Cyclone Bhola: The Disaster That Re-Made South Asia
The cyclone in 1970, though not always recognized, was instrumental in the independence of Bangladesh
Newspaper clipping from November 1970 reporting on the devastation of cyclone Bhola. Source: DAWN
In October 2017, shortly after Hurricane Maria, considered the deadliest ever typhoon to slam the island of Puerto Rico, a video of then President Donald Trump went viral on news media. He was in a church in the capital city of San Juan surrounded by several presumable affectees, suffering from the impact of the worst disaster they had ever experienced, and he rather playfully threw a packaged roll of toilet paper at the crowds. This gesture was unsurprisingly criticized for showing a complete “lack of empathy” by locals, as “terrible and abominable” by the mayor, and is said to have left a lasting legacy of callous indifference of the Trump administration towards the unincorporated territory of the US.
In the years since the disaster, this indifference has been the subject of significant scholarship suggesting that this apathy is not the cause but rather the symptom of a far deeper and more structural problem – Puerto Ricans are considered subjects, rather than full rights bearing citizens, within the Imperial state of the USA.
“Commentators rarely mentioned the world’s deadliest tropical cyclone in their analysis of Bangladesh’s struggle for, and eventual, independence from Pakistan”
These conditions around a disaster (the typhoon), second grade citizenship status of Puerto Ricans within an Imperial state, and the failure of the state to reach out effectively to the most affected — primarily due to indifference — immediately reminds anyone with a serious interest in political developments in postcolonial South Asia of Cyclone Bhola. Yet in most instances, and until very recently, scholars and commentators rarely mentioned the world’s deadliest tropical cyclone in their analysis of Bangladesh’s struggle for, and eventual, independence from Pakistan. Mark Pelling, a development geographer, in his 2011 book, presents Cyclone Bhola as a case study of a disaster that provided “sufficient shock to destabilize the dominant political regime” in Pakistan in 1970. He further highlights the inadequate study of this typhoon by scholars of South Asia:
Interestingly, the authors cited here whose work was published in academic journals make no mention of the catastrophic typhoon in their analyses of the events surrounding Bangladesh independence.
The rest of this article will be unpacking the role that Cyclone Bhola (1970) played in highlighting the subject status of East Pakistan’s citizens, contributing to the eventual birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state in 1971.
Cyclone Bhola makes landfall in East Pakistan
The coastal areas of East Pakistan had historically always been vulnerable to devastating cyclones, with an average of almost two cyclones a year between 1959-1969. The areas around the semi-enclosed Bay of Bengal are densely populated and low-lying, making typhoons extremely deadly. In fact, when the 1960 North Indian Ocean cyclone season resulted in the death of 20,000 people in East Pakistan, the government in West Pakistan acknowledged that more had to be done to protect lives, and brought in America’s “Mr Hurricane” from the National Hurricane Centre in Florida to advise on cyclone mitigation.
On 12 November 1970, therefore, when Cyclone Bhola smashed the coast of East Pakistan, with winds over 200 kilometers per hour and a storm surge of up to 10 meters high, it was famously a disaster forewarned and foretold. “Mr Hurricane”, Dr Dunn, told the press how if the government had followed his most basic recommendation, of erecting simple earth mounds on the islands and the low-lying coasts for families and their livestock to take shelter, more than 90 percent of the 500,000 who perished in this disaster would not have died. The same article, as many others printed in international newspapers, very emphatically states that, “many Pakistan flood victims died needlessly [due to] inefficiency, procrastination and downright neglect on the part of Pakistani government officials”.
A photograph of survivors of Cyclone Bhola. Image: Harry Koundakjian/AP via The Guardian
“If there was any doubt earlier, the cyclone cemented the subject status of East Pakistan’s citizens”
Furthermore, reports on whether evacuation warnings were issued by the government are conflicted. Some authors suggest that the military government in West Pakistan was made aware of the approaching cyclone and failed to inform the population. Others argue that “possibly as much as 90 percent of the population got the message, but only 1 per cent fled to stronger buildings, because they could not or would not go”. However, everyone agreed that the state response to the Bhola, after it devastated the lives and homes of millions of people, was woefully lacking. If there was any doubt earlier, the cyclone cemented the subject status of East Pakistan’s citizens. In the words of Pakistani political commentator, Ayaz Amir:
While a tidal wave of death and destruction swept over the eastern wing, the military government was slow to respond, paralyzed by what I can only think of as a sense of remoteness. East Pakistan and its coastal people were just too far away. Which is a bit like the Bheels of Thar and the Koochis and other nomads of Balochistan. Mainstream Pakistan passes them by.
In the aftermath of the disaster
Much like disaster-affected Puerto Ricans, communities in East Pakistan had to reckon with a similar kind of callous apathy from their leader: General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s military dictator. The press reported that he was drunk when doing an aerial survey of the worst affected areas on 17 November 1971. Subsequently, 11 political leaders from East Pakistan sent him an angry telegram calling out the indifference of his West Pakistan-based government. They complained that in the aftermath of a calamitous disaster “not one single minister ” came to East Pakistan and that the General himself “left the province after a cursory glance at the first flush of news of the tragedy.”
Yahya Khan in East Pakistan in the aftermath of Cycline Bhola in 1970. Image: Wikimedia
It is now well-known that the optics of a concerned leader in the aftermath of a disaster rolling their sleeves up and wading through mud and debris to reach out to people is a critical factor in maintaining post-disaster government legitimacy. Leaders in extremely diverse and different contexts, from the UK to India, to the USA, have been punished by the electorate for not “being there” with their people in difficult times.
