The 1971 War: Thirteen Days That Broke Pakistan in Two and Made Bangladesh

On the afternoon of 16 December 1971, at a racecourse in the middle of Dhaka, two generals sat at a small table. One was Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi, commander of Pakistan’s forces in the east. The other was Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the head of India’s Eastern Command, a Sikh officer born in Kala Gujran, in Jhelum district of undivided Punjab.

At 5.01 pm Bangladesh time, 4.31 pm in Delhi, Niazi signed. Around them, a huge crowd erupted. About 93,000 Pakistanis, soldiers and civilians, were now prisoners. A country called East Pakistan had ceased to exist. A country called Bangladesh had arrived.

It had taken thirteen days of war. But the story started nine months earlier, with an election Pakistan’s rulers refused to honour.

In December 1970, Pakistan held its first general election. In East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won 160 of 162 general seats, enough for a majority in the whole country. In the West, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s party won 81 seats.

The generals and the politicians in the West would not hand over power. On the night of 25 March 1971, the army launched Operation Searchlight in Dhaka. Soldiers attacked police lines, university halls and Hindu neighbourhoods. With foreign reporters thrown out, nobody knows exactly how many died that night; one journalist’s estimate ran to thousands. In the early hours of 26 March, Mujib declared independence.

What followed was months of killing. Then came the refugees. About 10 million people crossed into India, into camps in West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, where at one point refugees outnumbered locals. For India, this was no longer only Pakistan’s problem.

India began training and arming Bengali fighters, the Mukti Bahini, under a programme called Operation Jackpot. By December they numbered about 30,000 regulars and at least 100,000 guerrillas.

On 9 August, India signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. The US State Department’s own history says it helped keep the UN out of the crisis and discouraged China from opening a front in the north.

Then there was the timing. Army chief Sam Manekshaw argued against going to war in spring: the monsoon would turn the east into a swamp, and winter snow would block Chinese passes. Whether Indira Gandhi had already decided to wait, or Manekshaw talked her into it, is still argued over; the cabinet papers are classified. Either way, India waited for winter.

At 5.40 pm on 3 December 1971, Pakistani jets took off for India. Pathankot was hit first, then Amritsar, Halwara, Ambala, Srinagar, Jodhpur and other bases. Pakistan called it Operation Chengiz Khan, hoping to knock out India’s air force on the ground, the way Israel had done to Egypt in 1967.

It did not work. The raids did little more than damage runways, and Pakistan lost four aircraft. That night, Indira Gandhi told the nation on radio that the strikes were a declaration of war. Indian Canberra bombers were already on their way to Pakistani bases. The war had begun on both fronts at once.

In the east, Indian forces and the Mukti Bahini came in from several directions at once. The plan, the generals later argued over whether it was ever officially to take Dhaka itself, was to move so fast that Pakistan’s forces could never regroup.

Lieutenant General Sagat Singh flew his troops across the wide Meghna river in a fleet of helicopters, a move nobody expected. On 11 December, Indian paratroopers of 2 Para dropped near Tangail to grab the Poongli bridge and cut off a Pakistani brigade falling back on Dhaka.

By mid-December, Indian troops were on the edge of the capital. Aurora’s chief of staff, Major General J.F.R. Jacob, later wrote that Niazi still had about 26,400 troops in Dhaka against some 3,000 Indians near the city. Jacob flew in to talk him into surrender anyway. By Jacob’s account, Niazi broke down and asked who had said he was surrendering. Within hours, he had.

Jake, go and get a surrender.

For Punjab, 1971 was not a war far away in Bengal. It was fought at its own border, around its own towns.

Hussainiwala. On the first night, Pakistan attacked the bridgehead at Hussainiwala near Ferozepur, the site of the memorial to Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. Soldiers of 15 Punjab fought off a brigade-sized attack, and bridge spans were blown to shield Ferozepur. The area around the old Qaiser-i-Hind fort stayed in Pakistani hands until after the war, so accounts still differ on whether it was a brave delay or ground lost.

Fazilka. Pakistan’s 105 Brigade crossed a water channel near Fazilka because a bridge was never blown, and held its bridgehead for the rest of the war. About 190 Indian soldiers were killed and around 200 went missing there, but the town itself held. The Asafwala War Memorial near Fazilka honours them.

