The Bangladesh-Pakistan relationship was jeopardized from the outset by a series of disputes arising from the war. Issues over population transfer, the division of assets, and accountability for war-time crimes remained unresolved for years. To this day, Pakistan has not fully honoured its promise to receive hundreds of thousands of non-Bengali, Urdu-speaking Muslims from Bangladesh. Known as Biharis, after the war they were herded into camps -- like the Geneva Camp in central Dhaka -- where many of them still live.
Pakistan has never officially apologized for its actions in 1971, let alone acknowledged legal responsibility or paid reparations. The closest it came to an apology was in 2002, when Pervez Musharraf, president and military dictator of Pakistan at the time, expressed “regret” during an official visit to Dhaka. With Pakistan still dominated by its military, an official apology remains unlikely.
“It’s a very sensitive issue for Pakistan,” Rafiuzzaman said. “It will open up a Pandora’s box.” When he was in Dhaka, “so many people would tell me to my face what they had suffered in ’71 and I was very sympathetic towards them. They would say, ‘We can forgive, but we can’t forget.’” Personally, he said, “I think even killing one person was wrong.”
According to Maroof, Hasina’s government made an apology a pre-condition for any thaw in bilateral relations. “Their attitude was if you apologies, then we can move forward,” he said. He welcomed the new government’s more pragmatic attitude. “Of course we’ve been talking about it, but in private,” he said. “The good thing is that there is so much progress going on in parallel.” He had not yet met a victim of the 1971 war, he added, but if he did he “would definitely sympathize with them -- it shouldn’t have happened to them.”
Yunus’s recent meeting with Shehbaz Sharif in Cairo offered a good example of this parallel progress. According to an official readout, Yunus raised the issue of the 1971 war and asked Pakistan to “settle those issues for us to move forward.” Sharif replied that the war had been settled since the 1970s, “but if there are other outstanding issues” he would be happy to look at them. The two men agreed “to strengthen relations between the two countries through increased trade, commerce, and exchange of sports and cultural delegations,” indicating that the war may no longer be a sticking point in the bilateral relationship.
AL has tended to prioritize the memory of Pakistani brutality and Indian assistance to Bangladesh in 1971. For Hasina’s party, Pakistan represents the antithesis of what it is to be Bangladeshi
“The war happened in the past,” Hossain, Bangladesh’s high commissioner in Islamabad, told me. “Look at Vietnam and the US.” But he refused to say whether he had raised the issue with the Pakistan government, referring me to Dhaka instead. I contacted numerous officials, including the interim government’s adviser on foreign affairs, but they declined to comment.
Pakistan’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for 1971 helps keep the trauma alive in a country deeply marked by the war. The academic Meghna Guhathakurta, whose father was killed by the Pakistan army at Dhaka University in 1971, told me that “failing to confront the past with all its pain, suffering, and mistakes can only lead to ... an unsustainable peace.”
Even if the ghosts of 1971 remain, there are also underlying strands of sympathy that coexist with the historical trauma. As Rafiuzzaman remarked, “some sections of Bangladeshi society have a soft corner for Pakistan.”
The two countries share a majority religion and some aspects of culture. Some Bangladeshi artists, like the iconic painter Zainul Abedin, are highly prized in Pakistan. Many members of the Bangladeshi elite spent their formative years in boarding schools, colleges, or cantonments in Lahore, Rawalpindi, or Karachi. After 1971, Bangladesh was run by ex-Pakistani civil servants and the Bangladesh army was led for decades by Pakistan-trained Bengali officers -- including Ziaur Rahman and Hossain Mohammad Ershad, who also ruled the country as dictators. Even today, a former Pakistani officer, Brigadier Sakhawat Hossain, serves in Bangladesh’s interim government.
These links occasionally filter into bilateral ties. In 2023, at the height of his power as Sheikh Hasina’s advisor, Salman F Rahman met Pakistan’s president, Arif Alvi, while performing Hajj in Mecca. The two men recalled their friendship as schoolboys in Karachi -- although Rahman later tweeted that he had asked Alvi to apologize for 1971. Muhammad Yunus, while representing Bangladesh at the UN General Assembly in September 2024, had a lengthy meeting with Tariq Fatemi, Shehbaz Sharif’s foreign policy advisor. An influential voice in the Pakistani establishment, Fatemi was born in and studied in Dhaka before moving to Pakistan after 1971. The two men reportedly spoke in fluent Bangla before an uncomprehending audience of Pakistani diplomats.
