This common hostility towards an immensely rich secular culture reached a tipping point when the leader of the nationalist Awami League, Sheikh Mujib, won a national election. He was imprisoned, and the Pakistani forces began a genocide throughout 1971.
Pakistan has never accepted responsibility for what happened. The official Pakistani estimates were originally only 26,000 dead and two million refugees.
It is thought that at least 200,000 women were raped by the Pakistani forces and their collaborators. There are eyewitness accounts of "rape camps" set up by the Pakistani forces. The numbers, and the names of rape victims, remain disputed. Sheikh Mujib, the first leader of Bangladesh, ordered the destruction of lists.
In the last week of the war, when Pakistani defeat was inevitable and a new nation was clearly about to be born, a concerted effort was made to kill as many intellectual leaders as possible.
The historian R.J. Rummel, who has looked as deeply into it as anyone, concludes that the "final estimate of Pakistan's democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000".
That was 40 years ago. The Pakistani perpetrators of the war crimes have never been brought to trial after independence. Nor, until recently, have the Bengalis who collaborated with the genocidaires. The trials have operated under threats of violence from a still active Jamaat-e-Islami. Some criminals fled abroad.
The shabby series of amnesties and diplomatic effrontery that left some of the cruellest mass murderers of the century enjoying a peaceful retirement was often challenged by activists, without success.
The rage of the crowds at the life sentence given Mollah is that they know, as so often before, that Sheikh Hasina's Government has not achieved what it could, and a change of government will almost certainly lead to a pardon of imprisoned war criminals. It has done so often in the past.
- Independent