The War Lasted 13 Days. The Argument Over the Dead Has Lasted 55 Years

Just after half past four on the afternoon of Thursday 16 December 1971, a Pakistani general sat down at a small table on a racecourse in Dhaka, in front of a crowd that had every reason to want him dead, and signed away the eastern half of his own country.

Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi surrendered to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora of the joint Indian and Bangladeshi command. Around 93,000 Pakistani soldiers and officials passed into Indian hands, the largest surrender by any army since the Second World War.

The fighting had lasted thirteen days. What led to it had lasted nine months, and the cost is still argued over in three countries.

An election won, then set aside

In December 1970 Pakistan held its first general election on one person, one vote. The country came in two pieces with about 1,600 km of India in between. The west had the army, the capital and the money. The east had more than half the people and spoke Bengali.

The Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, ran on self-rule for the east inside a federal Pakistan. It won 167 of the 169 National Assembly seats in East Pakistan and none of the 138 in the west, an outright majority in a house of 313.

It was never allowed to govern. On 1 March 1971 the military president, General Yahya Khan, put off the assembly’s first sitting, under pressure from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose party had swept the west. East Pakistan stopped working. On 7 March Mujib told a huge crowd in Dhaka to shut the offices, courts and schools, and for three weeks the Awami League ran the province in all but name.

The night of 25 March

Then the army moved. Operation Searchlight was planned in advance and launched across the province at once on the night of 25 March 1971. In Dhaka the first targets were the university, the police barracks at Rajarbagh and the East Pakistan Rifles headquarters at Pilkhana. Mujib was arrested that night and flown to a prison in the west.

What followed lasted nine months. Villages were burned. Hindus were singled out and driven across the border. Locally raised militias, the Razakars and Al-Badr, did much of the pointing out and some of the killing. On 14 December, two days before the surrender, more than two hundred Bengali professors, doctors, writers and journalists were taken from their homes in Dhaka and shot.

Bangladesh calls all of it a genocide, and so do many historians. The word is a legal term, not just a strong one: a United Nations convention of 1948 defines genocide as acts carried out with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. Intent is what has to be proved, and what gets fought over.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars has passed a resolution naming 1971 a genocide and asking the UN to do the same. The UN has not. No court has ruled. Pakistan rejects the label.

Ten million people at the border

They crossed into India all summer. By late May the daily flow was above 100,000. By the end of the year India told the UN it was sheltering ten million refugees, and the UN’s refugee agency still calls it the largest movement of refugees anywhere in the second half of the twentieth century.

Cholera went through the camps and the bill landed on a poor country. This is what turned a Pakistani crisis into an Indian one, and Indira Gandhi’s government put it in front of every capital that would listen. Few did.

Inside East Pakistan the resistance organised itself as the Mukti Bahini, Bengali for liberation force: soldiers, border troops and policemen who had changed sides, plus students and farmers with a few weeks of training. India armed them and gave them ground to fall back to.

The telegram Washington filed away

On 6 April 1971 the American consulate in Dacca cabled Washington under the title “Dissent from U.S. Policy Toward East Pakistan”. Twenty officials signed it. Their own government, it said, had failed to denounce the suppression of democracy and failed to denounce atrocities; “unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable”; the American position was moral bankruptcy.

The consul general, Archer Blood, backed his staff and was pulled out of Dacca. Nixon and Kissinger stayed with Pakistan anyway, partly because Yahya Khan was the private channel that had just carried Kissinger to Beijing.

Gandhi drew her own conclusion. In August 1971 India signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union whose ninth article bound each side to act if the other were attacked. Twenty years of non-alignment ended, and India had a guarantor.

The general who said not yet

The story every Indian schoolchild hears is that Gandhi wanted to march in April and her army chief, General Sam Manekshaw, refused: too few tanks, the Himalayan passes about to open with China behind them, the rivers of East Bengal turning into seas in the monsoon. He asked for months and offered to resign. She kept him and let him pick his moment.

It is a good story, and the historian Srinath Raghavan has spent a chapter arguing that it is a myth. Working from Indian government papers, he calls it the most stubborn of all the legends of 1971 and says Gandhi was not planning an April invasion at all.

Either way, the shape of the year is not in doubt. India waited out the rains, signed the Soviet treaty, and let the Mukti Bahini spend eight months forcing the Pakistan Army to spread itself thin. By December most of the work was done.

