20th Century In Bangladesh

"Armed Pathans, operating in bands, were perhaps the worst offenders in West Punjab, especially in the districts of the Rawalpindi division (where they were concentrated), for it was they who systematically preyed upon the refugee trains and convoys, carrying off women to be sold for as little as Rs10 or 20 to Muslim men. Non-Muslim women from Kashmir also were offered for sale in West Punjab, ending up as 'slave girls' in factories. A report from Sargodha district claimed,The Pathans brought a very large number of abducted women and children from the Kashmir front and they had been selling these like cattle and chattel. There were cases in which a woman had been sold thrice or four times. The Pathans had made this a regular trade."

"They shot everyone who couldn't recite the kalima - the Arabic-language Muslim declaration of faith. Many non-Muslim women were enslaved, while many others jumped in the river to escape capture."..."They had returned with war booty," he says. "Some had brought cattle, some horses. Most of them had brought arms, and many brought women. One Afridi tribesman walked back with two women in tow. They wept incessantly and just wouldn't stop.""

"The Punjabi Sikh and Hindu girls and Kashmiri women are proverbially beautiful, so they were in great demand in the Muslim countries of Africa and the Middle East. They were sold there by the barbarian Muslim kidnappers for very high prices. These ill fated women were confined in their purchasers' harems and bound to accept concubinage"

"No one could predict how long this sold-off woman would remain there. These poor women were housed by the government in the Kunja camp as there was fighting going on in Kashmir. The army handed them over to us when they were useless...All 600 had been used by the Pakistani army...Pakistan's attitude was that it should be thankful that it had managed to recover so many women. Naturally, they would not admit that they had any hand in the situation the women found themselves in."

"One Muslim member of the Legislative Assembly was said to have five hundred girls in his possession in West Punjab, while an abducted Muslim girl from a well-known family was reported to be with the Maharaja of Patiala. In West Punjab police officials, members of the Muslim League and landed magnates were involved."

"The following strategy, the Report continues, was used wherever the mobs attacked: First of all minorities were disarmed with the help of local police and by giving assurances by oaths on holy Quran of peaceful intentions. After this had been done, the helpless and unarmed minorities were attacked. On their resistance having collapsed, lock breakers and looters came into action with their transport corps of mules, donkeys and camels. Then came the ‘Mujahadins’ with tins of petrol and kerosene oil and set fire to the looted shops and houses. Then there were maulvies with barbers to convert people who somehow or other escaped slaughter and rape. The barbers shaved the hair and beards and circumcised the victims. Maulvis recited kalamas and performed forcible marriage ceremonies. After this came the looters, including women and children."

"The trouble for the non-Muslims in general, and for the women in particular, started in March, 1947. Whatever may be the causes of the Rawalpindi and Multan riots, it is admitted that these were of terrific nature Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, aftcr visiting district Rawalpindi reported to the British Government in England, "The whole of the Hindu-Sikh part is an absolute wreck, as though it has been subjected to an air raid."2 Several Hindu and Sikh villages were wiped out. Justice Teja Singh, a member of the Punjab Boundary Commission, stated before the Commission that during the Rawalpindi riots, "A large number of people were forcibly converted, children were kidnapped, and young women abducted and openly raped."3 Though a separate number of female casualities is not available, the official figure of deaths in the district of Rawalpindi was 2,263 which was considered far below the actual numbcr.4 Thc womcn were subjected to maximum humiliation and torture. Their agony can be judged by the fact that a number of women jumped into wells to save their honour. It is as unbelievable today as it was at that time. But fortunately Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru visited the village on 14th March, 1947, and he was told about thc incidents of ladies jumping into wells. His staff photographer took photographs of the bottom of the well with the help of a flashlight. These photographs showed the decomposed limbs of the bodies. One copy of a photograph was given to me by late Sant Gulab Singh in whose land the well existed. He told me that his wife was the first to jump into the well. The photograph has been published in my book Shahidian."

"The assailants did not spare even little children. It was naked beastliness performing a devil’s dance. Children would be snatched from the hands of their parents, tossed on spears and swords, and sometimes thrown alive into the fire. Other cruelties equally horrible were perpetrated. Women’s breasts, noses and arms would he lopped off. Sticks and pieces of iron would be thrust into their private parts. Sometimes the bellies of pregnant women were ripped open and the unformed life in the womb thrown out. In some places processions of naked Hindu and Sikh women are also reported to have been taken out by the Muslims mobs. (81)... At Nara, in the tehsil of Kahuta, Sikh women and children were burnt alive, and the women were tortured in ways most devilishly ingenious and sadistic, which it is not possible for any decent human being to describe.... All this was done in village after village after the Muslims had given assurances of safety on the Koran to Hindus. Hindu women were molested and abducted. Altogether 50 villages in this tehsil were looted with arson, murder and abduction of women. Ears, noses and breasts of women were cut off, and they were raped in the presence of their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons."

