Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka: building new nations after 1947 (History HL)

When Pakistan was created in 1947, it was not one country but two — West Pakistan and East Pakistan — separated by over 1,600 km of Indian territory. Its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, became the first Governor-General, but he died in September 1948, just a year after independence. Pakistan lost its most unifying leader almost immediately, before institutions of nation building were properly established.

From the start, Pakistan faced huge problems. It inherited little of British India's industry, administration or army officer corps (most had gone to India). Millions of refugees from Partition needed housing and jobs. And the two halves of the country shared almost nothing except Islam: West Pakistan (Punjabi- and Sindhi-speaking) and East Pakistan (Bengali-speaking) had different languages, cultures, and economies.

The core problem: two nations in one state: Pakistan's founding idea — that Muslims of South Asia formed one nation — broke down once Partition actually happened. Geography, language and economic interests pulled East and West apart from day one. This tension runs through the entire 1947-1971 period and explains why Bangladesh eventually broke away.

By the late 1960s, anger in East Pakistan had a clear political voice: the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, demanded regional autonomy through his "Six Points" programme (1966) — effectively home rule for East Pakistan in everything except defence and foreign affairs.

Link cause to consequence: For Paper 3, don't just describe Ayub Khan's rule — explain why it deepened East-West tension: military and economic power stayed in West Pakistan, so when Ayub fell in 1969 the crisis was already primed to explode in the East.

Ayub Khan resigned in 1969 after mass protests, handing power to another general, Yahya Khan. He called Pakistan's first general election on the basis of one-person-one-vote in December 1970. The result was decisive: the Awami League won an outright majority of seats in the national assembly, entirely from East Pakistan.

West Pakistan's leaders — Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose Pakistan People's Party had won most West Pakistani seats — refused to let Mujibur Rahman become prime minister of the whole country. Talks collapsed. In March 1971, the Pakistani army launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown on Bengali nationalists in Dhaka.

1971: war and the birth of Bangladesh: The crackdown triggered a civil war. Bengali resistance fighters (the Mukti Bahini) fought the Pakistani army through 1971, with millions of refugees fleeing into India. In December 1971, India intervened militarily against Pakistan; within two weeks the Pakistani army surrendered in Dhaka. East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh (see micro 20.16.1 for the India-Pakistan war angle in full).

Zia-ul-Haq's death in 1988 opened the way for civilian rule. Benazir Bhutto (Zulfikar's daughter) became prime minister twice (1988-1990 and 1993-1996), the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country — though both her governments were dismissed early on corruption charges, showing how fragile Pakistani democracy still was. In 1991, following years of debate about the balance between Islamic and secular law, Pakistan held a constitutional referendum confirming Islamic provisions within the legal system, closing our period.

Nation-building failures, in one line: Pakistan 1947-1991 struggled because power kept swinging between elected civilians and the military, and because West Pakistan's dominance over the East made the state's founding idea — Muslim unity — collapse into division and, ultimately, partition.

Bangladesh: nation-building after 1971

Bangladesh began independence in 1971 as one of the poorest countries in the world, devastated by war and a series of floods and famines. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became its first prime minister, but his government struggled with corruption and food shortages. In 1975, Mujib was assassinated in a military coup, beginning a long period of instability with alternating military and civilian rule through the 1970s and 1980s — a pattern of fragile democracy echoing Pakistan's own struggles.

Ceylon/Sri Lanka: from independence to civil war

Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) gained independence peacefully from Britain in 1948, without partition or war. But it held a deep ethnic divide: the majority Sinhalese (mostly Buddhist) and the minority Tamils (mostly Hindu, many descended from labourers brought from India by the British).

The Sinhala Only Act (1956): Sinhalese-dominated governments passed laws favouring the majority, most notably making Sinhala the sole official language in 1956. This shut Tamils out of many government jobs and university places, and became the single most important cause of rising Sinhalese-Tamil tension.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike became prime minister in 1960 — the world's first female head of government — after her husband, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (who had introduced the Sinhala Only Act), was assassinated in 1959. She continued nationalist, Sinhalese-favouring policies, deepening Tamil grievances over the following decades.

1971 JVP uprising — don't confuse it with the ethnic conflict: The 1971 uprising was a Sinhalese Marxist youth rebellion (JVP) against poverty and unemployment, crushed by Bandaranaike's government — a separate crisis from the Sinhalese-Tamil ethnic conflict, even though both reflect a state struggling to hold together different groups.