Beyond the indifferent leadership, the disaster relief efforts were also deemed abysmal. Drawing on a number of different primary sources, one scholar reports:
Twelve days after the cyclone, published newspaper photographs and reports showed relief goods piled up at the Lahore airport awaiting distribution. Around 129 bales of clothes and blankets allocated for survivors were left stranded. Helicopters required for the airdrop of relief materials were not sanctioned by the administration. The (military) junta’s refusal to allocate more helicopters despite the East Pakistani governor’s urgent request was termed by leading politicians as ‘shocking’. At the time of the 1970 cyclone, the status of the governor’s Emergency Relief Fund or its mobilization was unclear.
It was the Pakistan government’s failure to adequately respond to the large-scale devastation caused by the disaster that “gave East Pakistan’s majority party, the Bengali Awami League, a stronger position from which to negotiate” with the West Pakistan based regime. Awami League’s demand was provincial autonomy for East Pakistan and an end to military rule. According to one UNDP report, it was “the disaster [that] gave further impetus to the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman… [and] in national elections held in December 1970, the League won an overwhelming victory across Bengali territory”.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman addressing a large crowd in Dhaka during his election campaign. Image: DAWN
The Awami League won 160 seats in East Pakistan, against Pakistan People’s Party’s 81 seats in West Pakistan. Mujibur Rehman was to be the “future Prime Minister of Pakistan”, but the military-bureaucratic leadership in West Pakistan did not honour the results. Mujib was thrown in prison, the military was sent in to East Pakistan on 25 March 1971 to manage the resistance and, after perpetrating large-scale genocidal violence against the local population there, the Pakistani military finally surrendered on 16 December 1971. East Pakistan gained independence and became the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. One analyst draws attention to the direct relationship between Cyclone Bhola and the election result, and between the election result and the political events that led to the creation of Bangladesh:
The polls were announced for Dec 7. However, a devastating cyclone in November 1970 in East Pakistan, which claimed the lives of close to 200,000 people, sealed the fate of the elections and, in retrospect it seems, of Pakistan. East Pakistanis were appalled at the response of the predominantly Punjabi-Muhajir military-bureaucratic administration in dealing with this crisis, and East Pakistani politicians, with just a few weeks to go for Pakistan’s first elections, were eager to point out how irrelevant Pakistani Bengalis had become to the ruling West Pakistan clique.
“I do not mean to imply ‘environmental determinism’ in any way”
It is important to point out that, in centering the discussion of Cyclone Bhola and disaster politics in the wider narrative of East Pakistan’s independence, I do not mean to imply “environmental determinism” in any way, and suggest that a hazard such as a cyclone resulting in floods created a movement for independence where there were no serious and underlying issues. Rather, my aim here is to recognize the impact that the Pakistani state’s disaster response had on the wider political struggle. This is especially significant because, in Pelling’s words, for too long the “relative newness of treating environmental crises as politically significant events, combined with an academic avoidance of anything that could be perceived or misunderstood as environmental determinism, explains why the disaster did not figure in [the mainstream narrative of the creation of Bangladesh]”.
The contract between the state and its subjects in East Pakistan
In my book exploring the impact of a contemporary large-scale disaster on the (social) contract between the state and its citizens in Pakistan, I would often reflect on the disaster in East Pakistan brought on by Cyclone Bhola. Forty years later, while in the field, I would speak to people who were in the midst of reassessing their rights to citizenship, to state entitlement, and what it meant to be a citizen of the state of Pakistan. If anything, my work on the Indus Floods of 2010 and 2011 revealed the force with which ordinary citizens came out to make demands, and the state, accidentally, listened. This in many ways represents the exact opposite of the outcome of Cyclone Bhola.
While the term “social contract” is rooted in European political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is still possible to derive some valuable analysis from its basic idea within the postcolonial world today. This philosophical contract between the state and its citizens is understood as one where citizens willingly form a social and political collective, giving up some rights (such as to commit murder) in order to be provided a basic level of human security by the state. Disasters, when the state has been unable to provide basic human security to its citizens, are increasingly being understood as destabilizing this state–citizen contract. Thus, challenging the very basis of this contract and catalyzing moments for change.
People rush to catch sacks of rice and clothing from a US army helicopter delivering aid to survivors of Cyclone Bhola. Image: Larry Burrows/ LIFE Magazine via Londoni
“Disasters are increasingly being understood as destabilizing this state–citizen contract”
In the case of Cyclone Bhola, and the ensuing disaster, this “change” was in accelerating an existing demand for independence. After over two decades of being subjects of the West Pakistani elite, the Cyclone laid bare the inequalities between the two wings and the apathy of the ruling regime towards East Pakistan. This gave further legitimacy to the Awami League and its movement for autonomy and, later, independence.
Scholars have gone on to link contemporary Bangladesh’s high levels of competency in dealing with deadly cyclones to this historic burden. The people of modern-day Bangladesh were able to successfully negotiate independence with not one but two imperial powers by using disasters to catalyze change. In the words of Hossain (2018) “any lingering legitimacy that the [British] Raj may have enjoyed in East Bengal did not extend past the 1943 famine; Pakistani rule enjoyed a similar fate” after Cyclone Bhola in 1970.
Ayesha Siddiqi is a University Lecturer at the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.