Birth of Bangladesh: Leadership Failure, Ideology, and the Making of a Tragedy

The breakup of Pakistan in 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh are habitually presented as the inevitable consequence of economic discrimination. Discrimination between East and West Pakistan was real. But real as it was, discrimination does not have an inexorable logic. History is littered with states that could and should have survived greater discrepancies. In the end, what turned an unfortunate development gap into an irreparable rupture was a toxic brew of feckless leadership, bad-quality advisers, misplaced ideology, and Indian strategic adventurism. All of these contributed, but none so much as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the intelligentsia in his orbit.

History judges leaders not because injustice is real but because of how they chose to respond to injustice, how they govern when they came to power, and whether they build or destroy institutions in the name of ideology.

Disparity as Context, Not Destiny

In an interview with Prothom Alo this month, Rehman Sobhan, Bangladesh’s most celebrated development economist and longtime head of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), returns to a theme he has revisited many times in the past. Bangladesh, Sobhan laments, suffers from chronic implementation failures, which account for a large part of its development path. Policies in South Asia, he points out, are rarely implemented; they are subverted, sabotaged, or quietly allowed to wither on the vine. Weak institutions, a culture of political incapacity, and disinterest in governance all play a role.

Situated in a section where Sobhan discusses the economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, the interview is instructive. Implicitly, it concedes what Sobhan has long said: that the financial imbalance was not artificial, nor manufactured, but existed in real time and was growing. Implicitly, Sobhan concedes that it wasn’t a purposefully designed condition from day one.

This framing of the debate is necessary but incomplete.

East Pakistan at Partition in 1947 had virtually no industrial base. Bengal under British colonial rule had been one of the most advanced manufacturing regions in the world in the late eighteenth century. But colonial policy in the nineteenth century actively de-industrialized the region, building a whole commercial, service, and administrative infrastructure that bypassed Bengal entirely and hived off its wealth.

East Pakistan was agrarian: it was dependent on jute cultivation, rice growing, petty trade, fishing, and a hinterland service economy. West Pakistan, by contrast, received the vast bulk of the industrial, commercial, military, and administrative infrastructure that had constituted the British empire in India: its mills, engineering workshops, banks, cantonments, transport, and administrative headquarters.

Disparity was therefore real but also historically inherited and correctable through devolution, investment, and institutional development. In Sobhan’s own account, this was more or less accepted. Inequality became the explosive catalyst for an unwise political movement for an independent Bangladesh.

This is half the truth. Catalysts are not enough. They must have agents.

Sheikh Mujib and the Poverty of Leadership

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a charismatic mass leader. In 1970, that was enough to lead his party to a parliamentary majority. But in office, Sheikh Mujib proved an inadequate statesman. He replaced governance with sloganeering, administrative competence with labor agitation, and socialist verbiage. He expanded his political power by subverting, rather than strengthening, institutions through street power rather than governance.

This was not incidental to Mujib’s way of thinking. Mujib was steeped in socialist romanticism and populist absolutism. He believed in politics as a theater of the moral, not the administrative. Predictably, the results of that worldview, when combined with the horrors of war in 1971, were disarray and governance deficit.

India’s Role

India was no bystander in all of this. New Delhi had strategic incentives to divide and weaken Pakistan. Sheikh Mujib was the ideal instrument: passionate, uncompromising, dependent on foreign powers, and intensely nationalistic.

Indian support for the Awami League was not benevolence, but geostrategic calculation. Mujib’s leadership made perfect strategic sense to India because it provided New Delhi the opportunity to take down its perennial adversary’s eastern wing without any real economic costs at the time. The consequences for Bangladesh were longer-term.

Advisers without Accountability

Leadership failure in Bangladesh was exacerbated by the quality of advisers surrounding Sheikh Mujib. Sobhan, with his strong socialist leanings and his socialist friends, many of whom held cabinet positions, was among the most influential of these advisers.

Sobhan’s own intellectual background was not in question. A distinguished scholar, he was among the best and the brightest. But his policy choices were ideologically rigid and empirically shaky. In 1973–74, Sobhan became one of Mujib’s principal economic advisers during the famine that gripped the country. Sobhan reportedly tried to engage Henry Kissinger to mobilize foreign aid, but to no avail.

Worse, the government was unable to present a coherent, credible, and politically viable economic plan to save Bangladesh. The famine of 1974 was not the result of natural factors, such as bad monsoons. It was as much the result of policy paralysis, mismanagement, and a failure of ideas and economic vision.

