Bangladesh Defense
Source:
https://www.PKDefense.com
Indo-Bangla Relation: India's Regional Ambition, Geopolitical Reality, and Strategic Options For Bangladesh
By Saif
The independence movement under the leadership of Congress was for establishing undivided independent India through the eviction of British rulers from the soil of India, but the degeneration of Hindu-Muslim relations into hostility and the subsequent demand of Muslim league for a separate state for the Muslims of the region thwarted the dream of an undivided independent India and made the partition of subcontinent inevitable. While the initial proposal for the partition met with steep resistance as most of the senior leaders of Congress namely, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad vehemently protested such proposal and termed it as British conspiracy to divide India, the Congress finally gave its nod of approval in the fear that outright rejection of the partition proposal might be used by the British colonial rulers against the independence movement to perpetuate their political domination over the country and in the hope that with a small resource base, peculiar geographic reality that separates both the wings of the country by one thousand miles, and paucity of leaders with high political experience, Pakistan would not survive too long and would reunite with India in the end.
There is no surprise that partition of India came as a shock to Congress leaders and that they could never reconcile themselves to the idea of an independent Pakistan because their freedom struggle was for undivided India, and therefore they wanted to roll back the geographical changes made to Indian subcontinent through partition and their intention was clearly demonstrated to Pakistan from the very beginning, which gave rise to a plethora of problems and a paucity of trust between the two nations.
What Pakistan needed in those formative years was national unity and balanced development in the two wings to ensure security and progress to consolidate its position as a powerful nation in the subcontinent and to thwart Indian attempt to undo the geographical arrangements after partition. But the then Pakistani leaders' myopic failure to recognize Bengalis as equal partners and unforgivable reluctance to give them due share of political power and economic opportunity caused widespread resentment among the East Pakistanis, which was cunningly used by India against Pakistan in the subsequent years. The Indian political leaders in later years used their diplomatic channels and intelligence agencies to cultivate close relations with East Pakistani political establishment in order to involve themselves in almost all political movements in East Pakistan to use the prevailing sense of deprivation among East Pakistanis to their own political advantage and to instigate East Pakistanis against West Pakistanis to accelerate
the process of disintegration of Pakistan firstly, to weaken it, and secondly, to bring it back to India's lap through various political machinations to realize the dream of undivided India.
No amount of political negotiations between the two wings could improve the situation in East Pakistan due, mainly, to the stubbornness of West Pakistanis, which gave rise to increasing sense of alienation and deprivation among the people of East Pakistan, and finally when Sheikh Mujib was denied the premiership in 1970, Bengalis decided to get out of the relationship once and for all. So, for the first time and certainly for the last time in history, the disintegration of Pakistan became a common goal for both India and Bengalis of East Pakistan as the former wanted to break Pakistan to realize its vision of undivided India and the latter wanted to establish a separate independent nation to rid themselves of an insensitive and repressive political regime.
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