When State Neglect Turns Weather into Revolution

Why do some independence movements succeed while many others fade or are crushed? The birth of Bangladesh in 1971 is a rare case in which a separatist movement not only gained mass support but also prevailed in open conflict against a powerful state. Explaining that success is not just a historical exercise. It also clarifies how states lose legitimacy and how climate shocks can transform diffuse frustration into coordinated political action and military conflict.

The Bhola cyclone, which struck the coast of East Pakistan in November 1970, sits at the heart of this story. It was one of the deadliest disasters ever recorded. Winds topping 200 kilometers per hour (125 miles per hour) and storm surges over 10 meters (33 feet) swept across the world’s largest river delta, swallowing low-lying islands such as Bhola, Hatia, and Manpura. Entire villages disappeared in a single night. Well over 300,000 people died. Millions lost homes, boats, crops, and incomes. Yet the cyclone mattered not just for its human toll, but because of what the state did next—and what it failed to do.

In any disaster, the state is judged by its response. In East Pakistan, the central government’s response was widely seen as late, insufficient, and indifferent. International relief flights arrived within days. By contrast, aid from West Pakistan, the seat of political and military power, was delayed and in many places absent in the crucial first week. Food, medicine, shelter, and fuel did not reach some of the hardest-hit coastal areas. Reports described a supply bottleneck far from the delta while survivors waited in salt water and mud. That absence carried political meaning. It confirmed what many in East Pakistan already believed: they were governed by a distant elite that extracted from them but did not protect them.

By 1970, grievances had been accumulating for years. East Pakistan accounted for a large share of the country’s export earnings, particularly through jute. But the Western province—the seat of political and military power—captured over 70% of the government’s entire budget. Military command, top civil service ranks, and public investment were dominated by West Pakistanis. Demands for autonomy had long been brewing, but grievance alone does not yield a decisive break. The cyclone made the grievance immediate, visible, and shared, weeks before a national vote.

Statistical analysis of long-forgotten satellite images of the cyclone’s devastation that was archived by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) allows a clear view of this turning point. The ITOS-1 satellite, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, was among the most advanced real-time cloud monitoring systems of its time, and a critical Cold War asset. The satellite was only operational from January 23 to November 16, 1970, when a tape recorder malfunction halted data transmission. But the Bhola cyclone made landfall on November 12, 1970, so the satellite captured crucial imagery of cloud cover distribution and radiation.

In our new study, we apply modern atmospheric science research methods to these images to infer the intensity of cyclone winds felt in every sub-district in East Pakistan. We also digitize the voting records in every electoral constituency in 1954 and in 1970, as well as the birthplaces of every one of the 206,000 freedom fighters who bravely took up arms to engage in guerrilla warfare against the Pakistan army. We statistically connect all these data streams and apply modern empirical research standards to explore whether the Bhola cyclone indeed played any catalytic role to turn the discontent that already existed amongst Bengalis in the 1950s and 1960s into collective action at a decisive moment in history.

We find that areas hardest hit by the cyclone, especially where government relief failed to arrive, delivered the strongest electoral support for the Awami League. This party, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, ran on a platform of autonomy: control over revenue, security, and political decisions in the East. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the party suspended regular campaigning and organized relief instead, sending boats with food and medicine into inundated communities. For voters, the contrast was stark. On one side stood a remote central government that appeared absent after mass death; on the other, a local movement that showed up with supplies and solidarity. When people cast ballots in December 1970, they were not only choosing among policy planks. They were deciding whom to trust in a crisis.

Electoral constituencies that experienced greater storm intensity gave the Awami League significantly more votes. Across the East, the party won 160 of 162 seats, securing a majority in Pakistan’s National Assembly and the right to form the next government. Our estimates imply that the cyclone nudged the Awami League’s vote share in East Pakistan from roughly 74% to roughly 78%. In this sense, the cyclone was likely not pivotal to the election’s outcome; the Awami League would probably have prevailed anyway. Yet small shifts can still matter by broadening the base and deepening the mandate, particularly when the path to power is contested.

What matters even more is what happened next: the state predictably responded to the threat of losing power and control by engaging in armed conflict to suppress the demands for autonomy. Armed resistance became necessary, and the same cyclone-affected areas again shouldered a disproportionate share of that struggle. After the Awami League’s victory, the military regime refused to transfer power. Tensions escalated, and on March 25, 1971, the army launched a violent crackdown in East Pakistan. Many young Bengalis joined a guerrilla movement and fought for nine months.

