Mukti Joddhas turn emotional on Vijay Divas in Kolkata

The nostalgia of Vijay Diwas or as in Bengali it called `Bijoy Dibosh` continues as the Mukti Jodhas recall the historic day. There were several moist eyes at the venue already, thanks to the screening of a well-produced documentary by the Army’s Eastern Command on the 1971 Indo-Pak War in the East that led to the independence of Bangladesh.

A perfect hush descended on the gathering at the Dalhousie Barracks ground inside Fort William on Monday evening as Bangladeshi parliamentarian and professor Md Ali Ashraf mentioned how December 14 is observed as a ‘Black Day’ back home in memory of the intellectuals murdered by Pakistan Army and Al-Badr militia in 1971.

On that day itself, barely hours before the Pakistan Army in the east surrendered to India, nearly 200 intellectuals, including poets, writers, professors, journalists, doctors, and engineers, were brutally murdered to ensure that nobody of worth remains to run the government of Bangladesh.

Hard-hitting visuals of the kind of torture meted out to the population of East Pakistan by the Pakistan Army, well before the war began, had had their impact and people paid rapt attention as Prof Ashraf spoke about how three million lives were lost and two lakh women raped over a span of nine months till Indian Army captured Dhaka.