A History of the Bengali Muslim Nation from 1905 to Today

The pressures from the Raj’s Partition of Bengal enacted October 5, 1905 and its Annulment announced on December 12, 1911 materially impacted South Asia’s history and cartography, especially in August 1947 and December 1971.

Their long shadows hover over the current interim government and various political actors’ efforts to forge a decent architecture and structure of governance in Bangladesh.

These efforts are rooted in the 1905 Partition motivated by strategically viable considerations of administrative efficiency and promoting economic welfare of a disadvantaged community, not divide-and-rule imperialism.

The Raj had wrestled for years since 1861 to improve the administrative efficiency of the vast and unwieldy Bengal Presidency that Viceroy Curzon implemented in 1905. The Presidency, comprising present-day Bangladesh, and the Indian states of Paschim Banga, Bihar, and Orissa with 79 million peoples spread over 189,00 square miles, was split into three parts.

One part became the separate Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam (EBA) with Dacca as the capital. The Raj cobbled together a critical mass of area and population to provide efficient administration of a long-neglected area, simultaneously attempting to ameliorate the welfare of the economically disadvantaged Bengali Muslims.

Bengali Muslims were mostly landless peasants under Hindu landlords since Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement of 1793. The Partition was the first institutional attempt to give concrete expression to the political and economic aspirations of the Muslims of East Bengal in the undivided Bengal for a better and more just place in the sun.

The Calcutta-based congenitally and culturally communal elite Hindu Bengali Bhadroloks violently opposed the Partition. Their class-interest was revealed in the shrill and capricious objections outlined in the remarkably flatulent memorial of October 5, 1904.

The Bengali Muslims led by Nawab Salimullah supported the EBA plan. However, the Bhadroloks incessant agitation laced with Islamophobia, support from Hindus outside Bengal, and fear of terrorism spreading to martial Punjab -- the British Indian Army’s main recruiting area -- induced Whitehall to reverse course.

The Partition’s annulment and transfer of the Raj’s capital from Calcutta to Delhi were proclaimed at the Delhi Durbar of December 1911. Though Bhadroloks revile Curzon as few other Englishmen, the Viceroy had the last laugh.

Curzon recommended this transfer. London approved. This blighted the prospects of Calcutta and of the Bhadroloks. They picked up a rock to drop it at their feet.

To appease the Bengali Muslims, Viceroy Hardinge announced in January 1912 while visiting Dacca that it would get a university.

Strongly opposing this proposal, a delegation of eminent Bhadroloks told Hardinge in February 1912 that “the vast majority of Muslims there were agriculturists on whom the university would hardly confer any appreciable benefit.”

This venal and callous bigotry bordering on racism showing that the pox of communalism was alive and well amongst the highest Bhadroloks, was the incendiary elephant in the room, and became a ticking time bomb in Hindu-Muslim relations.

Partition’s enactment and annulment displayed the Bhadroloks’ unequivocal hostility to share power and profit with the Bengali Muslims, whom they despised as the loathsome other. The annulment temporarily thwarted the Bengali Muslims' legitimate political and economic aspirations.

Nevertheless, these aspirations remained powerful driving forces in the numerous seminal interwar events that culminated in the Partition of India and establishment of Pakistan in August 1947.

The former EBA minus Assam became Pakistan’s province of East Pakistan. Unlike 1905, the Bhadroloks did not object to Bengal’s second partition.

The aspirations of the Bengali Muslims were cruelly thwarted again by the distant Punjabi Bhadroloks. They imitated the Bengali Bhadroloks’ policy of calculated deprivation but leavened it with grudgingly calibrated benefits that were too little, too late, and exhibited an equally powerful cultural disdain towards their Bengali co-religionists.

This led to the emergence of an independent Bangladesh in December 1971 through a complex Liberation War.  Alongside Bengali Muslim freedom fighters, Indian regulars played a substantive but not exclusive role in vanquishing the Pakistan army in East Pakistan.

Dhaka has repeatedly acknowledged this fact but not as enthusiastically or frequently as a hegemonic India would like. Military victory gave India bragging rights. Regrettably, these have spilled over into a proprietary attitude towards Bangladesh by the new set of New Delhi-based Hindu Bhadrolok mandarins cavalierly implementing the rule of RAW that is astonishingly unreasonable and short-sighted.

Bangladesh and India are joined at the hip through immutable geography and shifting history. Eternal gratitude is not a sound basis for inter-state relations. Recognizing changing national interests over time is. This realism is not rocket science.

But in the euphoria following December 1971, Indian policy-makers deliberately overlooked or downplayed this reality. New Delhi’s implicit goal executed mainly through RAW is to make Dhaka its satrapy. This effort reached abnormal levels of crudity under BJP, intensifying the image in Bangladesh of the Ugly Indian.

A word about RAW is in order here to flesh out this statement. India’s external intelligence agency was established by Indira Gandhi in September 1968 to focus on “covert action in East Pakistan,” Pakistan’s soft underbelly, that became RAW’s “finest hour.”

By 1971, RAW had successfully penetrated the inner portals of the Awami League and its student wing Chhatra (Student) League. The latter resurfaced in April 1971 in Kolkata as the RAW sponsored, trained, and controlled Mujib Bahini, in which Sk. Mujibur Rahman’s nephew Sk. Fazlul Huq Moni was a key player.

The Mujib Bahini in 1972 became the Jatiya Rakhhi Bahini (RB) with training continued under RAW’s insurgency specialist Major General Sujan Singh Uban. The RB was Mujib’s praetorian guard of professional killers who created a culture of impunity for mayhem and murder with Indian connivance and support.

This culture of impunity was exponentially expanded by Mujib’s daughter Sheikh Hasina in her vindictively autocratic rule from 2009 to 2024. New Delhi’s influence in Bangladesh expanded by leaps and bounds under her.

