The nature of these systematic purges enraged the Bengalis, who declared independence from the union of Pakistan to establish the new nation of Bangladesh. īengali intelligentsia, academics and Hindus were significantly targeted alongside Muslim Bengali nationalists, with widespread indiscriminate and extrajudicial killings taking place. The operation also directly precipitated the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis were killed while around 10 million fled to neighbouring India as refugees. The main phase of Operation Searchlight ended with the fall of the last major Bengali-held town in mid-May 1971. West Pakistani military leaders had not anticipated prolonged Bengali resistance or later Indian military intervention. Ordered by the central government in West Pakistan, the original plans envisioned taking control of all of East Pakistan's major cities on 26 March, and then eliminating all Bengali opposition, whether political or military, within the following month. Pakistan retrospectively justified the operation on the basis of anti-Bihari violence carried out en masse by the Bengalis earlier that month.
Operation Searchlight was the codename for a planned military operation carried out by the Pakistan Army in an effort to curb the Bengali nationalist movement in former East Pakistan in March 1971. ‡ indicates events in the Indo-Pakistani War linked to the internal resistance movement in Bangladesh. § indicates events in the internal resistance movement linked to the Indo-Pakistani War. 1,800 East Pakistani police personnel.1 armoured regiment (75 M24 Chaffee tanks).
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