"There is a marked difference in the behaviour of Muslims and Sikhs towards women and children captured during this fight. While Muslims everywhere dishonoured, abducted or murdered Hindu and Sikh women and children, Sikhs never resorted to anything of which they might have reason to be ashamed. On the first day of attack, several Muslims got killed by an infuriated Sikh crowd in a locality which was at the junction of a Muslim and non-Muslim zone, not very far from the centre of the Sikh influence. More than one hundred Muslim women and children, whose menfolk had either been killed or had run away for safety, fell into the hands of the Sikhs. Sikhs kept them safe and fed them for the two or three days that the fighting lasted and all communications in the town were cut off, and later sent them under escort to the City Police Station, These women acknowledged the chivalry and courtesy of the treatment of the Sikhs towards them. (156)"

"When everybody had got into the train and as the engine was whistling to indicate that the train was going to start, a huge crowd of Muslims came from the side of the Mandi and factories. They were armed with rifles, chhuras, axes, barchas and other lethal weapons... The women-folk were not butchered, but taken out and sorted. The elderly women were later butchered while the younger ones were distributed... The children were also similarly murdered. All the valuables on the persons of the women were removed and taken away by the mob... During these visits I also saw a large number of Hindu women in the houses of the Muslim inhabitants of Kamoke. All of them complained that they were being very badly used by their abductors."

"“On 4-10-47, a small caravan of about fifteen non-Muslims tried to cross the bridge Ravi from Pakistan to this side. They were entrapped by the Muslim Military picket on the other side of the bridge. That caravan included four women. The male members of the caravan were murdered during the night. Our Military picket on this side of the bridge heard shrieks and cries of the victims. The Gurkha Jamadar in charge of the picket saw the women with Military (Muslim). They kept those women in their tents during the night and the military picket on our side heard their shrieks too during the night as if they were being raped. Later on those women never crossed the bridge on this side."

"“Girls abducted from Mirpur side are sold in Jhelum city at Rs. 10 or 20 each. The local police refuses to interfere on the ground that the girls were not removed from the Punjab and also they express their helplessness because of the attitude of the armed Pathans possessing these girls. I am bringing this to the notice of the West Punjab Government but I am afraid nothing would come out of it and in our helplessness all these girls shall have to stand hardships for all their lives and suffer misery.” According to the information received most of the girls abducted from Jammu and Kashmir States and some of the girls abducted from Gujranwala, Jhelum, Mianwali, Jhang and Dera Ghazi Khan districts are taken to the North-west Frontier Province and from there to the tribal territory. At Mansera and some other places (North-West Frontier) there are regular camps where Hindu girls are being sold."

"A British Officer of the M. E. O. of West Punjab reported (September, 1947) that at a place near Sheikhupura he was called to rescue a Hindu girl, who had been carried away by Muslim National Guards. He found the girl in a hut with 4 of her captors, who had raped and cut off her breasts and were now frying them. He shot the lot."

"The man installed as Bangladesh’s president by the young officers who had slain Rahman was Khondakar Mustaque, generally identified as the leader of the right-wing element within the Awami League. He was at pains to say that the coup had come to him as a complete surprise, and that the young majors who had led it—Major Farooq, Major Rashid and four others, at the head of a detachment numbering just three hundred men—had “acted on their own.” He added that he had never met the mutinous officers before.... The cover story (one might term it the coincidence version) leaks at every joint and comes apart at the most cursory inspection."

"Only a reopened congressional inquiry with subpoena power could determine whether there was any direct connection, apart from the self-evident ones of consistent statecraft attested by recurring reliable testimony, between the secret genocidal diplomacy of 1971 and the secret destabilizing diplomacy of 1975. The task of disproving such a connection, meanwhile, would appear to rest on those who believe that everything is an accident."

"Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, (...) But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected."

