"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion."

The morning of December 16, 1971, was one such dream, delivered nine months after it was first dreamt on March 26. The birth of a nation. Bangladesh was free. Pakistan had been defeated. The colonial trope had been replicated barely two decades after the British left the Indian subcontinent. It was all supposed to go well for the 'baby' of the region. The carnage in East Pakistan, leading up to the historic surrender of the Pakistan Army to India, was meant to birth a terrible beauty.

Except it didn't.

And that's one of the biggest paradoxes of the idea of nationalism. An idea as strong as any to mobilise multitudes.

It suits almost all stakeholders to imagine the independence of Bangladesh as an example of the nationalist collective will finding its just culmination. A beleaguered people, facing political discrimination based on their linguistic and cultural identity, seceded from the hegemonic West Pakistan. The independence of Bangladesh was, after all, a belated correction to address the mistake of the earlier independence project. The dream of 1947 delivering 1971, to go back to the opening quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Anthony D Smith, a prominent theorist of nationalism, asserts, "Autonomy is the goal of every nationalist." In Bangladesh's case, the autonomy........

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