What Was Op Searchlight? US Lawmaker Seeks Genocide Label For 1971 Pak Atrocities Against Bengali Hindus

(MENAFN- Live Mint) A Democratic congressman from Ohio has introduced a formal resolution in the US House of Representatives calling on the United States government to officially recognise the atrocities committed by the Pakistani Army and its Islamist allies against Bengali Hindus in 1971 as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Greg Landsman, who represents Ohio’s first congressional district, moved the resolution on Friday. It has since been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs - the first formal step in a process that could see the US government take an official position on one of the twentieth century’s most contested and under-acknowledged mass atrocities.

What the Resolution Says About Operation Searchlight

The resolution centres on the night of 25 March 1971, when the government of Pakistan imprisoned Sheikh Mujibur Rahman - the founding father of Bangladesh and the most prominent voice of Bengali self-determination - and simultaneously unleashed its military across East Pakistan in a coordinated campaign of violence code-named Operation Searchlight.

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According to the resolution, Pakistani military units, acting in conjunction with radical Islamist groups inspired by the ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami, began a general crackdown that involved widespread massacres of civilians. The resolution does not mince its language.

It states that the Pakistani Army and its Islamist allies “indiscriminately mass-murdered ethnic Bengalis regardless of their religion and gender, killed their political leaders, intellectuals, professionals, and students, and forced tens of thousands of women to serve as their sex slaves.”

It goes further still, stating that Pakistani forces “specifically targeted the religious minority Hindus for extermination through mass slaughtering, gangrape, conversion, and forcible expulsion.”

What Was Operation Searchlight?

Operation Searchlight was a systematic military crackdown launched by the Pakistani Army on the night of 25 March 1971 against the civilian population of East Pakistan - the territory that would, by December of that year, become the independent nation of Bangladesh.

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The operation was conceived and ordered by the Pakistani military leadership under General Yahya Khan, who had assumed power in a military coup in 1969. Its stated objective was to suppress the Bengali nationalist movement that had gathered extraordinary momentum following the landslide electoral victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League party in December 1970 - a victory that the Pakistani military establishment and its political allies in West Pakistan refused to honour.

How Operation Searchlight Was Executed

The operation began simultaneously across multiple cities in East Pakistan, with Dhaka - then spelled Dacca - bearing the brunt of the initial assault. Pakistani Army units moved through the city under cover of darkness, targeting university dormitories, Hindu neighbourhoods, political offices, and the homes of intellectuals, journalists, and professionals.

The University of Dhaka was among the first sites attacked. Students and faculty were killed in their residences. The Hindu community of the old city was subjected to concentrated, deliberate violence -homes burned, residents killed, women assaulted. The operation was not random. Soldiers worked from lists. Targets had been identified in advance.

Beyond Dhaka, the operation spread rapidly to Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khuln, and Jessore. In the weeks and months that followed, what began as a military crackdown evolved into a prolonged campaign of terror across the entire territory of East Pakistan, lasting until the Pakistani Army’s formal surrender to Indian and Bangladeshi forces on 16 December 1971.

The Role of Jamaat-e-Islami and Razakar Militias

The Pakistani Army did not operate alone. Aligned Islamist groups - most prominently those inspired by the ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami, provided auxiliary forces that assisted in identifying, targeting, and killing Bengali civilians. These collaborators, known collectively as Razakars, as well as the Al-Badr and Al-Shams militias, played a particularly notorious role in the systematic murder of Bengali intellectuals in the final days of the war, a targeted killing campaign now known as the Intellectual Massacre of 1971.

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The participation of these groups in the atrocities committed during Operation Searchlight and its aftermath forms a central element of Landsman’s congressional resolution, which specifically names Jamaat-e-Islami as a co-perpetrator of the violence directed at Bengali Hindus.

The Death Toll: A Number That Remains Contested

The human cost of Operation Searchlight and the nine-month war it ignited remains one of the most disputed figures in modern South Asian history. The Bangladesh government and many historians cite a death toll of three million.

Pakistani government investigations and some Western academic sources place the figure considerably lower, in the range of 300,000 to 500,000. Independent scholars generally situate the number somewhere between the two.

What is not disputed is the scale of the displacement - approximately ten million refugees fled East Pakistan into neighbouring India during the conflict - nor the systematic nature of the violence directed at specific communities, most particularly Bengali Hindus, who comprised roughly 20 per cent of East Pakistan’s population at the time and bore a disproportionate share of the killing.

The Blood Telegram: When a US Diplomat Called It Genocide

One of the most powerful elements of Landsman’s resolution is its invocation of the Blood Telegram - a piece of diplomatic history that remains one of the most remarkable acts of conscience in the annals of American foreign service.

On 28 March 1971, US Consul General in Dacca, Archer Blood, sent a telegram to Washington titled simply Selective Genocide. In it, Blood wrote with unmistakable clarity:“Moreover, with support of Pak military, non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people’s quarters and murdering Bengalis and Hindus.”

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Washington said nothing publicly. Nine days later, on 6 April 1971, Blood went further. In what became formally known as the Blood Telegram, he sent a direct objection to the official US government silence on the unfolding catastrophe - a dissent cable signed by 20 members of the Consulate General Dacca.

The telegram stated:“But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state.”

Who Is Greg Landsman? The Ohio Congressman Behind the Resolution

Greg Landsman is a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives, serving Ohio’s first congressional district.

Landsman was first elected to Congress in November 2022, defeating incumbent Republican Steve Chabot in a race that drew national attention. Before arriving in Washington, he served on the Cincinnati City Council, where he built a reputation as a pragmatic, community-focused legislator with a particular emphasis on education, child poverty, and social equity.

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Born and raised in Cincinnati, Landsman comes from a family with deep roots in public service and civic engagement. He is Jewish.

Landsman sits on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and has been an outspoken voice on human rights issues since taking office.

His office has not yet issued a detailed public statement beyond the resolution itself, but the move has already drawn significant attention from Bangladeshi diaspora communities and Hindu advocacy organisations across the US.

What the Resolution Formally Demands

The resolution urges the House of Representatives to condemn the atrocities committed by the Armed Forces of Pakistan against the people of Bangladesh on 25 March 1971.

It simultaneously calls on the President of the United States to formally recognise those atrocities - specifically those directed at ethnic Bengali Hindus - as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.

The resolution is careful to note that entire ethnic groups or religious communities cannot be held collectively responsible for crimes committed by their members, a standard legal and moral qualifier in genocide recognition frameworks, before making its core demand for presidential recognition.

(With agency inputs)

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