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).