The final straw? Bhola cyclone, 1970 election, disaster politics, and the making of Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

The article explores the impact of one of the deadliest disasters in the twentieth century, the East Pakistan cyclone of 1970, also known as the Great Bhola Cyclone, on the first-ever general election held in united Pakistan immediately thereafter. It argues that the cumulative dissidence of the eastern bloc since the partition of India in 1947 had reached its crescendo and made a landfall impact following the disastrous aftermath of the cyclone, which was evidenced in the general election of December 1970, creating the very triggering effect that led to a series of political events and the bloodbath that followed, eventually culminating in the formation of an independent nation-state of Bangladesh in 1971. While doing so, the article builds on the literature on disaster and electoral politics, historical disasters, and uses hitherto underexplored sources, both official and unofficial, archives, and personal memoirs.

KEYWORDS:

• Bhola cyclone
• natural disaster
• Pakistan
• Bangladesh
• election 1970
• aid
• disaster politics

1. Introduction

The existing historiographical discourse on the emergence of the independent nation-state of Bangladesh is quite formidable. There have been quite a few nodal points between the partition of India in 1947 and the birth of Pakistan, with her two wings widely separated in between by India, and the final secession of East Pakistan from West Pakistan in 1971. Almost every point – from the language movement in 1952, the six points movement in 1966, the first-ever general election in 1970, to the targeted genocide in East Pakistan in 1971 – has been taken up by scholars working on Bangladesh, both national and international, to understand the causal relationship that led to the final showdown in 1971 and separation. While doing so, attempts have also been made to bring out some of the fundamental differences between the eastern and western wings of Pakistan – from language, culture, and economy, to racial segregation and hegemonic political leadership – that made sure that ‘never the twain shall meet’.¹ However, what has largely been missed out in this process thus far, is the absence of a politico-environmental perspective. What role did the ecology and natural hazards play in the political outcome of this region? Even a cursory sifting of the existing literature on the history of the emergence of Bangladesh shows the absence of any serious academic engagement, although the region has almost always been identified as ecologically vulnerable.

It is generally believed that the failure of the Pakistani military regime in dealing with the disaster in a divided society of Pakistan caused a landslide victory for the Awami League in East Pakistan that ultimately led to the birth of Bangladesh. With little more than a passing mention,² this claim of various scholars, politicians, and international observers has gained widespread acceptance but fails to provide any systematic analysis of how the cyclone could have possibly changed the magnitude of electoral outcomes, if any. Amongst the existing literature, two relatively recent articles need to be mentioned here, as an exception, which have carefully examined the significance of the Bhola cyclone and its long-term and immediate impact in the making of Bangladesh, both having established hypotheses that contribute towards the larger argument made in the present article. First, using the Bhola cyclone of 1970 as an analytical lens to elucidate subsequent development policy choices in Bangladesh, Naomi Hossain argues that the cyclone had long-term extraordinary political significance that put disaster management on the nationalist agenda; the famine of 1974 firmly established its significance, thereby ‘producing a social contract to protect the population against disasters and subsistence crises on which the country’s acclaimed resilience to the effects of climate change rests’ (Hossain 2018, 187). The second article, co-authored by Sravani Biswas and Patrick Daly, on the other hand, analyses the more immediate significance of the cyclone (Biswas and Daly 2021). In an attempt to address the lack of a prescribed framework to examine the extent to which one should ‘credit the 1970 cyclone for the political turbulence and the secession that followed’ (Biswas and Daly 2021, 4), the authors went on to claim that the Bhola cyclone acted merely as an accelerated status-quo in the prevailing socio-political and economic tension in East Pakistan. In other words, according to Biswas and Daly, the cyclone of 1970 did not alter the political configuration of East Pakistan, but rather reinforced pre-disaster arguments and ‘boosted the political efficacy of East Pakistan’s demand for autonomy’ (Biswas and Daly 2021, 29).

Both articles have indeed underscored the importance of the cyclone (and of disasters) in shaping the long-term and immediate ramifications in East Pakistan/Bangladesh. While Hossain’s study made a significant contribution to disaster management, social contract, and subsistence crisis in post-independent Bangladesh, we aim to contribute to the scholarship on electoral studies by drawing on disaster politics. This article thus contributes to the debate initiated by Hossain, Biswas and Daly about the nature and impact of the disaster on Bangladeshi politics. It suggests that although politics in East Pakistan were quite divisive leading up to the 1970 elections, the Bhola cyclone was a unifying factor in terms of identifying a clear and shared grievance, and in hindsight, acted as a catalyst in expediting the process towards the final secession and independence of Bangladesh.

In addition to building on secondary literature on historical disasters, electoral politics, and political ecology, the article uses relevant archival documents – official and private correspondences, parliamentary reports – from the National Archives of Bangladesh, the National Archives of India, the British Library's online resources, and the US Department of State, including the Secret and Confidential papers relating to India-Pakistan-Bangladesh, between 1965 and 1973, compiled by Roedad Khan (1999). It also analyses domestic and international newspaper reports in Bengali and English, memoirs and autobiographies, and personal interviews conducted with erstwhile politicians and ministers of EP. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the residents of Bhola and of severely affected neighbouring regions, who are still alive to share their horrid tale of the cyclone and its aftermath.

2. Politics of disasters: theoretical perspectives

The dearth of any serious engagement with the ecological disaster perspective in understanding the political ramifications that led to the final separation of the two wings of Pakistan is quite disconcerting, but not entirely surprising. Historical disasters have in general been outside the analysis of academics for a very long time, especially in South Asia. Despite the emergence of environmental history, political ecology in the last two decades, or more popularly in recent times Environmental Humanities, as a more specialized thematic area of research, there have been few studies on natural disasters in South Asia – disasters originating from a natural hazard such as earthquakes, floods, or cyclones.³ One of the plausible reasons behind this, as Eleonor Marcussen has argued in her recent monograph, could be the perception of catastrophes of nature to be outside the scope of political history, and particularly so outside the history of states, which would explain why historical research tends to study the role of governance in hybrid or man-made disasters rather than governance in natural hazards (Marcussen 2022).

