Operation Searchlight

Operation Searchlight was the codename for a planned military operation carried out by the Pakistan Army in an effort to curb the Bengali nationalist movement in former East Pakistan in March 1971. Pakistan retrospectively justified the operation on the basis of anti-Bihari violence carried out en masse by the Bengalis earlier that month. Ordered by the central government in West Pakistan, the original plans envisioned taking control of all of East Pakistan's major cities on 26 March, and then eliminating all Bengali opposition, whether political or military, within the following month.

Operation Searchlight
Part of the Bangladesh Liberation War

Human remains and war material from the 1971 genocide at the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Date26 March 1971 – 25 May 1971
Location
East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh)
Result Pakistani victory
Belligerents

Bangladesh Provisional Government

Supported by:

 Pakistan

Commanders and leaders
Strength

Bengali Resistance Forces:

Paramilitary Forces:

Reinforcements:

  • Unknown number of ex-servicemen and civilian volunteers

Pakistan Army:

  • 14th Infantry Division (approx. 18,000+ troops)
  • 1 armoured regiment (75 M24 Chaffee tanks)

Paramilitary Forces:

Pakistan Navy:

Pakistan Air Force:

Land Reinforcements:

Casualties and losses
Mukti Bahini:
  • unknown
  • ~10,000+ POWs
  • ~6,000 KIA or wounded
  • Small number of POWs
Civilian death toll: Around few hundred thousand Bengali civilians

West Pakistani military leaders had not anticipated prolonged Bengali resistance or later Indian military intervention. The main phase of Operation Searchlight ended with the fall of the last major Bengali-held town in mid-May 1971. The operation also directly precipitated the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis were killed while around 10 million fled to neighbouring India as refugees.

Bengali intelligentsia, academics and Hindus were widely targeted alongside Muslim Bengali nationalists—with widespread, indiscriminate extrajudicial killings. The nature of these systematic purges enraged the Bengalis, who declared independence from the union of Pakistan to establish the new nation of Bangladesh.

The widespread violence resulting from Pakistan's Operation Searchlight ultimately led to the Bangladesh Liberation War, in which Indian-backed Mukti Bahini guerrillas fought to remove Pakistani forces from Bangladesh. The civil war escalated in the following months as East Pakistani loyalists (mostly from the persecuted Bihari minority) formed militias to support West Pakistani troops on the ground against the Mukti Bahini. However, the conflict took a decisive turn in the Bengalis' favour following the ill-fated Operation Chengiz Khan, which resulted in direct Indian military intervention in the civil war, eventually prompting Pakistan's unconditional surrender to the joint command of Indian forces and the Mukti Bahini on 16 December 1971.

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