Bangladesh also has a powerful religious right, which seeks to foreground the country’s Muslim identity. For them, Pakistan is a natural ally. According to Hashmi, “they look up to Pakistan and consider it an elder brother.” Jamaat, for instance, first emerged as a branch of the Pakistani group with the same name.
AL has tended to prioritize the memory of Pakistani brutality and Indian assistance to Bangladesh in 1971. For Hasina’s party, Pakistan represents the antithesis of what it is to be Bangladeshi. But in Bangladesh today, there is a powerful backlash against Hasina and everything she stood for. Repressed for years, opposition parties like Jamaat and BNP are resurgent. Although the opposition parties are politically and ideologically far apart on numerous fronts, many of their supporters take the view that India represents a common threat. And, in light of Hasina’s close relationship with India, anti-Indian sentiment among Bangladeshis has reached an all-time high.
For 15 years, India backed Hasina to the hilt, sometimes at the expense of the Bangladeshi people. New Delhi recouped its investment in the form of lucrative trade deals, security cooperation, and foreign-policy concessions.
“India’s unwavering backing of a widely unpopular regime has significantly fuelled anti-India sentiment among the Bangladeshi public,” Faisal Mahmud, recently appointed the press minister at the Bangladesh high commission in New Delhi, told me. “Successive Indian governments have consistently supported AL and Sheikh Hasina, ensuring that their relationship remained intact even at the expense of Bangladesh’s gradual democratic decline.”
Tariq Karim saw the relationship at close quarters as Bangladesh’s high commissioner in New Delhi from 2009 to 2014. “A lot of the bad relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan is due to India,” he said. “They didn’t actually ask us to cut ties, they just said, ‘Be wary.’”
With tensions between India and Pakistan running high, Bangladesh might find it difficult to strike a balance
India supported Hasina as she tightened her grip on power. Her government forcibly disappeared at least 708 people, and the interim government has raised serious allegations of Indian involvement in some of these enforced disappearances. In 2009, India even reportedly threatened military intervention to support Hasina. During last year’s protests, Salman F Rahman reportedly watched her flee to India, where she remains, on the television news.
India’s approach to Bangladesh has always been motivated in good part by a fear of Pakistan; New Delhi has believed that Bangladesh, with influence from Pakistan, may become a safe haven for insurgent groups active in India’s Northeast or for Islamist groups looking to destabilize India. Bangladeshi diplomatic sources indicate these fears might have been justified during a BNP-Jamaat alliance government in Bangladesh in the early 2000s, when a grenade attack almost killed Hasina and a huge shipment of illicit arms was discovered in the port of Chittagong. Linked to an insurgency in India’s Northeast, the arms came from a ship owned by a BNP politician known for his ties with Pakistan.
Pakistan, for its part, has always denied any covert interference in Bangladesh. AL, when it came to power in 2009, pointedly promised closer cooperation with India on security issues.
Karim recalled that, when he was Bangladesh’s high commissioner in New Delhi, “I conveyed the message: you deal with us on water[-sharing] and trade, and we will deal with your security concerns.” But, he said, in the end, “India was reneging on the commitments it had made to Bangladesh.”
Hossain, the Bangladesh high commissioner in Islamabad, told me his country wants “balanced relations with all friendly countries.” But with tensions between India and Pakistan running high, Bangladesh might find it difficult to strike a balance in its approach to the two neighbours.
The Pakistani establishment, meanwhile, have watched events in Bangladesh with undisguised pleasure. Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Asim Munir, gloated that Hasina’s fall validated the “two-nation theory” that there was an eternal, immutable division between Muslim and Hindu Southasia. But supporters of Imran Khan, the jailed former prime minister of Pakistan, took a different view; for them, the uprising in Bangladesh provided an enviable model for the youth of Pakistan, so oppressed by the Pakistan army.
Ultimately, Bangladesh’s relationship with Pakistan cannot be separated from its relationship with India. “You can’t change your geography,” Karim said. “Connectivity is our greatest trump card, and all connectivity has to go through India.” Bangladesh cannot afford to ignore this.
Hashmi, the Pakistani diplomat, agreed. “We are a country that is a thousand miles from Bangladesh,” he said. “They have to live with India.”
Cyrus Naji was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews. From 2022 to 2023, he was a teaching fellow at the Asian University for Women, a private university in Chittagong. A version of this article previously appeared in Himal Southasian and has been reprinted under special arrangement. Part 1