Disaster as an opportunity to reorder society, both in the moment of crisis and in the longer aftermath, creates spaces where political legitimacy is contested or reinforced. In this context, Mark Pelling and Kathleen Dill have referred to disasters as a ‘tipping point’ in the sense that they open a political space where power can be challenged or further entrenched (Pelling and Dill 2006, 2010). According to this view, ‘ruptures caused by the disaster within the political and social spheres contribute to a distinctive break in the pre-disaster political trajectory, allowing the emergence of new political actors, forms of political rhetoric, and policies.’ To them, ‘this results in a break and a major transformation of the pre-disaster political situation’ (Pelling and Dill 2010, 34). Others, such as Edward Simpson, propose that disasters can be used by governments and other actors to assert their authority and/or reinforce the power and role of the state (Simpson 2013). As the article will argue, building on the perspective offered by Pelling and Dill, the cyclone and its immediate aftermath provided the tipping point that reconfigured the political theatre of united Pakistan and eventually led to the road towards East Pakistan’s independence.

A plethora of literature sheds light on the disaster response of the government and its impact, drawing on different cases around the world. Existing literature demonstrates that natural disasters have significant consequences and implications for government stability. For example, natural disasters have conventionally been viewed as ‘bad omens for governments’ (Abney and Hill 1966, 974). One of the important characteristics of the disaster response of the government is that ‘natural disaster declarations and assistance are politically influenced’ (Garrett and Sobel 2003; Shughart 2006; Sobel et al. 2007, cited in Chang and Berdiev 2015, 1790). The government’s response in dealing with natural disasters could vary significantly. The response could be inadequate, unjust, unequal or a government could simply be incapable of providing necessary service to the victims. This uneven distribution of disaster relief may lead to frustration among the population, thereby holding the government accountable (Cavallo et al. 2010; Keefer, Neumayer, and Plumper 2011). Using rainfall, public relief, and election data from India, Cole, Healy, and Werker (2012) argue that ‘voters punish the incumbent party for weather events beyond its control. However, fewer voters punish the ruling party when its government responds vigorously to the crisis, indicating that voters reward the government for responding to disasters. The study suggests, ‘voters only respond to rainfall and government relief efforts during the year immediately preceding the election’. Thus, the government’s inability to effectively distribute public disaster relief and improve the well-being of the affected populace may often lead to violent conflagration, and/or destabilize an incumbent government.

In their work entitled Catastrophic Politics: How Extraordinary Events Redefined Perceptions of Government, Atkeson and Maestas developed a framework to study how Hurricane Katrina changed American politics and projected the political consequences of future extraordinary events (Atkeson and Maestas 2012). They argued that the extraordinary political environment prevailing in a society creates shocking moments that permit political and opinion changes, which is unlikely to occur during normal political times. Strong emotions that are felt by the public during catastrophes are powerful motivators of public opinion and activism. These events, as we argue, bring citizens together, provide shared experiences, emotion and information, and create opinions that transcend traditional political boundaries. Ecological disasters also create opportunities for what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’, the tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures (Klein 2008; also see: Loewenstein 2017). The article partly builds on Klein’s analysis to bring out the ‘political capital’ of an ‘ecological disaster’.

The article thus contributes to the existing historiography in interconnected ways, and while doing so takes the scope of this paper from a regional to a global scale. We aim to establish ecology and environment as an integral part of politico-historical analysis, after they have long being ignored and pushed to the side-lines. As Iftekhar Iqbal (2010, 6) rightly puts it, the political, cultural, and economic histories of South Asia have been told and retold in a framework in which the environment has either no place or has been used as an ecological bow from where other kinds of history take-off, while the ecology itself remains ontologically static. The Bhola cyclone of 1970 has historically been treated as an ecological disaster, a ‘natural’ event that had little or no ramifications over the political reconfiguration in a region that was also intertwined within global cold war politics.

3. The context: gathering of the storm and the landfall

The geographical location and character of the terrain make Bangladesh one of the most natural-hazard prone countries of the world. About 26 per cent of the population are affected by cyclones and 70 per cent live in flood-prone regions (Cash et al. 2013). The cyclone of November 1970, the origin of which was a remnant of a tropical storm around the Malay peninsula, was the eventual culmination of an ever-growing tropical storm in East Pakistan that had taken thousands of lives per year for more than a decade (Frank and Husain 1971). The cyclone, which according to World Bank estimates affected around 4.8 million people in the affected areas of East Pakistan, was initially estimated to be of moderate intensity, but it steadily gathered momentum and moved northwards, eventually making landfall on 12 November. The cyclone eventually gathered a force of more than 150 miles per hour, and brought along with it massive tidal waves, sweeping away more than 250,000 people, along with thatched houses and agricultural and pastoral livelihoods.⁴ In certain areas, such as Tazumuddin in Barisal district, more than half the population were lost by the calamitous effect of the immediate landfall (Sommer and Mosley 1972).

