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Should this article specify Bengalis or Bengali Hindus as the victims of the Bangladesh genocide? Malerisch ( talk) 05:14, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
Though Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims) and Ben Kiernan (
The final toll … included disproportionate numbers of local Hindus and city dwellers, though most victims were Muslim Bengali villagers), so saying that the victims were "primarily Bengali Hindus" is also factually inaccurate.
the 1971 massacre of Bangladeshis by Pakistan an exclusively "Hindu genocide"is
untrue. A recent article published this month from Hindus for Human Rights calls out the Hindu nationalist framing of this genocide.
the crimes committed against the Bengali population in 1971 in Bangladesh as genocide. This group is the best source for a consensus among genocide scholars—on Wikipedia, their resolutions are prominently mentioned in articles like Armenian genocide recognition, Sayfo (a featured article), and Greek genocide. The IAGS does not say that only Bengali Hindus were the targets of the genocide.
[t]here would seem to be a prima facie case to show that [the indiscriminate killings of Bengalis] was the intention on some occasions, which would constitute
genocide against part of the Bengali people. (
partrefers to the
in whole or in partphrase in the definition of genocide.) The 2023 IAGS resolution specifically cites the ICJ report and concludes that Bengalis were the victims. Besides, this 51-year-old report (contemporaneous with the genocide) is a WP:PRIMARY source and should not be relied on to represent the present-day consensus—just like it would be absurd to use the Famine Inquiry Commission as the arbiter of truth for the Bengal famine of 1943.
[s]ome West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them.In The Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023) [7], Bass writes that
[e]ven Muslim Bengalis were seen as Hinduised and therefore unfit for Muslim Pakistan.In any case, Bass makes clear in The Cambridge World History of Genocide that Bengalis were the victims—the first sentence defines the genocide as
a massive slaughter of Bengalis.
[m]ass migration as a survival strategy was enormous; ten million civilians fled to India, mostly Hindus, and 16 or 17 million were internally displaced, mostly Muslims.
ran probably into the tens of thousands, while he writes in The Civilianization of War that the overall death toll of the genocide was at least 500,000. In The Civilianization of War, Gerlach states that
[t]here were direct mass killings by the Pakistani army, by their auxiliaries, and to a lesser extent also by Bengali formations and crowds, clearly indicating that crowd violence was a small minority of the overall violence.
the crimes committed against the Bengali population in 1971 in Bangladesh as genocide. This group is the best source for a consensus among genocide scholars—on Wikipedia,"
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus.7 This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staers had condemned as genocide.
...But the Indian government assiduously hid this stark fact from Indians. “In India we have tried to cover that up,” Swaran Singh candidly told a meeting of Indian diplomats in London, “but we have no hesitation in stating the figure to foreigners.” (Sydney Schanberg and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Kennedy administration’s ambassador to India, separately highlighted the fact in the New York Times.) Singh instructed his staff to distort for their country: “We should avoid making this into an Indo-Pakistan or Hindu[-]Muslim conict. We should point out that there are Buddhists and Christians besides the Muslims among the refugees, who had felt the brunt of repression.” In a major speech, Gandhi misleadingly described refugees of “every religious persuasion—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian.”10
The Indian government feared that the plain truth would splinter its own country between Hindus and Muslims. India had almost seventy million Muslim citizens, and as Singh told his diplomats, the government’s worst fear was vengeful sectarian confrontations. By not mentioning the Bengali Hindus, India also avoided hinting to Pakistan that it might be willing to accept them permanently. And Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jana Sangh party. From Moscow, D. P. Dhar, India’s ambassador there, decried the Pakistan army’s “preplanned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery,” but, fearing inammatory politicking from “rightist reactionary Hindu chauvinist parties like Jana Sangh,” he wrote, “We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicised in India.”
— Gary J. Bass, p. 165-66: The Blood Telegram, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)
the Dacca consulate was not at first clear on which victims they were talking about. Was this a genocide against the Bengalis, or against the Hindu minority among the Bengalis?
"There was clear targeting of Hindus," says Scott Butcher. "You might also talk about going after Bengalis as a racial or cultural group. It was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown." At first, in his hasty cable about "selective genocide," Blood had meant a genocidal campaign against the Bengalis overall, both the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority. (This was the same way that the Indian government used the word.) "The term ‘selective genocide,' you had an army crackdown on one set of people," says Butcher. "There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis. You'd hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers." Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them. As one of Yahya's own ministers noted, the junta "looked down" upon the "non-martial Bengalis" as "Muslims converted from the lower caste Hindus." In similar terms, Sydney Schanberg reported in the New York Times on the "depth of the racial hatred" felt by the dominant Punjabis of West Pakistan for Bengalis.
But there was mounting evidence that among the Bengalis, the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecution. From the first few days of the crackdown, Blood had noticed this. Many of the West Pakistanis seemed to blame Bengali nationalism and secessionism on the Hindus, even though the Bengali Muslims had overwhelmingly supported the Awami League. "There was much feeling against Hindus," says Meg Blood. "It was one way they whipped up their soldiers to do such abominable things." Butcher remembers that the Hindus were "seen as making them less pure as Pakistanis."
— Gary J. Bass, Chapter 5: The Blood Telegram, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)
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'.
— ICJ, East Pakistan Staff Study (1972)
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.
— ICJ, East Pakistan Staff Study (1972)
Figures are lacking about important population groups such as Hindus and Bengali Muslims) and Jahan (
Though Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims). I don't think Bass ever says that Hindus were the majority of victims either, only that Hindus were targeted.
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus. This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staffers had condemned as genocide.
— Gary J. Bass, page 165: The Blood Telegram, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)
[t]hough Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims – ordinary villagers and slum dwellers – who were caught unprepared during the Pakistani army's sweeping spree of wanton killing, rape, and destruction.According to Ben Kiernan,
[t]he final toll, variously estimated from 300,000 to well over 1 million, included disproportionate numbers of local Hindus and city dwellers, though most victims were Muslim Bengali villagers.Malerisch ( talk) 18:03, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm not arguing for scrubbing this article of any mention of the targeting of Hindus, which is clearly very relevant to the genocide—just that the genocide's victims weren't solely Bengali Hindus. I absolutely think the article should mention Hindus, but it shouldn't say that they were the only victims of the genocide, like the article does now. So something like Two Smoking Barrel's comment above could work—the first sentence defines the genocide's victims as Bengalis, and another part of the lead can mention specific targets, like Hindus.
Bengalis, primarily Bengali Hindusor
Bengalis, especially Bengali Hindusin the first sentence—the IAGS and other reliable sources I mentioned don't hedge their definitions like that, so I don't think this article should either. Malerisch ( talk) 06:45, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
Bengalis, primarily Bengali Hindusor any of the variations you mentioned need to be used at all. Shaan Sengupta is saying (if I understand correctly) that the article should start with something like
The Bangladesh genocide was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis, primarily Bengali Hindus, residing in East Pakistan…, while I'm in favor of something like
The Bangladesh genocide was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis residing in East Pakistan…. Malerisch ( talk) 07:45, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
The women were gang-ra'p'ed sometimes in front of their family (later killed) sometimes they were kidnapped are taken to West Pakistan as slaves and Hindu children were killed mercilessly.I said women were gang-ra'p'ed not Hindu women which means in general women. Please read carefully. ShaanSengupta Talk 11:47, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
Although the army of West Pakistan killed and burned indiscriminately in order to terrorize all the people, they had some specific targets (Jahan, 1995, p 378; Mascarenhas, 1971, pp 117–118; Payne, 1973, p 20). According to Mascarenhas, the following were the main targets. (1) The Bengali military men who were in “the East Bengal Regiment, the East Pakistan Rifles, police and paramilitary Ansars and Mujahids.” The obvious reason for them to be targeted is that they were the only available trained groups that could resist the army of West Pakistan (Mascarenhas, 1971, p 117). (2) The Hindus (because they were considered by the West Pakistanis as the “subverts of Islam and agents of India,” the country which was engineering the movement of autonomy to force the disintegration of Pakistan; Costa, 1972, p 56). Moreover, with the extinction of Hindus in East Pakistan it would be easier to get rid of the Hindu cultural traits still practiced by the Bengali Muslims. (3) “The Awami Leaguers—all of office bearers and volunteers down to the lowest rank in the chain of command” (Mascarenhas, 1971, p 117). This was the party which, after winning over-whelmingly in the 1970 elections, duly demanded transfer of power, which would have ended West Pakistani domination. Therefore, people belonging to this party were to be crushed. (4) Students of colleges and universities who played a significant role in anti-government movements. And (5) Bengali intellectuals: intellectuals were thought to be the ones who guided the independence movement.
