Inna lillahi wa inna ilahi rajiun

There are no official figures for the number of people that died during the nine-month long systematic killing of Bengalis which started in 25 March 1971 and finished, albeit officially, on 16 December 1971. No one really knows the correct figure about these as strict censorship prevailed over news from Pakistan.

Death estimates

Figures vary from 5,000–35,000 in Dhaka, and 200,000 - 3 million for Bangladesh as a whole.

Different figures were mentioned by different persons in authority but the latest statement supplied to us by the GHQ shows approximately 26,000 persons killed during the action by the Pakistan Army.

This figure is based on situation reports submitted from time to time by the Eastern Command to the General Headquarters. It is possible that even Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report these figures may contain an element of exaggeration as the lower formations may have magnified their own achievements in quelling the rebellion.

However, in the absence of any other reliable date, the Commission is of the view that the latest figure supplied by the GHQ should be accepted.

An important consideration which has influenced us in accepting this figure as reasonably correct is the fact that the reports were sent from East Pakistan to GHQ at a time when the Army Officers in East Pakistan could have had no notion whatsoever of any accountability in this behalf.

Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report

In late June of 2005 the Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State held a two-day conference on U.S. policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972. Bangladeshi speakers at the conference stated that the official Bangladeshi figure of civilian deaths was close to 300,000, which was wrongly translated from Bengali into English as three million. Ambassador Shamsher Mobin Chowdhury acknowledged that Bangladesh alone cannot correct this mistake and suggested that Pakistan and Bangladesh should form a joint commission to investigate the 1971 disaster and prepare a report. A 2008 study in the British Medical Journal concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.

Asian Tribune

The Peace Research Institute in Norway along with Uppsala University in Sweden, have collected information on the numbers of deaths in all wars since 1900. Apparently, on the basis of eye-witness and media reports as well as other data, they have estimated that about 58,000 people died in 1971 in Bangladesh.

However, it has proven difficult to clarify the methodology upon which they came to this figure and relying on press reports is clearly a far from accurate method of ascertaining the number of deaths. It is not clear whether this low figure of 58,0000 has any better basis in truth than the high figure of 3 million.

More recent research conducted by academics at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and published in 2008 in the British Medical Journal, analysed World Health Organisation population surveys, looking at sibling deaths, to estimate the number of deaths in different wars in different countries. Their calculation suggest that the number of dead in 1971 was closer to 269,000 – five times the number of the Scandinavian researchers. Their figures range from 125,000 to 505,000...

David Bergman

It is to [Dr. M. A.] Hasan's credit that he has tried to undertake a detailed estimate of war dead. However, his figures [of 1.2 - 1.8 million] do remain pretty speculative.

David Bergman on Dr. M. A. Hasan's effort

My own feeling, remembering how charming Pakistani officers, like their Indian equivalents, can be, is that she may have been a bit too ready to accept the honourable, just-trying-to-do-our-duty image that those officers naturally prefer to convey, and that she may also be too convinced that the received wisdom needs to be entirely overturned. Yet when she underlines how stretched the Pakistani forces were, how unready they were for the role of suppression that was thrust on them, and how perplexed they were in the face of a Bengali hostility that seemed to them so disproportionate, what she writes rings very true.

Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971. One lakh, in other words, at most. One cannot say that she absolutely proves this, but her evidence points in that direction, and, in any case vastly away from the figure of 3 million still proclaimed in Bangladesh and India. The wider revision of the conflict's history she implies exonerates the Pakistani government of any plot to rule the east by force, suggests that the Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman let the genie of nationalism out of the bottle but could not control it, and insists that the conflict was a civil war within East Pakistan. The killings by Bengalis of non-Bengali minorities, of Bengalis who stuck with the idea of a united Pakistan, and even of some Hindu Bengalis - all of whose deaths were attributed at the time to the Pakistani army - needs to be reckoned in any fair balance.

Martin Woollacott's (of The Guardian, UK) review of Sarmilla Bose's controversial book 'Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War'

[Sarmilla] Bose takes some gaps in the popular narrative, and then pushes it to an extreme to argue that 1971 was a war between two equally violent sides, with the Pakistan army using only justified and temperate amounts of retaliatory force.

Her unusual hypothesis is that Pakistani army officers are the most objective source to establish their own innocence. She also privileges Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report - even though it was carried out under the post-1971 Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto regime, who had every stake in presenting the March negotiation breakdown (which he largely engineered) as the fault of the Bengalis.

Bose's Interviewee List (page 199-201) reveals selection bias. In Pakistan, she interviewed 30 Pakistani army officers, and 3 civilians. In addition 4 Pakistani army officers are listed as not agreeing to give interviews. Her pool of "expert knowledge" on the Pakistani army's actions failed to include anyone from Pakistan who has publicly said there was a genocide, and contested official and army denials, such as Nadir Ali and many others.

Naeem Mohaiemen on Sarmilla Bose

The scale of the carnage has never been authoritatively established but has been internationally recognised as one of the twentieth century’s genocides. There is a broad consensus in the literature that at least a million Bengalis lost their lives at this time. Some sources put the figure as high as three million people, and this is widely accepted by many in Bangladesh who lived through this traumatic period. The Pakistani administration reported at the time that the Bengali "insurgents" had killed 100,000 "non-Bengalis" and that only about 30,000 Bengalis had died.

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The greatest casualty in war times is always the truth. And that is what seems to have happened with Bangladesh/East Pakistan liberation/civil war of 1971. It is conceivable that while Bangladesh authorities exaggerated the casualty figures of their Bangladeshi victims to draw sympathy to their cause, they discounted the casualty figures of those Urdu-speaking and pro-Pakistani residents. Similarly, the lower estimates provided by the HRC [Hamoodur Rahman Commission] Report seem aimed at arresting anti-Pakistan feelings and possibly exonerating the war crimes of their planners.

Dr. Habib Siddiqui,

Second greatest massacre of 20^th century

Bangladesh government figures state that Pakistani forces aided by collaborators killed three million people, raped 200,000 women and displaced over 10 million people - making the monthly casualty suffered in the Bangladesh Liberation War far greater than that suffered during the First World War, and the second biggest during the twentieth century.

Source: Necrometrics

Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.

Noble Qur'an - Surah 5:Al-Ma'idah, verse 32