Although the cyclone was not ranked in the top category of cyclone intensity scales, and as Benjamin Reilly (2009, 172) pointed out, was not the strongest cyclone ever recorded, nor even the strongest storm of the North Indian Ocean cyclone season of 1970, it is widely believed to be the deadliest tropical cyclone in recorded history and one of the greatest natural disasters (Hossain 2018, 187). What made the cyclone one of the worst natural disasters was not just the force of nature; it was also the force of circumstances. In other words, the Bhola cyclone struck at the worst possible place at the worst possible time. As indicated above, the November cyclone of 1970 in erstwhile East Pakistan is particularly significant in terms of the disastrous policies pursued by West Pakistan in the aftermath of the cyclone and what followed thereafter. Citing the event as a ‘critical juncture’, US Agency for International Development suggested that

[The Bhola cyclone] was one of the first instances of a compound or iterative disaster where a natural event (the 1970 cyclone) helped trigger a civil war, which triggered an external military intervention and the final dissolution of a nation-state. (USAID 2007, 42)

This was coupled with the continuing and ever-growing dissatisfaction amongst the ruling elites and general people of East Pakistan towards the dictatorial rule of West Pakistan over the orevious two decades. East Pakistan was, as Jahan (1973, 199) argued, under the internal-colonial rule of West Pakistan almost immediately after South Asia attained its independence from British colonial rule and was divided into two nations. Years of grievances as a consequence of misrule, subjugation of basic rights, along with endless exploitation and extraction of resources from East Pakistan had already created a climate of extreme dissidence amongst the ruling elites and people of East Pakistan towards their Western counterpart.⁵ Amongst other issues, what irked the East Pakistan leadership was the complete apathy of West Pakistan towards the ecologically vulnerable landscape and the natural hazard-prone coastal belt of East Pakistan. This was reflected in the earlier demands raised by the United Front, an alliance of four major political parties of East Pakistan formed in 1954, in their 21-point election manifesto, which specifically called for better flood control ‘to protect the country from flood and famine by means of digging canals and improving irrigation system’.⁶ Furthermore, in as late as 1968–69, during the anti-Ayub Khan students’ movement in East Pakistan, the demand for ‘flood control and provisions for proper use of water resources in East Pakistan’ (Umar 2006, 148) was once again at the forefront. In response to the north Indian Ocean cyclone season of 1960, the Government of Pakistan established a program to improve cyclone protection, develop warning systems, provide shelters, deliver relief, and decrease vulnerability by rezoning settlements. But needless to say, those measures were certainly not adequate. Drawing on M. Aminul Islam’s (1971) work, Hossain (2018, 193) suggested that the few cyclone shelters constructed after 1960 were inadequate for the needs of vulnerable coastal and island communities. These shelters were often located far away from these communities, and a study conducted just prior to the Bhola cyclone revealed that the most vulnerable populations lacked access to radios, were unable to hear or trust cyclone warnings, or were hesitant to leave their homes and crops to go to the limited number of suitable shelters due to fear of theft or physical limitations. This attitude of the West Pakistan leadership stemmed from the colonial discourse about the tropics and the Orient. Edward Said (1978) deployed this term in his influential discussion of how the Orient has been produced, its meaning regulated, and imperial influence and authority over it exerted by Western knowledge, institutions, and scholarship – by a discourse of Orientalism, or system of representation, that constructs the Orient as inferior to the West. Orientalism and tropicality operate as discourses of power by dramatizing the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘here' and ‘there’. The nationalist leadership in West Pakistan imbibed this colonial idea of Orient as ‘natural’, and prevalence of diseases, natural hazards and poverty were all but a fait accompli of the Eastern wing. The government of Pakistan were cognizant that East Pakistan had to frequently endure the force of a cyclone, floods and tidal bore, and the accompanying health hazards, mortality, and economic setbacks. But these issues were perceived by West Pakistan as part of the ‘natural’ landscape of the Eastern wing, and thus never became an integral part to be considered within the policy formulation by the central administration. Gary Bass (2013, 23) in his book The Blood Telegram, has quoted the words of Archer Blood, the US Consul General to Dhaka at that time, ‘it was almost as if they (West Pakistan) just didn't care’.

What followed thereafter need not be elaborated here.⁷ What needs to be emphasized though, was the way the cyclone became part of the larger political discourse of East Pakistan. As the paper argues, the cyclone of November 1970 marked the end of any remaining political legitimacy and the moral claim that West Pakistan had over the governance of East Pakistan. The cyclone expedited the cry for regional autonomy in East Pakistan, if not outright independence, and acted as a catalyst towards the effectiveness of the political campaign. In the aftermath of the disaster, immediate action was crucial to aid the survivors and prevent the situation from further deterioration. And yet, whether deliberately or otherwise, the response from West Pakistan was negligible; they seemed to turn a deaf ear to the sufferings of the people of East Pakistan. There was a deliberate attempt to imply that East Pakistan leaders were ‘crying wolf’, exaggerating the impact of the devastation. It wasn't until the international media started publishing images of mutilated bodies, hanging from trees or washed ashore, that they decided to undo the harm already done.⁸ But by then it was too late. The public anger in East Pakistan had already reached a point that was beyond repair.

The issues concerning the cyclone disaster soon became entwined within the major political discourse of the two wings of Pakistan. This was further augmented by the fact that within a few weeks after the cyclone struck, the general election was scheduled to be held. While the West Pakistan administration, even though too late by then, called for a postponment of the election under the circumstances, for the East Pakistan leadership it was an opportunity that was not to be lost. To the Awami League, the cyclone provided a much needed spark to the already advantageous political position they had in the upcoming general election due to the long-standing economic and political disparities between the two wings of Pakistan. The devastation and the subsequent negligence of the West Pakistan-led government in dealing with the post-disaster relief and rehabilitation also made the Awami League’s six-point demands for regional autonomy within a federal structure not just an electoral rhetoric, but the only alternative. As David Ludden (2011, 79–85) argued, for the East Pakistan leadership, it was important that the political leverage that accompanied the disaster be directed towards the failure of the Pakistan state in general, not just the Yahya regime, thereby justifying the demand to bring down a dysfunctional state. Subsequently, in the election that followed, the Awami League won 160 of the 162 National Assembly seats allotted to East Pakistan, with around 72 per cent of the vote, and 288 of the 300 East Pakistan Provincial Assembly seats, in ‘possibly the greatest victory of any party in a free and contested election anywhere’ (Baxter 1971, 212). One interesting point to note here is that neither of the two major political parties, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in the west wing and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League in the east, secured a single seat on the other side, and as such, it was already evident that Pakistan was politically separated even before the final cessation. The electoral outcome, quite obviously, was not acceptable to the leadership in West Pakistan. The deteriorating political conditions eventually culminated in a historical war of liberation that ended in 1971 with East Pakistan's independence as the new nation, Bangladesh. To many, such as Eric Griffel, the chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Dhaka at that time, the cyclone was the real reason for the final cessation.⁹

