The Run-Up To East Pakistan’s 1971 Genocide

NEW DELHI: This week 50 years ago, East Pakistan faced extreme brutality at the hands of the Pakistani army. Tens of thousands of Bengali Muslims and Hindus were killed, many more were forced to flee to save their lives. All this because the political elite in West Pakistan and the Pakistani Army refused to accept the result of a parliamentary election that gave the Awami League a thumping win and its leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman the mandate to be Prime Minister. In the first of a two-part series on Bangladesh, StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale describes the sequence of events that led to the genocide of 1971.