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus. This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan". "Bengali" and "Bengali Hindu" are not mutually exclusive terms and can be used interchangeably. It's very easy to misrepresent the sources by quoting cherry-picked sentences which is why I shared the full excerpts in my comment above to show the entire context. That is a complete opposite to what Malerisch did by quoting cherry-picked sentences out of context. For instance, he quoted this sentence from Bass's book — "
Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them" to falsely claim that Muslims were also targeted in the genocide but refrained from quoting what Bass added few sentences later,
But there was mounting evidence that among the Bengalis, the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecution.Again, the full excerpt can be seen in my comment above. Gary J Bass may not be the only scholar but his scholarship in this topic is by far the most recognized among all the sources discussed here. Christian Gerlach in Chapter 2 of "Genocide and Mass Violence in Asia: An Introductory Reader" also talks about Hindus being the target of the violence but doesn't mention Bengali Muslims being a target. In fact, there is no reliable source discussed here that has ever mentioned Bengali Muslims as a target of the genocide but almost all of them mentioned Hindus as such. A.Musketeer ( talk) 14:53, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecutioninstead of
only the Hindu minority was marked out for persecution? I have never denied that Hindus were especially targeted.
After partition in 1947–48 there emerged the state of Pakistan consisting of two wings that were 1600 kilometers apart and differed widely culturally and economically. A little more than half of the population lived in largely rural East Pakistan (from December 1971: Bangladesh), dominated by a peasant rice economy. Most inhabitants there were Bengali-speaking Muslims. The most important minorities consisted of about 10 million Hindus and between one and two million Urdu-speaking former Muslim refugees from India, dubbed Biharis.
…
The military tried to crush the autonomy movement in a bloody crackdown, and, together with supportive local Muslim militias – including Biharis, but also Bengali conservatives – killed, arrested or expelled Awami League functionaries, students, pro-Bengali intellectuals and Hindus. In April, the army also started with massacres in villages, trying to defeat an emerging guerrilla movement with bases in India. Ten million people, mostly Hindus, fled to India, and even more people, largely Muslims, were displaced within East Pakistan.
— Christian Gerlach, Chapter 2: Crowd Violence in East Pakistan/Bangladesh 1971–1972, Genocide and Mass Violence in Asia (2019)
Therefore victims of this violence were mostly members of easily identifiable and located minority groups that were perceived as ethnically, religiously or culturally different. Non-Bengalis (so-called Biharis) and Hindus lived often in separate settlements, neighborhoods or houses. There were relatively weak ties between groups,104 and ideas about the otherness of certain groups widespread, having in part solidified during former conflicts. Non-Bengalis and West Pakistanis were recognized on the basis of their broken Bengali, West Pakistanis by their fair skin color, male Hindus because they were not circumcized and female ones through their clothing and body painting. Interwoven with ethnoreligious difference was socioeconomic conflict: by the Bengali majority, Biharis and Hindus were still identified with wealth and power although many of the latter groups had lost their elite status before, or their elites had. A.Musketeer ( talk) 15:03, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
ran probably into the tens of thousands—the death toll of this genocide has been estimated to be anywhere from 300,000 to 3 million, so this is a small minority of the violence. Malerisch ( talk) 21:59, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
[t]here were direct mass killings by the Pakistani army, by their auxiliaries, and to a lesser extent also by Bengali formations and crowds, so it's pretty clear that Gerlach views crowd violence as a small portion of the overall violence. Malerisch ( talk) 22:13, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
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." A.Musketeer ( talk) 15:14, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
[p]rimary sources are not used in history-related articles. Malerisch ( talk) 22:37, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
The genocide in Bangladesh, which started with the Pakistani military operation against unarmed citizens on the night of March 25, continued unabated for nearly nine months.
The reasons behind the genocide, however, were not simply to terrorize the people and punish them for resistance. There were also elements of racism in this act of genocide. The Pakistani army, consisting mainly of Punjabis and Pathans, had always looked upon the Bengalis as racially inferior. ... A policy of genocide against fellow Muslims was deliberately undertaken by the Pakistanis on the assumption of racial superiority and a desire to cleanse the Bengali Muslims of Hindu cultural linguistic influence. ... The Pakistani ruling elite believed that the leadership of the Bengali nationalist movement came from the intellectuals and students, that the Hindus and the urban lumpenproletariat were the main supporters, and that the Bengali police and army officials could be potential leaders in any armed struggle.
The victims of the 1971 genocide were, thus, first and foremost Bengalis. Though Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims - ordinary villagers and slum dwellers - who were caught unprepared during the Pakistani army's sweeping spree of wanton killing, rape, and destruction.
— Jahan, Rounaq (2009) [First published 1997]. "Genocide in Bangladesh". In Totten, Samuel; Parsons, William S. (eds.). Century of genocide: critical essays and eyewitness accounts (3rd ed.). Routledge. pp. 300, 302, 306. ISBN 978-0-415-99084-4.
The objective of any war is to win against the adversary, and the 1971 conflict was certainly no different. However, the scale of brutality over those nine months went further than merely attempting to 'win', ultimately resulting in mass killings and claims from the Bangladeshis that genocide had occurred - a claim that scholars today back up (Kuper, l98l; Totten,2004; Rummel, 1998; Kiernan, 2001).
Genocide scholars across the world widely accept that, in its intent to destroy an ethnic group, in the systematic and strategic use of rape, and in the selected and targeted killings of a religious minority (Hindus) and intellectuals, the 1971 war was indeed a case of genocide.
— D'Costa, Bina (2011). Nationbuilding, gender and war crimes in South Asia. Routledge. pp. 76, 144. ISBN 978-0-415-56566-0.
What followed can only be described as a premeditated genocide (Jahan 2005: 68). Initially it appeared like a ‘selective genocide’ as there was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown on the ‘Bengalis as a racial or cultural group’ – both the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority were exterminated and/or targeted to be exterminated. There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis, as one would hear snide remarks from the soldiers that these ‘Bengali people are less religious, our own little brothers’. Some West Pakistanis even scorned Bengalis, the Muslim majority, as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them (Bass 2014: 81). So the depth of racial hatred felt by the West Pakistanis towards the East manifested itself through a horrific genocide.
— Khan, Sonia Zaman (2018). The politics and law of democratic transition: caretaker government in Bangladesh. Routledge. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-415-31230-1.
After the midnight of 25 March, there was no doubt about the intention of the Yahya regime to carry out a genocide for the purpose of destroying the verdict of the 1970 election. ... the non-elected leaders of this government were committing genocide on the majority of Pakistanis living in the eastern wing [for anyone unfamiliar with the situation, the majority of Pakistanis living in the eastern wing were Bengalis, and moreover, Bengali Muslims].
To Yahya Khan, war was both acceptable and inevitable. He launched a war-cum-genocide against his own people and continued it for nine months.
There is, however, no doubt that minorities (mostly Hindus) in East Bengal (East Pakistan) were subjected to ethnic cleansing ... The Pakistani soldiers were also responsible for the genocide of Muslims in East Pakistan.
— Ray, Jayanta Kumar (2011). India's foreign relations: 1947 - 2007. Routledge. pp. 149–150, 164, 342–343. ISBN 978-0-415-59742--5.
The killings took place between 25 March, when Pakistani forces launched Operation Searchlight, and ended in mid-December, when Dhaka fell to the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini forces. Bangladesh calls this gonohotta, or genocide.