"200,000, 300,000 or possibly 400,000 women (three sets of statistics have been variously quoted) were raped. Eighty percent of the raped women were Moslems, reflecting the population of Bangladesh, but Hindu and Christian women were not exempt. ... Hit-and-run rape of large numbers of Bengali women was brutally simple in terms of logistics as the Pakistani regulars swept through and occupied the tiny, populous land ...Rape in Bangladesh had hardly been restricted to beauty... Girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy-five had been sexually assaulted ... Pakistani soldiers had not only violated Bengali women on the spot; they abducted tens of hundreds and held them by force in their military barracks for nightly use.... Some women may have been raped as many as eighty times in a night"

"And the students at the university Asleep at night quite peacefully The soldiers came and shot them in their beds And terror took the dorm awakening shrieks of dread And silent frozen forms and pillows drenched in red Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bangladesh, Bangladesh When the sun sinks in the west Die a million people of the Bangladesh"

"Indians see the war as a moral triumph too, a victory for democracy and human rights. As the leading Indian scholar and analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote, “India’s 1971 armed intervention in East Pakistan—undertaken for a mixture of reasons—is widely and fairly regarded as one of the world’s most successful cases of humanitarian intervention against genocide. Indeed, India in effect applied what we would now call the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) principle, and applied it well.”"

"The army even operated its own death camps... There were no trials, no interrogation. The processing of the arrivals was simple. Seven or eight of them would be roped together, led to the river’s edge, and in the light of an arc lamp forced to wade out into knee deep water. And then, from above them on a pier jutting out into the water alongside, executioners would shoot down on the starkly lighted forms. Group upon group would be so executed."

"As the soldiers advanced and consolidated control over one district or town after another, atrocities were repeated ad nauseam. Bengalis were spared no torture, no way in which their lives could not be stolen from them. Some accounts seem simply the stuff of propaganda but come from reputable sources or eyewitnesses. In a letter to The Guardian of London, for example, the Reverends John Hastings and John Clapham cite instances of babies tossed in the air and caught on bayonets, women bayoneted vertically, children sliced up like meat, and the heads of others smashed.31 A correspondent of The Daily Mirror reported from the province that soldiers had buried two boys “in mud that came up past their noses and the crows did the rest.”"

"According to the post-independence report of the Bangladesh Government Inquiry Committee, nearly one-third of all workers were murdered.29 Since there were nearly 2 million workers,30 this would mean the premeditated murder of around 666,000 in just nine months."

"The atrocities committed in Dacca were more than equaled elsewhere. In particular, in what became province-wide acts of genocide,25 Hindus were sought out and killed on the spot. As a matter of course, soldiers would check males for the obligated circumcision among Moslems. If circumcised, they might live; if not, sure death. Women and children were no less victims, but this the army would self-righteously deny."

"Overall, in the first days of slaughter in Dacca, possibly 7,000, to 10,000 civilians,22 or 15,000 overall,23 maybe even as many as 50,000,24 were killed. If we just take the lower estimate of 10,000 as the number burned to death or shot in cold blood in Dacca, this alone would make it an incredible, premeditated act of mass murder. But within months the death toll throughout the province would be over 100 times this number. This, done by the authorities of an internationally recognized government."

"But the most horrible of all was the army’s attack the following day on the poor shanty-town area of Dacca’s old city. Over 1 million people lived there, along a jungle of winding narrow streets and alleys, and they were strong supporters of Sheikh Mujib. For twelve hours soldiers systematically razed one area of the old city or another. Gasoline was poured around blocks and ignited. People trying to escape the flames were shot down. Streetside squatter colonies were especially vulnerable and were destroyed by tanks. As the massacre proceeded, whole families were killed together. One can easily picture the horror and panic of these poor people as they jumped from windows or ran out of buildings and down streets and alleys to escape the flames, bullets, and tanks.21 It was no accident that this was mainly a Hindu section — it was part of the plan to kill large numbers of these “infidels” and to terrorize the rest into fleeing the province."

"That first night, army units also attacked the University of Dacca. Four American-built M-2 tanks shelled student dormitories at close range, killing many men and women students.13 Those students who survived until the morning were forced to dig mass graves for the dead and then themselves were lined up and shot."

"The plan of the top political and military leadership of the state of Pakistan was to arrest Sheikh Mujib for later disposition, kill other leaders and organizers of the Awami League, arrest or kill Bengalis in the army stationed in East Pakistan, kill or arrest all the top intellectuals and Bengali civil servants working there, kill most of the university students (who provided the rationale, energy, and organization for the pro-independence demonstrations), destroy the old shanty towns and city blocks in Dacca and kill their inhabitants (a home of mass support for the Awami League), and throughout East Pakistan kill a significant number of the 10 million Hindus, forcing the rest to flee across the border into India. All this would be launched in Dacca by surprise."