4. First general election of united Pakistan, December 1970

Before we delve further into the election of December 1970, we should note that the Bhola cyclone, although certainly the determinant factor in turning the electoral outcome solely towards the Awami League, was not the only disaster that was influential in precipitating this outcome. Even before the fateful cyclone hit the coastal regions of East Pakistan in November 1970, the area was already ravaged by perennial monsoon flooding. The general election was initially scheduled for 5 October 1970, but this was postponed because of severe monsoon flooding in August 1970. Monsoon flooding in the deltaic region wascommon, but the 1970 floods were more severe in their consequence than the regular ones, coupled with the fact that the election was scheduled only weeks later. Yahya toured the flood-affected areas, and after consultation with officials and political leaders he postponed the elections. Political parties were sharply divided regarding the postponement of the elections.

When Yahya announced the postponement of countrywide general elections, he rationalized his decision by referring to several challenges arising out of the unprecedented flood situation in East Pakistan. Ostensibly, Yahya was concerned about human miseries caused by the floods.¹⁰ However, sceptics believe that there was more to it than Yahya's humanitarianism. Bangladeshi politician, diplomat, and academic Kamruddin Ahmed (1975, 235) noted that if the elections were held on 5 October 1970, leaders of all the other political parties in East Pakistan expected the Awami League to win sweepingly. They therefore demanded the postponement of the election, which was eventually accepted by Yahya. They believed that if the election was postponed then the Awami League would exhaust its resources and thus the tide of popularity eventually would turn in their favour. In other words, until August 1970, there was sharp polarization between the Awami League and other political parties.

On top of the floods, the Bhola cyclone came as the catalyst in shaping electoral politics. After the cyclone, there were demands by all political parties except the Awami League that elections should again be postponed. While most of the leaders in East Pakistan, including Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, the leader of the National Awami Party, demanded the postponement of the elections, Mujib alone, in a press conference, cautioned that ‘if the polls are frustrated, the people of Bangladesh will owe it to the millions who have died to make the supreme sacrifice of another million lives, if need be, so that we can live as a free people and so that Bangladesh can be the master of its destiny’.¹¹ While strongly opposed to the postponement of the elections, Mujib, however, agreed that elections could be postponed in the constituencies devastated by the cyclone.

Against the threat from Mujib, all other political parties of East Pakistan were prepared to back Yahya. G.W.Choudhury (2018, 101), cabinet member in Yahya's administration, noted that Bhashani communicated to Yahya through an emissary that if Yahya focused all of his resources on relief efforts in areas affected by the cyclone instead of preparing for elections, Bhashani and his party would support Yahya instead of Mujib, in case the latter objected to Yahya for postponing the election. All other political parties in East Pakistan also were willing to support Yahya ‘if Mujib started an agitation against the postponement of elections’ (Choudhury 2018, 101). However, on 27 November 1970, in a press conference in Dhaka, the President firmly announced that the election would take place. Between late November and early December of 1970, according to Choudhury (2018, 101), Yahya had three secret meetings with Mujib in Dhaka. In contrast, Yahya refused to meet with the leaders who appealed to him to postpone the election. Yahya believed that his decision not to postpone the election was ‘correct and far-sighted’ (see, Choudhury 2018, 102).

The two disasters preceding the election were dealt with by the government in different ways. During the flood in July-August, Yahya and his government dealt with the situation in a relatively efficient manner. In dealing with the cyclone, however, the President and his government's ‘unpardonable apathy’ was termed as ‘criminal negligence’ by Mujib. When the cyclone struck in November 1970, the President was in China. Faruk Ahmed Choudhury, a former Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh, who went to China with the President, noted that ‘President Yahya Khan could have come to Dhaka from China on November 13, the day after the storm … But Yahya instead returned to Dhaka from Peking on 14 November.’ (Choudhury 2012). Yahya stayed for just two days in Dhaka at a time when everyone expected the President to oversee the relief work from the city. The only thing Yahya did was to survey the affected areas by air, from a safe height of over ten thousand feet. From that altitude, it was impossible to get any real picture and sense of the devastation. No other ministers of his administration from West Pakistan bothered to visit the cyclone-affected areas. Back at the Dhaka airport, before departing for Islamabad, while Yahya expressed his sympathy for the disaster victims, many of the press correspondents heard him say, ‘It didn’t look so bad’ (Blood 2006, 77).

Neither Yahya nor his administration worked to provide minimum service to the victims. Even his own man, Major General Khadim Hussain Raja – General Officer Commanding 14 division and one of the prime architects of Operation Searchlight¹² that led to the genocide of countless Bengalis between March and May 1971 – hesitantly noted the apathy and negligence of the central as well as the provincial government. In his words, ‘it was only two or three days later that news of the tragedy started trickling in. Initially, the civil administration committed an error of judgment and ignored the news’ (Raja 2012, 36). The Governor of East Pakistan was busy with his usual business as he had ‘convened a conference of deputy commissioners and superintends of police and went ahead with it as if nothing had happened’ (Raja 2012, 36).

