Whose Independence Is It?

When radical left-leaning leaders such as Kazi Zafar Ahmed, Haider Akbar Khan Rono, Mohammad Abdul Haq “Juno,” and Hasanul Haq Inup pressed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to break with Islamabad before March 25, 1971, warning that time was slipping away, Sheikh Mujib resisted, seeking space for negotiation.

The imposed mythology by the Awami regime that Mujib dispatched a formal declaration of independence before his arrest on the night of March 25 is a historical fabrication. Pakistani soldiers did not arrive at his residence to politely facilitate a seditious farewell address. 

Mujib’s essential ambition was to govern a united Pakistan, commanding international stature akin to Jawaharlal Nehru. Becoming the custodian of a peripheral east-wing state carried little allure; global statesmen would have afforded the leader of an impoverished enclave no more deference than a regional tribal monarch. His strategy was to wage a long game for constitutional democracy from within the state structure.

That deliberate strategy was shattered by a single reckless gamble. Ziaur Rahman, an officer forged in the rigid matrix of the Pakistan Army, acted with the impulsive bravado characteristic of his institution. Without weighing the geo-strategic consequences, he issued a call to arms, plunging a vulnerable population into a catastrophic confrontation that claimed millions of lives. 

Zia was a product of an army [of Pakistan] that had long abandoned its core duty of national defense in favor of political participation. Trained to absorb superficial western militarism, its officer corps consistently mistook command presence for statecraft, institutionalizing a habit of overthrowing civilian governments…a tradition later inherited by Bangladesh’s own military establishment.

The Pakistani high command committed an unpardonable strategic error. Rather than cultivating the eastern wing’s demographic majority, it launched a campaign of systemic suppression against its own citizens. As modern counter-insurgency operations repeatedly demonstrate, superior firepower cannot eradicate an entrenched national population. 

Islamabad’s hubris resulted in a devastating defeat, culminating in the surrender of 90,000 troops to India, which capitalized on total local support to reshape the subcontinental map.

Yet the immediate aftermath revealed the hollow reality of a sudden, unplanned birth. Bangladesh inherited a scorched economy, broken infrastructure, pervasive lawlessness, and a surplus of uncollected weaponry held by unaccountable factions. 

Lacking a coherent post-war policy for thousands of demobilized fighters, the state watched as private interests usurped public authority. Mujib found himself presiding over a collapsing administrative structure, unable to secure basic necessities or internal order. The rhetoric of liberation yielded a fragile entity entirely dependent on foreign aid—a classic political economy of failure.

Five decades later, a cold balance sheet demands an accounting of what was truly gained. Before 1971, Bengalis were not a colonial subject, but an integral population of a major regional power. In securing statehood, Bangladesh lost sovereign access to a landmass four times its size, relinquishing historical claims to the economic hubs of Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. 

Today, thousands of Bangladeshi economic migrants endure precarious, undocumented lives in Pakistan’s urban slums or face deportation from India, having traded broad federal citizenship for a tiny territorial enclave with nowhere to migrate beyond Dhaka.

The narrative of liberation ultimately enriched a narrow duopoly: the Sheikh and Zia political dynasties. Power has oscillated between these two families and their client networks, replacing West Pakistani elites with an indigenously manufactured oligarchic class. Modern political survival requires deference to hereditary heirs, where public discourse has dissolved into competitive sycophancy among aspiring dynasts. Political figures across the spectrum maintain a feudal succession, ensuring that privilege remains strictly intergenerational.

For the ordinary citizen—the rickshaw puller, the factory hand, the daily laborer—the structural reality remains unchanged. They labored under the old flag, they labor under the new, and they seek work abroad when home offers no sustenance. 

Statehood delivered immense returns for a select political class while externalizing the cost onto the masses. Independence was framed as a grand national transformation, but for the majority, it merely changed the identity of their masters.

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CM Kajawl is a New-York based Bangladeshi journalist