The Pakistani military establishment is the most ruthless gang of killers in human history. General AM Yahya Khan used the Islam card to maintain the unity of Pakistan.

Still, the military and their local collaborators, including leaders and activists of Jamaat-e-Islami, weren’t scared of Allah while committing genocide, rape, looting, arson, and forced conversion to Islam against the Bangalees in 1971.

Since their surrender on December 16, the Pakistani rulers and people in general have been ungrateful—rather more cunning—to destroy Bangladesh. Their conspiracies haven’t stopped yet.

They’ve infiltrated politics, administration, and civil society, assassinated the Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of his family members, destroyed the secular fabric of society, and captured power through widespread arson and killings on August 5, 2024, to take Bangladesh back toward Pakistan.

The Pakistani Jamaat-controlled Yunus government, the deep state actors, and the government’s jihadist mobs are demonizing Sheikh Hasina to hide their crimes and labeling the August 5 jihadist coup as a revolution or student-led uprising to dodge the law.

The Pakistani government’s views towards the Awami League, the Hindus, and India are still very similar to their followers, like Jamaat and its allies, though 54 years have passed since independence.

Brief timeline: 1971 Liberation War and birth of Bangladesh

In 1971, the West Pakistani rulers launched an offensive in East Pakistan to subdue the Awami League and its supporters, as well as Hindus. Ethnic (Hindu) cleansing, forced pregnancy of Hindu women, and deliberate killing of Hindu males to exterminate Bangalee Hindus as a race were the key agenda of the Pakistani military.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sydney Schanberg covered the start of the war and wrote extensively on the suffering of the East Bengalis, including the Hindus, both during and after the conflict.

London-based The Sunday Times reported on June 13 that the Pakistan government’s policy for East Bengal was spelled out to me in the Eastern Command headquarters at Dacca. It has three elements:

1. The Bengalis have proved themselves unreliable and must be ruled by West Pakistanis.

2. The Bengalis will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic lines. The Islamization of the masses—this is the official jargon—is intended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious bond with West Pakistan.

3. When the Hindus have been eliminated by death and fight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win over the underprivileged Muslim middle class. This will provide the base for future administrative and political structures.

According to RJ Rummel, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, “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.”

In his book, Rummel describes a chilling genocidal ritual, reminiscent of Nazi procedure towards Jewish males: “In what became province-wide acts of genocide, Hindus were sought out and killed on the spot. As a matter of course, soldiers would check males for the obligatory circumcision among Moslems. If circumcised, they might live; if not, sure death.”

Rummel writes: “The human death toll over only 267 days was incredible. Just to give for five out of the eighteen districts some incomplete statistics published in Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the Pakistani army killed 100,000 Bengalis in Dacca, 150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen districts, the total is 1,247,000 killed. This was an incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows the final toll. Some estimates of the democide are much lower — one is of 300,000 dead — but most range from 1 million to 3 million. … The Pakistani army and allied paramilitary groups killed about one out of every sixty-one people in Pakistan overall; one out of every twenty-five Bengalis, Hindus, and others in East Pakistan. If the rate of killing for all of Pakistan is annualized over the years the Yahya martial law regime was in power (March 1969 to December 1971), then this one regime was more lethal than that of the Soviet Union, China under the communists, or Japan under the military (even through World War II).”

The Wall Street Journal on July 27 reported: “To help control of Bengali population, the army has been setting up a network of peace committees superimposed upon the normal civil administration, which the army cannot fully rely upon. Peace Committee members are drawn from Biharis and from the Muslim Leagues and Jamat-e-Islami. The peace committees serve as the agent of army, informing on civil administration as well as on general populace. They are also in charge of confiscating and redistribution of shops and lands from Hindu and pro-independence Bengalis. The peace committee also recruits Razakars. Many of them are common criminals who have thrown their lots with the (Pakistan) army.”