Yahya’s apathy towards the suffering of the cyclone victims created a serious reaction in political circles and bitterness in the minds of the people of the region. The reaction of the political leaders had two dimensions: while they were still divided about the postponement of the election, all the party leaders in East Pakistan, including the National Awami Party and the Awami League, were united in blaming the West Pakistanis for what they perceived as deliberate negligence. Based on the available evidence, we argue that although political leadership in East Pakistan were divided, the apathetic reaction from the West Pakistan leadership further unified the voters in the East into ‘one vote bank’. Days before the national election, a continuous whining by all political parties strengthened the feud between two wings of Pakistan, which was popularly termed as ‘the Bengali – Punjabi feud’ by Sydney H. Schanberg.¹³

The Bengali-speaking political leaders and activists, students, and journalists in East Pakistan relentlessly criticized the negligence of the central government, which further helped forge unity in an otherwise politically divided East Pakistan. On 23 November 1970, in a collective statement, all eleven political parties of East Pakistan unequivocally condemned the West Pakistan-led government for their callous, immoral, and insensitive attempt to suppress their failure in dealing with disaster relief. They raised questions as to why foreign aid was being treated in the most unacceptable way, with stocks being piled up for days without proper distribution and thus being wasted; and demanded the declaration of a state of emergency and the provision of ‘immediate massive post-disaster response, using every available government and private resources available with immediate effect’.¹⁴

On 26 November 1970, in a press conference in Dhaka, Mujib provided a horrific account of the devastation that he had witnessed during his tour in the cyclone-ravaged areas. He claimed that many non-governmental organizations, social workers, relief team members of the Awami League and Chatra (Student) League, who were in the affected areas to provide relief, were facing trouble, as the administration was not cooperating with them. Mujib lamented,

West Pakistan has a bumper wheat crop, but the first shipment of food grain to reach us is from abroad. We have a large army deployed in West Pakistan, but it is left to the British Marines to bury our dead.

He further argued that ‘the feeling now pervades every village, home, and slum that we must rule ourselves. We must make the decisions that matter. We will no longer suffer arbitrary rule by bureaucrats, capitalists, and feudal interests of West Pakistan’ (Heitzman and Worden 1989, 27). Mujib was critical towards the lackadaisical attitude of the elite industrial families of erstwhile Pakistan – proverbially known as the 22 families – towards the relief effort. Despite ‘exploiting’ the resources of East Pakistan for years, spending more than seventy-two per cent of the common resources in West Pakistan and more than sixty per cent of the budget towards the defence services, Mujib expressed his disappointment that the West Pakistani elites had not taken any action to assist the disaster victims in East Pakistan' (Heitzman and Worden 1989, 27).

5. The cyclone as the turning point

5.1. Point of departure: justification for six-point program

The complaint of negligence and indifference of the central government towards the plight of cyclone victims provided an excellent opportunity for Mujib to justify his six-point programme, based on which his election campaign was designed. The six-point program demanded greater regional political and economic autonomy, in order to close the disparity between the two wings of Pakistan. Mujib first presented the six-point programme after the India-Pakistan war of 1965, in which East Pakistan was defenceless. This was further intensified in the eleven-point demand, raised during the anti-Ayub Khan movement led by students in 1968 (Umar 2006, 139–188). However, as Rashed Khan Menon noted,¹⁵ the six-point program was more widely supported in the educated, urban-based settlements, than amongst the majority of the rural peasantry in East Pakistan. For Mujib and the Awami League, it was essential that the significance of the demands reached the masses. The cyclone and its devastating aftermath provided Mujib with the necessary wherewithal to rationalize the demands within the larger discourse of the disaster to his supporters.

Using the cyclone as a point of departure, Mujib pointed out the helplessness of the people of East Pakistan under the current administration,¹⁶ and stressed that to save the land from future natural disasters and accompanying losses it was imperative to participate in the upcoming election and achieve full autonomy based on the six point and eleven point demands. (Momen 2020 205–209). Accordingly, the Awami League took various such initiatives, including public meetings, street marches, slogans and posters. One such poster, to cite an example, became quite influential in bringing the cyclone disaster within the long-term grievances encapsulated in the six-point program, appropriately and provocatively captioned: Shonar Bangla Shoshan Keno? (Why is Golden Bengal a Crematorium?) The poster, published in hundreds of thousands of copies, building on post-disaster criticism towards West Pakistan that addressed the disparity between the two wings of Pakistan, was used extensively during the last leg of the election campaign.¹⁷

Mujib’s tactical use of the disaster to his political advantage is further reflected in the memoir of Tofail Ahmed, a close associate of Mujib and an elected Member of Parliament in 1970 from Bhola, who reminisced that while visiting the cyclone-affected areas, Mujib urged him to do his utmost to take care of the victims, and instructed him to do so under the official banner of the Awami League.¹⁸ While it is beyond doubt that Mujib was genuinely concerned about the cyclone victims and millions of others left with nothing in the aftermath of the cyclone, the above statement from Ahmed clearly points out the kind of political mileage he wished to draw out of the prevailing disaster.

5.2. An unanticipated electoral outcome and its ramification

To further establish our claim that the Bhola Cyclone of 1970 played a pivotal role in shaping the outcome of the election of 1970, this section argues that the electoral mandate, which went overwhelmingly in favour of the Awami League, was unanticipated. In one of the most systematically researched books on the emergence of Bangladesh, published in 1990, Sisson and Rose claimed that ‘the results of the elections on 7 December 1970, were unanticipated by winners, losers, and government alike’ (Sisson and Rose 1990, 33). To them, albeit most political observers expected the Awami League to emerge as the leading political party in East Pakistan, very few predicted them to win 160 out of 162 seats, and that too by such significant margins. On a similar note, Rehman Sobhan, one of the key figures of Mujib’s inner circle between 1966 and 1971, suggested that ‘all except perhaps Bangabandhu and Tajuddin must have been surprised at the final outcome’ (Sobhan 2016, 312). Prior to the cyclone, Mujib estimated that the Awami League would win around 140 of the 162 seats in East Pakistan.¹⁹ In other words, he did not expect an absolute majority in the election, allowing him to form the government in the 300 member parliament of Pakistan. The electoral outcome and the magnitude of it was overwhelming to most of the Awami League leaders. This can be ratified by the fact that early in the election campaign, the Awami League high command had been preparing to enter agreements with other parties in the east not to contest the elections against one another (Sisson and Rose 1990, 31). Post-election political reaction in East Pakistan further testifies that the electoral outcome was unanticipated to most politicians in the east. Sisson and Rose noted that ‘after the national elections more than 500 candidates withdrew from the Provincial Assembly elections to be held on 17 December and several eminent leaders who had held top positions in previous regimes decided to retire from political life’ (Sisson and Rose 1990, 33).

