India, Jan. 4 -- For many in India, 1971 became a story that seemed to end neatly. A just war, a decisive victory, a surrender on a winter afternoon, and the belief that history had declared its verdict. In Bangladesh, the story never carried that sense of completion. The war was a climax inside a much longer and more painful narrative. It paused a tragedy that had begun years earlier and that never truly ended. Behind the images we remember lay a society that had already been worn down by neglect, contempt and the steady erosion of trust.

The fault lines that tore East Pakistan apart did not appear suddenly in 1971. They grew through years of humiliation and distance, in which a region that sustained the economy was treated as inferior ...