Bengal, Pakistan (Pakistan Wins)

Bengal (Bengali: بڠگو, Bengali pronunciation [bɔŋgo], Urdu: بنگال ، Urdu pronunciation [bəŋgaːl]) is a province of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in eastern South Asia. It shares borders with the countries of India and Burma, as well as the Bay of Bengal. Formerly known as East Bengal and later East Pakistan, Bengal was originally partitioned from British India's Bengal Province. The goal of the partition was to separate the Muslim majority regions from the Hindu majority ones. Bengal had originally been more populated than all of mainland Pakistan combined, but higher birthrates, as well as an exodus of Hindus from the province, resulted in this fact no longer being true.

History
Rising tensions between Hindus and Muslims in World War II led to the adoption of the Two Nation theory by many Muslims, though not all, of British India. Eventually, a deal was made among the departing British colonisers and the soon-to-be leaders of their colonies in 1946 to partition India into two nations, Pakistan and India.

The newly created East Bengal had been subject to much violence as a result of the aforementioned event. Furthermore, a significant population of Hindus, as well as smaller communities of Christians and Buddhists, would become close to zero in numbers as the federal government and police encouraged such.

In the early years of Pakistan, tensions in East Bengal were higher than anywhere else. This was due to the growing Bengali nationalism in the region, and due to what may have been perceived as an oppression of Bengali culture. In fact, in 1971, the Mukti Bahini rebels of East Bengal, by now called East Pakistan, had attempted to secede from the nation, and war had been declared. The Mukti Bahini rebels were, however, unsuccessful, as their organisation was crushed by the Pakistani Army and Police within a few months.

East Pakistan had been under very strict Pakistani government control for three years, and the language and culture of the natives had been altered greatly in order to make the Bengalis more similar to the West Pakistanis, predominantly Punjabis. It was very difficult to receive any news about what was happening in East Pakistan between 1971 and 1973, but organisations who questioned Islamabad on the matter were ignored. In 1973, under the leadership of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, East Pakistan slowly reappeared into the world. The two year period is now referred to as the Great Bengali Silence.

By 1975, East Pakistan would be renamed back to Bengal, though one travelling there at the time could have argued that the place did not seem too "Bengali". This was because, over the years of the Great Bengali Silence, the public was trained to see themselves as Muslims and Pakistanis, and any local nationalism or opposing beliefs were brutally crushed by a strict police force.

The language, one of the primary reasons the 1971 rebels had fought for, had changed a good bit. The Bengali language, standardised in Nadia, India, had already sounded a bit different due to dialectal differences of much of the Eastern Bengalis and Muslims. However, careful education planning on the part of the western government had erased much of the Sanskrit vocabulary from the Bengalis' standard language and literary tradition, replacing the vocabulary with that of Persian and Arabic. The regulatory body of the Bengali language in Pakistan, the Bangla Academy, had been under full government control in the years within and following the Great Bengali Silence, and thus making these modifications on an official scale. It would later be known that a secretive language police, Muhāfiz-e-Zabān, would be the violent enforcers of these "purifications" on a local scale, among the citizens.

The decade following the renaming of Bengal was not seen as one very eventful for the world, or even the Bengalis. The voices of any rebellion, however, seem to have faded away, and a truly Muslim and Pakistani Bengal seems to have been born in their places.