The Liberation War of 1971 remains one of the most consequential and painful chapters in the history of Bangladesh as well as South Asia. The immediate trigger of the war was the refusal of the Pakistani state to accept the 1970 electoral victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, followed by a brutal military crackdown on the Bangalee population. As the war unfolded, international media became central to how the conflict was understood worldwide. That process, however, was not politically neutral.
As Srinath Raghavan shows in 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, much of the early international discussion, especially among Western policymakers and a significant part of the media, framed the violence as an “East Pakistan crisis” or a “civil war.” This framing mattered. To describe a state-run campaign of mass killing as a civil war was to hide the responsibility and make the conflict present like a symmetrical struggle between two wings of Pakistan, rather than a brutal military crackdown by the Pakistan Army against the Bangalee ethnic community. Raghavan notes that even Richard Nixon viewed the events in East Pakistan through the lens of civil war, comparing them to Vietnam and thereby reducing the moral and political specificity of what was happening.
This early language shaped international perception in significant ways. “East Pakistan” was the language of the existing state structure. “Civil war” was the language of diplomatic caution. It also protected geopolitical convenience, allowing many in the West to see the conflict as an internal matter of Pakistan rather than as a crisis of mass atrocity, national self-determination of the Bangalee population, and colonial-style domination within a formally postcolonial state. In that sense, the battle over media representation was also a battle over political meaning.
The Pakistan authorities expelled foreign journalists from East Pakistan in late March 1971; much of the information that reached the outside world later came from refugees, scattered eyewitness testimony, and sources connected to the provisional Bangladeshi leadership. International reporting conveyed horror, but it was not always morally or conceptually precise. According to Raghavan, many reports used words such as “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “tragedy,” while terms like “genocide” and “holocaust” were still rare. He notes that only a few publications, such as Singapore’s The New Nation and New York’s Saturday Review, used that stronger language, and neither carried the influence of a major paper like the Sunday Times.
A major turning point came with Anthony Mascarenhas’s famous report, “Genocide,” published in The Sunday Times on June 13, 1971. In Raghavan’s reading, this was the first major rupture in the earlier “civil war” frame. The report broke through the censorship and exposed the systematic character of the Pakistan Army’s violence. After Mascarenhas’s article came out, international media attention deepened and the moral vocabulary of the crisis began to shift. Mascarenhas helped reshape the international media framing.
At this point, the question of naming became even more important. The transformation of “East Pakistan” into “Bangladesh” in the global media was not merely semantic—it presented a significant political shift. “East Pakistan” described a province within an existing state. The name “Bangladesh” was a claim of the Bangalee people to express their political future. In this respect, Raghavan’s discussion of Ravi Shankar and George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh” is especially significant. He does not say that the concert was the first time the name “Bangladesh” ever appeared in Western media. What he does argue is that the concert gave the name “Bangladesh” enormous visibility and used it consciously in place of more cautious alternatives such as “East Pakistan” or “East Bengal.”
Raghavan writes that by invoking the name “Bangladesh” and refusing the more cautious alternatives, Ravi Shankar and George Harrison made their political sympathies unmistakable. This was not simply a humanitarian concert—they did not use only a neutral title—but a cultural intervention into the politics of representation taking against the Bangalee population who are calling their country with a new name. To say “Bangladesh” was to reject the language of Pakistani territorial unity and to acknowledge the legitimacy of Bangalee national self-identification. The choice of name itself carried political weight.
At the same time, Raghavan is careful to show that the older frame had not fully disappeared even then. He points to contemporary television coverage in which people waiting in line for tickets still referred to “East Pakistan,” and reporters described the concert as relief for refugee children from the “holocaust in East Pakistan.” This detail is important because it shows that the transition in global media language was uneven. The name “Bangladesh” was emerging forcefully, but “East Pakistan” still lingered in public discourse. The struggle over naming was still going on.
The concert itself, however, was unmistakably framed around Bangladesh as a political and humanitarian reality. According to Raghavan, Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan opened with “Bangla Dhun,” and Shankar told the audience that although they did not want to “do politics,” they wanted people to feel “the agony, and also the pain, and a lot of sad happenings in Bangladesh.” George Harrison’s song “Bangla Desh” reinforced that naming. For Raghavan, the effect was clear: audiences came to see that the Bangladesh crisis was not only a humanitarian tragedy but also a political one. The concert did more than simply collecting money for refugees: it helped recast the crisis in the Western cultural imagination.
That is why the emergence of Bangladesh in global media should be understood as a layered process rather than a single moment.
And this shift had profound consequences. Once the conflict was increasingly represented not as unrest in East Pakistan but as the struggle of Bangladesh, the terms of international perception started to shift. Newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian, along with broadcasters like the BBC and Voice of America, helped circulate that transformation. The international story changed because the words changed.
The role of global media in 1971 was not limited to reporting facts only. Media shaped the interpretive framework through which those facts were understood. The Liberation War of Bangladesh was not limited to military and political struggle, but also a struggle over naming and legitimacy. “East Pakistan” was the language of state preservation, while the “civil war” frame was the language of diplomatic evasion. “Genocide” was the language of moral recognition of the atrocities happening to the Bangalee population. “Bangladesh” was the language of national emergence. The transformation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh in the global media was historically decisive. Through this transformation, the world came to see that what was unfolding in 1971 was not merely a crisis within Pakistan, but the violent birth of a new nation.
Asif Bin Ali is a geopolitical analyst and doctoral fellow at Georgia State University in the US. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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