Bangladesh's history: divided by religion, made independent by language

What the delta held before the sultans came

The written record of the territory begins with a stone. The Mahasthan Brahmi Inscription, a Prakrit text found at Mahasthan, is the earliest piece of writing in Bangladesh and appears to order supplies stockpiled against an emergency; it marks the site as a provincial centre of the Maurya empire, whose eastern frontier was Bengal. Archaeology is otherwise thin. Bengal has little stone, early builders worked in wood, bamboo and clay, and rivers that shift their beds every few years have carried away much of what was left. At Wari-Bateshwar excavators found a port with coinage, iron goods, a brick road and a fort, trading as far as Southeast Asia and the Roman world.

The ancient names are regional: Vanga in the centre, Varendra in the north, Samatata and Harikela in the east. Several dynasties ruled parts of the delta after the Maurya and Gupta empires receded, and the one that left the largest mark on the ground was the Pala dynasty, founded when a group of feudal chiefs elected Gopala in about 750. The Palas were Mahayana and Tantric Buddhists who ruled until the middle of the twelfth century. The monastery at Paharpur, Somapura Mahavihara, is in UNESCO's words evidence of the rise of Mahayana Buddhism in Bengal from the seventh century, and it remained an intellectual centre until the twelfth. It was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1985.

The Senas, who defeated the Palas around 1150, were Brahminist and apparently from Karnataka. Some historians connect their suppression of Buddhism with the later conversions to Islam in eastern Bengal. The Chandra dynasty, ruling Harikela from Vikrampur, lasted about a century and a half from the early tenth century.

How eastern Bengal became Muslim

Muslim rule began in 1202 when Bakhtiyar Khalji took Nadia from the Senas. The conquest did not bring swift conversion. Sena authority held on in Vikrampur until about 1245, and much of what is now eastern Bangladesh was neither conquered nor converted for decades afterwards.

From 1342 Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah ruled an independent Bengal, and his dynasty called the province Bangalah and united its parts into a single territory. Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah had already taken Chittagong in 1340. In the fifteenth century a Turkish general, Ulugh Khan Jahan, founded the city of Khalifatabad in the south-west, now the Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat; UNESCO describes it as covering 50 km² and counts 360 mosques, mausoleums, bridges and water tanks of baked brick. It was inscribed in 1985, the same year as Paharpur.

The Mughals took Bengal in 1576 and spent four decades subduing the Bara Bhuiyan, the twelve landlords led by Isa Khan of Sonargaon. Dhaka became the provincial capital in 1610, and muslin looms moved there from Sonargaon. Bengal under the Mughals was, in the words of historian C. A. Bayly, probably the empire's wealthiest province.

The Mughal period is also when most of eastern Bengal became Muslim, and the historian Richard Eaton ties the two together. The administration promoted forest clearing and wet-rice farming in the east, issued land grants to pioneers who would pay tax, and required a shrine on each grant. Many of the pioneers were pirs, and the boatmen and fishermen who cleared and farmed the land settled around the shrines. On this reading Islam spread with the rice frontier, and its shrines and rituals merged with local practice.

What British rule made of Bengal

The East India Company defeated the nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey in 1757 and took the diwani, the revenue rights, in 1765. Taxation was not relaxed during the drought and floods of 1769 to 1770, and a severe famine followed. In 1790 the Company introduced the Permanent Settlement, made law three years later, which granted land in perpetuity to zamindars in return for fixed revenue. Britannica traces the rise of the bhadralok, a new landed middle class centred on Calcutta, to that settlement. It was dominated at first by upper-caste Hindus, and Muslim participation grew only toward the end of the nineteenth century.

The first partition of Bengal took effect on 16 October 1905. Its stated reason was administrative: splitting a province too large to govern from Calcutta had been discussed since 1866. Its geography split the province into a Hindu-majority west and a Muslim-majority Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital at Dhaka. Congress and Calcutta opinion protested; most Muslim leaders supported it, and in 1906 they met at Dhaka under Nawab Salimullah and founded the All-India Muslim League. The partition was annulled in 1911.

In 1940 Fazl ul-Haq, chief minister of Bengal from 1937 to 1943, proposed the resolution at the Muslim League's Lahore session that demanded independent states for Muslims. Six years later, after communal violence in Calcutta in August 1946, the Bengal politicians Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy and Sarat Chandra Bose reopened talks for a separate, united and independent Bengal. Britannica records that Mountbatten did not oppose it and that Gandhi and the Congress did.

Why Bengal was divided a second time

The Radcliffe Line gave the Muslim-majority east to Pakistan as East Bengal when British rule ended in August 1947. It did not follow religion exactly. Britannica notes that Muslim-majority Murshidabad and Nadia went wholly or partly to India, while Khulna, nearly half Muslim, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where Muslims were a small fraction, went to Pakistan. A referendum on 6 July 1947 took Sylhet out of Assam and into East Bengal, though part of the district still went to India.

The new border also split an economy. Jute was the largest industry in Bengal at partition, and the line left every jute mill in West Bengal and four-fifths of the jute-growing land in the east. East Bengal was separated from the rest of Pakistan by about 1,600 km of Indian territory.

How a language dispute became a national movement

Bengali speakers made up 44 million of Pakistan's 69 million people at independence. In November 1947 an education summit in Karachi recommended Urdu and English as the state languages, and in 1948 the central government declared Urdu the sole federal language. Bengali was dropped from the Public Service Commission's list of subjects and from currency notes and stamps. Students at the University of Dhaka began protesting in December 1947.

