Bangladesh Declares Independence: East Pakistan Breaks Free

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared the independence of Bangladesh over a clandestine radio transmitter just hours before Pakistani soldiers arrested him. On March 26, 1971, East Pakistan broke from the western half of the country after months of political crisis triggered by West Pakistan's refusal to honor election results that would have made Mujib the prime minister of a united Pakistan. His arrest launched a nine-month liberation war that killed between 300,000 and three million people. The roots ran deep. East and West Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory, had been yoked together at Partition in 1947 on the basis of shared Muslim identity. But the Bengali-speaking East had a larger population, generated more export revenue from jute, and received less government investment. West Pakistan dominated the military, civil service, and economy. When Mujib's Awami League won a landslide in the 1970 elections, General Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto refused to transfer power. The Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight on the night of March 25, targeting students, intellectuals, and Hindu minorities in Dhaka. Soldiers attacked Dhaka University, killing hundreds of students in their dormitories. The crackdown spread across East Pakistan, driving roughly 10 million Bengali refugees into India. The Pakistani army's systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, with estimates of 200,000 to 400,000 women assaulted, became one of the conflict's defining atrocities. India intervened militarily in December 1971, and Pakistani forces in Dhaka surrendered on December 16 after a 13-day war. Bangladesh became the world's newest nation, and Mujib returned from a Pakistani prison to lead it. He was assassinated by military officers four years later, but Bangladesh's independence, born from one of the 20th century's most devastating civil conflicts, endured.