“March 1971 was the most horrible month of my life.”

So wrote Archer K. Blood, U.S. Consul General in Dhaka in March 1971. That was the month that the West Pakistani forces launched Operation Searchlight and initiated the start of the Bangladesh Liberation War. This was the conflict between what was then West and East Pakistan. The victory of the latter, led to the formation of a brand-new country – Bangladesh.

The bloody events of 1971 are placed front and centre around the Bangladesh capital Dhaka today: in murals, memorials, monuments and museums. 1971 also defines the politics of modern-Bangladesh, with the two main parties (based around two family dynasties) made up from the two sides that emerged in Bangladesh after 1971. Each political party castigates the other for how their ancestors and predecessors acting during the war. This means that an exploration of the history of 1971 leads you into Bangladeshi politics today.

And any journey into Bangladesh today, sooner or later, brings you to the country’s dramatic birth in 1971.

Bangladesh & the Cold War

In 1947, British India was partitioned on religious grounds, leading to the formation of the Hindu-majority Dominion of India and the Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan. Partition slashed in two both the Punjab and Bengal, two of the largest provinces of undivided India. Pakistan therefore comprised two geographically and culturally distinct regions: West Pakistan and East Pakistan (formerly East Bengal), separated by 1,600 kilometres of hostile Indian territory.

Having wanted Pakistan to comprise of the entirety of the Punjab and Bengal, the country’s first governor-general, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, described the territory he ultimately inherited as “a mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan.” In his book Shame, author Salman Rushdie describes Pakistan at is birth as “that fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God.”

Over the years, the Bengali population of East Pakistan felt increasingly marginalized by West Pakistan. Despite having a smaller population, it was West Pakistan that held the political and economic power. The prominent Bengali politician and leader of the Awami League, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was to say: “the basic truth that every Bengali has felt in his bones, [is] that we have been treated so long as a colony and a market.”

The catalyst of the war between the two halves of Pakistan, was when the West Pakistani president, General Yahya Khan, refused to accept the election victory of Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League.

After much political wrangling, on 25 March 1971, the military of West Pakistan initiated Operation Searchlight in Dhaka. Officially, this was an attempt to neuter the East Pakistan independence movement by arresting its leaders. In reality, it was a brutal crackdown incorporating widespread atrocities that targeted civilians, including the slaughter of students and razing of Hindu sections of Old Dhaka.

This was the beginning of the Bangladesh Liberation War which lasted until the defeat of West Pakistan, with the arrival of the Indian Army in Dhaka in December 1971.

The students that create the country

In September last year, I stood under a banyan tree planted by Senator Ted Kennedy. Kennedy had campaigned against Nixon’s policy and even visited the festering and disease-ridden refugee camps in India. After the conclusion of the war, he came to Dhaka, now the capital of an independent country, and planted this tree.

This was where I met with two students of Dhaka University today, Rifat and Mahedi, who had agreed to take me around their campus and explore the history of 1971. From the banyan tree we walked to the Memory Eternal memorial that lists the hundreds of university students and staff killed in 1971. They then took me on to Iqbal Hall – their student halls today, and a focus of Pakistani violence in 1971 …

The West Pakistanis believed that many of the leading rabble rousers of the Bangladesh liberation movement were students, which is why on 26 March 1971, much of the focus of Operation Searchlight was directed at the University. Three student halls were targeted: Iqbal Hall, Rokeya Hall for female students, and Jagannath Hall for non-Muslim students, predominantly Hindus.

Archer Blood writes in his book The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh:

“What was generally believed was that the Army plan of attack at the University was to take no prisoners and to kill all students present in the dorms. We saw traces of two mass graves on the campus, one near Iqbal Hall, the other near Rokeya Hall. The rain on the night of March 29 exposed some bodies and the stench was terrible. The students at Iqbal Hall, some of who had weapons, were either shot in their rooms or mowed down when they came out of the building in groups. Rokeya Hall, a dormitory for girl students, was set ablaze and the girls were machine-gunned as they fled the building. The attack seemed to be aimed at eliminating the female student leadership since many girl students resided in that hall.”

Rifat and Mahedi took me through the colonial structure of Iqbal Hall, with students milling about in longyis, smoking, laundry hanging up outside their rooms on clothes lines. The central quad was water-logged from the monsoon. Dogs snoozed in the corners of corridors and in the large pond in the hall grounds, a swimming team was doing lengths. Out the back we saw the graves of the students that had been massacred that night in March.

Rifat proudly said to me, that although in most countries, it is the country that creates the universities. In Bangladesh, it was the universities that created the country. Students were at the forefront of Sheikh Mujib’s political movement, and many of them took up arms in the Liberation War. Since then, students in Bangladesh have been embroiled in the country’s politics – they are a sounding board (and recruiting pool) for the political parties, and one of the most powerful demographics in the country.

It was student protests that led to the downfall of the Bangladesh government in 2024. When I asked Rifat and Mahedi if they had been part of the protests, they looked at me as if I was mad.

“Of course we were!”

Sheik Hasina – daughter of Sheikh Mujib, the independence hero – had been in power since 2009. Under her premiership the economy has grown and she is credited with stamping out the threat of Islamic terror.

However she had become increasingly authoritarian. She defined her political party as the true custodians of Bangladesh liberation, while she cast opposition politicians – many who have been locked up or disappeared – as too Islamic, too close to Pakistan, and the descendants of quisling “Razakars” – the people of Bangladesh who supported West Pakistan in 1971.

