as it was by Kashmir and the Indian border, and rarely invested the diplomatic energy a market of a hundred and seventy million people deserved. Islamabad’s textile and garment sectors compete directly with Bangladesh’s in Western markets instead of exploring the obvious complementarities in yarn, fabric, and finished goods that could benefit both. Neither government treated the stranded Biharis and their mirror population in Pakistan as a solvable humanitarian file; both let roughly three hundred thousand people on each side sit in legal limbo for decades, citizens of nowhere in practice, because resolving it required political will neither side wanted to spend. Reparations and formal acknowledgment of the past have been raised and shelved by successive governments, tied to a disputed accounting of pre-1971 assets that both sides have let gather dust rather than negotiate, when a joint commission could have settled it years ago.
None of this was inevitable. What kept it frozen was political psychology, particularly inside Bangladesh, where the Awami League’s legitimacy depended on permanent hostility toward Pakistan. To normalise relations with Islamabad was, for that party, to undercut its own founding myth. Opposition forces sometimes overcorrected into an uncritical nostalgia for Pakistan that ignored real, unresolved grievances. Both instincts served domestic politics far more than they served the Bangladeshi or Pakistani people, and both ignored the strategic logic sitting in plain sight: two Muslim-majority states, wary of the same regional hegemon, with complementary economies and a shared interest in containing extremist ideology, chose suspicion over cooperation for half a century.
Strip away the party politics and the fraternity is still visible. Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslims share liturgical rhythm, culinary instinct, a common devotion to cricket that turns into genuine warmth whenever the two teams meet, and a folk memory of solidarity that predates any of the twentieth century’s borders. Pakistani students still discuss Nazrul and Tagore. Bangladeshi households still cook biryani with the same reverence as any Lahori kitchen. This is not manufactured sentiment. It survived fifty years of state-level coldness because it never depended on the state to begin with.
Sheikh Hasina’s fall in August 2024 cracked open a door that had been welded shut for a decade and a half. The former interim government under Muhammad Yunus has visibly warmed toward Islamabad: direct flights resumed, visa restrictions eased, trade delegations exchanged, and quiet security consultations begun on shared concerns, from India’s regional dominance to the containment of extremist ideology, including the Taliban’s ideological pull, that neither Dhaka nor Islamabad wants spreading unchecked within their own borders.
Both governments should jointly resolve the stranded-persons question through expedited citizenship, not further study. Trade and direct connectivity should expand without waiting for a full political reconciliation to be declared first. A joint commission on reparations and the record of 1971 would remove a psychological weight that has hung over three generations, and would cost both sides less than another fifty years of silence. Both sides should resist the temptation to let this rapprochement be read, or driven, as an anti-India project. It should stand on its own logic of shared interest, not on spite toward a third country. Neither Dhaka nor Islamabad should allow domestic politics to hold the relationship hostage again, the way narrow political interests did for much of the last five decades. And it may be the time for Islamabad and Dhaka to stop allowing the wounds of the past to define the possibilities of the future.
