![]() The victory came on Decemat a heavy cost–hundreds of thousands of dead, few thousand women defiled, millions suffered and most infrastructures destroyed.īut the freedom fighters were conspicuously left out of the victory lap, the surrender ceremony, held on the land they bitterly fought and won. He later made the radio announcement that Bangladesh was independent and urged the people to join him to fight the occupation forces of Pakistan until victory. In that political vacuum, Major Ziaur Rahman of the East Bengal Regiment in Chittagong decided to rise and act. Most hitherto firebrand leaders went into hiding or fled to India. Ostensibly, Mujib’s call of Songram was a calculated bluff. In a collaboration with the killer junta, he quietly surrendered after ensuring befitting hospitality for self and family that included today’s Sheikh Hasina, who delivered son Joy under Pakistan military care and great fanfare. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the top Bengali political leader, shied away from the Songram (fight) he passionately called on March 7, 1971. Within hours, hundreds of thousands of victims lay bleeding on the ground. Pakistan military commenced a genocide on the unarmed people of East Pakistan on March 25, 1971, aimed at crushing their demands for political and economic rights. The question thus arises, whose victory was it, for the Mukti Bahini or the Indian forces? The question continues to haunt the fighters for independence and the people at large, as the current regime–unelected and illegal–continues to obey the dictates of New Delhi. Indian history still records it as the Indo-Pak War of 1971. Mukti Bahin, which fought the bloody war for nine months, were kept away. Indian forces, the last-minute entrant in the frontal action, availed the surrender, maliciously claiming it an Indo-Pak War. ![]() The land was still soaked with the blood of the independence fighters, the women were still traumatized from the loss of their honor and the people still wailed for the lost ones. Half a century ago on this day, the defeated Pakistan military surrendered, not to the Mukti Bahin, the liberation forces of Bangladesh, but to an alien force that did not recognize the Mukti Juddho, liberation war, in the first place. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor it must be demanded by the oppressed.”–Martin Luther King Jr.īangladesh celebrates the Golden Jubilee of Victory on December 16, 2021.
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