Bangladesh Liberation and Loss: The Silenced Hindu Genocide of 1971

By Vinay Nalwa

While the political confrontation between West Pakistan’s military elite and the democratically elected Awami League defined the immediate trigger of the 1971 crisis, what is often overlooked is how this turmoil simultaneously unleashed unprecedented brutality on the most vulnerable, particularly the Hindu minority of East Pakistan. As the Pakistani army moved to crush Bengali nationalism through Operation Searchlight, Hindus were specifically profiled, and targeted with systematic killings, expulsions, rapes, and destruction of property. Thus, alongside the wider Bengali struggle for liberation, a parallel and more sinister campaign was unfolded. The deliberate attempt to terrorise, displace, and erase the Hindu population. Between the political power struggles, rights to self-determination, language, culture and governance what was caught was Hindus. 

The Hindu population in Bangladesh never recovered to its pre-1971 demographic trajectory. A tragedy that continues to shape the demographic and civilizational landscape of present-day Bangladesh.

In Pakistan’s first general election of 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won an overwhelming mandate in East Pakistan on the promise of autonomy, exposing decades of political and economic discrimination by the West Pakistani establishment. Yet President General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s military ruler, backed politically by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party in West Pakistan, refused to honour the 1970 electoral verdict and stalled the transfer of power. The military secretly prepared to crush rising Bengali nationalism. On the night of March 25, 1971, as Yahya Khan left Dhaka, Pakistan launched Operation Searchlight, plunging the city into darkness both literally and morally. What followed was not merely a crackdown but one of the most brutal, systematically orchestrated genocides of the 20th century an operation designed to crush a people, a culture, and, with particular intensity, the Bengali Hindus who were marked for extermination.

From 1947 onward, East Pakistan was treated as an exploited colony earning most of Pakistan’s foreign revenue yet receiving only scraps in return. The imposition of Urdu on a Bengali-speaking majority and the regime’s indifference during the devastating 1970 Bhola Cyclone deepened alienation. Even after the Awami League won a clear majority of 162 seats, the military elite moved swiftly to block democracy. By February 22, 1971, Yahya Khan’s chilling proclamation “Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands” made the intent unmistakable. When Operation Searchlight began, nearly 60,000–80,000 soldiers descended upon Dhaka with predetermined targets: Dhaka University, working-class and Hindu neighbourhoods, journalists, students, and young boys. Within hours, more than 7,000 civilians lay dead. Teachers were dragged from classrooms and executed; entire dormitories were emptied and shot in batches. “Meherunnesa Chowdhury, who was a Senior House Tutor of Rokeya Hall, described how female student halls were raided by army men, who, before brush-firing hundreds of students to death in their own dorms, would look for girls they thought were "pretty" and would capture and drag them to their army trucks, never to be seen again. Male students were lined outside their dorms and shot execution-style in batches, while others were made to dig mass graves and bury their newly deceased friends. After their job was done, they, too, were shot to death and buried on top of their friends.”

Children hiding under beds watched their parents shot before their eyes. As British journalist Anthony Mascarenhas documented, a Pakistani officer chillingly remarked, “They may call themselves Muslims, but they are Hindu at heart. We are now sorting them out… Those who are left will be real Muslims.” This was not war it was ideological ethnic cleansing.

Across the country, Hindu localities such as Shankhari Bazaar and Rayerbazar, along with villages in Khulna, Noakhali, Sylhet, and Barisal, were targeted with particular ferocity. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission Pakistan’s own official inquiry later acknowledged that Hindus were deliberately singled out. There were verbal instructions to eliminate Hindus. The Chuknagar massacre became one of the largest single-day slaughters, where between 10,000 and 15,000 fleeing Hindu civilians were gunned down in a matter of hours. By the end of 1971, between 500,000 and 3 million civilians had been killed; another 8–10 million refugees, the majority of them Hindus, had poured into India(STATISTICS OF DEMOCIDE Chapter 8 Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources By R.J. Rummel), and between 200,000 and 400,000 women had been raped, many imprisoned in camps controlled by the Pakistan Army. Rivers and canals ran thick with bodies an unmistakable testament to a genocide that met every definition in international law, with academic consensus affirming that the violence, particularly against the Hindu population, constituted genocide.

Primary Evidence of Anti-Hindu Genocide

Pakistan’s own Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report based on 213 witness testimonies explicitly records “deliberate killing of members of the Hindu minority” as a distinct category of crimes. Senior officers testified to receiving verbal and written orders to eliminate Hindus, with Lt. Col. Mansoorul Haq stating that the army moved “ruthlessly, destroying, burning and killing,” and Lt. Col. Aziz Ahmed Khan recalling that General Niazi personally demanded to know “how many Hindus we had killed.”

Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas, whose 1971 exposé in The Sunday Times first revealed the genocide to the world, documented the same pattern. In The Rape of Bangla Desh, he describes thousands of Hindus slaughtered in Dhaka’s Shankhari Bazaar, Hindu students executed in trenches at Jagannath Hall, and entire Hindu villages hunted “from house to house” as part of what officers openly called a “cleansing process.”Together, the Commission’s testimony and Mascarenhas’s account provide undeniable, contemporaneous proof that Hindus were singled out for systematic extermination.

The world largely looked away, allowing the atrocities to continue unchecked for 9 months. India intervened when millions of refugees destabilised its border states and Pakistani aircraft launched attacks on Indian bases. In a swift 13-day military campaign, Pakistan finally surrendered on December 16, 1971, and Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation. Yet the trauma of 1971 especially the unacknowledged genocide of Hindus remains a wound that continues to shape the region’s demographic and civilizational reality.

And it is precisely on Bangladesh Liberation Day that this truth must be remembered. The destiny of Bengali Hindus has too often been written in a dark ink of dried blood scattered across Noakhali in 1946, 1950,1964, scorched into 1971, and etched into the recurring violence that still shadows their existence. Liberation Day was paid for by the bodies of those who had no armies, by women whose dignity was torn apart, and by families who fled the land of their birth to stay alive. To speak of their suffering today is not to reopen wounds but to honour a truth the world refused to acknowledge then and still hesitates to name now. Genocide must not be commemorated selectively. If the liberation of Bangladesh is to be remembered with honesty, the cost of that liberation particularly the targeted extermination and dispossession of Hindus cannot be omitted from history, nor from the conscience of a world that once chose silence.

(The writer is an author and columnist)