In 2009, Hasina re-instated a quota of government jobs for the descendants of Liberation War veterans. The remaining positions were given to those who display the right amount of “spirit of the Liberation War”.  This “spirit” effectively branded anyone not loyal to the Awami League as a Razakar. In August 2024, Sheikh Hasina castigated the students demanding reform to the quota as “Razakar’s progeny.” The students responded with chants such as:

“Who am I? Who are you? Razakar, Razakar!”

At Iqbal Hall, Rifat and Mahedi showed me collages that had been put up documenting the student protests and the violence inflicted upon them by the security forces. In their bedrooms (the same bedrooms that their predecessors in 1971 would have slept in) they lifted up their longyis and showed me the bruises they had sustained during the protests.

What about the Hindus?

Rifat and Mahedi next took me to Jagannath Hall. The students halls for non-Muslim students, and another site of violence during Operation Searchlight.

Sheikh Mujib had said that the non-Muslims of Bangladesh “are our sacred trust.” His daughter, Sheikh Hasina, proclaimed to take up this mantle. Now that she is gone, there is much concern over the border in India. Reading the news about Bangladesh in India, you would think that mobs are rampaging from house to house in search of Hindus and burning their houses to the ground.

This reporting is overblown. But not completely groundless.

It is undeniable that Hindus were targeted by the West Pakistanis in 1971.

Blood recalled in May that year

“At a recent social gathering young West Pak[istani] officer […] denied Army was killing Hindu women and children but admitted they were killing Hindu men. He justified this on basis Hindus were enemies and that East Pakistan has to be “cleansed”. He said he was engaged in a jihad, a holy war.”

He also recounts the fate of one professor at Dhaka University, Dr Dev (“A jolly, stout white-haired man, he reminded me of Santa Claus”) who was apolitical and interested only in philosophy and his beloved students.  “Still, he was a Hindu and was on the Army’s hit list. So soldiers came to his home on that awful night, took him out to a nearby field and shot him. He must have been about 70 years of age.”

All this was reported by Blood to the Nixon White House. And he wasn’t alone. The US Ambassador to Delhi, Kenneth Keating, told President Nixon in the Oval Office that what was happening in East Pakistan was “almost entirely a matter of genocide killing the Hindus.”

Since 1971, in spite of Sheikh Mujib’s pledge to protect the non-Muslims of Bangladesh, there have been waves of violence against the Hindu minority.

In 1992, Hindu fundamentalists in India destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, provoking fierce anti-Hindu riots in Bangladesh. This is the subject of Taslima Nasrin’s 1993 novel Lajja, (which translates as “shame”). Her protagonist Suronjon Datta, reflects:

“For quite a few years, he had thought that Hindu was a pejorative, mocking term. It was only as he grew up a bit that he understood that there was a community of people called Hindus and he belonged to that community. After some time, he began to believe that he belonged to the human race and a community called Bengali. The Bengali community had not been created by any religion. He wanted to believe that it was non-communal and inclusive. He believed that the term ‘Bengali’ signified non-divineness.” 

What next for Bangladesh?

I ended my walking tour with Rifat and Mahedi at the Modu Canteen at the heart of the university campus. This canteen has been there since 1971. It is just opposite the Student Union and is often referred to as the heart of student politics, and even, the “mini-Parliament of Bangladesh”.

Here we ate samosas and drank chai, spoke contentedly about other, less heavy topics, and I reflected – not for the first time – how much I enjoyed the company of Bangladeshis, and how much I appreciated their warmth and eagerness to look after visitors.

This young country has a dramatic, turbulent history. But as a traveller, you will be looked after well in Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh Liberation War prefigured many features of contemporary conflicts such as the tensions between human rights and national sovereignty; the importance of international media; and the clash between young Western protesters and their governments. (Allen Ginsberg’s poem September on Jessore Road ignited the youth of the US, and teenage Beatles-fans outside George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh” at Madison Square Garden in August 1971 told reporters that they were “Really into this Bangladesh thing”.)

In his excellent book The Blood Telegram, Gary J. Bass writes that Bangladesh ought to rank with Vietnam and Cambodia among the darkest incidents in Nixon’s presidency and the entire Cold War.

“But few Americans today remember anything about these atrocities, let alone about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s support for the government that was committing them. […] Faraway, poor, brown – the place is all too easily ignored or mocked.”

There were zero foreign correspondents based in Bangladesh at the time of the student demonstrations last year. Bangladesh’s is position as a forgotten corner of the sub-continent is one of the reasons I am so attracted to it. A visit to Bangladesh offers the opportunity to delve beyond the headlines.  To look closer. To go further.

There is much to celebrate in Bangladesh today. Labelled by Kissinger at its birth as a “bottomless basket” seeking international aid, in 2021 Bangladesh surpassed both India and Pakistan in per capita income. Institutions like Grameen Bank and BRAC – the largest NGO in the world – have been global pioneers in microfinance for the rural poor and exemplars in self-sufficient not-for-profits.

Major progress has been made in closing the gender gap in school enrolments and girls currently outnumber boys’ enrolments.  It has an industrious and passionate young generation with much to offer.

Political turbulence in Bangladesh since 2024 should not dampen this celebration of what Bangladesh is and could still yet become.

As Archer Blood concludes his book:

“Given its cruel birth and bloody infancy and adolescence, Bangladesh, blessed with talented, industrious, and charming people, certainly merits a tranquil and productive maturity.”

Amen to that.

Find our more about Sampan’s Bengal Rising tour, looking at the birth of Bangladesh.