On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani army initiated a coordinated, bloody assault across East Pakistan. The designated centres of offensive operations under that plan were Dhaka, Khulna, Chittagong, Comilla, Jessore, Rajshahi, Rangpur, Saidpur and Sylhet, areas where West Pakistani army units were concentrated. In Dhaka, their targets were intellectuals, students, politicians, and ordinary citizens sympathetic to the Bengali nationalist movement demanding autonomy and independence for East Pakistan. They specifically zeroed in on Hindu areas. The attack was called Operation Searchlight, and it was part of a crackdown initiated by the Pakistani military junta to suppress the growing resistance and protests by Bengalis.
It involved:
A Pakistani Army convoy armed with tanks, automatic rifles, rocket launchers, heavy mortars, and light machine guns encircling Dhaka University. Attacks on campus buildings, dormitories, staff halls and teachers’ residences. Indiscriminate killing of students, staff, professors.
Military tanks blowing up the offices of The Daily Ittefaq newspaper on Hatkhola Road
Attack and suppress the East Pakistan Rifles (EPR)
Machine gun firing across bazaars
Razing the Kali Mandir, a Hindu temple, and the Central Shaheed Minar
Arresting Sheikh Mujib and top Awami League leaders
Internal and international communications cut off, including telephone, television, radio and telegraph
Sealing off all major towns
What prompted Operation Searchlight?
Anam Zakaria gives a succinct summary, capturing decades of history in two masterfully crafted paragraphs:
The struggle for Bengali rights started shortly after Pakistan gained independence as a country with two incontiguous territories known as West Pakistan (today’s Pakistan) and East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh). The refusal to accept Bengali as a state language of Pakistan in the early years after Partition, economic disparity between the two parts, the hegemony of the West Pakistani ruling elite over Pakistan, martial laws, and a demeaning attitude towards Bengali culture and the Bengali population soured relations between the two parts.
Tensions rose in December 1970 when the Awami League party, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (also known as Mujib) and based in East Pakistan, won the national elections but West Pakistan parties, namely the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), refused to hand over power. Tensions between Bengalis and Biharis – the Urdu-speaking communities that had moved to East Pakistan from different parts of India after Partition and who were seen as pro-West Pakistan – rose, which led to attacks on some Bihari communities.
The Government of Pakistan used the "Bihari massacre" to justify its military intervention in East Pakistan on March 25th. The ensuing weeks were marked by widespread brutality, as described in these excerpts from Anthony Mascarenhas’ reporting for The Sunday Times. His reporting stunned, exposing the brutality of Pakistan’s suppression and turning world opinion in favor of Bangladesh.
Operation Searchlight was the start of the 1971 War of Liberation between the Pakistan Army and Bengali guerrilla forces, Mukhti Bahini. Its chief architect was General tikka Khan, who becane known as the ‘Butcher of Bengal’ - what a title to earn. The war ended in December 1971, when India joined on behalf of the Bengali forces.
Today, Operation Searchlight is widely regarded as a genocide and a crime against humanity. But it, and the ensuing nine-month war, occurred with complicity from the United States.
As Ishaan Tharoor wrote, “Neither Nixon nor Kissinger exercised any of their considerable leverage to restrain Pakistan’s generals. Instead, they covertly rushed arms to the Pakistanis — in violation of a congressional arms embargo — as India and its Bangladeshi separatist allies gained the upper hand.” And this was well after Archer Blood, the US Consul General in East Pakistan, crafted his dissent cable, expressing horror at the violence and asked Washington, D.C. to intervene:
But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation's position as a moral leader of the free world.
Why was there an East Pakistan and West Pakistan to begin with?
The partition of India in 1947 created West and East Pakistan - it involved demarcating portions of India that were more ‘Muslim’ to become part of Pakistan, while Hindu-majority areas were given to India. So India’s partition included the partition of Bengal - East Bengal became East Pakistan, and West Bengal was a part of India. This is a simplified explanation but the technicalities are not that much more sophisticated since the borders were orchestrated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had in fact never been to India, or anywhere else in Asia, and was not familiar with the demographics of India.
As with everything else in this world, colonialism is to blame. For the Partitions, the wars, the massacres, the need to fight for liberation, the resulting genocide when the oppressor faces resistance.
If 1971 sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it is exactly what we are seeing now in Gaza.
Palestine was a flourishing country before it was given - by the British! - through the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which pledged its aim to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. How can you give away something that’s not yours to begin with? The West has mastered this particular form of thievery.
As Edward Said said of the Balfour Declaration: “Made by a European power … about a non-European territory … in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.”
Balfour, Radcliffe. 1947, 1971, 2023 (and the many, many other years I’m failing to include that all mark some first of West-led or West-sponsored genocide in the global south). History repeats itself because it is owned, packaged and distributed by the oppressor.
Or at least, it has been.