Accommodation of Bengali; no Bangladesh?

If the central government of Pakistan had agreed to the demands of the population of East Pakistan in the late 1940s/early 1950s to make the Bengali language (and script) the official language of Pakistan, or one of the official languages, and consequently there was no massacre of student protesters in Dhaka in 1952, or attempts to enforce Arabic script for Bengali, could East Pakistan have realistically remained joined to West Pakistan up to the present day? There were other points of tension between West and East, but the question of the status of Bengali was one of the biggest (the central government's (lack of) response to the 1970 cyclone being probably the other crucial point).
 
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Apparently it wasn't just Arabic script...
Ayub Khan wanted Bengali to be written in Latin in the 1960s, following the Turkish (and Malay/Indonesian) example, which of course didn't go over well either...

The thing is that the Bengali language and script were perceived by the West Pakistani elites as symbols of East Pakistanis being "tainted" by Hinduism, of being "not fully Muslim", unlike the West Pakistanis...
This is epitomized by the ban on Tagore's works being broadcast on radio...

And this was part of a broader view that West Pakistanis had of East Pakistanis being inferior, particularly in military manners (martial race theory, where Bengalis were seen as crappy soldiers)...

And there's the fact that Pakistan was mostly a dictatorship during the 1950s/60s, meaning that East Pakistanis didn't have much representation in government (being dominated by West Pakistanis), despite their greater population...

So I would say that the language was the major sticking point, but these other factors existed, and would still be a problem for unity...
The population imbalance and the geographical isolation of these 2 regions are especially problematic for a continued West/East Pakistani existence...
But of course, language did not help at all...
 
It's crazy that the country was even configured like that to begin with. I mean, I guess they had to in order to encompass the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent, but still (also, wasn't there talk pre-independence at some point of making the Hyderabad area a "third wing" of Pakistan? I seem to recall this from somewhere).

If the Khan dictatorships had not occurred, that is, if Pakistan had remained largely democratic throughout the late '50s and '60s, *and* the Bengalis were accommodated, do you think geography and logistics would still have led to a separation at some point? It is hard to maintain two non-adjacent pieces of territory; there are only a handful of countries that have that configuration today, and all of them are only separated by water (e.g. Malaysia).
 
No way, no how. It was simply unworkable and ludicrous to include East Bengal into Pakistan in the first place.

Not only is it geographically separated by a vast distance (i.e. all of India), but there are significant - and as we saw IOTL, insurmountable - ethnic, cultural, social, and linguistic differences between West Pakistanis (Punjabis, Pathans, Sindhis, Balochis, Kashmiris, and Urdu-speaking Mohajirs) and Muslim Bengalis. They are just too different and have no significant links, other than nominally sharing the same religion, and even then the type of Islam practiced by the majority of Muslim Bengalis is vastly different to that practiced by Pakistanis.

Also, in practice, West Pakistan treated East Bengal effectively like a colony, extracting surplus and giving very little in return (see the pathetic response to the 1965 cyclone, and various floods and famines). The West Pakistani establishment viewed Bengalis as racially and culturally inferior, refused to share power with them, tried to suppress the Bangla language and culture, and excluded them from most avenues of political, economic, and military authority, even though East Bengal had near population-parity with all of West Pakistan. When the Bengali Awami League party won the Pakistani national elections - and thus the right to govern all of Pakistan - the West Pakistani establishment and Pakistani Army responded with a military coup. That's how much they viewed Bengalis as inferior colonial subjects.
 
It's crazy that the country was even configured like that to begin with. I mean, I guess they had to in order to encompass the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent, but still (also, wasn't there talk pre-independence at some point of making the Hyderabad area a "third wing" of Pakistan? I seem to recall this from somewhere).

If the Khan dictatorships had not occurred, that is, if Pakistan had remained largely democratic throughout the late '50s and '60s, *and* the Bengalis were accommodated, do you think geography and logistics would still have led to a separation at some point? It is hard to maintain two non-adjacent pieces of territory; there are only a handful of countries that have that configuration today, and all of them are only separated by water (e.g. Malaysia).

Well the fact of the matter is, which I feel should really be remember today as well, is that just sharing the same religion doesn't mean that different groups of people regard themselves as the same people...

And with respect to Malaysia...I think it was because the elites of Sarawak and Sabah had more "buy-in" into the country of Malaysia than the East Pakistanis had of Pakistan...
It also didn't hurt that the alternatives were to be incorporated into the Philippines or Indonesia, who were aggressively claiming them as part of their territory at the time...
 

Ak-84

Banned
Bengali was made an official language; and that caused a lot of consternation amongst West Pakistanis, since Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto and Balochi were not so made, remember Urdu is a foreign language, as well. (Ayub Khan wanted to bring in Roman script for all languages, not just Bengali).

Short of Pakistani developing nuclear weapon before 1971, there really was no way to keep the country united.
 
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