1971 and the Permanent Fracture of Muslim Nationalism

On 16 December 1971, Lieutenant-General A.A.K. Niazi signed the instrument of surrender on a small table in Dhaka’s Ramna Race Course. Ninety-three thousand Pakistani soldiers laid down their arms in front of an Indian general. In one afternoon, the state that sought to prove that Islam alone could bind a nation lost 55 percent of its population and every inch of its eastern territory. We usually remember 1971 as a military humiliation or a triumph of Bengali nationalism. This article argues that it was something far more consequential: the first public, large-scale bankruptcy of religion-based nationalism in the modern world.

Fifty-four years later, the wound is not healed, it is still bleeding. When a Baloch mother in 2025 waits for a son who disappeared a decade ago, when a Pashtun student in Peshawar burns the national flag, when a Sindhi poet writes “another 1971 is coming”, they are not inventing grievances. They are reciting the same lines the Bengalis spoke in the 1950s and 1960s. The grievances are identical: economic exploitation, political exclusion, cultural contempt, and the state’s willingness to use lethal force to preserve an idea rather than accommodate people. Until Pakistan confronts the ideological roots of 1971, every new protest will feel like a sequel rather than a fresh episode.

Pakistan was demanded on one powerful, seductive claim that the Muslims of the subcontinent formed a separate nation, and religion was strong enough to override language, geography, and culture. The 1940 Lahore Resolution spoke of “independent states” in the plural, hinting at a loose confederation. Yet the Radcliffe Award of 1947 delivered a geographical absurdity two wings separated by 1,600 kilometers of hostile Indian territory. West Pakistani elites were not particularly worried. Islam, they believed, would magically bridge the gap. Jinnah’s inclusive 11 August 1947 speech (“You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State”) was politely applauded and then quietly buried after his death in 1948. Religious symbolism became the cheapest and fastest glue to hold together a state that made no geographical or economic sense.

By 1966, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Six-Point programme had crystallized East Pakistan’s long-standing grievances into a coherent political demand: genuine federalism, provincial control over taxation and revenue, separate but convertible currencies, and independent foreign trade powers. To the military-bureaucratic establishment in Rawalpindi and Lahore, these were not economic proposals; they were heresy against the very idea of Pakistan. If Bengalis were allowed to run their own house, what remained of the claim that Islam required a single, powerful centre? Provincial autonomy threatened the core narrative that Muslims must remain united under one flag at any cost.

The state’s answer was the Agartala Conspiracy Case (1968), accusing Mujib and thirty-four others of colluding with India to secede. The charges were so flimsy that mass protests forced Ayub Khan to withdraw them and eventually resign. Yet the case achieved its real purpose: it criminalized the demand for federal rights and equated it with treason against Islam. The pattern was set for decades to come.

The 1970 general elections became the most significant referendum in Pakistan’s history. The Awami League, campaigning on the Six Points, swept 167 of East Pakistan’s 169 National Assembly seats, an absolute majority in the 313-member house. For the first time, a majority of the citizens of a state created in the name of Islam had peacefully voted to restructure that state radically.

West Pakistan refused to accept the verdict. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto threatened to “break the legs” of anyone travelling from the West to attend the assembly. General Yahya Khan postponed the session indefinitely. The message to Bengalis was brutally clear: democracy mattered less than preserving the unitary, Islam-first idea of Pakistan.

On the night of 25 March 1971, the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight. University dormitories were attacked, professors and students were dragged out and shot, and newspaper offices were set ablaze. The Hamood ur Rahman Commission Report later confirmed that the operation aimed to “restore the authority of the government” by crushing the Awami League and its supporters. Within months, the comforting myth that “a Muslim cannot oppress another Muslim for political gain” lay in smoking ruins. West Pakistani Muslims were killing Bengali Muslims in the name of saving Islam and Pakistan. Anthony Mascarenhas’s front-page article “Genocide” in the Sunday Times on 13 June 1971 forced the world to look away from its cricket scores and see what was happening. The Two-Nation Theory was devouring its own children.

When Bangladesh emerged in 1972, its constitution deliberately rejected the ideological foundation of Pakistan. It chose Bengali nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism, four words that were practically heretical in the remaining Pakistan. Joy Bangla replaced religious slogans as the cry of liberation. An entire nation walked away from the experiment and proved that language, shared suffering, and the memory of common oppression could be stronger foundations than faith alone.

Instead of loosening the centre, the truncated Pakistan tightened it. The 1973 Constitution took the 1949 Objective Resolution out of the preamble and made it a substantive, enforceable part of the Constitution. Islam was declared the state religion for the first time. Religious parties that had been wiped out in the 1970 elections suddenly became king-makers. General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization drive from 1977 onwards, hudud ordinances, blasphemy laws, compulsory religious education was not merely piety; it was over-compensation for the ideological vacuum created by Dhaka’s fall.

Two of Pakistan’s most perceptive historians had seen the danger years earlier. In The Making of Pakistan (1967), K.K. Aziz described the Two-Nation Theory as a classic negative nationalism: extraordinarily powerful when directed against the Hindu “other”, but fragile when asked to govern diverse Muslim groups. Khalid Bin Sayeed, in Pakistan: The Formative Phase (1968), showed that the movement had unified Muslims only by keeping the Hindu adversary in sight. Once that external “other” disappeared from the eastern wing, the internal contradictions exploded. Both scholars warned that without an inclusive, federal nationalism, the state would survive on coercion and rhetoric, not consent.

Pakistani textbooks still call 1971 the “Fall of Dhaka” caused by Indian conspiracy and Bengali treachery. Bangladesh teaches it as Muktijuddho, a war of independence. The truth lies closer to Aziz and Sayeed: the ideology in its original, exclusivist form could not accommodate diversity. Baloch, Pashtun, and Sindhi voices today repeat the same warnings the Bengalis once gave economic exploitation, political marginalization, cultural contempt, and the ever-present threat of military action. The state’s reflex to label critics as foreign agents, send in troops, and blame RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) remains unchanged.

Other nations have confronted their darkest chapters and grown stronger. In 2008, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in Parliament to Indigenous survivors of residential schools and launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the same year, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the Stolen Generations, “For the pain, suffering and hurt… we say sorry.” Neither country collapsed; both began to heal.

Pakistan needs no multibillion-dollar fund, only the moral courage to speak four honest sentences in the National Assembly: “We apologize to the people of former East Pakistan for the military action of 1971, for the atrocities committed in the name of unity, for denying them their democratic verdict in 1970, and for teaching generations a distorted version of those events.”

Until the state admits that an idea failed in 1971, every demand for provincial rights will be treated as another Agartala Conspiracy. Every protest will be seen as another Six Points movement. And every military operation will risk becoming another Searchlight. The 2025 World Bank Survey on trust in institutions echoes this, noting that perceptions of federal equity remain “alarmingly low” in non-Punjab provinces, fueling a cycle of alienation.

From there, the way forward is straightforward: teach 1971 honestly in every classroom, broadcast and gazette that apology, turn the 18th Amendment into real fiscal federalism, so provinces keep the wealth they generate, and stop wielding the “ideology of Pakistan” as a baton against citizens who merely demand their constitutional rights.

Pakistan does not have to abandon faith; it only has to abandon the illusion that faith alone can govern a multi-ethnic nation. Until we admit that 1971 was an ideological collapse, not just a military defeat, every December will echo with the surrender in Dhaka, and we will remain one crisis away from the next province deciding it, too, has had enough.