The Bengalees' resolve during the nine months of the Liberation War in 1971 had been unwavering. Yet this stance ran the risk of fraying. Throughout the month of December, the nation, under siege, had been confident of its victory. But a veiled trepidation and despondency kept overtaking them throughout the month of November. The glum mood had continued until the first week of December. During this critical period of the Liberation War, the Bangladesh-India joint forces' fighter jets and bombers were able to make the then Dhaka Airport completely dysfunctional by conducting their non-stop, all-out assaults. In a 10-day period, the airport wore the look of a pile of concrete garbage.
The Indian Allied Forces' air attacks were followed by the much-awaited flickers of hope amid deep-seated gloom of the Bengalees. Most of the people living in the country welcomed the anti-occupation war led by the Allied Forces' air division. Thus the Liberation Fighters realised that the Pakistani savageries and the arrogant vow to crush the 'Bangladesh dream' were about to prove a sheer exercise in nothingness. The fate of the enemy forces was sealed, with their days being numbered. By the evening of the 15th day of December, 1971, scores of Mukti Bahini soldiers congregated on the Dhaka outskirts. They would be omnipresent in the capital the next day. This scenario and some other events unfolded in a short time one after another. Another report broadcast by a few foreign radios had it that the US Seventh Fleet had already started advancing towards the Bay of Bengal to help out the Pakistan Army. Amid this thick of events, the essentially peace-loving Bengalees witnessed the dawn of their heard-earned victory.
The formal surrender of the Pakistani enemy forces to the Allied Indian and the Liberation forces took place in the afternoon of the 16th December the following day. The venue was the Suhrawardy Udyan, the then race course ground. Ironically, it was the very place where Pakistan's founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah declared in 1948, "Urdu and Urdu shall be the state language of Pakistan, and no other languages." It occurred only one year after the creation of Pakistan, an absurd state with two wings 1500 miles away from each other. The greatest irony of the episode is the Bangla Language Movement sparked off in the historic city of Dhaka, only five years later. It was this very movement and the mass protests, accompanied by a number of martyrdoms embraced by the language soldiers which led to the demand for free and independent Bangladesh. That the very Race Course ground was selected for giving farewell to the statehood of the undivided Pakistan was like an historical prank. On the part of Pakistan, it smacked eloquently of a purge thanks to its wartime crimes two decades later. The crimes included a genocide Pakistan let loose on the innocent Bengalees in March-December, 1971. After the 9-month Liberation War, the historic day of the 16th December later came to be known as the nation's Victory Day.
Few warring countries fighting for their independence had to go through such a blood smirched time which Bangladesh had to go through before tasting victory. The freshly emerged Bangladesh deserved that credit; in spite of its all-out war waged against a barbaric army, they went ahead with their attacks on the enemy positions. In less than a year in 1971, i.e. nine months, the international diplomatic and military circles understood what awaited the artificially created statehood of Pakistan. They could realise that the erstwhile East Pakistan, occupied by the invading forces, was destined to taste a bitter-caustic and ignoble defeat. It could be possible thanks to the rock solid resolve of the Bengalee nation. This kind of resoluteness had rarely been seen in the national struggles for freedom in any part of the world. Coming to comparisons, it was only Vietnam which could stand by it. But still, the Far Eastern country was fortunate to launch their armed assaults from a separate territory within the country targeting enemy positions (1955-1975).
In the formative days of the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Freedom Fighters comprised mostly ragtag yet patriotic youths. As days wore on, the provisional Bangladesh government arranged military training courses for them. The neighbouring country of India took charge of these training sessions. All those courses were of short duration --- which only trained the youths on the hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. On this count, the Vietnamese fighters were in an advantageous position. Despite their short training courses under local commanders, Vietnamese war vets soon took charge to create battle-hardened fighters. Although from the mid-time to the concluding phase of the war, the Allied Indian Army personnel came up with their military help and morale booster, the Bangladesh Liberation War had all along been spearheaded and inspired by the pledge of the creation of a pure Bengalee nation. The Vietnamese and other freedom wars have often been seen being infiltrated by saboteurs. Although the secret and, later haughtily open, these forces had gone all out to detract from the Liberation War's spirit and goal. At one stage, spontaneous mass hatred and resistance were clear enough to keep them skulking throughout the later part of the Liberation War. At the war's fag end, people noticed their real face as they picked the intellectuals, doctors, journalists and many other members of the intelligentsia in Gestapo style --- blindfolding them before killing and dumped their bodies into ditches on the city outskirts. However, ignorance coupled with the poison of zealotry made these monsters, called Al Badar and Razakar. They were oblivious of the reality.
To speak briefly, but also quintessentially, the short length of the Liberation War couldn't belittle the war's historical importance. The short duration of the full-scale war eventually emerged as a blessing in disguise. Thanks to the fast changing courses of the war --- the then Indian Prime Minister's globe-trotting to elicit support for the emerging Bengalee nation, the then US and the then Chinese government's opposition, the erstwhile Soviet Union's veto against an anti-Bangladesh resolution in the UNSC and the threat of the US Seventh Fleet etc presaged the war's end. Despite the mindless killing orgy involving three million East Pakistani Bengalees, the Pakistan Army didn't budge a little from its anti-Bengalee killing frenzy. The fast developments in the diplomacy of the sympathising world heavyweights, the pro-Bangladesh camaraderie of the world-famed intelligentsia with the just war --- all those tilted towards the option of the war's end. Had the situation been otherwise, more innocent people and intellectuals might have been killed by the brutal army.
At the same time, the fate of the great independence leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, interned in Pakistsan, would have been more clouded. The Sheikh could have been used as a pawn in Pakistan's gambling with the freedom of Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujib was not the type of a mercurial or adventurous Shubhas Bose. He was a follower of the constitutional process of political struggles. He emerged as a national leader after decades of engaging in people's politics. The leader could read the popular pulse. This had led to the fear of the Pakistani military rulers for Sheikh Mujib as their archenemy.