Many Bangladeshis insist what they experienced was genocide. Legal scholars wedded to internationally agreed definitions are reluctant to use the word ‘genocide’.
Genocide has a specific meaning in international law, which categorizes mass atrocities during armed conflict as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. War crimes include the murder of civilians in times of war, the expulsion of people from their homes and communities, the running of forced labour camps and the indiscriminate destruction of cities or villages not justified by military necessity. Crimes against humanity are defined as widespread or systematic attacks against civilians—not always during a war—and these include murders, deportations or forced transfers of populations, and attempts to exterminate through deprivation of food and other essentials. The gravest of all crimes is genocide, which is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group in whole or part.
In describing the conflict as genocide, prosecutors extend the definition beyond what the Genocide Convention says. The Convention does not cover ‘extermination of a political group.’ That may be a limitation of the Convention, but such is the law.
This we know: that many Bengali students and intellectuals and others of different faiths, and Bengali Hindus, were targeted, and killed in genocidal acts; that many Bengali women were raped, impregnated, or forced into sexual slavery; that more Bengali intellectuals were abducted and murdered two days before surrender.
— Tripathi, Salil (2016). The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy. Yale University Press. p. 125, 312-313, 316. ISBN 978-0-300-22102-2.
There was evidence that the military generals meeting in February 1971 had already decided that a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing would be necessary to crush the autonomy movement, the numerical majority, and the racial identity of East Pakistan.
The Act [The International Crimes (Tribunals) Act, 1973] defines genocide as those acts that are committed against a national ethnic, racial, religious, or political group with an intent to destroy wholly or partially by ...
... the definition of genocide in the 1973 Act includes ‘political group’ as yet another target ‘group’ in addition to the groups listed in the Genocide Convention and the ICC Statute.
The indiscriminate extermination of the distinct national groups of civilian population, particularly the Hindus as a religious group and pro-independence people as a political group has been the deliberate policy of the Pakistani occupation army and its local para-militia forces and collaborators throughout the territory of Bangladesh during its liberation war. The physical commission of these acts has been established through the tangible evidence as a matter of fact, which has demonstrated the actus reus required in the definition of genocide under the 1973 Act. This actus reus became a historical fact of common knowledge, rendering it a less disputed and challenging issue in most cases. However, the presence of the mental element (mens rea) of intention to destroy partially or fully a group, particularly the Hindus as a distinct targeted group, became a fiercely contested issue in every trial of the genocide charge. Proving beyond reasonable doubt the existence of the genocidal intent has been a daunting challenge for the prosecution, which has noticeably been cautious in limiting the charge of genocide only in nearly half of the cases, albeit with limited success under very difficult circumstances posed by the delayed trial after over 40 years of the liberation war.
One of the important elements in the majority status of East Pakistan and the massive election victory of Awami League was the Hindu population, who were treated as having an association with and loyalty to India, the arch enemy of Pakistan. The West Pakistani ruling elites never trusted the Hindus, who were treated as the ‘enemies of the State’ of Pakistan. In the holocaust of army crack-down in East Pakistan in 1971, the Pakistani occupation army and its local auxiliary para-militia forces and collaborators pursued a specific policy of targeting, among others, an identified group, the Hindus, for liquidation by killing and a reign of terror of rapes, severe torture, destruction of their homes/properties to forcibly driving them to India, a form of religious cleansing ‘for no other reason than that they belonged to [the Hindu religious group], thus constituting religious genocide.'
— Islam, M. Rafiqul (2019). National trials of international crimes in Bangladesh: transitional justice as reflected in judgments. Brill Nijhoff. p. 3-4, 94, 102, 110. ISBN 978-90-04-38937-3.
During the Bangladesh conflict, the insurgents used the term "genocide" to whip up support for the independence struggle at home ... and abroad ... Within days of the Pakistani military crackdown in East Bengal, the Indian government had denounced it as "genocide."
According to the standard version in genocide studies ... The West Pakistani junta attempted to kill off the Bengali intelligentsia (including Awami League supporters, professors, and university students) and the Hindus.
The standard version tells a Manichean story. Its overarching objective is not to explain 'genocide' but to justify why the nation of Bangladesh had to come about and what its virtues are.
Nationalists ... enter a 'my-genocide-is-bigger-than-yours' game, a competition in gravity in order to underline the uniqueness of their nation's (or group's) experience on which, after all, the identity of the group rests to no small degree ... Some genocide scholars have been all too receptive to this line of argument, calling Bangladesh "the most lethal of the contemporary genocides." ... The very label "Bangladesh" put on the 1971 events in East Pakistan in genocide studies confirms how close to the Bangladeshi nationalist view foreign scholars are.
— Gerlach, Christian (2010). Extremely violent societies: mass violence in the twentieth-century world. Cambridge University Press. pp. 255, 261–262. ISBN 978-0-521-88058-9.
... part of the founding myth of the state of Bangladesh – namely, that Bangladeshi state-building was imperative because the Bengali people faced attempted genocide by the ... West Pakistanis, who wanted to eradicate their identity.
Most of the scholarship on the mass murders in East Pakistan of 1971 states that the Pakistani military attempted to annihilate the Bengali intelligentsia. This assertion is, in turn, crucial to justify the claim that the Pakistani army committed ‘genocide’ in East Pakistan. The massacres at Dacca University at the beginning of the military crackdown in late March 1971 and the killing of about 200 intellectuals in December 1971 just before the defeat of the Pakistani army have become symbolic of the entire ‘genocide’ both in scholarship and in public discourse. These massacres did occur, and many intellectuals were killed by the Pakistani military or by local death squads supporting them, but the available figures – many of them produced by the Bangladeshi authorities themselves – do not indicate any systematic attempt to eradicate the intelligentsia in East Pakistan.
Figures are lacking about important population groups such as Hindus and Bengali Muslims.
— Gerlach, Christian (2018). "East Pakistan/Bangladesh 1971–1972: How Many Victims, Who, and Why?". In Barros, Andrew; Thomas, Martin (eds.). The civilianization of war: the changing civil-military divide, 1914-2014. Cambridge University Press. pp. 120, 123, 132. ISBN 978-1-108-42965-8.
Much public debate has focused on what label to give to the events of 1971. Before the war was over ..., the term genocide crept into the lexicon for naming the event.
Can we read the violence as genocide? Genocide scholars agree it is a contested concept; there is a great deal of disagreement about what qualifies for the term.
What motivated the Pakistani soldiers to kill nationalist Bengalis who were until then a part of Pakistan and were citizens of the same country? Did the Pakistani soldiers think they were committing genocide?
Another viewpoint for naming the violence comes from scholars of genocide studies who focus on empirical findings to refer to this event as “politicide,” whereby political issues lead to mass murder of communal victims (Harff 2003; Staub 2000). Unlike genocide, which is defined by the perpetrators based on their differences with the victim community, in politicide groups are defined by political terms, and victims oppose the regime and dominant groups. West Pakistani soldiers performed the task they were told to do, which included killing and destroying the Bengalis, because they believed the enemy group was working with the Indians and that the Indian government’s political interest was to destroy Pakistan. These men fought and killed to save their nation, which was in their political interest.
Obviously the misguided ethnocentric and political interests of the participants—Pakistani, Bengali, Bihari, and even Indian—led to mass violence. There was no fixed group of perpetrators or victims in this story to tell of the inhumanity of the other. Should we conclude that there were multiple genocides within the nine months of war?
— Saikia, Yasmin (2011). Women, war, and the making of Bangladesh: remembering 1971. Duke University Press. pp. 47–51, 256. ISBN 978-0-8223-5021-7.
... the assertion by Bangladeshi nationalists, believed by people around the world including Indians and many Pakistanis, that the Pakistan army committed 'genocide' ... In the dominant narrative of the 1971 war, ... the victims are assumed to be ethnic Bengalis, the majority inhabitants of the rebel province. The 'three million' allegedly killed are referred to usually as 'innocent Bengalis' suggesting that they were noncombatants, killed solely on the basis of their ethno-linguistic identity.
