Contact:	Suzanne Trimel				For immediate release
		(212) 854-6579				January 6, 1998
		smt4@columbia.edu


Golam W. Choudhury, Diplomat and Author, Dead at 71

	Golam W. Choudhury, a diplomat and author of books about Pakistan, 
China  and Islam who taught at Columbia University, died December 13 at 
Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.  He was 71.
	He died of a heart attack, according to his wife, Dilara Choudhury.
	Born in 1926 in Madharipur, which was then in India, later East Pakistan 
and now in Bangaladesh, Dr. Choudhury, who was known as G.W., was 
chairman of the political science department of the University of Dhaka when he 
joined Pakistan's foreign ministry in 1967 as Director-General of the Research 
Division.  Earlier, he had helped to work out the Tashkent Agreement that ended 
the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965. He then served as Minister of Communications 
from 1969 to 1971, during which time he outlined plans for establishing a 
confederation between East and West Pakistan.
	  With the failure of that plan and the subsequent brutal suppression of 
Bengali uprisings, which led to the establishment of Bangaladesh as a nation, he 
went into exile, first in England, where he taught at the Royal Institute of 
International Affairs and later at Columbia, where he was associated with the 
Research Institute on Communist Affairs under Zbigniew Brzezinski and the 
Southern Asian Institute at the School of International and Public Affairs.
	  He taught at North Carolina Central and Duke universities and returned 
to Dhaka in 1985.  He was an adjunct professor at Columbia from 1988 to 1994, 
teaching courses on South Asia and Islam.
	He wrote 14 books, including "The Last Days of United Pakistan" and the 
widely used textbook, "China in World Affairs."
	 He received undergraduate and master's degrees from Calcutta University 
and the Ph.D. from Columbia in 1958.
	In addition to his wife, a professor of political scientist at Jahangirnagur 
University in Dhaka, he is survived by two sons, Golam Mabud of Warren, N.J. 
and Golam Sayeed of Baltimore.
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