Bangladesh: Humiliation, Carnage, Liberation, Chaos - Hardcover

by Iqbal Chand Malhotra (Author), Subroto Chattopadhyay (Author)

The roots of the conflict between East and West Pakistan go back to the traumatic partitionof the subcontinent in 1947. Pakistan was united by religion but divided by language andculture-fault lines that soon metastasized into repeated humiliations and injustices. Asprotests erupted, the Pakistan Army unleashed a brutal campaign to silence dissent: threemillion people were killed, over 200,000 women were subjected to sexual violence, and tenmillion refugees fled to India, all for demanding autonomy.The silence of the international community was deafening. The US and China, openly tiltingtowards Pakistan, did nothing to halt the unfolding genocide. The subcontinent had becomethe epicentre of a superpower contest.India stood isolated.Impoverished and destabilized by left-wing insurgency yet morally steadfast, Indira Gandhi'sIndia-working in close coordination with Tajuddin Ahmad, Bangladesh's first PM, and theresolute Mukti Bahini-waged a covert struggle for nine months. This culminated in a swiftthirteen-day military campaign that broke the Pakistan Army, resulted in the capture of93,000 prisoners of war, and delivered Bangladesh in one of history's fastest and mostdecisive liberations.All arms of the Indian state and Bangladesh's government-in-exile had worked in perfectunison to deliver a glorious victory, yet peace proved fragile. Chaos followed almostimmediately after independence, and nearly all the central figures of the struggle wereeventually assassinated in a spiral of senseless violence.Half a century later, as the same hatreds of language, identity, and faith erupt again, theghosts of 1971 return-not as memory, but as warning.