Regardless of the number of dead, whether the deaths during the 197I conflict were 'genocidal' in nature is a separate question. The crime of 'genocide' is not based on the numbers killed, but on whether victims were targeted on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion.
The available evidence indicates that the Pakistan Army committed political killings, where the victims were suspected to be secessionists in cahoots with the arch-enemy India and thus 'traitorous'. Extra-judicial political killings in non-combat situations, however brutal and deserving of condemnation, do not fit the UN definition of 'genocide' ... However, to identify their targets-secessionist rebels-in situations other than straight combat, the Pakistan army used proxies, or 'profiling' as it is called in current usage: sometimes the proxy might have been political affiliation (membership of Awami League, for instance), but at other times the proxies appear to have been age (adult), gender (male) and religion (Hindu). It is the latter proxies, in particular the disproportionate probability of being presumed to be an insurgent on the basis of religion-Hinduism-that led the army into killings that may have been 'political' in motivation, but could be termed 'genocidal' by their nature. ... many Hindu refugees were leaving their villages and fleeing to India not because of any action of the army, but because they could no longer bear the persecution by their Bengali Muslim neighbours. Much of the harassment of Hindus by their fellow-Bengalis appears to have been non-political, motivated by material greed. The intimidation, killing and hounding out of Hindus-whether by the army or by Bengali Muslims-amounted to what has later come to be termed 'ethnic cleansing'. While the Pakistan Army's political killings turned 'genocidal' when religious 'profiling' was used for the selection of victims, the killing of non-Bengalis-Biharis and West Pakistanis-by Bengalis was clearly 'genocide' under the UN definition. As many instances in this study show, many Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan committed 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' of non-Bengali Muslims and Bengali and non-Bengali Hindus, as the victims were targeted on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
— Bose, Sarmila (2011). Dead reckoning: memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Columbia University Press. pp. 175, 181–183. ISBN 978-0-231-70164-8.
When the East Pakistani Awami League won a majority of seats in a new Constitutional Assembly that seemed likely to give the Easterners political control of the country, the army moved in on East Pakistan with the intention of destroying the Awami League's ascendancy. Along the way, it was envisaged that he army could also rid East Pakistan of its large Hindu minority and terrorize the East Pakistani people into accepting what was in reality a colonial status. In a short period of time, a massive explosion of violence resulted in the murder of 3 million people a quarter of a million women and girls raped, 10 million refugees who fled to India, and 30 million displaced ftom their homes. Ultimately, a calculated policy of genocide initiated by the government of West Pakistan was unleashed on the people of East Pakistan for what seemed to be the singular purpose of coercing the people into accepting a continuance of Pakistani rule over the region.
— Totten, Samuel; Bartrop, Paul R. (2008). Dictionary of genocide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 34–35. ISBN 978-0-313-34642-2.
During the nine-month war for liberation (March 25–December 16, 1971) fought between the Pakistan Army and its local militia supporters on the one hand and Bengali separatists and their supporters on the other, a full-blown genocide unfolded, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the majority of whom were Hindu. ... As Bengali independence fighters sought to secede from Pakistan, the Pakistani government began a major offensive on March 25, 1971. The operation was initially aimed at Hindus (the perennial enemy of Pakistan) as well as political dissidents and Bengali intelligentsia; later, the scope of the offensive would be widened to include many innocent civilians in urban as well as rural areas. The Pakistani army first instructed allied militia forces to attack Dhaka University, Bangladesh’s largest and most prestigious university. On the evening of March 25, and continuing over the next several days, the militias began killing or capturing hundreds of unarmed students (most of them Hindu and other minorities), faculty, and staff members. ... Hindus were targeted the most. ... Much of the international community has since labeled the conflict as a genocide.
— Pierpaoli, Paul G. Jr (2015). "Bangladesh". In Bartrop, Paul R.; Jacobs, Steven Leonard (eds.). Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 1866. ISBN 979-8-216-11854-1.
[g]enocide is an analytically worthless concept made for political purposes. I don’t use it.In The Extermination of the European Jews (2016), Gerlach doesn't even use the term "genocide" to describe the Holocaust (a genocide if ever there was one). The front matter of Extremely Violent Societies (2010) states that Gerlach
argues that terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities; this 2006 paper by Gerlach demonstrates that he views "extremely violent societies" as a better alternative term, not a category separate from genocide. Malerisch ( talk) 04:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Pinging all (unblocked) participants of the last RFC about this article to get more input: SheriffIsInTown, Ghatus, Volunteer Marek, TripWire, My very best wishes, Spartacus!, Kautilya3, Vinegarymass911, Homemade Pencils. Malerisch ( talk) 19:52, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
[e]ditors who have participated in previous discussions on the same topic (or closely related topics). I did not ping "selective" editors; rather, I pinged every single unblocked editor who !voted in the last RfC for this article. Feel free to ask an admin if you think that my pings were inappropriate. And I would appreciate it if you removed the personal attack (for the record, I'm not "desperate"). Malerisch ( talk) 10:36, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
"* Bengali Hindus While more Russians died in WW2 than any other grouping we don't say that Russians were victims of
The Holocaust. Jews were victims of The Holocaust. Not everyone who dies in a specific conflict are victims of genocide. In this conflict Bengali Hindus were victims of genocide.
TarnishedPath
talk 00:01, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[
reply]"
64.229.49.146 (
talk) 05:42, 9 January 2024 (UTC)Shouldn't the name of the article be renamed as East Pakistan genocide since Bangladesh came into being as an independent country on 16 December 1971 whereas the genocide was committed throughout the year of 1971 from March to December of 1971 when the whole region internationally was called East Pakistan. 39.49.32.84 ( talk) 09:59, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
@ Worldbruce: This 3 million figure has been debunked. Read this article. "the official Bangladeshi estimate of “3 lakhs” (300,000) was wrongly translated into English as 3 million". That appears to be the case. Ratnahastin ( talk) 10:21, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
Whether he mistranslated "lakh" as "million" or his confused state of mind was responsible I don't know). David Bergman notes in [16] and [17] that the 3 million figure came from Pravda (quoting Syed Anwarul Karim) and denies that Rahman was the source. Pravda first reported the 3 million figure on 3 January 1972 [18], while Rahman met Mujib five days later (8 January 1972), so this seems quite plausible.
Within 267 days it killed about 1,500,000 people
Pakistan's Islamic military regime murdered probably 300,000 and possibly 1 million fellow Muslims and minority Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971.
The systematic violence and widespread destruction executed by the Pakistani army, with the assistance of local supporters, ... resulted in the deaths of at least 1 million Bengalis.
The campaign of murder, rape, and pillage that continued until December 1971 caused 1 to 3 million deaths.
It can hardly have exceeded one million and is likely to have been slightly higher than 500,000.
Estimates of the number of victims vary greatly, from 300,000 to 3 million.
At least one million Bengalis, perhaps as many as three million, were massacred by the security forces of West Pakistan, assisted by local allies.
Estimates of the death toll vary widely, from 300,000 deaths to over 1 million. Bangladeshi authorities claim that 3 million were killed.Malerisch ( talk) 11:54, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
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Kindly change the description from "1971 genocide of Bengalis by Pakistan" to "1971 genocide of Bengalis by Pakistan Army". And please, also remove the Category:Persecution of Hindus by Muslims, because although the main target were Hindus, the Bengali Muslims were also targeted by the Pakistan army in this genocide. Therefore, the Category:Massacres of Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan is sufficient there. I think that Category:Persecution of Bengali Muslims should also be added in the article. 103.169.65.150 ( talk) 18:47, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
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Change the sentence where it says “especially Bengali Hindus”, it’s not factual. Bengali Hindus were one of the least targeted people. It was the actual Bangladeshi people who were targeted, the Bangladeshis who reside in Bangladesh now and are Muslim. Please do not take away the sacrifice of the Bangladeshi people by stating that. 24.51.233.131 ( talk) 13:00, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
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Should this article specify Bengalis or Bengali Hindus as the victims of the Bangladesh genocide? Malerisch ( talk) 05:14, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
Though Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims) and Ben Kiernan (
The final toll … included disproportionate numbers of local Hindus and city dwellers, though most victims were Muslim Bengali villagers), so saying that the victims were "primarily Bengali Hindus" is also factually inaccurate.
the 1971 massacre of Bangladeshis by Pakistan an exclusively "Hindu genocide"is
untrue. A recent article published this month from Hindus for Human Rights calls out the Hindu nationalist framing of this genocide.
the crimes committed against the Bengali population in 1971 in Bangladesh as genocide. This group is the best source for a consensus among genocide scholars—on Wikipedia, their resolutions are prominently mentioned in articles like Armenian genocide recognition, Sayfo (a featured article), and Greek genocide. The IAGS does not say that only Bengali Hindus were the targets of the genocide.
