ABSTRACT
Both India and Pakistan have had to struggle with the problems of regionalism and separatism since independence. In India this has frequently meant the realignment and redefinition of constituent states. In the case of Pakistan it has meant a variety of experiments with the redefinition of and even the abolition of provinces. It has even meant the loss of East Pakistan, which has become the sovereign state of Bangladesh. In trying to write about all of these I have experimented with keeping all of these events in one chapter, treating the case of the independence of Bangladesh simply as a special case of the problems of accommodating regional forces. In the end, for clarity and convenience I treat it in this chapter as a special case on its own. In making the story a separate chapter I have also had to decide whether it should come before or after the other stories about regionalism: I have decided it should come first, as the most traumatic event in Pakistan since 1947.
