Tonight, as darkness falls across Bangladesh, our collective memory travels back to that horrific March night in 1971 when the very air of Dhaka smelled of gunpowder and blood. The Pakistani military junta, in an act of unspeakable barbarity, launched “Operation Searchlight”—not merely an operation, but a calculated genocide designed to exterminate the spirit of 75 million Bengalis in one swift, murderous stroke.
What transpired was not war. It was a slaughter.
The University of Dhaka, our temple of knowledge, became a killing field. Pakistani forces—armed with tanks, mortars, and machine guns—surrounded Jagannath Hall, Iqbal Hall (now Sergeant Zahurul Haq Hall), and the Hindu-majority neighborhoods of Old Dhaka. Professors were shot point-blank in their offices. Students were mowed down in dormitories. Families were burned alive in their homes. The Rajarbagh Police Lines and Pilkhana EPR headquarters ran red with the blood of our bravest defenders.
Siddiq Salik, the Pakistani military’s own spokesman, later confessed in Witness to Surrender: this was no spontaneous crackdown, but a premeditated massacre. Professor Anwar Pasha’s Rifle, Roti, Awrat documented how intellectuals were hunted like animals, their bodies left to rot in the very halls where they once taught enlightenment.
Yet, in that darkest hour, something miraculous happened. The blood of our martyrs did not soak into the earth in vain—it ignited a fire. The same students who fell under Pakistani bullets became the embers of our revolution. The same teachers who were executed for dreaming of freedom became the prophets of our independence.
March 25 was meant to be our end. Instead, it became our beginning.
Today, as we light candles for the souls lost that night, let us remember: their sacrifice was not just for the land we stand on, but for the ideals we must uphold. When corruption stains our politics, when injustice silences the weak, when we forget the price paid for each inch of this sacred soil—we betray that night’s martyrs.
Their ghosts still walk among us—in the bullet marks on old university walls, in the mass graves we’ve turned into memorials, in the fading scars of our freedom fighters.
They whisper: “Never again.” Will we listen? We must. To forget is to kill them twice.
Prodip Roy
Editor- OTN Bangla
March 25, 2025
