Bangabandhu, Bangladesh & Britain

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This book elaborates on the life, legacy and achievements of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, dubbed Father of the Nation in Bangladesh. The timeline details the various critical years in history from the Independence and Partition of the Indian Subcontinent to Bangladesh emerging as an independent nation.

Critical events in the history of Pakistan, such as the language movement, the great famine, the creation of one unit, and the dictatorial regime that followed have been examined. There is also an examination of the economic exploitation of East Pakistan and the infrastructure boost of the Western wing as part of the great decade. New light is shed on this financial apartheid.

The last section of the book is a critical and comparative analysis of the road to recognizing Bangladesh as an independent nation. Primary data such as specific online declassified records from the National Archives in Kew, London, England, were looked into. Based on these records, analysis was conducted on what could have transpired between the global powers at play. After the unconditional surrender by Pakistan on the 16 of December 1971, a diplomatic tug-of-war erupted. This book is a testament to the forgotten pages of history 53 years ago, when the entire Indian subcontinent was on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

ABU SAYED is an eminent author, researcher, publisher and journalist from Bangladesh and works with a special focus on the 1971 war of liberation. He has written multiple books on the same subject and regularly writes columns and analysis in leading newspapers from Bangladesh.

PRIYAJIT DEBSARKAR is an author and geopolitical analyst based in London. He has published multiple books focusing predominantly on international relations and current affairs with special reference to East Pakistan and the 1999 Kargil war.

Bangladesh Studies, fifty plus years on since that bloody birth and baptism, has come of age as has the republic, which is no "basket case" as Henry Kissinger, recently deceased, once disdained it. A steady corpus of scholarship has examined several aspects of the 1971 civil war, its antecedents, and legacies. The latter particularly so since a rethink of partition, seventy-five years on, has encouraged fresh debate and rethink of both successor states of British India. Bangladesh, it is often forgotten, was an inheritor too: Bengal, from 1757, was the British bridgehead in India.

This book predominantly discusses not only the history of Bangladesh but also from a global perspective as to how the chain of events leading up to the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War impacted geopolitically. The book is a fitting tribute to the father of the Nation, Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal), Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. We have examined his struggles for rights, leading up to getting equal respect, then the revolution of 1971 with the recognition of Bangladesh as an independent nation in the global arena.