The build-up to the 1971 war and India’s dilemma. An extract

General V.K. Singh with Shiv Kunal Verma

The stories accumulated. Villages had been attacked. Men had been killed, their genitals mutilated; some had been taken hostage. Almost all the women had been subjected to rape, and many had been shot or hacked to death after being violated. Houses had been burned. The names of places meant little to us then, but they would acquire meaning in time.

At that stage, we did not know the full scale of what was unfolding. Operation Searchlight, launched on the night of 25 March 1971 under the authority of General Yahya Khan, was still a term that appeared in reports without conveying its full weight. What we saw on the ground was enough to indicate that this was not an isolated development.