Mapping the birthplaces of recognized freedom fighters shows that volunteers were disproportionately drawn from the subdistricts that had experienced the most intense storm damage and the weakest relief. Our estimates imply that the same variation in cyclone intensity that marginally raised the Awami League’s vote share also increased insurgent participation by about 21%, on the order of 260 additional volunteers per electoral district. In a war of attrition, that surge helped sustain resistance until India’s intervention in December 1971 brought the conflict to a decisive close.

What links the cyclone to both ballots and battlefields is a mechanism of coordination under duress. Large shocks can realign coalitions, not because they invent grievances, but because they make them common knowledge and morally legible to many people at once. The cyclone did that in three ways. It exposed the incapacity and indifference of a distant state in the most vivid form possible, which sharpened the demand for self-government. It created a narrow window in which that shared demand could be expressed at the ballot box. And when that electoral mandate was denied, it supplied the conviction and networks that channeled anger into organized resistance.

The geography of relief distribution clarifies the mechanism. Cyclone-hit areas that received little or no government aid experienced the sharpest separatist shifts. Where the state failed to show up, the case for autonomy was strongest. A simple mediation exercise—a statistical analysis that tests whether one factor helps explain the link between two others—shows that variation in government responsiveness accounts for a large share of the electoral response. In other words, the pathway from environmental shock to political revolution runs through perceived state neglect, amplified by visible non-state relief that competes for trust.

This mechanism is not unique to Bangladesh. History offers parallels in which disasters weakened rulers’ claims and galvanized opposition. The 1978 Tabas Earthquake in Iran and the Shah’s inadequate response are believed to have fueled dissent that culminated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Scholars argue that the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake in China similarly accelerated political shifts, including Deng Xiaoping’s market reform agenda. In colonial Bengal, the 1943 famine intensified by British policy decisions deepened anti-colonial sentiment and crystallized a demand for self-rule. In each case, a disaster did more than destroy. It forced people to confront a fundamental question: if the state cannot or will not protect us when we are most vulnerable, what claim does it still have on our loyalty?

The Bhola cyclone is often described as a natural calamity. That label is accurate but incomplete. It was also a political event that made priorities visible. It offered a shared language for what East Pakistanis would no longer accept. The grievances were already there. The cyclone synchronized them. It helped turn anger into a project and a project into a nation.

There is also a methodological lesson. Narratives alone can hint at mechanisms, but they rarely separate what is causal from what is coincidental. Here, a modern measurement tool from atmospheric science applied to archival satellite imagery allows us to recover credible, fine-grained variation in storm exposure. Matching that variation to constituency-level election returns and to an official registry of war volunteers provides a basis for inference. The evidence points to three core findings. First, greater exposure to the cyclone’s devastation increased support for autonomy in the election held weeks later. Second, the increase was sharpest where government relief failed to arrive, consistent with a channel of governance failure and lost legitimacy. Third, the same places that punished the state at the ballot box also supplied disproportionate numbers of volunteers in the War of Independence. Together, these findings trace a specific chain from environmental shock to electoral coordination to sustained collective action.

Was the cyclone an independent cause of independence, or an amplifier of forces already in motion? The answer lies somewhere between. The Awami League’s victory in East Pakistan was overwhelming and likely would have occurred even without the storm. At the same time, the cyclone widened the base of support at the polls and clearly raised participation in the insurgency. In a struggle that required months of endurance against a superior military, that extra mobilization mattered. It helped buy time until a shift in the regional balance of power ensured a decisive end.

The broader lesson extends beyond the specific case of Bangladesh. Most separatist movements do not culminate in new sovereign states, which is why isolating mechanisms matters. The combination of environmental vulnerability, visible state neglect, and rapid channels for coordination is a powerful one. As climate risks intensify across many regions, these dynamics will recur more frequently. Severe events will test institutions. In some settings, they will determine their survival.

The Bhola cyclone’s legacy, therefore, is not only a measure of human loss. It is a record of how a shock exposed the fault lines of a federation and transformed dispersed grievances into a unified demand for self-government. It shows that legitimacy can fail abruptly when the state’s most basic function—protection in crisis—falls away. And it demonstrates that when coordination becomes possible at scale, a movement can move from ballots to the battlefield and, against long odds, bring a new nation into the world.