[t]here would seem to be a prima facie case to show that [the indiscriminate killings of Bengalis] was the intention on some occasions, which would constitute
genocide against part of the Bengali people. (
partrefers to the
in whole or in partphrase in the definition of genocide.) The 2023 IAGS resolution specifically cites the ICJ report and concludes that Bengalis were the victims. Besides, this 51-year-old report (contemporaneous with the genocide) is a WP:PRIMARY source and should not be relied on to represent the present-day consensus—just like it would be absurd to use the Famine Inquiry Commission as the arbiter of truth for the Bengal famine of 1943.
[s]ome West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them.In The Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023) [7], Bass writes that
[e]ven Muslim Bengalis were seen as Hinduised and therefore unfit for Muslim Pakistan.In any case, Bass makes clear in The Cambridge World History of Genocide that Bengalis were the victims—the first sentence defines the genocide as
a massive slaughter of Bengalis.
[m]ass migration as a survival strategy was enormous; ten million civilians fled to India, mostly Hindus, and 16 or 17 million were internally displaced, mostly Muslims.
ran probably into the tens of thousands, while he writes in The Civilianization of War that the overall death toll of the genocide was at least 500,000. In The Civilianization of War, Gerlach states that
[t]here were direct mass killings by the Pakistani army, by their auxiliaries, and to a lesser extent also by Bengali formations and crowds, clearly indicating that crowd violence was a small minority of the overall violence.
the crimes committed against the Bengali population in 1971 in Bangladesh as genocide. This group is the best source for a consensus among genocide scholars—on Wikipedia,"
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus.7 This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staers had condemned as genocide.
...But the Indian government assiduously hid this stark fact from Indians. “In India we have tried to cover that up,” Swaran Singh candidly told a meeting of Indian diplomats in London, “but we have no hesitation in stating the figure to foreigners.” (Sydney Schanberg and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Kennedy administration’s ambassador to India, separately highlighted the fact in the New York Times.) Singh instructed his staff to distort for their country: “We should avoid making this into an Indo-Pakistan or Hindu[-]Muslim conict. We should point out that there are Buddhists and Christians besides the Muslims among the refugees, who had felt the brunt of repression.” In a major speech, Gandhi misleadingly described refugees of “every religious persuasion—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian.”10
The Indian government feared that the plain truth would splinter its own country between Hindus and Muslims. India had almost seventy million Muslim citizens, and as Singh told his diplomats, the government’s worst fear was vengeful sectarian confrontations. By not mentioning the Bengali Hindus, India also avoided hinting to Pakistan that it might be willing to accept them permanently. And Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jana Sangh party. From Moscow, D. P. Dhar, India’s ambassador there, decried the Pakistan army’s “preplanned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery,” but, fearing inammatory politicking from “rightist reactionary Hindu chauvinist parties like Jana Sangh,” he wrote, “We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicised in India.”
— Gary J. Bass, p. 165-66: The Blood Telegram, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)
the Dacca consulate was not at first clear on which victims they were talking about. Was this a genocide against the Bengalis, or against the Hindu minority among the Bengalis?
"There was clear targeting of Hindus," says Scott Butcher. "You might also talk about going after Bengalis as a racial or cultural group. It was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown." At first, in his hasty cable about "selective genocide," Blood had meant a genocidal campaign against the Bengalis overall, both the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority. (This was the same way that the Indian government used the word.) "The term ‘selective genocide,' you had an army crackdown on one set of people," says Butcher. "There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis. You'd hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers." Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them. As one of Yahya's own ministers noted, the junta "looked down" upon the "non-martial Bengalis" as "Muslims converted from the lower caste Hindus." In similar terms, Sydney Schanberg reported in the New York Times on the "depth of the racial hatred" felt by the dominant Punjabis of West Pakistan for Bengalis.
But there was mounting evidence that among the Bengalis, the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecution. From the first few days of the crackdown, Blood had noticed this. Many of the West Pakistanis seemed to blame Bengali nationalism and secessionism on the Hindus, even though the Bengali Muslims had overwhelmingly supported the Awami League. "There was much feeling against Hindus," says Meg Blood. "It was one way they whipped up their soldiers to do such abominable things." Butcher remembers that the Hindus were "seen as making them less pure as Pakistanis."
— Gary J. Bass, Chapter 5: The Blood Telegram, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)
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'.
— ICJ, East Pakistan Staff Study (1972)
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.
— ICJ, East Pakistan Staff Study (1972)
Figures are lacking about important population groups such as Hindus and Bengali Muslims) and Jahan (
Though Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims). I don't think Bass ever says that Hindus were the majority of victims either, only that Hindus were targeted.
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus. This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staffers had condemned as genocide.
— Gary J. Bass, page 165: The Blood Telegram, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)
[t]hough Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims – ordinary villagers and slum dwellers – who were caught unprepared during the Pakistani army's sweeping spree of wanton killing, rape, and destruction.According to Ben Kiernan,
[t]he final toll, variously estimated from 300,000 to well over 1 million, included disproportionate numbers of local Hindus and city dwellers, though most victims were Muslim Bengali villagers.Malerisch ( talk) 18:03, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm not arguing for scrubbing this article of any mention of the targeting of Hindus, which is clearly very relevant to the genocide—just that the genocide's victims weren't solely Bengali Hindus. I absolutely think the article should mention Hindus, but it shouldn't say that they were the only victims of the genocide, like the article does now. So something like Two Smoking Barrel's comment above could work—the first sentence defines the genocide's victims as Bengalis, and another part of the lead can mention specific targets, like Hindus.
Bengalis, primarily Bengali Hindusor
Bengalis, especially Bengali Hindusin the first sentence—the IAGS and other reliable sources I mentioned don't hedge their definitions like that, so I don't think this article should either. Malerisch ( talk) 06:45, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
Bengalis, primarily Bengali Hindusor any of the variations you mentioned need to be used at all. Shaan Sengupta is saying (if I understand correctly) that the article should start with something like
The Bangladesh genocide was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis, primarily Bengali Hindus, residing in East Pakistan…, while I'm in favor of something like
The Bangladesh genocide was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis residing in East Pakistan…. Malerisch ( talk) 07:45, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
The women were gang-ra'p'ed sometimes in front of their family (later killed) sometimes they were kidnapped are taken to West Pakistan as slaves and Hindu children were killed mercilessly.I said women were gang-ra'p'ed not Hindu women which means in general women. Please read carefully. ShaanSengupta Talk 11:47, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
Although the army of West Pakistan killed and burned indiscriminately in order to terrorize all the people, they had some specific targets (Jahan, 1995, p 378; Mascarenhas, 1971, pp 117–118; Payne, 1973, p 20). According to Mascarenhas, the following were the main targets. (1) The Bengali military men who were in “the East Bengal Regiment, the East Pakistan Rifles, police and paramilitary Ansars and Mujahids.” The obvious reason for them to be targeted is that they were the only available trained groups that could resist the army of West Pakistan (Mascarenhas, 1971, p 117). (2) The Hindus (because they were considered by the West Pakistanis as the “subverts of Islam and agents of India,” the country which was engineering the movement of autonomy to force the disintegration of Pakistan; Costa, 1972, p 56). Moreover, with the extinction of Hindus in East Pakistan it would be easier to get rid of the Hindu cultural traits still practiced by the Bengali Muslims. (3) “The Awami Leaguers—all of office bearers and volunteers down to the lowest rank in the chain of command” (Mascarenhas, 1971, p 117). This was the party which, after winning over-whelmingly in the 1970 elections, duly demanded transfer of power, which would have ended West Pakistani domination. Therefore, people belonging to this party were to be crushed. (4) Students of colleges and universities who played a significant role in anti-government movements. And (5) Bengali intellectuals: intellectuals were thought to be the ones who guided the independence movement.
