Jagannath Hall massacre: Loved ones lost to demons
An eerie calm settled over Jagannath Hall of Dhaka University in the evening of March 25, 1971. The uneasiness soon turned into foreboding as the night progressed.
Bakul Rani Das and her two children had their dinner early as her husband Sunil Chandra Das, a security guard of the dormitory, had to leave for his duty around 10:00pm.
Bakul and the children went to bed soon only to be awakened by the sound of shelling around two hours later.
As they shuddered in fear, her husband returned home to the staff quarter around half an hour later.
"Let's flee right now," Sunil told Bakul.
Around half an hour earlier, tanks and truckloads of Pakistani soldiers broke through the boundary wall opposite the UOTC building (now BNCC). They also entered the dormitory through the north and the south gates and fanned out across the premises.
Tracer fire lit up the night sky. Bullets were flying overhead. The sharp cracks of rifles with shelling of mortars were all around. "Operation Searchlight" had just begun.
As Sunil's family and those of his neighbours' stepped outside, they saw the army men lining the students up on the playground and shooting at them. Sunil and the others hid behind a mandap near a tin-shed building for the resident students.
The marauding army men continued their search all over the dormitory. While the family members were hiding, a child suddenly began to cry. The soldiers lit up their torches and found them out within moments.
"They got my husband and dragged him away. I tried holding on to him, but a soldier kicked me hard. I lost consciousness," Bakul told The Daily Star while sharing the horror unleashed on that fateful night.
After regaining consciousness, she walked a few steps and saw house tutor Anudvaipayan Bhattacharya being dragged away. His hands were tied together with his dhuti, as the soldiers beat him with the rifles. They took him to the line near the southern building of Jagannath Hall.
"They put him in the line and shot him down," said Bakul, now in her mid-70s.
The Pakistan army launched the Operation Searchlight and mercilessly killed the Bangalee members of East Pakistan Rifles and police, students and teachers as well as thousands of common people in Dhaka city.
Jagannath Hall, and Iqbal Hall, now renamed Sergeant Zohurul Haq Hall, Pilkhana, Rajarbagh Police Lines, and Hindu neighbourhoods in Old Dhaka were the main targets.
Dasu Ram Roy was another staff member of Jagannath Hall who was killed brutally. His daughter Giriza Rani Roy saw the shooting.
She said some soldiers forcibly took her father, saying that he should arrange the dead bodies.
"My mother fell unconscious after they took away my father. As he was not returning after a long time, I left the house with my grandmother and sister," she said.
"I saw two lines being formed on the field. After a while, a man started firing a machine gun. Everyone dropped to the ground. We couldn't move our feet in fear," she recalled.
When the army men left, she ran to the playground and started looking for her father.
"I finally found him… Initially I thought he lost consciousness as I could not find any bullet wounds in his body. Then I noticed blood oozing out of his ears. I realised a bullet pierced through his head."
The Pakistani force continued their mayhem until the next day.
Madhusudan Dey, owner of Madhur Canteen in DU, used to live in a house on the eastern side of Jagannath Hall. Madhusudan, his wife, son and daughter-in-law were murdered on March 26.
Arun Dey, the younger son of Madhusudan, said around 7:00am a military vehicle arrived at their house and another stopped in front of Prof Gobinda Chandra Deb's house.
They began asking, "Where is Madhu Da?"
Madhusudan was on the third floor of the building. Someone told the soldiers that he was on the first floor. On reaching the first floor, they learnt that he was in an apartment on the third floor.
Madhusudan opened the door after the soldiers went up there and knocked on the door. The men took him to the apartment next door, said Arun, who was also in the apartment.
"A soldier entered our apartment and started searching. Then he killed my brother and his wife. When they approached to kill my father, my mother said, 'I have lost everything, please don't kill my husband.' The soldier shot my mother dead. Two bullets hit my father's leg. The army men went outside to bring someone to remove the bodies. After a while, they returned with two Bangalees. Then they took Madhusudan and Prof Deb to the playground and shot them dead."
Buet teacher Nurul Ulah secretly filmed the atrocity from the window of his apartment at the teachers' quarter. He could record the massacre of three lines of people, but he saw six lines of people gunned down.
It is thought that over a hundred students, employees, teachers, and slum-dwellers were shot and buried en masse on Jagannath Hall premises that night. Three resident teachers, 34 students, and four employees of the dormitory were among them, according to historians.
Fifty-one years have passed since Bangladesh achieved its cherished independence with the supreme sacrifices of three million people. The actual number of people killed at Jagannath Hall is not yet known.
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