East Pakistan was constitutionally part of Pakistan, not a formal colony.

The Receipts

1. Self–Determination in International Law: The Tragic Tale of Two Cities–Islamabad (West Pakistan) and Dacca (East Pakistan) *

   cambridge.org·Mar 28, 2017

2. 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh

   ku.ac.bd·Jan 1, 2013

3. War, 1971

   idsa.in·Oct 1, 2021

4. The Independence of Bangladesh in 1971

   nationalarchives.gov.uk

5. Bangladesh And Pakistan: The Great Divergence (PIDE Knowledge Brief No. 16:2020)

   pide.org.pk·Sep 24, 2020

6. The Historic Seventh March Speech of Bangabandhu: Its Influence on International Legal Discourse and Reform | The Daily Star

   thedailystar.net·Mar 8, 2021

7. Intimation of Revolution

   cambridge.org·Feb 21, 2023

8. Introduction Recovering a ‘united’ Pakistan Writing in 2023, the Cambridgeeminent historian Joya Chatterji noted that at independence in 194,7 it was not ‘clear where exactly East Bengal fitted into the emerging Pakistani national imaginary.’ 1 This question has bogged down most assessments of a ‘united’ Pakistan between 1947 and 1971, after whichwhen East Pakistan became Bangladesh inafter a bloody civil war. From the vantage point of 1971, the inclusion of East Bengal and Sylhet (a district of Assam province) in a Pakistan whosewhere the other part, or ‘wing’ as it was called, was separated by over a thousand miles of enemy territory, has always seemed to foretell the inevitable misplaced and disjoined, with the death of a united Pakistan almost foretold. This has led to a tendency of only highlighting the elements—political, social and economic elements, which led to the vivisection of the country’s destruction, while ignoring how itthe country actually functioned as one for nearly a quarter of a century. Similarly, until very recently in modern day Bangladesh, and some other academic writing, the period betweenof 1947 and - 1971 has been seen solely as being a preparatory time for ‘national liberation’ in 1971, sideling all other issues and developments. For example, Bangladeshi scholar Badruddin Umar, writing abouton the period 1947-58, even titleds his book ‘The Emergence of Bangladesh,’ seeing the history of a united Pakistan period in a completely teleological waythrough this singular lens. 2 Arguing for the inevitability of civil warseparation he writes that many factors, ‘ from the very beginning, decided the course of political developments which logically and inevitably led to the disintegration and partition of Pakistan.’ Similarly, Raunaq Jahan, writing about the years betweenon the period 1958 and 19-69, of Pakistan sees examines the periodit manifestingas ‘the gradual process of east-west disintegration in Pakistan that resulted in 1971 in the breakup of Pakistan.’ 4 This tendency has been so strong that Bangaldeshi scholar Taj Hashmi has even argued that the period between 1920 and -1947 was a also a ‘prelude to the history of the freedom struggle that eventually led to the creation of Bangladesh.’ Even non-Bangladeshi scholars often see this period in strongly teleological termsthrough such a prism. Thus, writing more recently, in 2011, Anatol Lieven also remarked that ‘no freak of history like united Pakistan with its two ethnically and culturally very different wings separated by 1,000 miles of hostile India, could possibly have lasted for long.’ 6 The inescapabilty of the east-west Pakistan split has even entered the realm of fiction with author Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame imagery of Pakistan as ‘that fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God.’ Yet, neither was Pakistan was not doomed from the start, nor and Bangladesh inevitable. Many scholars, writing in the period before 1970, wrote about Pakistan’s problems, but by no means did they pronounced the death knell of the new country. In those years, Pakistan was seen as dealing with problems that were common to many new states. Indeed, writing in 1957, American political scientist Keith Callard, who had long worked on Pakistan, remarked that despite its myriad of problems, ‘Pakistanis are a people united by a common will to be a nation…’ but, as isn common with many post-colonial states, ‘… they do not yet know what kind of nation they want to be.’ 8 If anything, it was India that was widely understood as being more threatened by linguistic nationalism in the South and secessionism in Kashmir and the North-East. The east v. west Pakistan binary also misses how even ‘West’ Pakistan was not a united monolith from the start, and unlike, East Bengal, which was only renamed East Pakistan in 1955, was composed of three full provinces, one chief commissioner’s province, one federal territory, a number of tribal areas, ‘Azad’ Kashmir, Gilgit Agency, and nine princely states. EThere even the accession of the nine princely states (and even some tribal areas) there, even though they all hadwere all Muslim majoritiesy, was not a given, and in the case of a principalitynd for a state like Kalat, took nearly eight long months of negotiations. 9 The consolidation of most territories in western Pakistan in 1955 under the ‘one unit’ scheme did not mean that the neow West Pakistan spoke as one voice, but, as Maryam S. Khan’s article shows, gave rise to several east-west conversations and alliances. Recently, only Srinath Ragahvan has has been the lone voice strongly rejectinged the inevitability of the creation of Bangladesh. Writing about the emergence of the country, Raghavan contends that ‘there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of an independent Bangladesh in 1971. Far from being a predestined event, the creation of Bangladesh was the product of conjuncture and contingency, choice and chance.’ Any historically legitimate inquiry into this period would therefore need to abandon the teleological and crisis-dominated narratives that emerged after 1971 to explore instead the everydayness of Pakistan’s efforts to fashion a postcolonial nation-state in no matter how violent or problematic a way. And the everydayness of this project was defined by the new state’s imperial and Cold War inheritance as much as it was by a regional or domestic politics of nationalism and religion. The sidelining of athe united Pakistan period in historical, as well as social and economic assessments, has led to an underassessment of the period 1947-71, preventing a fuller understanding of the dynamics of the time, by especially byonly allowing only a very jaundiced understanding of the development of the state, nation and society in Pakistan. Coupled with the fact that there are almost no academic linkages between Pakistan and Bangladesh, and that relations between the two countries are often more polarised than those between India and Pakistan, no serious attempt has also been made to bridge this historiographical abyss. The Possibility of Different Imaginations A re-assessment of the period 1947-71 in Pakistan throws open many ways in which the country can be imagined. For example, in the imperial imagination it was commonplace for a single polity to occupy different geographies. This was true not only of Western European empires in which centres and peripheries were defined by different and unequal laws, but even more so of North American ones which folded distinct and separated territories into a single nationality. This was true of the US, for example, which included Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico along with other territories while at the same time encouraging immigration to shape its citizenship. 