In November of 1970, British weather outposts in India found a disturbing weather system in the Bay of Bengal. The storm formed into a major cyclone and churned north toward what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It wasn’t the strongest cyclone — its winds reached 115 miles per hour yet there have been many stronger — but it was the wall of water pushed ahead of it that would make it the deadliest storm in recorded history. It smashed into East Pakistan under cover of darkness at the worst possible time, at high tide under a full moon, and a 33-foot high storm surge flooded up into the Ganges River Delta. Islands along the coast were washed over with nearly total loss of life. Towns miles inland were flattened, and crops and livestock throughout the region were destroyed. In the end, what became known as the Bhola Cyclone killed up to half a million people.
The people of East Pakistan were caught completely off-guard by the storm, and the question turned to why. The British meteorology station along with the National Hurricane Center in Miami had alerted the governments of India and Pakistan, and the British even sent consulate members in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad to deliver warning to the government in person. But those scientists likely under-appreciated the intense political divisions that existed between West and East Pakistan at the time. A separatist movement in the East had been gaining support, and a civil war bubbled seemed on the horizon. Pakistan was a democracy, and the Bangladeshi vote had consolidated into a major threat to the recently elected President Yahya Khan, a strongman who sought to crush the separatist movement by force.
And so when the warnings of the cyclone came into Khan’s office, the East was not alerted. The coastal towns of Bangledesh were obliterated, and with them hundreds of thousands of opposition votes. The aid efforts in the wake of the storm were a shitshow as organizations and foreign governments had to work around the Pakistani government, and thousands more died because of the slowdown.
The disaster even became a flashpoint in the Cold War. Since the Pakistani government was an ally of the United States, the Soviet Union jumped at the opportunity to fan the flames of separatism in Bangladesh with the hope of dislodging the West from an important foothold in the Bay of Bengal. Soviet and American jets crossed each other several times in the skies over the flood zone, and warships eyed each other from distance in international waters.
Nationalist furor in the East soon grew into an inferno, and in 1971 a nasty civil war broke out between East and West Pakistan in which up to three million people died. The year after, Bangladesh would officially become an independent country.
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Natural disasters have always been a playground for politics. Even when they don’t entail the murder-by-silence of hundreds of thousands of people, their impact provides many angles by which political factions can wrangle with each other.
Government action is needed for preparation, setting the stage for heroics and recriminations depending on what unfolds. Allocation of resources is necessary during recovery, so deciding who gets what can become a fierce patronage fight. Interaction and cooperation between multiples levels of government along with various other aid and commercial organizations is required, and can be derailed by strife between those entities.
And darkest of all — as seen in Bangladesh in 1970 — natural calamity can provide a means of punishing victims who belong to rival political factions. Especially when tensions already approaching fever pitch.
This is not to comment directly on current events. More to expand the scope of what’s possible when acts of God happen in a house divided. People believe many wild things, but often what’s more impactful is a failure of imagination.
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