There was absolute deprivation in East Pakistan in terms if lack of recourses and infrastructure, but there was also

new element of relative deprivation within the new country as power began exercised over by the West. Economic Domination: Pakistan, with its two separate land blocs separated by a thousand miles of Indian Territory, faced a series of important contradictions and tensions. Although the economy of East Pakistan grew, it had no facilities of its own to process its jute crop for export. It was therefore, transferred to industrial facilities in West Pakistan for processing. This led to an exploitative system of internal transfer within Pakistan that disadvantaged East Pakistanis in two ways, First, raw jute was purchased from East Pakistani growers at a disadvantageous rate of exchange. Second, little of the value added from subsequent jute processing and exportation was returned by the government of East Pakistan. Military Domination: Pakistan found itself at partition with few highly trained civil servants because the majority of those working on the British administrative system had been Hindus, few had been senior and most had opted to remain India. This was a particularly acute problem for East Bengal because most of the Hindus in the Bengali administrative service had left at partition, and it was therefore mainly trained West Pakistanis, usually Punjabis, who took up civil service posts in the East, not Bengalis. Many were not culturally attuned to Bengali life and were therefore seen as outside masters (Baxter 1998:64). It was not until 1954 with the appointment of Fazlul Haq that a Bengali would hold the highest administrative office. Administrative Domination: Pressure from Bengalis led to the creation of a quota system in the new Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP), which was to ensure that 40 percent from the east and the west would be represented, along with 20 percent of positions to be filled only on merit, based on results in the annual civil service examination. However, the reality was that few Bengalis reached the top, and among those that did most were from the Urdu-speaking national elite. The West Pakistan elite had monopolized most of the key positions in the new state of Pakistan, from banking and administrative to business and banking, and also dominated the armed forces. As Ziring (1992: 14) puts it: Bengali demands for a proper distribution of the countrys resources and opportunities went unheeded. Language Movement: The Critical focus of Bengali dissatisfaction and nationalist aspiration rapidly crystallized around the issue of language (Ziring 1992: 15). In East Pakistan, what was regarded as Pakistans declaration of Urdu as the national language led to protests in Dhaka in 1952 and the birth of the language movement. Urdu had been widely looked upon as the language of Indias Muslims because it had evolved during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal periods with Persian, Arabic and Turkish influences. It was written

using Arabic script rather than the Development script used in Sanskrit and Hindi and from which written Bengali evolved. For this reason, Bengali was viewed in some quarters in Pakistan as an un-Islamic language (Afzal 2001). Bengalis recalled that during Jinnahs only visit to East Bengal in 1948, he had to told those assembled to hear his public address: Let me make it very clear to you that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. For Ian Stephens (1964: 61), Bengali was a regional language, while Urdu had no local roots but was a kind of lingua franca with a loose wide web of intelligibility among the diverse communities of West Pakistan, giving logic to the assumption that it would eventually become Pakistans national language. In 1952 Prime Minister Nazim-ud-Din, a Bengali, visited Dhaka and declared that Urdu should be the state language. Yet the strength of Bengali Muslim culture attachments had been severely underestimated by the authorities in West Pakistan. In the demonstrations that ensured, students and other groups marched to demand equal status for Bengali, and twelve people were killed when the army fired upon the protester. These grievances were not simply cultural but also were underpinned by the growing sense of economic and political discrimination felt b Bengalis in relation to the central authorities. For example the imposition of Urdu would mean that Bengalis would be at a disadvantage when applying for government employment (Bano 2008). A decision from Pakistans constituent assembly in 1954 that Urdu and Bengali and other languages could each be official languages of Pakistan, and equal billing of languages in the 1956 constitution, was seen as representing too little too late and serious political damage had already been done.