The popular upsurge of the sixties in Pakistan was a product of the interaction among global, regional and local politics. It was not a unilinear movement towards the rise of Bengali nationalism but, rather, several complex twists and turns in global and local politics, and the atmosphere of the global sixties transformed nationalist imaginings in East Pakistan. The image of Ayub Khan’s military-bureaucratic regime was seriously tarnished by his inability to wrest Kashmir from Indian control. Propaganda during the 1965 war had convinced the Pakistani people that they had emerged victorious from the war. Yet the Tashkent peace accord belied such claims. This resulted in popular anger at home as Ayub Khan could not explain why he had been unable to secure in Tashkent what he had claimed to have won on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the war also involved Ayub Khan’s regime in intense Cold War diplomacy. During the war, China had proclaimed open support to Pakistan while the US had stopped the supply of weapons to the latter as soon as the war started. However, after the war Ayub Khan moved closer to the US, since he knew that China could not meet the economic needs of his model of foreign-aid-driven praetorian capitalism. He also compelled the long-time member of his kitchen cabinet, the pro-Chinese Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to resign. Bhutto raised the banner of revolt on the high moral ground of independence for Kashmir, installation of parliamentary democracy and policies tuned towards Islamic socialism. It was a timely move on Bhutto’s part. Consequently, divisions appeared among the ruling elites of Pakistan, and Ayub Khan became estranged from the very institution that had supported him, namely the army. As the ruling elites became fragmented, the war unleashed inflationary pressure on the economy, and people embarked on protests. Glaring class inequality and regional imbalance fuelled unrest. Soon global revolutionary waves hit Pakistan.

George Katsiaficas, a participant social historian of the global 1968, calls this the ‘eros effect’ of the global wave of revolution. The eros effect refers to the movement of transnational waves of transformative social movements. During this moment, popular social upheavals dramatically challenged established social orders, and the basic assumptions of patriotic nationalism.