"In 1971, the self-appointed president of Pakistan and commander-in-chief of the army General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top generals prepared a careful and systematic military, economic, and political operation against East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). They planned to murder that country’s Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide. After a well-organized military buildup in East Pakistan, the military launched its campaign. Within 267 days it killed about 1,500,000 people, turned another 10 million into refugees who fled to India, provoked a war with India, incited a countergenocide of 150,000 non-Bengalis, and lost East Pakistan."

"The genocide and gendercidal atrocities were also perpetrated by lower-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers. These "willing executioners" were fueled by an abiding anti-Bengali racism, especially against the Hindu minority. "Bengalis were often compared with monkeys and chickens. Said General Niazi, "It was a low lying land of low lying people." The Hindus among the Bengalis were as Jews to the Nazis: scum and vermin that [should] best be exterminated. As to the Moslem Bengalis, they were to live only on the sufferance of the soldiers: any infraction, any suspicion cast on them, any need for reprisal, could mean their death. And the soldiers were free to kill at will. The journalist Dan Coggin quoted one Pakistani captain as telling him, "We can kill anyone for anything. We are accountable to no one." This is the arrogance of Power."

"Whenever they found Hindus, the Pakistanis would capture them, kick them with their boots, attack them with bayonets, gouge out their eyes and then break their backs. If they survived this sort of brutality, they were then killed. Sudhamoy had seen many Muslims being beaten up but their lives would usually be spared but this never happened with the Hindus. During the war of independence,the corpses of many Hindus and Muslims who fought for their country were piled into a well in the local sweepers’ colony. In a poignant moment, even as the country rejoiced in its new-found independence, the relatives of people he had known like Majid, Rahim and Idris had come and cried over the bones of both Hindus and Muslims that were stacked in the well of Mathurpatti. Their tears had fallen even more copiously when they had realized that they had no way of distinguishing between the bones of the Majids and the Anils."

"In any case where large numbers were massacred and it can be shown that on the particular occasion the intent was to kill Bengalis indiscriminately as such, then a crime of genocide would be established. There would seem to be a prima facie case to show that this was the intention on some occasions, as for example during the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the poorer quarters of Dacca during the 'crack-down'. ... As far as the other three groups are concerned, namely members of the Awami League, students and Hindus, only Hindus would seem to fall within the definition of ' a national, ethnical, racial or religious group '. There is overwhelming evidence that Hindus were slaughtered and their houses and villages destroyed simply because they were Hindus. The oft repeated phrase ' Hindus are enemies of the state ' as a justification for the killing does not gainsay the intent to commit genocide; rather does it confirm the intention. The Nazis regarded the Jews as enemies of the state and killed them as such. In our view there is a strong prima facie case that the crime of genocide was committed against the group comprising the Hindu population of East Bengal."

"March 25th officially marks the beginning of the genocide in Bangladesh. The brutality unleashed by the Pakistani army and the targeting of Bengali Hindus simply because of their religion must be strongly condemned as religious freedom is one of the most sacred of human rights. It has been 50 years since the genocide in Bangladesh, and the survivors and their descendants are still fighting for recognition; they are still fighting for an apology from Pakistan, as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh formerly asked her Pakistani counterpart as recently as January of 2021; and they are still fighting for justice and for closure."

"At least ten thousand civilians were butchered in the first three days. The eventual civilian death toll has never been placed at less than half a million and has been put as high as three million. Since almost all Hindu citizens were at risk by definition from Pakistani military chauvinism (not that Pakistan’s Muslim coreligionists were spared), a vast movement of millions of refugees—perhaps as many as ten million—began to cross the Indian frontier. To summarize, then: first, the direct negation of a democratic election; second, the unleashing of a genocidal policy; third, the creation of a very dangerous international crisis."

"The CIA had a blunt explanation for this "incredible" migration: "many if not most of the Hindus fled for fear of their lives." Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, Yahya's military governor, evidently thought he could quickly frighten the Bengalis into submission. The Pakistan army, the CIA noted, seemed to have singled out Hindus as targets. Although the CIA refrained from crying genocide, it did insist this was an ethnic campaign, with 80 percent—or possibly even 90 percent— of the refugees being Hindus. So far, out of eight million refugees, over six million were Hindus, and many more might follow—ending perhaps only when East Pakistan had no more Hindus left. Yahya's recent efforts to curtail such attacks had been of little use in a "virulent atmosphere" where loyalists got used to persecuting the Hindu minority... As a respected U.S. development official reported, the Pakistan army, driven by anti-Hindu ideology, was clearing East Pakistan of Hindus. Even Major General Rao Farman Ali Khan, the senior military man ruling East Pakistan, agreed with this U.S. official’s assessment that some 80 percent of the Hindus had left East Pakistan. Off the record, the Pakistani general admitted there were roughly six million refugees, and that another million and a half would eventually flee into India—roughly the number of Hindus still remaining in East Pakistan."