11 Pakistan did not look so out of place in this context, where New World ideas of mobility, citizenship and loyalty rather than an Old World focus on the supposedly immemorial links of race and homeland defined both the nation and the state. 12 Such political forms included the constitutional identification of France and Algeria until 1962 and the United Arab Republic that brought together Egypt and Syria between 1958 and 1961. Like the US, these were federal polities, and in Pakistan’s case we can even see the Muslim League’s earlier demands for a federated India translated into the relationship between its eastern and western wings. Furthermore, the Cold War context for Pakistan’s founding has to do with its leaders’ frequent invocations of the Soviet Union as a model not of federation so much as the ideology that was required for it. Despite being staunchly anti-communist, for example, Islamists routinely cited the USSR as a model in this respect. After the creation of Pakistan, it was argued that Islam would be a ‘panacea’ forto the ills of the modern world split between the capitalistt and communistt campsworlds. Even religious scholars like Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, who was a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, evoked this comparison when, during the discussion ofn the Objectives Resolution, he compared the ‘Islamic’ ideology of Pakistan with the ‘secular’ ideology of the USSR.’ Having already repudiated the Old World vision of an ethnic nationality in colonial times, which was seen as providing cover for Hindu majoritarianism, influential Muslim thinkers like Muhammad Iqbal, who would be hailed as one of Pakistan’s founding fathers, saw Islam not as a set of beliefs or practices so much as an ideological vision of the world like communism. Iqbal, in his famous 1930 address to the annual session of the All India Muslim League at Allahabad, stated that Islam in India ‘has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.’ 15 Thus, ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.’ 16 This ‘people-building force,’ i.e., ideology, was then what set the Muslims of India apart from others, giving them and identity far above and beyond the confines of mere race, language, and culture. Therefore, in a way, Pakistan was a result of a modern ideological force where, again in the words of Iqbal, ‘Islam is itself Destiny and will not suffer a destiny.’ Having been developed in the circumstances of Hindu-Muslim rivalry in colonial times, this idea came to define the relationship between East and West Pakistan after independence. For a federation made up of geographically separate and distinct units required not race, language, and ethnicity but rather ideology to unite it. No wonder, then, Sir Zafruallah Khan, soon to be the first foreign minister of Pakistan, suggested to Jinnah that if the residual India tried to use the name ‘India,’ Pakistan should be called either ‘Muslim India,’ to clarify its existence vis a vis ‘Hindu’ India. This was important, Zafrullah argued, because Pakistan ‘connoted an ideal rather than any territory.’ 18 Thus, while scholarship on the Bangladesh War has attributed racist attitudes to the West Pakistani army and leadership, therefore, it was the Bengalis who were seen by the latter as opposing a narrowly racial vision of nationality to the officially ideological one whose universality went well beyond the state itself. If the joining together of East and West Pakistan did not look so unusual in the imperial and Cold War world, the political differences between its wings also drew upon older visions which in intellectually coherent ways counterposed race to ideology. It was a distinction which had originated in colonial India to define the Muslim League against the Indian National Congress but was soon repurposed to characterise the relations between Bengalis and the national government. In this sense, it is possible to say that Islam as an ideological foundation for Pakistan today is a remnant of the pre-1971 period. These ideas, of a racial or territorially contiguous nationality opposed to an ideological and territorially unfixed one, had emerged in colonial times largely to define Hindu-Muslim relations. But they were only put into political practice after independence, having now been identified with East and West Pakistani debates. TBut they also came to characterise all other forms of provincial or ethnic autonomy, with Bengal serving merely as the biggest and most important example of such Old World visions which had been criticised by Iqbal decades earlier. In its first couple of decades, then, Pakistan did not look so unusual or exceptional as contemporary scholars think, though it predicated itself upon a different set of political ideas and genealogies than India. The relations between its two wings, moreover, also drew upon and reformulated older themes that had defined those between the League and Congress in colonial times. And it is this world of inheritances and connections that the articles in this special issue address. (Re)Discovering Pakistan Unusual in focusing on the period between 1947 and 1970, this special issue is also unprecedented in bringing together an equal number of scholars from Pakistan and Bangladesh working on a diverse set of topics about the everyday politics of a newly independent nation-state. The articles in this issue cover a wide range of topics which enable us to understand this early phase of Pakistan in a more nuanced manner, uncovering newer understandings of the country, whenre the nation state was being imagined, contested, performed and realised in a fashions not normally discussed in historiography. The articles herein come from a wide variety of disciplines—history, politics, law, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and literature— reflecting not just different approaches but also the diverse ways in which the new nation state of Pakistan was being forged. The first set of articles focuses on the the exigencies of nation building in Pakistan. Here Maryam Khan breaks new ground by

   ora.ox.ac.uk

9. পূর্ববঙ্গে পাকিস্তানি উপনিবেশবাদ | প্রতিচিন্তা

   protichinta.com·Apr 29, 2018

10. The South Asia Crisis and the Founding of Bangladesh, 1971

    history.state.gov

+ 24 more sources — see the full list on Lenz