Pakistan: Committing Genocide Against Fellow Muslims

This is the ninth installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series, Pakistan: Anatomy of a Failed State.  Click here for the rest of the series.

On the night of 25 March 1971, tanks rolled into the campus of Dhaka University, opening fire on the sleeping students of the Jaganath and Iqbal halls. Sitting behind his bedroom window in the flat opposite the halls, Professor Nurul Ullah of the university’s Engineering Department captured the slaughter on a camera he had purchased on a trip back from the U.S. the previous year. The shaky black-and-white footage paralyses the viewer.

Tiny figures carrying corpses emerge from the halls. These are the students, dressed in light clothes, neatly piling up the dead bodies of their classmates and professors. Cows graze lazily a few feet away. A crow flies off an electric pole. The students then line up in a row. The Pakistani army appears. One student drops to his knees and grabs the jackboot of a soldier, begging for mercy. He is shot. The gap between each shot decreases progressively thereafter, reaching a crescendo within seconds. The sound is muffled by the distance, but it is distinct because there is no other noise. In a haunting flash, the cows run. The students calmly collapse into a fresh pile. One student is left standing in the middle of the pile. He is still for a moment. A final shot adds him to the pile he stands over. The soldiers then walk between the bodies and fire shots at them. This was the beginning. Tikka Khan declared that he would implement the “Final Solution,” promising to kill 4 million Bengalis in 48 hours. “Army officials and soldiers give every sign of believing that they are now embarked on a Jehad against Hindu-corrupted Bengalis,” Consul-General Archer Blood of the U.S. mission in Dhaka wrote. Assisted by 13 battalions of mujahideen, Pakistan’s soldiers slaughtered three million people at the rate of 500 an hour over 9 bloodcurdling months in 1971 in what is today Bangladesh. Half a million women were turned into sex slaves.

By August 1971, nearly 10 million Bengali refugees had flooded into India. At the peak of their inhumanity, Pakistani leaders persisted in presenting their country as a victim: they described India’s acceptance of refugees as an “Indo-Zionist plot against Islamic Pakistan.” Israel was nowhere in the picture, but India had by then trained and armed Bengali guerrillas.

“CRUSH INDIA” stickers went up on car windows in Lahore and Rawalpindi. Radio Pakistan, typifying the male chauvinism of the Pakistani establishment, blared the song “War is not a game that a woman can play” in pointed reference to India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi. A top-secret memo reached Zulfi Bhutto from the president’s secretariat, informing him that “any day now you should become the Prime Minister to our great delight.” Then, somewhat hubristically, it read: “Pakistan should occupy the whole of Eastern India and make it a part of East Pakistan… This will also provide a physical link with China. Kashmir should be taken at any price, and even the Sikh Punjab and turned into Khalistan.”