The election outcome came as a total surprise not just to the political parties, but to the Pakistani military as well; it was an outcome for which they were not ready at all. Consequently, the government refused to respect the electoral mandate. Yahya and his close military aides genuinely believed that the electoral outcome would be a hung parliament, and that the martial law administration would go on indefinitely (Siddiqi 2004, 43, 45–46, 49–50). Major General Khadim Hussain Raja, an otherwise close aide of Yahya who was headquartered in Dhaka and regularly sent monthly intelligence reports to the High Command in West Pakistan, repeatedly warned about the increasing dominance of Awami League in East Pakistan. Raja lamented that while he kept reporting ‘accurately and truthfully’ to the President, suggesting that by his reckoning the Awami League would capture a minimum of 75 per cent of the National Assembly seats from East Pakistan, the intelligence agencies stuck to their earlier predictions (Raja 2012, 3). Quite clearly, Yahya and his military administration had grossly underestimated the increasing influence of two of the major political parties in Pakistan, Mujib’s Awami League in the east, and Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in the west. In a similar manner, Ian Talbot (1998, 193) too concluded that ‘from November 1969 until the announcement of the national election results, he [Yahya] discounted the possibility of an Awami League landslide in East Pakistan.’²⁰ However, as it turned out, in the election that followed the Awami League won an overwhelming political mandate, winning 160 out of 162 seats – providing Mujib and his party an absolute majority, and legitimacy to form the government at the Centre.

5.3. The turning point? Bhashani, electoral boycott, and its consequences

The overwhelming electoral mandate that the Awami League received was indeed to a large extent shaped by the already harpooned criticism of Mujib towards Pakistan’s outright failure in protecting the Eastern wing over the years and specifically in the aftermath of the cyclone disaster. However, as we argue in this section and the next, the mandate was influenced by several other factors which were equally decisive in the electoral outcome. First, it is important to note the role of Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani in turning the tide further in favour of a landslide victory of the Awami League in the 1970 election. This is interesting since Bhashani, by the time of the election in 1970, already had a strained relationship with Mujib and was in opposition to the Awami League. It should be noted that Maulana Bhashani was the founding President of the Awami Muslim League which was later renamed the Awami League and was one of the political mentors of Mujib.²¹ Later, he severed his relationship with the Awami League on ideological grounds and founded the National Awami Party.

A critical look at Bhashani’s response towards the cyclone disaster between 16 November and 8 December 1970 is important, in order to understand the landslide victory of the Awami League. Upon hearing of the devastation and the indifference of the government, Bhashani, who was at the time critically ill and undergoing treatment, decided to visit the cyclone-affected areas. Returning from the scene of the cyclone, Bhashani held a press conference on 22 November 1970, which was then followed by a public rally at Paltan Maidan in Dhaka on 23 November 1970 (Rano 2012). On both these occasions Bhashani narrated the harrowing scale of devastation he witnessed and expressed his deepest condemnation towards the central government for their apathy and deliberate negligence (Bahar 2003). In his relentless campaign against the government's negligence in the aftermath of the cyclone, two of his assertions became a national slogan and gained widespread approval: Ora keo ashe nai (none of them came), referring to the absence of any of the central ministers from West Pakistan visiting the cyclone affected areas, and As-Salaam Alaikum, herein referring to a formal and final goodbye to West Pakistan, followed by a call for ‘Independent East Pakistan Zindabad!’ (Chowdhury 2014). Bhashani’s political influence was strong enough to send a shockwave through the people of East Pakistan, by making a sharp polarization between Ora (They/people of West Pakistan), and Amra (Us/people of East Pakistan) – ironically anticipating Bhutto’s infamous ‘udahar tum, idhar hum’ (you there, us here) speech delivered on 14 March 1971 in Karachi, with reference to the sharing of power in the aftermath of the election, between Mujib in East Pakistan and Bhutto in the West (Jalal 2014, 172).

Second, the Bhola cyclone changed the nature and dynamics of electoral settings in East Pakistan in many ways, one of the most important of which was the call for election boycott. Considering the devastation wrought by the cyclone, Bhashani’s National Awami Party and other political parties in East Pakistan demanded postponement of the election. However, on 27 November 1970 Yahya confirmed that the elections will not be postponed because of the cyclone. Shortly thereafter, in a massive gathering at Paltan Maidan organized in collaboration with other political parties, Bhashani (National Awami Party), along with Ataur Rahman Khan (National League), Pir Mohsinuddin (Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam), Mashiur Rahman (East Pakistan-National Awami Party), and A.S.M Solaiman (Krishak Sramik Party), publicly announced their decision to boycott the election, considering the devastation and horrid situation prevailing at the time in East Pakistan (Umar 2006, 269). Consequently, the Awami League turned out to be ‘the only party of consequence’ (Umar 2006, 268).

Third, a critical look at the voting pattern shows that the electoral outcome had a serious impact on the two weeks long pre-election campaign. Voting turnout in East Pakistan was comparatively low at 55%, compared to 66% of Punjab, and 59% of the national average (Baxter 1971). As a direct consequence of the electoral boycott by all the other parties in East Pakistan, the voters had only two options: either to abstain themselves from voting (for those who were not in favour the Awami League), or to come out and vote for the Awami League (as the only alternative). In either of the two options, there was only one possible outcome – an overwhelming majority for Mujib and his party. As we argued in the earlier section, the pre-cyclone electoral anticipation of the Awami League getting no more than 140 seats – which was overwhelming but still short of the 151 out of 300 seats needed to win an absolute majority in the general election – was superseded by the unanticipated 160 seats won by the Awami League in the election. This cardinal shift, from an anticipated 140 seats to winning more than 151 seats, thereby crossing the ‘magic number’ and making Mujib the undisputed leader to form the government at the Center, we argue, would perhaps not have been possible without Bhashani’s aggressive stance towards boycotting the election.

