Beauty of Rural Bangla.

Bangladesh
The War for Bangladeshi Independence, 1971

On
March 25, the Pakistan Army launched a terror campaign calculated to
intimidate the Bengalis into submission. Within hours a wholesale
slaughter had commenced in Dhaka, with the heaviest attacks
concentrated on the University of Dhaka and the Hindu area of the old
town. Bangladeshis remember the date as a day of infamy and liberation.
The Pakistan Army came with hit lists and systematically killed several
hundred Bengalis. Mujib was captured and flown to West Pakistan for
incarceration.

To conceal what they were doing, the Pakistan
Army corralled the corps of foreign journalists at the International
Hotel in Dhaka, seized their notes, and expelled them the next day. One
reporter who escaped the censor net estimated that three battalions of
troops--one armored, one artillery, and one infantry--had attacked the
virtually defenseless city. Various informants, including missionaries
and foreign journalists who clandestinely returned to East Pakistan
during the war, estimated that by March 28 the loss of life reached
15,000. By the end of summer as many as 300,000 people were thought to
have lost their lives. Anthony Mascarenhas in Bangladesh: A Legacy of
Blood estimates that during the entire nine-month liberation struggle
more than 1 million Bengalis may have died at the hands of the Pakistan
Army.

The West Pakistani press waged a vigorous but ultimately
futile campaign to counteract newspaper and radio accounts of wholesale
atrocities. One paper, the Morning News, even editorialized that the
armed forces were saving East Pakistanis from eventual Hindu
enslavement. The civil war was played down by the government-controlled
press as a minor insurrection quickly being brought under control.

After
the tragic events of March, India became vocal in its condemnation of
Pakistan. An immense flood of East Pakistani refugees, between 8 and 10
million according to various estimates, fled across the border into the
Indian state of West Bengal. In April an Indian parliamentary
resolution demanded that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi supply aid to the
rebels in East Pakistan. She complied but declined to recognize the
provisional government of independent Bangladesh.

A propaganda
war between Pakistan and India ensued in which Yahya threatened war
against India if that country made an attempt to seize any part of
Pakistan. Yahya also asserted that Pakistan could count on its American
and Chinese friends. At the same time, Pakistan tried to ease the
situation in the East Wing. Belatedly, it replaced Tikka, whose
military tactics had caused such havoc and human loss of life, with the
more restrained Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi. A moderate Bengali,
Abdul Malik, was installed as the civilian governor of East Pakistan.
These belated gestures of appeasement did not yield results or change
world opinion.

On December 4, 1971, the Indian Army, far
superior in numbers and equipment to that of Pakistan, executed a
3-pronged pincer movement on Dhaka launched from the Indian states of
West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura, taking only 12 days to defeat the
90,000 Pakistani defenders. The Pakistan Army was weakened by having to
operate so far away from its source of supply. The Indian Army, on the
other hand, was aided by East Pakistan's Mukti Bahini (Liberation
Force), the freedom fighters who managed to keep the Pakistan Army at
bay in many areas ....