Operation Searchlight: The Horrific Genocide That Never Happened

- Talk-Think-Shishir Ramavat

- Young students of Dhaka University were ordered: Dig a hole in the ground, bury your brothers in it! Imagine what happened to the boys who were studying with them when they lifted the blood-soaked corpses and threw them into the pit?

Today is December 16. Exactly fifty-two years ago, on 16 December 1971, India changed the map of the Asian continent. The British kept India wedged between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, but India ended the war with Pakistan and won a glorious victory on this day, cutting off its eastern wing... thus creating an independent, new nation - Bangladesh.

Since the partition of India-Pakistan in 1947, discrimination against East Pakistan started from West Pakistan. In 1948, Urdu was declared the national language of Pakistan. Bengali-speaking citizens of Dhaka, especially college students, demanded that the Bengali language be given equal status. This demand was rejected outright. Students staged protests. The police shot at him. Violent agitations ensued and the seeds of Bengali national identity were planted in them. The demand for a separate nation intensified after the results of the 1970 general elections in Pakistan. Although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awam League Party of East Pakistan won a clear majority, the ruling was ignored and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's government was formed in West Pakistan. Against this movement, a huge rally was organized in Dhaka on March 7, 1971... and with that, the Bangla liberation struggle began! First Bangladesh Liberation Army was formed, but before that, in February 1971, the then President of Pakistan Yahya Khan ordered Army Chief Tikka Khan to take extreme measures... and the bloody Operation Searchlight was born!

It was a painful day, 25 March 1971. This is the saddest day in the history of Bangla liberation struggle. 40 thousand Pakistani armed soldiers entered Dhaka. First among their targets were Dhaka University students, teachers as well as Hindu and Muslim citizens demanding human rights.

The details of the massacre of young boys in Dhaka University hostel are shocking. Eight-ten-twelve boys are made to stand in a queue and then they are killed with a barrage of bullets. When their work is done, it is the turn of another group of eight-ten-twelve boys. The corpses kept piling up. Meanwhile a few other boys have been ordered: Dig a hole in the ground, bury your brothers in it! Imagine, what would have happened to the boys who were studying with him when they lifted the blood-soaked corpses and threw them into the pit? After all the corpses were loaded into the pit, these surviving boys were also wiped out.

Many graves were dug in which dead or even half-dead people were buried. A bulldozer was rolled over it. A writer named Anwar Pasha has written in his novel 'Rifle, Roti, Aurat' that, while looking at these graves, one would see fingers sticking out of the ground somewhere. It felt like fingers sprouting from the ground like grass...

After wiping out the students, Pakistani jawans stormed into the students' hostel. Here his intention was slightly different. The silver-haired girls were picked up and put into army trucks, and as the then Senior House Tutor named Mehrunnessa Chaudhary says, the girls were never seen again. Completely disappeared.

A professor of English named Jyotmay Guhatkurta at Dhaka University. Pakistani army soldiers entered his house and dragged him out. The professor's wife was horrified, but she assumed that this would keep my groom in police custody for the night enough and then release him. He said with great innocence to the jawans forcing him to stay: Brother, just a minute let the professor take a pair of clothes with him, he will need them to wear at night... Just a few minutes after the professor was taken away, there was a sound of gun fire from outside. The woman opens the door panting and steps out. What do you see in front? The pierced bodies of Professor Moniruzman and his son who live in the neighborhood are lying on the ground and they are eating dutch.

On that night of March 25, 1971, the slums were set on fire. People ran out of their houses screaming in a burnt condition, but army men like Yamraj were standing ready with rifles pointed in front of them. Bullets rained and some innocent people were killed. His fault? If there was a curfew, why did you step outside the burning house? The same night the offices of three major newspapers 'The Daily Ittefaq', 'The Daily Sangbad' and 'People' were set on fire and several senior journalists were killed for brazenly publishing news about the atrocities of the Pakistan Army.

On the day of this massacre, President Yahya Khan and Pakistan People's Party chief Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto were both in Dhaka. Yahya Khan left for Karachi that evening, but Bhutto continued to rest in the luxurious presidential suite of the Hotel Intercontinental. The sounds of machine guns, military tanks, flames, people's shouts and screams... all this he saw with his own eyes from the balcony of the suite. In that single night, the Pakistani Army killed 7,000 unarmed Bangladeshis. Before leaving Pakistan the next day, Bhutto lavished praise on the army's performance, saying: 'Thanks to God that Pakistan could have been saved...'

According to one estimate, about three to five hundred thousand Bangladeshis were killed in a period of nine months. This is the largest massacre since World War II. A British journalist was the first to break the news of the horrific carnage in East Pakistan in the international media. The name of Anthony Mascarenhas, who was posted in Pakistan. He quoted the words of a Pakistani major in his report. Major used to say, 'This fight is between pure and impure Muslims. The natives of East Pakistan may call themselves Muslims and keep their names like Muslims, but they are Hindus inside. We are settling the accounts of all these... and what will be left behind will be the true Muslims.'

The Bengali liberation struggle could not have been successful without the help of India... and India helped a lot. The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi handed over the reins of the war with Pakistan to the capable hands of the then Chief of Army Staff Sam Manek Shaw. The planning and execution of Sam and his team was so thorough that in just 13 days the enemy devastated the country. 93 thousand Pakistani soldiers surrendered. East Pakistan vanished forever.

Like India, Bangladesh also shed a lot of blood to become independent. See curvature. Even though there is so much evidence, footage, mass graves, countless eyewitnesses and detailed reports from foreign journalists, the United Nations has not yet acknowledged the massacre in Bangladesh. What to talk about Pakistan? Far from expressing regret or offering an official apology, Pakistani governments have consistently denied that anything like this ever happened. This is a different level of shameless, naftai!