Thirteen days

Pakistan opened it. On 3 December 1971 its air force struck airfields in north-western India, and India treated that as the declaration. In the east, Indian columns did not stop to capture towns. They went around them and drove for Dhaka, with Mukti Bahini units alongside.

At sea, on the night of 4 December, three small Indian missile boats, towed most of the way to save fuel, put Soviet-made missiles into Karachi harbour. A destroyer, a minesweeper and an ammunition ship went down and the shore fuel tanks burned. India still keeps 4 December as Navy Day.

In the Bay of Bengal, INS Vikrant, India’s only aircraft carrier, sent her Sea Hawks against Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar. East Pakistan’s ports shut.

In the western desert, about 120 men of 23 Punjab under Major Kuldip Singh Chandpuri held a post called Longewala through the night of 4 December, until Indian Hunters could hit the Pakistani tanks in daylight. That night has grown in the retelling, helped by a popular film, but the attack did not get through.

On 6 December India recognised Bangladesh. Nixon sent the carrier USS Enterprise towards the Bay of Bengal, officially to evacuate Americans. It never entered the bay; the historian Gary Bass calls it a nuclear-powered bluff.

Ten days later Niazi was at the table on the racecourse.

Ninety-three thousand men, and no trials

Prisoners of war are soldiers held by the other side until a war is formally settled. India held about 93,000 of them, with officials and family members, for more than two years.

The Simla Agreement, signed by Gandhi and Bhutto on 2 July 1972, bound the two countries to settle their quarrels between themselves, turned the Kashmir ceasefire line into the Line of Control, and provided that they would meet to arrange the prisoners’ return. India also handed back most of the ground it had taken in the west. The prisoners themselves went home between September 1973 and April 1974, under the eye of the Red Cross.

Bangladesh had wanted to try 195 Pakistani officers for war crimes. They went home with everybody else. No Pakistani officer has ever been tried for anything that happened in 1971.

Pakistan held an inquiry of its own. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission heard 213 witnesses and reported in 1972 that the army had used excessive force against civilians, that troops had looted, that people had been made to disappear, and that officers should face public trial. Eleven of its twelve copies were destroyed, and it stayed unpublished for nearly thirty years.

The number nobody can settle

Bangladesh’s official figure is three million dead. It is on the monuments and in the textbooks, and it has been enforced in court: in 2014 the country’s war crimes tribunal convicted a British journalist, David Bergman, of contempt over blog posts that questioned it.

Independent researchers have generally landed a long way below that. A 2008 study in the British Medical Journal, built from household surveys rather than press reports, estimated about 269,000 violent war deaths in Bangladesh, with an uncertainty range of 125,000 to 505,000. The figures quoted most often in the academic literature sit between 300,000 and 500,000. Some go higher: the political scientist R. J. Rummel argued for well over a million. Pakistan’s own number is around 26,000, which almost nobody accepts, including Sarmila Bose, whose 2011 book arguing the killing had been overstated was itself heavily criticised. Her own summary is fair: the Pakistani figure is absurdly low, the several-million figure is absurdly high, and the evidence will not support either.

Why can it not be settled? There was no census before and none after. Mass graves were never opened in any systematic way. Deaths from cholera and hunger cannot be cleanly separated from deaths by shooting. Records were burned. And the three million figure has its own contested path into public life, through a Dhaka newspaper editorial in December 1971, a report in Pravda, and then Mujib’s own statements that January.

None of that makes the lower estimates true. They are estimates too, and the floor of every serious range is still hundreds of thousands of people.

The same problem runs through the record of sexual violence. Bangladesh has long used a figure of 200,000 women raped, and some accounts go to 400,000. It was never counted, and it is disputed. In December 1971 the new government gave the survivors the title birangona, war heroine, which honoured them in public and, as the anthropologist Nayanika Mookherjee has shown, did not always protect them at home.

What the date can and cannot tell you

A country is a rare thing to be able to date to the hour. Bangladesh can date itself to a Thursday afternoon on a racecourse.

The rest of 1971 carries no such precision, and that is the part worth keeping. A war can be won in thirteen days and still leave a count that fifty-five years have not closed. When you next meet a single number for the dead of 1971, stated flatly with no range, look at who is stating it. The politics are rarely about 1971.