"Kennedy declared, “Nothing is more clear, or easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror—and its genocidal consequences—launched by the Pakistan army on the night of March 25th.” Invoking the Holocaust, he said that Hindus were being specifically targeted, “systematically slaughtered, and, in some places, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H.’ ” He blamed the Nixon administration for much of this: “America’s heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal.”"

"In the New York Times, Schanberg reported, "The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow 'H's' on the Hindu shops still standing in this town." Emphasizing the targeting of Hindus, he described "the hate and terror and fear" throughout the "conquered province." Back in Dacca at last, Schanberg found the city "half-deserted," with fresh loads of troops arriving daily from West Pakistan at the airport. Terrified merchants had taken down signs in the Bengali language and put up new ones in English, because they did not know Urdu. He wrote that foreign diplomats estimated that the army had killed at least two hundred thousand Bengalis."

"Trying to blunt the impact of these terrible stories, Pakistan allowed in some foreign correspondents. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who had been expelled from Dacca in March, jumped at the chance. He remembers the Pakistan army’s contempt for Bengalis: “Even the officers in charge of these units would say, ‘You can’t trust these people, they’re low, they lie.’ ” The officers gave “no denials that they had just killed them.” He recalls, “You’d see places where they had marked little wooden houses as Hindus.” Survivors told him that the army would “come through yelling, ‘Are there any Hindus there?’ When they found out there were, they would kill them.” He concludes, “It was a genocide”—perhaps even a more clear case than Cambodia."

"The Nixon administration had ample evidence not just of the scale of the massacres, but also of their ethnic targeting of the Hindu minority—what Blood had condemned as genocide. This was common knowledge throughout the Nixon administration. Kissinger once told the president himself, "Another stupid mistake he [Yahya] made was to expel so many Hindus from East Pakistan. It gave the Indians a great cause" for war. Kissinger, in a memorandum drafted by Saunders, alerted Nixon to the difficulty of getting Hindu refugees to return. The undersecretary of state said to Nixon, "The Hindu population has suffered strong persecution, and many have fled the country." Kissinger was repeatedly alerted about this genocide. Harold Saunders informed him about reports that the Pakistan army was "deliberately seeking out Hindus and killing them," while a senior State Department official notified him that Pakistan's policy was "getting rid of the Hindus." In a Situation Room meeting, another State Department official plainly told Kissinger, "Eighty percent of the refugees are Hindus." In the same meeting, the CIA director doubted the prospects of refugees returning to East Pakistan, no matter what Yahya said to them: "The way the Pakistanis have been beating up on the Hindus, the refugees would have to be convinced they wouldn’t be shot in the head.""

"Desaix Myers remembers, "We were aware the Hindu markets had been attacked. The villages that we visited were Hindu. We were aware that Hindus specifically were being attacked." In a letter at the time, he wrote, "The Army continues to check, lifting lungis [a kind of sarong worn by Bengalis], checking circumcision, demanding recitation of Muslim prayers. Hindus flee or are shot." He recalls that on one trip out of Dacca, "I was convinced I saw people wearing pieces of cloth identifying themselves as Hindus." Butcher says, "You heard stories of men having to pull down their lungis. If they were circumcised, they were let go. If they were not, they were killed. It was singling out the Hindus for especially bad treatment, burning Hindu villages, it was like a pogrom. It was ridding the province of these people.""

"The consulate emphasized how Hindus were targeted. One of Blood’s senior staffers privately noted “evidence of selective singling out of Hindu professors for elimination, burning of Hindu settlements including 24 square block areas on edges of Old Dacca and village built around temple.… Also attack night of March 26 on Hindu dormitory at Dacca University resulting in at least 25 deaths.” Although Pakistani forces had concentrated on Awami League activists, “Hindus seem [to] bear brunt of general reign of terror.”"