5.4. Newspapers and the shaping of public opinion

In addition to the already charismatic leadership of Mujib, his sharp political manoeuvres in the aftermath of the cyclone in turning the voters into a unified force behind the Awami League, which was further reinforced by the denouncement of West Pakistan by Bhashani for their apathy, criminal negligence, and failure, and followed by the election boycott by most of the political parties in East Pakistan, it was the Bengali press that played a pivotal role in shaping the mindset of the people in East Pakistan towards the electoral outcome of 1970. Although politically opinionated and ideologically motivated and divided, the Bengali press often had a similar stance during any national crisis such as the language movement and the 1954 provincial elections. During the anti-Ayub movement in 1969, the Bengali press was united against the regime. When political activities were allowed in January 1970, and elections for the National Assembly were scheduled in October, the newspapers of East Pakistan were once again actively involved in mobilizing public opinion towards the cause of East Pakistan. However, they were not necessarily unanimous in their ideological opinion and support. Dainik Sangbad, one of the top circulated newspapers, openly supported the National Awami Party of Bhasani. Its managing director, Ahmedul Kabir, became a candidate in the election for the National Awami Party. Weekly Ganashakti and Weekly Holiday were supporters of Bengali nationalism but against the Awami League. Similarly, while Daily Morning News and Dainik Pakistan were pro-government, Dainik Azad held an anti-Awami League stance. On the other hand, the most circulated Daily Ittefaq was a pro-Awami League newspaper (see, Emran Jahan 2008). And yet, as we argue, the cataclysmic event of 12 November 1970 erased the ideological and political differences of most of the newspapers in East Pakistan, launching a united, scathing, and coordinated anti-government campaign that continued all the way to the election, influencing popular opinion that was already leaning towards the cause of East Pakistan.

It is interesting to note that even before the cyclone made its landfall on the fateful day of 12 November 1970, the newspapers – irrespective of political and ideological differences – had widely published the cyclone warning, cautioning the government officials as well as the people of the impending danger. To cite a few examples, Pakistan Observer had published headlines such as ‘cyclonic storm may hit coastal areas’ and ‘cyclonic storm may intensify’, while Daily Morning News even included a satellite image of the region, days before the storm hit coastal belts of East Pakistan. But as it happened, it was obvious that the administration hardly paid any attention to these indications.

In the immediate aftermath of the cyclone, both the vernacular and English language newspapers were deeply critical of the West Pakistan-based government's refusal to acknowledge their deliberate negligence in response to to the catastrophic disaster, their apathetic attitude towards immediate and concerted action, denying every responsibility, and worse still, denying or blocking immediate international aid efforts.²² Consequently, in the days following the disaster till the end of the election, and even thereafter, there was a concerted attempt by the newspapers in East Pakistan to condemn the existing administration in every possible way. Reports of deliberate delay on the part of the administration in supplying the relief essentials to the victims, even after several days post cyclone, were published with photographs in the newspapers, showing relief goods including 129 bales of blankets and clothes piled up at Lahore Airport waiting to be distributed.²³ Similar reports were published on relief aid being dumped at the Dhaka airport, while millions were still starving and dying in the absence of basic essentials.²⁴ Reports of cholera, typhoid and other epidemic outbreaks in the affected region were widely reported, criticizing the deliberate inaction of the government towards the death of countless thousands, who had otherwise survived the cyclone.²⁵ As a consequence of this deliberate delay and worsening situation, Dainik Ittefaq reported in its front page headline that the League of Red Cross Societies in Geneva suspended further aid flights to EP.²⁶ Similarly, Pakistan Times reported that other agencies and organizations, such the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere (CARE), Save the Children and the Pakistan Red Cross Society severed ties with the government of Pakistan for lack of action and transparency.²⁷ The extent to which the newspapers were critical towards the government is deeply etched in the psyche of those who were at the receiving end of it, even in more recent times. Khadim Hussain Raja, reminiscing about the role of media, noted ‘the Bengali press had spread enough poison: they had carried vastly exaggerated stories of the casualties and economic damage and decried the relief efforts of the Central Government’ (Raja 2012, 38).

Exaggerated or otherwise, what remains undeniable is that from the immediate aftermath of cyclone until the election in December 1970, vernacular and English newspapers in East Pakistan, irrespective of their ideological or political affiliations, had their columns and pages filled with scathing reports, including countless pictures of inconceivable suffering and horrible scenes of mutilated dead bodies scattered across the disaster-hit areas, which further united and shaped public opinion overwhelmingly in favour of the Awami League in the 1970 election.

6. Conclusion

This paper has argued that the cyclone of 1970 acted as a catalyst in shaping the political reconfiguration of united Pakistan. The cyclone from its very inception got intrinsically intertwined with the politics of the region. This 'natural disaster' turned out also to be a ‘political disaster’, which, with the involvement of US, UK, international voluntary aid organizations, along with ongoing cold war politics, assumed global proportions. The outcome of the first general election of 1970 that followed soon thereafter was influenced by the scope of the disaster, and the ways it was dealt with by the actors on opposite sides of the spectrum. The electoral margin by which the Awami League won the historic election provided Mujib the much-needed wherewithal to have a much stronger stance towards the rights and demands for the autonomy of East Pakistan. The failure to compromise from both sides would eventually lead to a complete breakdown of negotiation between the two wings of Pakistan and pave the road towards the final showdown – a genocidal bloodbath in East Pakistan, followed by the independence of Bangladesh. While not advocating an environmental-deterministic approach, this article underscores the importance of ecology, disaster, and politics in the making of Bangladesh. As Naomi Hossain points out, the lessons learned from the Bhola cyclone would eventually help shape the new nation-state of Bangladesh on long-term policy formulation towards ecological disasters, subsistence crises within governance.²⁸

Acknowledgement

The authors express their sincere gratitude to Arild Engelsen Ruud, Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway, to Eleonor Marcussen, Researcher in the Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden, and the anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by North South University (CTRG, 2020–2021, Number: CTRG-20-SHSS-05), Bangladesh . In addition, the authors acknowledge, with gratitude, the institutional assistance received from the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway.

