In 1958, when Ayub Khan staged his coup d’état, the streets of East Pakistani towns remained calm. After nearly a decade of palace intrigues, with its unstable ministerial coalitions, its game of political musical chairs for the positions of prime minister and chief minister and its suppression of popular electoral verdict, people were alienated from political processes. This was also a period of political transition when pivotal figures of Bengal politics – Fazlul Huq, Suhrawardy and Khawaja Nazimuddin – passed away in the consecutive years of 1962, 1963 and 1964. In 1965 a coalition of opposition political parties made their last desperate bid to uninstall the Ayub Khan regime through the shambolic presidential election instituted by Ayub Khan. The combined opposition parties selected Fatima Jinnah, sister of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, as their candidate. Fatima Jinnah would have been a formidable consensus candidate if Pakistan had had a universal adult franchise, but under conditions of the Basic Democracy regime, Fatima Jinnah had to win over the ‘Basic Democrats’ who were beholden to Ayub Khan for access to the position of power. The defeat of Fatima Jinnah foreclosed the possibility of removing the military-bureaucratic regime through lawful constitutional opposition and electoral mobilization.

Under the shadow of the garrison state, politics in East Pakistan evolved both within the framework of the Constitution of Pakistan and clandestine plans to liberate East Pakistan through armed revolution. In 1960 the world witnessed a radical re-alternation of the global political order with the independence of African colonies. In 1960 alone, 17 independent states emerged in Africa. Most of these newly independent states experienced political convulsions emanating from the contestation between various forms of socialist movements and dying colonial imperialism. Congo, for example, entered a political crisis with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and Algeria witnessed a prolonged revolution. Radical ideas of revolution informed by a global wave of national liberation in Africa and Asia impacted students’ movements in East Pakistan. A tacit understanding between the Awami League and the CPP (East Pakistan Provincial Committee) produced a united front among those students who were against the military-bureaucratic regime.