"For six days as I traveled with the officers of the 9th Division headquarters at Comilla I witnessed at close quarters the extent of the killing. I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot offhand after a cursory “short-arm inspection” showed they were uncircumcised. I have heard the screams of men bludgeoned to death in the compound of the Circuit House (civil administrative headquarters) in Comilla. I have seen truck-loads of other human targets and those who had the humanity to try to help them hauled off “for disposal” under the cover of darkness and curfew. I have witnessed the brutality of “kill and burn missions” as the army units after clearing out the rebels pursued the pogrom in the towns and the villages. I have seen whole villages devastated by “punitive action.”"

"[T]he bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, . . . and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything."

"Midnight, March 25, 1971: past the University, which was being shelled, the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib's lair. Students and lecturers came running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and Merchurichrome stained the lawns . . . And while we drove through the city streets, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that weren't-couldn't-have-been-true: soldiers entering women's hostels without knocking; women dragged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled to knock . . . When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy . . . dog-soldiers strain at the leash, and then, released, leap joyously to their work. O woltliound chases of undesirables! O prolific seizings of professors and poets! O unfortunate shot-while-resisting arrests of Awami Leaguers and fashion correspondents! Dogs of war cry havoc in the city . . . Farooq Shaheed Ayooba take turns at vomiting as their nostrils are assailed by the stench of burning slums . . . no undesirable is safe tonight; no hiding place impregnable. Bloodhounds track the fleeing enemies of national unity; wolfhounds, not to be outdone, sink fierce teeth into their prey . . ."

"I covered the war and witnessed first the population's joyous welcome of the Indian soldiers as liberators .. Later I toured the country by road to see the Pakistani legacy first hand. In town after town there was an execution area where people had been killed by bayonet, bullet and bludgeon. In some towns, executions were held on a daily basis. This was a month after the war's end (i.e. January 1972), ... human bones were still scattered along many roadsides. Blood stained clothing and tufts of human hair clung to the brush at these killing grounds. Children too young to understand were playing grotesque games with skulls. Other reminders were the yellow "H"s the Pakistanis had painted on the homes of Hindus, particular targets of the Muslim army."

"To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones."

"I wouldn't put out a statement praising it, but we're not going to condemn it either."

"Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands."

"On the borders of what was to become East Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim violence in 1947 was far smaller in scale. What happened there was that after a relatively peaceful transition to independence, the Partition process of religious cleansing took place anyway but drawn out over decades. During this "prolonged Partition", there has been a constant trickle of Hindu refugees from East Bengal to India, which became a flood in times of crisis. The biggest crisis was of course the Bangladesh war of 1971, when the Pakistani army and its Bengali and immigrant-Bihari collaborators hunted down Hindus along with Muslim Bengali nationalists. The official death toll as claimed by the Bangladeshi government was 3 million; foreign observers settle for 1.5 million. All disinterested observers agree that Hindus were the first and largest among the victim groups. As for the Muslim victims, they were not killed by Hindus but by Pakistanis and their Jamaat-i-Islami collaborators who killed them for not being Muslim enough."

"The victims of the Pakistani repression in East Bengal in 1971 (of whom the big majority were Hindus, while the Bengali Muslims too were killed for anti-Hindu reasons, viz. for being "half-Hindu renegades"), like those of the Sultanate and Moghul regimes, have never been properly counted; careerwise, it is suicidal for a scholar to calculate the magnitude of Islam's crimes against humanity. The figure of 3 million is probably too high, but as it was given by a Muslim secularist (Bangladesh founder Mujibur Rahman), and as the secularists themselves have thrown their full weight against a proper study of the magnitude of Islamic massacres of Hindus, they cannot fault us for provisionally sticking to it."

"Nandan Vyas has argued convincingly that the number of Hindu victims in the 1971 genocide was approximately 2.4 million, or about 80%. In comparing the population figures for 1961 and 1971, and taking the observed natural growth rhythm into account, Vyas finds that the Hindu population has remained stable at 9.5 million when it should have increased to nearly 13 million (13.23 million if the same growth rhythm were assumed for Hindus as for Muslims). Of the missing 3.5 million people (if not more), 1.1 million can be explained: it is the number of Hindu refugees settled in India prior to the genocide. The Hindu refugees at the time of the genocide, about 8 million, all went back after the ordeal, partly because the Indian government forced them to it, partly because the new state of Bangladesh was conceived as a secular state; the trickle of Hindu refugees into India only resumed in 1974, when the first steps towards Islamization of the polity were taken. This leaves 2.4 million missing Hindus to be explained. Taking into account a number of Hindu children born to refugees in India rather than in Bangladesh, and a possible settlement of 1971 refugees in India, it is fair to estimate the disappeared Hindus at about 2 million."