Following Pakistan's army launching Operation Searchlight against Bengali nationalists in Dhaka, a declaration attributed to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was transmitted by radio, galvanizing resistance. The ensuing nine-month Liberation War killed an estimated 300,000 to 3 million people and ended with Indian intervention and Pakistani surrender in December 1971, creating the independent nation of Bangladesh.
The night before, Pakistani forces had launched Operation Searchlight, a systematic crackdown on Bengali nationalist and student movements in Dhaka, arresting and killing intellectuals, students, and Awami League leaders in a paroxysm of violence that would eventually be recognized by scholars as genocide. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Awami League leader who had won a decisive electoral majority the previous December, only to be denied power by Pakistan's military government, was arrested that night.
Before his capture, a declaration of independence attributed to Mujib was transmitted via wireless from Chittagong, read by Major Ziaur Rahman, who would later become Bangladesh's president. The message declared East Pakistan the independent state of Bangladesh and called on all Bengalis to resist. It spread by radio relay across the region, becoming a rallying cry even as its author sat in a Pakistani prison.
The war that followed was catastrophic—estimates of the dead range wildly from 300,000 to 3 million, with mass rape used as a weapon and roughly 10 million refugees fleeing into India. India's military intervened in December, and Pakistani forces surrendered on December 16, 1971. March 26 is now commemorated as Bangladesh's Independence Day, a date etched into the national identity of a country of over 170 million people.
Key people: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Ziaur Rahman