The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus. This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan". "Bengali" and "Bengali Hindu" are not mutually exclusive terms and can be used interchangeably. It's very easy to misrepresent the sources by quoting cherry-picked sentences which is why I shared the full excerpts in my comment above to show the entire context. That is a complete opposite to what Malerisch did by quoting cherry-picked sentences out of context. For instance, he quoted this sentence from Bass's book — "
Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them" to falsely claim that Muslims were also targeted in the genocide but refrained from quoting what Bass added few sentences later,
But there was mounting evidence that among the Bengalis, the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecution.Again, the full excerpt can be seen in my comment above. Gary J Bass may not be the only scholar but his scholarship in this topic is by far the most recognized among all the sources discussed here. Christian Gerlach in Chapter 2 of "Genocide and Mass Violence in Asia: An Introductory Reader" also talks about Hindus being the target of the violence but doesn't mention Bengali Muslims being a target. In fact, there is no reliable source discussed here that has ever mentioned Bengali Muslims as a target of the genocide but almost all of them mentioned Hindus as such. A.Musketeer ( talk) 14:53, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecutioninstead of
only the Hindu minority was marked out for persecution? I have never denied that Hindus were especially targeted.
After partition in 1947–48 there emerged the state of Pakistan consisting of two wings that were 1600 kilometers apart and differed widely culturally and economically. A little more than half of the population lived in largely rural East Pakistan (from December 1971: Bangladesh), dominated by a peasant rice economy. Most inhabitants there were Bengali-speaking Muslims. The most important minorities consisted of about 10 million Hindus and between one and two million Urdu-speaking former Muslim refugees from India, dubbed Biharis.
…
The military tried to crush the autonomy movement in a bloody crackdown, and, together with supportive local Muslim militias – including Biharis, but also Bengali conservatives – killed, arrested or expelled Awami League functionaries, students, pro-Bengali intellectuals and Hindus. In April, the army also started with massacres in villages, trying to defeat an emerging guerrilla movement with bases in India. Ten million people, mostly Hindus, fled to India, and even more people, largely Muslims, were displaced within East Pakistan.
— Christian Gerlach, Chapter 2: Crowd Violence in East Pakistan/Bangladesh 1971–1972, Genocide and Mass Violence in Asia (2019)
Therefore victims of this violence were mostly members of easily identifiable and located minority groups that were perceived as ethnically, religiously or culturally different. Non-Bengalis (so-called Biharis) and Hindus lived often in separate settlements, neighborhoods or houses. There were relatively weak ties between groups,104 and ideas about the otherness of certain groups widespread, having in part solidified during former conflicts. Non-Bengalis and West Pakistanis were recognized on the basis of their broken Bengali, West Pakistanis by their fair skin color, male Hindus because they were not circumcized and female ones through their clothing and body painting. Interwoven with ethnoreligious difference was socioeconomic conflict: by the Bengali majority, Biharis and Hindus were still identified with wealth and power although many of the latter groups had lost their elite status before, or their elites had. A.Musketeer ( talk) 15:03, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
ran probably into the tens of thousands—the death toll of this genocide has been estimated to be anywhere from 300,000 to 3 million, so this is a small minority of the violence. Malerisch ( talk) 21:59, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
[t]here were direct mass killings by the Pakistani army, by their auxiliaries, and to a lesser extent also by Bengali formations and crowds, so it's pretty clear that Gerlach views crowd violence as a small portion of the overall violence. Malerisch ( talk) 22:13, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
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." A.Musketeer ( talk) 15:14, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
[p]rimary sources are not used in history-related articles. Malerisch ( talk) 22:37, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
The genocide in Bangladesh, which started with the Pakistani military operation against unarmed citizens on the night of March 25, continued unabated for nearly nine months.
The reasons behind the genocide, however, were not simply to terrorize the people and punish them for resistance. There were also elements of racism in this act of genocide. The Pakistani army, consisting mainly of Punjabis and Pathans, had always looked upon the Bengalis as racially inferior. ... A policy of genocide against fellow Muslims was deliberately undertaken by the Pakistanis on the assumption of racial superiority and a desire to cleanse the Bengali Muslims of Hindu cultural linguistic influence. ... The Pakistani ruling elite believed that the leadership of the Bengali nationalist movement came from the intellectuals and students, that the Hindus and the urban lumpenproletariat were the main supporters, and that the Bengali police and army officials could be potential leaders in any armed struggle.
The victims of the 1971 genocide were, thus, first and foremost Bengalis. Though Hindus were especially targeted, the majority of the victims were Bengali Muslims - ordinary villagers and slum dwellers - who were caught unprepared during the Pakistani army's sweeping spree of wanton killing, rape, and destruction.
— Jahan, Rounaq (2009) [First published 1997]. "Genocide in Bangladesh". In Totten, Samuel; Parsons, William S. (eds.). Century of genocide: critical essays and eyewitness accounts (3rd ed.). Routledge. pp. 300, 302, 306. ISBN 978-0-415-99084-4.
The objective of any war is to win against the adversary, and the 1971 conflict was certainly no different. However, the scale of brutality over those nine months went further than merely attempting to 'win', ultimately resulting in mass killings and claims from the Bangladeshis that genocide had occurred - a claim that scholars today back up (Kuper, l98l; Totten,2004; Rummel, 1998; Kiernan, 2001).
Genocide scholars across the world widely accept that, in its intent to destroy an ethnic group, in the systematic and strategic use of rape, and in the selected and targeted killings of a religious minority (Hindus) and intellectuals, the 1971 war was indeed a case of genocide.
— D'Costa, Bina (2011). Nationbuilding, gender and war crimes in South Asia. Routledge. pp. 76, 144. ISBN 978-0-415-56566-0.
What followed can only be described as a premeditated genocide (Jahan 2005: 68). Initially it appeared like a ‘selective genocide’ as there was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown on the ‘Bengalis as a racial or cultural group’ – both the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority were exterminated and/or targeted to be exterminated. There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis, as one would hear snide remarks from the soldiers that these ‘Bengali people are less religious, our own little brothers’. Some West Pakistanis even scorned Bengalis, the Muslim majority, as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them (Bass 2014: 81). So the depth of racial hatred felt by the West Pakistanis towards the East manifested itself through a horrific genocide.
— Khan, Sonia Zaman (2018). The politics and law of democratic transition: caretaker government in Bangladesh. Routledge. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-415-31230-1.
After the midnight of 25 March, there was no doubt about the intention of the Yahya regime to carry out a genocide for the purpose of destroying the verdict of the 1970 election. ... the non-elected leaders of this government were committing genocide on the majority of Pakistanis living in the eastern wing [for anyone unfamiliar with the situation, the majority of Pakistanis living in the eastern wing were Bengalis, and moreover, Bengali Muslims].
To Yahya Khan, war was both acceptable and inevitable. He launched a war-cum-genocide against his own people and continued it for nine months.
There is, however, no doubt that minorities (mostly Hindus) in East Bengal (East Pakistan) were subjected to ethnic cleansing ... The Pakistani soldiers were also responsible for the genocide of Muslims in East Pakistan.
— Ray, Jayanta Kumar (2011). India's foreign relations: 1947 - 2007. Routledge. pp. 149–150, 164, 342–343. ISBN 978-0-415-59742--5.
The killings took place between 25 March, when Pakistani forces launched Operation Searchlight, and ended in mid-December, when Dhaka fell to the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini forces. Bangladesh calls this gonohotta, or genocide.