On 21 February 1952, students defied a ban on public meetings in Dhaka and police killed demonstrators. The deaths set off unrest across the province, and in 1956 Pakistan recognised Bengali alongside Urdu as a national language. The Shaheed Minar was built near Dhaka Medical College in memory of the dead. The date is now Language Movement Day, and on 17 November 1999 UNESCO's General Conference, on a proposal from Bangladesh, declared 21 February International Mother Language Day, observed since 2000.

The grievances did not stop at language. Britannica gives the civil service figure: by 1960 only about a third of the Civil Service of Pakistan was Bengali, although equal recruitment from the two wings was official policy. Military installations and most development spending were in the west, and jute from the east, Pakistan's largest export, earned revenue spent mostly in the west. East Bengal was renamed East Pakistan in 1955, and the military took power in 1958.

In 1966 the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, published six points demanding a federal constitution, federal control limited to defence and foreign affairs, separate currencies or safeguards against capital flight, and taxing powers for the provinces. The Bhola cyclone of 12 November 1970 killed an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people, and Britannica records that West Pakistan sent insufficient aid. In the December 1970 election the Awami League won 167 of the 169 seats allotted to East Pakistan, a majority in a National Assembly of 313. On 3 March 1971 Yahya Khan, under pressure from West Pakistani leaders, prevented the League from taking power.

What happened during the war of independence

On the night of 25 March 1971 the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight in Dhaka, aimed at intellectuals, activists, students and the Hindu minority. Mujibur Rahman declared independence on 26 March shortly before his arrest, and Awami League leaders set up a government in exile in Calcutta in April. Bengali units of the army and student militants formed the Mukti Bahini, the liberation force, which fought a guerrilla war with Indian training and supplies.

From May to October the army and allied militias, among them the Razakars, burned villages as collective punishment. Britannica and Wikipedia both give 200,000 to 400,000 as the number of women raped; after the war the government gave survivors the title Birangona, war heroine. Refugee numbers differ by source: Britannica's country history gives about 10 million by some estimates, its article on the war as many as 15 million.

India and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship in August 1971, and the United States and China backed Pakistan. Pakistan's air strikes on Indian bases on 3 December opened a full war between the two states. Pakistani forces in the east surrendered on 16 December, now Victory Day. Mujibur Rahman returned from prison in West Pakistan and became prime minister in January 1972.

Why the death toll of the war is disputed

No figure for the dead of 1971 is agreed, and the gap between the published estimates is a factor of more than a hundred. Each has a named source and each has been contested.

The figure of 3 million is embedded in Bangladeshi literature and public commemoration. Bangladesh's first foreign secretary, Sayyid A. Karim, said it originated in Pravda. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission, set up by Pakistan in December 1971, recorded killings of intellectuals, officials and Hindus by the army while giving the lowest total. Sarmila Bose's book drew strong criticism from journalists and scholars. Estimates of Biharis, Urdu speakers killed by Bengalis during and after the war, run from about 1,000 to 150,000.

Pakistan has not officially accepted responsibility for the killings of 1971. Bangladesh started war crimes tribunals in 1973 and set up another in March 2010, and the later tribunal's trials of Jamaat-e-Islami leaders were denounced by that party's supporters as political targeting.

How the republic swung between parties and soldiers

The constitution enacted on 4 November 1972 set up a secular parliamentary republic. China vetoed Bangladesh's first application to the United Nations, and admission came in 1974, the year of a famine Britannica describes as having a massive death toll. Mujibur Rahman moved toward one-party rule and was assassinated with most of his family on 15 August 1975 by army officers.

Two military rulers followed. Ziaur Rahman took power in November 1975, was confirmed by referendum in 1977, formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and was assassinated in Chittagong on 30 May 1981. Hussain Muhammad Ershad seized power on 24 March 1982, ruled until mass protests forced him out in December 1990, and in the 1988 election his Jatiya Party took 251 of 300 seats in a poll the main parties boycotted.

A referendum in September 1991 returned executive power from the president to the prime minister. For the next three decades office alternated between the BNP, led by Ziaur Rahman's widow Khaleda Zia, and the Awami League, led by Mujibur Rahman's daughter Sheikh Hasina. Caretaker governments oversaw the elections of 1991 and June 1996, and whether one should oversee each election became the recurring dispute between the two parties. In 1997 a peace accord ended the insurgency in the Chittagong Hill Tracts that had run since 1975. In 2007 a state of emergency was declared and the scheduled election cancelled; a caretaker government held elections in late December 2008, which the Awami League won.

Why a job quota helped bring down a government

The Awami League governed from January 2009. The BNP boycotted the January 2014 election, in which Britannica gives turnout as slightly above half nationally and under a quarter in Dhaka. From 2017 more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees crossed from Myanmar, adding to about 200,000 who had arrived earlier. The January 2024 election returned the Awami League for a fourth consecutive term amid allegations of manipulation.

The trigger for what followed was a legacy of 1971. On 5 June 2024 the High Court reinstated a 30% reservation of civil service posts for the children and grandchildren of freedom fighters, part of a quota system reserving 56% of posts in all. Student protests spread across the country in July and were met with force. On 21 July the Appellate Division cut the quotas to 7%, but the protests had become a movement against the government, and on 5 August 2024 the army chief announced that Sheikh Hasina had resigned; she left for India the same day. An interim government under Muhammad Yunus was appointed on 6 August.

A fact-finding report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, published on 12 February 2025, found reasonable grounds to believe that the former government, its security services and elements of the Awami League had carried out hundreds of extrajudicial killings between 1 July and 15 August 2024, with the knowledge and direction of the political leadership. The interim government banned the Awami League's activities, and the party did not take part in the general election of February 2026.