Sobhan and the Left Returned

Sobhan left Bangladesh in 1975 and joined the government of General Ershad, returning during Ershad's rule and serving as an advisor to his government. Today, Sobhan is a fine critic of the lack of democracy in Bangladesh. One must wonder if that is self-imposed amnesia, or denial, or both. Sobhan and his socialist coterie were at the forefront of advocating socialist transformation in Bangladesh during the Mujib years. This experiment spectacularly failed. He cannot be absolved of a share of the responsibility for that outcome. As a principal policy adviser to Bangladesh’s first autocratic government, Sobhan has some responsibility for what happened next.

Autocracy after Liberation

Post-1972 Bangladesh was not a democracy. It was an autocratic state without pluralism and institutional constraint. Opposition was violently suppressed, the press was muzzled, and political power was concentrated in a single party and its leader.

Opposition was brutally suppressed, creating, in turn, the incentives and conditions for a faction to assassinate Mujib. The process of democratic decay continued through 1975, and the creation of BAKSAL was the culmination of a governing philosophy that had been demonstrated long before. This was not some fall from grace but the expression of an impulse that had been on display before Pakistan was dissolved.

Economic Mismanagement and Corruption

Corruption was rife, but more than that, economic mismanagement became the norm rather than the exception. Nationalization was carried out across the board without regard for capacity or accountability. Mujib seized factories and industry not to increase their output, but to shore up political support. The predictable result was economic collapse.

Jute from Promise to Ruin

No sector is as illustrative of the tragedy as jute. Even in Pakistan, East Pakistan began to develop some of the finest jute industries in the world, building, in the process, backward linkages with the leather, cotton, jute milling and weaving, railway, and export trade. Gradually, the pattern established during colonial times was reversed, with raw jute sent west, and processed products exported back from East Pakistan.

After 1971, the state takeover of these industries led to their gradual destruction. Labor activism was encouraged in the name of class struggle. Discipline at work was undermined by a political leadership that lacked the capacity or interest to manage production. An elite organized around politicized unions, rent-seeking, and nepotism enriched themselves at the expense of productivity. A person like Mujahidul Islam Selim, a labor leader at the helm of some of these industries, came to be seen as the iconic face of a jute industry run for the benefit of political agitators rather than actual workers.

Bangladeshi communists and their socialist mythology were not bystanders in the destruction of industrial capacity in East Pakistan. Mills were shut down, workers lost their jobs, and the promise of a new, more egalitarian state was squandered.

The Myth of Total Discrimination

The mythology of unrelieved discrimination under Pakistan is one more example of selective memory. In practice, despite political discord, vast sums were invested in East Pakistan during those years. Colleges and universities expanded. Cadet Colleges were built. Good quality highways, settlement towns, and administrative buildings were constructed.

No reasonable historian or analyst can claim that these do not represent real and significant developments. To the contrary, all of these helped build a cadre, a middle class, and an infrastructure that has been the bedrock of development in Bangladesh. But the claim of totalized discrimination must be equally discredited. The cry of discrimination was weaponized, sometimes cynically, from the Indian side and from within by Sheikh Mujib and his advisers.

Led by Rehman Sobhan, socialist Bangladeshis seized on that false narrative and used it as a political weapon against the status quo. In doing so, a powerful opportunity for economic reform was lost. Reconciliation was foreclosed, and rupture made inevitable.

Posterity Will Judge

In the end, it was leadership failure that turned the economic and political conditions in pre-1971 Bangladesh into a tragic disaster. The shortcomings of Sheikh Mujib’s leadership, his poor-quality advisers, his instinct for autocracy, his intolerance for free speech, and his misplaced ideological rigidity all contributed to the failure of Bangladesh. This cocktail was potentiated by Indian geostrategic interest.

If Sobhan is right in his conclusion, then let history be the judge. Faithful posterity will not only hold to account those who were responsible for the sins of the past. It will also ask questions of its own leaders and of leaders who come to power. Did they pursue reform, or rupture? Institutions or ideology? Sovereignty or dependency?

Bangladesh was born in struggle, sacrifice, and hope. The fact that, in a matter of a few years, it descended into famine, corruption, and authoritarianism is not an accident of history. It is the consequence of a set of decisions made by human beings. By leaders who did not govern, who mistook agitation for governance, and ideology for wisdom.