Many Bangladeshis insist what they experienced was genocide. Legal scholars wedded to internationally agreed definitions are reluctant to use the word ‘genocide’.
Genocide has a specific meaning in international law, which categorizes mass atrocities during armed conflict as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. War crimes include the murder of civilians in times of war, the expulsion of people from their homes and communities, the running of forced labour camps and the indiscriminate destruction of cities or villages not justified by military necessity. Crimes against humanity are defined as widespread or systematic attacks against civilians—not always during a war—and these include murders, deportations or forced transfers of populations, and attempts to exterminate through deprivation of food and other essentials. The gravest of all crimes is genocide, which is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group in whole or part.
In describing the conflict as genocide, prosecutors extend the definition beyond what the Genocide Convention says. The Convention does not cover ‘extermination of a political group.’ That may be a limitation of the Convention, but such is the law.
This we know: that many Bengali students and intellectuals and others of different faiths, and Bengali Hindus, were targeted, and killed in genocidal acts; that many Bengali women were raped, impregnated, or forced into sexual slavery; that more Bengali intellectuals were abducted and murdered two days before surrender.
— Tripathi, Salil (2016). The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy. Yale University Press. p. 125, 312-313, 316. ISBN 978-0-300-22102-2.
There was evidence that the military generals meeting in February 1971 had already decided that a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing would be necessary to crush the autonomy movement, the numerical majority, and the racial identity of East Pakistan.
The Act [The International Crimes (Tribunals) Act, 1973] defines genocide as those acts that are committed against a national ethnic, racial, religious, or political group with an intent to destroy wholly or partially by ...
... the definition of genocide in the 1973 Act includes ‘political group’ as yet another target ‘group’ in addition to the groups listed in the Genocide Convention and the ICC Statute.
The indiscriminate extermination of the distinct national groups of civilian population, particularly the Hindus as a religious group and pro-independence people as a political group has been the deliberate policy of the Pakistani occupation army and its local para-militia forces and collaborators throughout the territory of Bangladesh during its liberation war. The physical commission of these acts has been established through the tangible evidence as a matter of fact, which has demonstrated the actus reus required in the definition of genocide under the 1973 Act. This actus reus became a historical fact of common knowledge, rendering it a less disputed and challenging issue in most cases. However, the presence of the mental element (mens rea) of intention to destroy partially or fully a group, particularly the Hindus as a distinct targeted group, became a fiercely contested issue in every trial of the genocide charge. Proving beyond reasonable doubt the existence of the genocidal intent has been a daunting challenge for the prosecution, which has noticeably been cautious in limiting the charge of genocide only in nearly half of the cases, albeit with limited success under very difficult circumstances posed by the delayed trial after over 40 years of the liberation war.
One of the important elements in the majority status of East Pakistan and the massive election victory of Awami League was the Hindu population, who were treated as having an association with and loyalty to India, the arch enemy of Pakistan. The West Pakistani ruling elites never trusted the Hindus, who were treated as the ‘enemies of the State’ of Pakistan. In the holocaust of army crack-down in East Pakistan in 1971, the Pakistani occupation army and its local auxiliary para-militia forces and collaborators pursued a specific policy of targeting, among others, an identified group, the Hindus, for liquidation by killing and a reign of terror of rapes, severe torture, destruction of their homes/properties to forcibly driving them to India, a form of religious cleansing ‘for no other reason than that they belonged to [the Hindu religious group], thus constituting religious genocide.'
— Islam, M. Rafiqul (2019). National trials of international crimes in Bangladesh: transitional justice as reflected in judgments. Brill Nijhoff. p. 3-4, 94, 102, 110. ISBN 978-90-04-38937-3.
During the Bangladesh conflict, the insurgents used the term "genocide" to whip up support for the independence struggle at home ... and abroad ... Within days of the Pakistani military crackdown in East Bengal, the Indian government had denounced it as "genocide."
According to the standard version in genocide studies ... The West Pakistani junta attempted to kill off the Bengali intelligentsia (including Awami League supporters, professors, and university students) and the Hindus.
The standard version tells a Manichean story. Its overarching objective is not to explain 'genocide' but to justify why the nation of Bangladesh had to come about and what its virtues are.
Nationalists ... enter a 'my-genocide-is-bigger-than-yours' game, a competition in gravity in order to underline the uniqueness of their nation's (or group's) experience on which, after all, the identity of the group rests to no small degree ... Some genocide scholars have been all too receptive to this line of argument, calling Bangladesh "the most lethal of the contemporary genocides." ... The very label "Bangladesh" put on the 1971 events in East Pakistan in genocide studies confirms how close to the Bangladeshi nationalist view foreign scholars are.
— Gerlach, Christian (2010). Extremely violent societies: mass violence in the twentieth-century world. Cambridge University Press. pp. 255, 261–262. ISBN 978-0-521-88058-9.
... part of the founding myth of the state of Bangladesh – namely, that Bangladeshi state-building was imperative because the Bengali people faced attempted genocide by the ... West Pakistanis, who wanted to eradicate their identity.
Most of the scholarship on the mass murders in East Pakistan of 1971 states that the Pakistani military attempted to annihilate the Bengali intelligentsia. This assertion is, in turn, crucial to justify the claim that the Pakistani army committed ‘genocide’ in East Pakistan. The massacres at Dacca University at the beginning of the military crackdown in late March 1971 and the killing of about 200 intellectuals in December 1971 just before the defeat of the Pakistani army have become symbolic of the entire ‘genocide’ both in scholarship and in public discourse. These massacres did occur, and many intellectuals were killed by the Pakistani military or by local death squads supporting them, but the available figures – many of them produced by the Bangladeshi authorities themselves – do not indicate any systematic attempt to eradicate the intelligentsia in East Pakistan.
Figures are lacking about important population groups such as Hindus and Bengali Muslims.
— Gerlach, Christian (2018). "East Pakistan/Bangladesh 1971–1972: How Many Victims, Who, and Why?". In Barros, Andrew; Thomas, Martin (eds.). The civilianization of war: the changing civil-military divide, 1914-2014. Cambridge University Press. pp. 120, 123, 132. ISBN 978-1-108-42965-8.
Much public debate has focused on what label to give to the events of 1971. Before the war was over ..., the term genocide crept into the lexicon for naming the event.
Can we read the violence as genocide? Genocide scholars agree it is a contested concept; there is a great deal of disagreement about what qualifies for the term.
What motivated the Pakistani soldiers to kill nationalist Bengalis who were until then a part of Pakistan and were citizens of the same country? Did the Pakistani soldiers think they were committing genocide?
Another viewpoint for naming the violence comes from scholars of genocide studies who focus on empirical findings to refer to this event as “politicide,” whereby political issues lead to mass murder of communal victims (Harff 2003; Staub 2000). Unlike genocide, which is defined by the perpetrators based on their differences with the victim community, in politicide groups are defined by political terms, and victims oppose the regime and dominant groups. West Pakistani soldiers performed the task they were told to do, which included killing and destroying the Bengalis, because they believed the enemy group was working with the Indians and that the Indian government’s political interest was to destroy Pakistan. These men fought and killed to save their nation, which was in their political interest.
Obviously the misguided ethnocentric and political interests of the participants—Pakistani, Bengali, Bihari, and even Indian—led to mass violence. There was no fixed group of perpetrators or victims in this story to tell of the inhumanity of the other. Should we conclude that there were multiple genocides within the nine months of war?
— Saikia, Yasmin (2011). Women, war, and the making of Bangladesh: remembering 1971. Duke University Press. pp. 47–51, 256. ISBN 978-0-8223-5021-7.
... the assertion by Bangladeshi nationalists, believed by people around the world including Indians and many Pakistanis, that the Pakistan army committed 'genocide' ... In the dominant narrative of the 1971 war, ... the victims are assumed to be ethnic Bengalis, the majority inhabitants of the rebel province. The 'three million' allegedly killed are referred to usually as 'innocent Bengalis' suggesting that they were noncombatants, killed solely on the basis of their ethno-linguistic identity.