After Hasina’s fall in August 2024, it has become existentially imperative to judge the role of the daughter and father duo in Bangladesh’s colorful history

First, Hasina. Bangladesh’s criminal justice system on November 17 gave her the death sentence on various charges. Enforcing any punishment will be impossible since India will not repatriate Hasina. This will add another layer of tension to the fraught Indo-Bangla relations.

Unsentimental pragmatism suggests the best thing to happen to improve this relationship is for Hasina to die naturally sooner than later. This will firmly put the lid on the dustbin of history where she now rightly belongs and symbolically ends a gruesome chapter in unsustainably bad inter-state behaviour.

New Delhi is likely to breathe a sigh of relief as Hasina’s presence is becoming embarrassingly unprofitable.

An intriguing question is the kind of funeral New Delhi will give Hasina. If it’s one with full state trappings including Modi’s attendance, that’ll portend a continuing Indian hard line.

If the funeral is dignified but low-key, that’ll suggest that New Delhi is willing and ready to turn a new page. The ball is India’s court.

The Indian establishment’s best minds must be exercising what kind of funeral to give Hasina. After all, she was its greatest treasure -- but relations with Dhaka minus Hasina, not indulging past memory and glories, must take priority.

This then brings us to the question of how history will rate Hasina’s legacy. Undoubtedly harshly.

Hasina has been rightly grateful to India for sheltering her from 1975 to 1981. Nevertheless, the manner and magnitude of concessions she gave New Delhi unilaterally without a corresponding quid pro quo and creating a culture of subservience to India are unprecedented and unjustified.

This suggests that Hasina was an Indian quisling in fact and deed. She is certainly widely perceived in Bangladesh as such. Perceptions matter in evaluating leaders.

Only a thorough psychiatric examination will reveal Hasina’s motives for her quisling-like behaviour. In its absence, laymen can speculate on two possible explanations.

One is her overarching revanchist personality that never forgot a favour or overlooked a slight. Another is that she’s a self-hating Bengali seeking revenge on an ungrateful nation for the August 1975 murder of her father and family members. Indian policymakers especially RAW adroitly exploited these characteristics to suborn and recruit Hasina during her New Delhi sojourn.

To move on to her father. Sheikh Muib’s assessment warrants a more seasoned approach because he did good and bad things.

Mujib’s incredibly bold public enunciation of the Six Points in February 1966 in the lion’s den of Lahore sensitized the Bengali Muslims to resist Punjabi Bhadrolok depredations vigorously (“make every house a fort,” he thundered in his landmark March 7, 1971 speech).

But when the war started on the night of March 25, 1971, Mujib as the commanding general surrendered to the enemy without a fight. He never publicly explained this decision that compromised his manifold achievements.

As Prime Minister, Mujib used his influence to get Indian soldiers to leave Bangladesh on March 15, 1972 and obtain swift international recognition for the fledgling nation. But he tarnished his legacy by forming BAKSAL in February 1975.

It’s not inconceivable that Mujib developed an inferiority complex about not participating in the Liberation War. He tried to atone for his absence through the untenable claim that he had issued a call for independence on March 25, 1971 through the East Pakistan Rifles network. Even more problematic was his gradual alienation from his colleagues, especially Tajuddin Ahmed, and increased reliance on blood relations like Moni, with disastrous results.

A sensible rendering of Bangladesh’s founding history requires Mujib’s measured assessment.

Hasina’s attempt to portray him as a monopolistic and monochromatic demigod at the expense of others backfired spectacularly. Worse, it undermined Bangladesh’s moral fibre, fabric and psyche.

The Chinese Communist Party in 1981 judged Mao Dze Dong -- a more accomplished leader than Mujib -- as 30% wrong and 70% right (3-7 formula).

Judging Mujib similarly would have historical precedent and validity. Since Awami League leaders are unlikely to do so, the present generation of Bangladeshi historians, journalists, political activists, and elected parliamentarians should research Mujib’s role and publish their contentious or praiseworthy findings.

The spirit should be to let a thousand flowers bloom and hundreds of thoughts contend to replace Hasina’s injudicious attempts at sterile conformity and uniformity.

The wheels of history, like justice, grind slowly but they grind small. Bangladesh cannot escape this general rule through prolonged distortion.

The hundred years since the 1905 Partition reveal that Bengal Muslims’ aspirations were thwarted thrice. This continues.

The first by Hindu Bengali Bhadroloks occurred between 1905-1912 in undivided colonial Bengal where Hindus and Muslims shared the same space but co-existed uneasily.

The second occurred in independent Pakistan from 1947 to 1971 where Muslim Punjabi Bhadroloks fathered an internal colonial economy that marginalized Bengali Muslims.

The third was constructed by the South Block and RAW Bhadrolok mandarins that has been ongoing since December 1971. This saw relations evolve between two ostensibly sovereign states where diplomatic niceties were honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Navigating this relationship is a challenge for the Yunus administration and will be for its successors.

A sensitive unresolved question that surfaced in 1905 but got traction under Pakistan is the identity of Bengali Muslims. Are they more Bengali than Muslim? Or vice versa?

The cute answer that they are both without elaboration on details like gender issues is semantic jugglery. The incoming parliamentarians -- secular or theocratic, government or opposition -- must craft an acceptable and durable answer to this explosive question. Their reputation and Bangladesh’s future depend upon it.

The signing of the July Sanad or Charter on October 17, 2025 suggests that the task will be difficult but not insurmountable.

To understand Bangladesh 2025, it’s helpful to know what happened in Bengal in 1905, where it all began.

Mumtaz Iqbal is a former banker and freelancer.