The Bangladesh Liberation War
East Pakistan became Bangladesh in December 1971 after nine months of war, mass killing and an Indian invasion. Pakistan had been created in 1947 in two wings separated by 1,600 kilometres of India, sharing a religion and almost nothing else. The eastern wing had the larger population and produced most of the export earnings from jute, and was governed from the west, whose military and civil service it barely appeared in. The language movement of 1952, in which students were shot for demanding that Bengali be an official language, is where Bangladeshis date the beginning. The Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won an absolute majority in the national assembly in the elections of December 1970 on a programme of autonomy — the first general election Pakistan had held. The military government refused to convene the assembly. Operation Searchlight began on the night of 25 March 1971 with the army attacking Dhaka University, the police lines and Hindu neighbourhoods. What followed over nine months is estimated by Bangladesh at three million dead and by other researchers in the hundreds of thousands, with mass rape used systematically and some ten million refugees crossing into India. The Mukti Bahini fought a guerrilla campaign with growing Indian support. India entered openly on 3 December after Pakistani air strikes, and the eastern command surrendered at Dhaka on 16 December with some 93,000 prisoners — the largest surrender since 1945. Pakistan recognised Bangladesh in 1974. No one has been tried in Pakistan. Mujib was released from a Pakistani prison in January 1972 and returned to govern; he and most of his family were murdered by army officers in 1975. The war crimes tribunal Bangladesh set up in 2010 to try collaborators has itself been a source of political conflict ever since.
- Year: 1971 CE
- Category: Independence