Notes on contributors

Mohammad Mozahidul Islam

Mohammad Mozahidul Islam is a Professor and Chair, department of History, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka-1342, Bangladesh. He is also a Visiting Professor, North South University, Bangladesh. He has published research articles in various international peer-reviewed academic journals. Islam is the editor of the Clio: Journal of the Department of History, Jahangirnagar University. His most recent book is titled Why Nations Fail to Feed the Poor: The politics of food security in Bangladesh, New York: Routledge, 2023.

Niladri Chatterjee

Niladri Chatterjee is a Historian and currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo. Having received his PhD in History from SOAS, University of London, Chatterjee was employed as Assistant Professor in History at North South University in Bangladesh between 2015 and 2019; and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Sweden (2018–2019). Chatterjee regularly publishes research articles and opinions in various international peer-reviewed academic journals, newspapers and podcasts. His research interests include global health histories, colonial and postcolonial studies, historical disasters, and South Asian studies.

Muhammad Asiful Basar

Muhammad Asiful Basar is a Senior Lecturer in the department of History and Philosophy, North South University, Bangladesh, and currently a PhD researcher at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, Belgium. His research interests include economic history, demographic history, climate and environmental discourses, and South Asian studies.

Notes

1 The quotation, used only as a metaphor and out of context, is taken from the first line of Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Ballad of East and West. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_eastwest.htm

2 In an attempted analysis to explain the birth of Bangladesh, Raghavan referred to the cyclone only once in a passing statement. (see: Raghavan 2013). Similarly, apart from referring to the cyclone as one of the most brutal ones ever recorded, and the shortcomings of the Pakistan government in providing relief boosted the Awami League in the electoral victory in 1970, Sunil Amrith had no further discussion on it (see: Amrith 2013, 248–249).

3 For further details, see: Marcussen 2017, 2022, 2023; Kingsbury 2018.

4 For further details see: Garrett and Sobel 2003; Sommer and Mosley 1972; Frank and Husain 1971.

5 For a detailed survey of the events following the partition of South Asia and the subsequent differences and tensions between the two wings of Pakistan, see: Jahan 1972. Also see: Umar 2004, 2006.

6 Muazzam Hussain Khan, ‘Twenty One Point Programme’, Banglapedia, National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Twenty_One_Point_Programme (Accessed: 2 May 2022)

7 For a detailed account of the aftermath of the cyclone see: Rohde 2015; Cash et al. 2013.

8 Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, 27 November 1970. Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Box 624, Country Files, Middle East, Pakistan, Vol. III, 1 Oct 70–28 Feb 71. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–7, Documents on South Asia, 1969–1972.

9 Library of Congress, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Archer Blood interview, 27 June 1989, quoted in Baxter (1971, 23). Also see: Carney and Miklian 2022, 79–85, 98–101, 110–114, 120–121.

10 The Dawn, 16 August 1970.

11 ‘Mujibur Rahman warns against bid to frustrate elections’, Morning News, 27 November 1970.

12 One of the most recent and haunting narratives of the details related to the Operation Searchlight and the genocide that followed, see: Baxter 1971.

13 Sydney H. Schanberg, “The Bengalis and the Punjabis: Nation Split by Geography, Hate”, The New York Times, 4 December 1970.

14 Dainik Purbodesh, 24 November 1970. Translated and paraphrased from Bengali by the author(s).

15 Personal interview, Rashed Khan Menon, 23 March 2021, Dhaka.

16 Tofail Ahmed, ‘Memoirs of the dreadful cyclone and the historic election of 1970’, Dainik Ittefaq, 12 November 2020. (Translated and paraphrased from Bengali by the author(s).

17 Hashem Khan, ‘Shonar Bangla Shoshan Keno?’ (Why is the Golden Bengal a Crematorium?), Bangladesh Pratidin, 4 March 2016.

18 Ahmed, ‘Memoirs’.

19 Consul Dacca to State, 7 January 1970, in Khan, American Papers, 316; report on conversation with Mujibur Rahman, 22 October 1970, POL 14 PAK 1- 1- 70, Box 2526, US National Archives and Record Administration.

20 Talbot (1998).

21 For an in-depth understanding of Maulana Bhashani, see Layli Uddin 2016); Also (see: Kabir 2012.

22 Rajya Sabha Parliamentary Debates, Official Report LXXIV, no. 14, New Delhi: Rajya Sabha Secretariat, p. 41.

23 Staff Correspondent, ‘Relief Goods Pile Up in Lahore’, The Pakistan Observer, 25 November 1970.

24 Staff Correspondent, ‘Foreign relief goods remain dumped in Dacca: No airdropping yet’, The Pakistan Observer, 18 November 1970.

25 Staff Correspondent, ‘Deteriorating Situation in Bhola due to Cholera outbreak’, Dainik Ittefaq, 25 November 1970.

26 Staff Correspondent, ‘Red Cross League will no longer send aid flights, but why?’, Dainik Ittefaq, 23 November 1970.

27 Staff Correspondent, ‘Coordination Lacking: CARE Stops Its Supplies’, The Pakistan Times, 24 November 1970.

28 For further reading on this, see Hossain 2018, 187–204.