Basantar. On the Shakargarh front, guarding the road between Jammu and Pathankot, the Poona Horse fought one of the war’s great tank battles. Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal, 21 years old, refused to abandon his burning tank because its gun still worked. He was killed on 16 December, the day of the surrender, and awarded the Param Vir Chakra.

Longewala. In the Rajasthan desert, about 120 men of 23 Punjab under Major Kuldip Singh Chandpuri held a small post overnight against a Pakistani armoured column. At first light, Indian Air Force Hunter jets from Jaisalmer destroyed the tanks.

The sky over Srinagar. On 14 December, Flying Officer Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon, from Isewal village near Ludhiana, took off alone in a small Gnat fighter against six Pakistani Sabres attacking Srinagar. He was killed. He remains the only Indian Air Force officer ever awarded the Param Vir Chakra, and his remains were never found.

On the night of 4 December, three small Indian missile boats, Nipat, Nirghat and Veer, raced towards Karachi. They sank a Pakistani destroyer, a minesweeper and a merchant ship, and set the port’s oil tanks ablaze, without losing a single sailor. India celebrates Navy Day every 4 December because of that raid.

The sea war had its tragedy too. On 9 December, the Pakistani submarine Hangor sank the frigate INS Khukri off Diu. Eighteen officers and 176 sailors died. Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla chose to go down with his ship. Khukri is still the only warship the Indian Navy has lost in battle. Off Visakhapatnam, the Pakistani submarine Ghazi sank too; India credits its navy, while Pakistan says it was an internal explosion.

Around 9 December, US President Richard Nixon ordered a naval group led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise towards the Bay of Bengal. Officially, it was there to evacuate Americans. India read it as pressure to stop.

It did not stop anything. Soviet ships sailed from Vladivostok and shadowed the Americans into January. Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger had stood by Pakistan’s ruler Yahya Khan partly because he was their secret channel to China, an argument the historian Gary Bass makes in his book The Blood Telegram. A US diplomat in Dhaka, Archer Blood, had warned Washington about the killings in April. He was recalled.

1971 is one of the most retold stories in India, and some of the most famous versions are not quite true.

In India, the mood was euphoric. Leaders from the Communists to the Jan Sangh praised Indira Gandhi, and her Congress swept the state elections in March 1972. Manekshaw became India’s first Field Marshal in 1973.

In Pakistan, the defeat brought down Yahya Khan, and Bhutto took over. A commission led by Justice Hamoodur Rahman recommended putting senior commanders on trial. Nobody was tried, and the report stayed secret until parts leaked in 2000.

On 2 July 1972, Indira Gandhi and Bhutto signed the Simla Agreement. Bangladesh joined the United Nations in 1974.

India marks Vijay Diwas every 16 December. On the 50th anniversary, four ‘victory flames’ lit at the National War Memorial in 2020 travelled the country, to Longewala and to the villages of the Param Vir Chakra winners, before coming back in December 2021.

The memory has become political too. In December 2024, the famous painting of the surrender in the Army chief’s lounge was replaced with a new artwork, and veterans objected. In Bangladesh, after Sheikh Hasina’s fall in August 2024, the 1971 surrender sculptures at Mujibnagar were vandalised, and in February 2025 Mujib’s house-museum in Dhanmondi was burned and demolished. When India’s prime minister marked Vijay Diwas in 2024 without mentioning Bangladesh, an adviser in Dhaka replied that India had been merely an ally.

1971 has fed Indian cinema for decades: Border (1997); 1971 (2007), about Indian prisoners of war; The Ghazi Attack (2017), about the submarine war; Pippa (2023), about the battle of Garibpur; Sam Bahadur (2023), with Vicky Kaushal as Manekshaw; Ikkis (January 2026), with Agastya Nanda as Arun Khetarpal; and Border 2 (January 2026), with Diljit Dosanjh as Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon and Varun Dhawan as Hoshiar Singh.

The 1971 war is usually told as a story of generals and maps, and it was a brilliantly run campaign. But it was also a story of ordinary people: 10 million refugees who walked into India with nothing, a 21-year-old tank officer who would not leave his gun, a pilot from a Ludhiana village who took on six jets alone.

For Punjab, it was personal. The war started with bombs on Pathankot and Amritsar, it was fought at Hussainiwala and Fazilka, and it ended with a general from Jhelum accepting the surrender. Fifty-five years on, the films get some of it wrong. The people deserve the real version.