Regardless of the number of dead, whether the deaths during the 197I conflict were 'genocidal' in nature is a separate question. The crime of 'genocide' is not based on the numbers killed, but on whether victims were targeted on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion.
The available evidence indicates that the Pakistan Army committed political killings, where the victims were suspected to be secessionists in cahoots with the arch-enemy India and thus 'traitorous'. Extra-judicial political killings in non-combat situations, however brutal and deserving of condemnation, do not fit the UN definition of 'genocide' ... However, to identify their targets-secessionist rebels-in situations other than straight combat, the Pakistan army used proxies, or 'profiling' as it is called in current usage: sometimes the proxy might have been political affiliation (membership of Awami League, for instance), but at other times the proxies appear to have been age (adult), gender (male) and religion (Hindu). It is the latter proxies, in particular the disproportionate probability of being presumed to be an insurgent on the basis of religion-Hinduism-that led the army into killings that may have been 'political' in motivation, but could be termed 'genocidal' by their nature. ... many Hindu refugees were leaving their villages and fleeing to India not because of any action of the army, but because they could no longer bear the persecution by their Bengali Muslim neighbours. Much of the harassment of Hindus by their fellow-Bengalis appears to have been non-political, motivated by material greed. The intimidation, killing and hounding out of Hindus-whether by the army or by Bengali Muslims-amounted to what has later come to be termed 'ethnic cleansing'. While the Pakistan Army's political killings turned 'genocidal' when religious 'profiling' was used for the selection of victims, the killing of non-Bengalis-Biharis and West Pakistanis-by Bengalis was clearly 'genocide' under the UN definition. As many instances in this study show, many Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan committed 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' of non-Bengali Muslims and Bengali and non-Bengali Hindus, as the victims were targeted on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
— Bose, Sarmila (2011). Dead reckoning: memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Columbia University Press. pp. 175, 181–183. ISBN 978-0-231-70164-8.
When the East Pakistani Awami League won a majority of seats in a new Constitutional Assembly that seemed likely to give the Easterners political control of the country, the army moved in on East Pakistan with the intention of destroying the Awami League's ascendancy. Along the way, it was envisaged that he army could also rid East Pakistan of its large Hindu minority and terrorize the East Pakistani people into accepting what was in reality a colonial status. In a short period of time, a massive explosion of violence resulted in the murder of 3 million people a quarter of a million women and girls raped, 10 million refugees who fled to India, and 30 million displaced ftom their homes. Ultimately, a calculated policy of genocide initiated by the government of West Pakistan was unleashed on the people of East Pakistan for what seemed to be the singular purpose of coercing the people into accepting a continuance of Pakistani rule over the region.
— Totten, Samuel; Bartrop, Paul R. (2008). Dictionary of genocide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 34–35. ISBN 978-0-313-34642-2.
During the nine-month war for liberation (March 25–December 16, 1971) fought between the Pakistan Army and its local militia supporters on the one hand and Bengali separatists and their supporters on the other, a full-blown genocide unfolded, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the majority of whom were Hindu. ... As Bengali independence fighters sought to secede from Pakistan, the Pakistani government began a major offensive on March 25, 1971. The operation was initially aimed at Hindus (the perennial enemy of Pakistan) as well as political dissidents and Bengali intelligentsia; later, the scope of the offensive would be widened to include many innocent civilians in urban as well as rural areas. The Pakistani army first instructed allied militia forces to attack Dhaka University, Bangladesh’s largest and most prestigious university. On the evening of March 25, and continuing over the next several days, the militias began killing or capturing hundreds of unarmed students (most of them Hindu and other minorities), faculty, and staff members. ... Hindus were targeted the most. ... Much of the international community has since labeled the conflict as a genocide.
— Pierpaoli, Paul G. Jr (2015). "Bangladesh". In Bartrop, Paul R.; Jacobs, Steven Leonard (eds.). Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 1866. ISBN 979-8-216-11854-1.
[g]enocide is an analytically worthless concept made for political purposes. I don’t use it.In The Extermination of the European Jews (2016), Gerlach doesn't even use the term "genocide" to describe the Holocaust (a genocide if ever there was one). The front matter of Extremely Violent Societies (2010) states that Gerlach
argues that terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities; this 2006 paper by Gerlach demonstrates that he views "extremely violent societies" as a better alternative term, not a category separate from genocide. Malerisch ( talk) 04:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Pinging all (unblocked) participants of the last RFC about this article to get more input: SheriffIsInTown, Ghatus, Volunteer Marek, TripWire, My very best wishes, Spartacus!, Kautilya3, Vinegarymass911, Homemade Pencils. Malerisch ( talk) 19:52, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
[e]ditors who have participated in previous discussions on the same topic (or closely related topics). I did not ping "selective" editors; rather, I pinged every single unblocked editor who !voted in the last RfC for this article. Feel free to ask an admin if you think that my pings were inappropriate. And I would appreciate it if you removed the personal attack (for the record, I'm not "desperate"). Malerisch ( talk) 10:36, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
"* Bengali Hindus While more Russians died in WW2 than any other grouping we don't say that Russians were victims of
The Holocaust. Jews were victims of The Holocaust. Not everyone who dies in a specific conflict are victims of genocide. In this conflict Bengali Hindus were victims of genocide.
TarnishedPath
talk 00:01, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[
reply]"
64.229.49.146 (
talk) 05:42, 9 January 2024 (UTC)Shouldn't the name of the article be renamed as East Pakistan genocide since Bangladesh came into being as an independent country on 16 December 1971 whereas the genocide was committed throughout the year of 1971 from March to December of 1971 when the whole region internationally was called East Pakistan. 39.49.32.84 ( talk) 09:59, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
@ Worldbruce: This 3 million figure has been debunked. Read this article. "the official Bangladeshi estimate of “3 lakhs” (300,000) was wrongly translated into English as 3 million". That appears to be the case. Ratnahastin ( talk) 10:21, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
Whether he mistranslated "lakh" as "million" or his confused state of mind was responsible I don't know). David Bergman notes in [16] and [17] that the 3 million figure came from Pravda (quoting Syed Anwarul Karim) and denies that Rahman was the source. Pravda first reported the 3 million figure on 3 January 1972 [18], while Rahman met Mujib five days later (8 January 1972), so this seems quite plausible.
Within 267 days it killed about 1,500,000 people
Pakistan's Islamic military regime murdered probably 300,000 and possibly 1 million fellow Muslims and minority Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971.
The systematic violence and widespread destruction executed by the Pakistani army, with the assistance of local supporters, ... resulted in the deaths of at least 1 million Bengalis.
The campaign of murder, rape, and pillage that continued until December 1971 caused 1 to 3 million deaths.
It can hardly have exceeded one million and is likely to have been slightly higher than 500,000.
Estimates of the number of victims vary greatly, from 300,000 to 3 million.
At least one million Bengalis, perhaps as many as three million, were massacred by the security forces of West Pakistan, assisted by local allies.
Estimates of the death toll vary widely, from 300,000 deaths to over 1 million. Bangladeshi authorities claim that 3 million were killed.Malerisch ( talk) 11:54, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
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Kindly change the description from "1971 genocide of Bengalis by Pakistan" to "1971 genocide of Bengalis by Pakistan Army". And please, also remove the Category:Persecution of Hindus by Muslims, because although the main target were Hindus, the Bengali Muslims were also targeted by the Pakistan army in this genocide. Therefore, the Category:Massacres of Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan is sufficient there. I think that Category:Persecution of Bengali Muslims should also be added in the article. 103.169.65.150 ( talk) 18:47, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
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Change the sentence where it says “especially Bengali Hindus”, it’s not factual. Bengali Hindus were one of the least targeted people. It was the actual Bangladeshi people who were targeted, the Bangladeshis who reside in Bangladesh now and are Muslim. Please do not take away the sacrifice of the Bangladeshi people by stating that. 24.51.233.131 ( talk) 13:00, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
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