MOHIUDDIN ALAMGIR

March 1971. The signs were ominous. There were uncomfortable developments, and people spoke of them in hushed undertones. Something was brewing and it did not bode well.

The political impasse appeared to have reached a breaking point by March 25. Dhaka seemed to hold its breath amid the suffocating tension.

There were a number of foreign diplomats, professionals, doctors, and aid workers who witnessed what happened that evening and later at night. They spoke of the Pakistan Army’s atrocities they had seen.

They saw how the army was unleashed on civilians. Others said they heard explosions, machine gun fire, and tank shells, and saw tracers streaking through the night sky.

Their accounts, written in dispatches and letters, or recounted to friends, remain among the earliest eyewitness records of the crackdown that marked the beginning of Bangladesh’s Liberation War.

Archer K Blood, then US consul general in Dhaka, captured the magnitude of that night in words that still resonate. “December 7, 1941 is remembered by Americans, in Franklin D Roosevelt’s [then US president] memorable words, as a ‘day that will live in infamy’. So too should the night of March 25, 1971 live on in the annals of the young nation of Bangladesh as a night of infamy.”

DHAKA ON FIRE

Earlier that evening, Blood had hosted a dinner for 16, trying to maintain a sense of normalcy amid rising tension.

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