Blood Thursday

50 years ago today, in the early hours of 25 March 1971, West Pakistan's ‘Operation Searchlight’ commenced. It was a well planned and thought out military operation carried out by trained military personnel against defenceless and untrained civilians with one clear aim: to massacre as many Bengalis in East Pakistan as possible. If you were a revered East Bengali academic, a scholar, poet, artist; an influential politician, a doctor, a teacher, an engineer, a lawyer, a student, a farmer, a rickshaw driver, a woman, a man...a child. If you were simply a Bengali, you would most certainly be a target.

Operation Searchlight led to one of the world's worst genocides in human history and, sadly, included the systematic killing of an estimated 3m Bengali people as well as the rape of 300K women. Minority groups were a focal point during the 'operation', especially Hindus who formed the largest minority group.

Hindus were identified and singled out by Bengali 'Razakars' who were anti-independence. As a consequence, Hindus were disproportionately impacted and led to one of the worst refugee crises of the 20th century as millions fled across the borders to India to save their lives.

This genocide of Bengalis, especially Hindus, remains the most grossly underreported genocides in world history, despite its death toll being smaller only to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and the Holocaust that commenced in 1941. Since the atrocities of 1971, silence across mainstream British media outlets remains.

For this reason, we are requesting you all to observe Thursday 25 March 2021 as 'Blood Thursday' by posting a red 'blood' tile on your social media pages, and use this day to look back and research about the Hindu and wider Bengali genocide and never forget. We request that only ONE hashtag is utilised: #bloodthursday and no other to ensure vital information remains accessible to all.

We are also asking for all mainstream media outlets (as tagged in our post) to utilise a fraction of their resources to highlight these crimes against humanity.

You can find some suggested text and the 'blood' tile on our website, a link is in our bio.

Joy Bangla

#bloodthursday