Bardonomics

Image: Wikimedia Commons Established as East Pakistan after India’s independence and partition, Bangladesh’s two decades prior to independence were marked by neglect and discrimination. Of the two parts of Pakistan, the East was more populous, but it remained politically and economically dominated by West Pakistan. Over 1,600km of Indian territory separated the two Pakistans. Liberation activists charged that the central government in West Pakistan engaged in the ethnolinguistic discrimination against the majority Bengali East Pakistanis. Only the West Pakistani native tongue, Urdu, was recognised as an official language in the, and Bengalis were also largely underrepresented in the Pakistani bureaucracy and army. Economically, the government of West Pakistan was accused of appropriating surpluses from the East to fund the West’s imports, and the West withheld the allocation of funds for development in the East.   As maltreatment and mismanagement grew, calls for freedom from