Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta’s family saved the bullet shells from the spot where he had been shot. Meghna Guhathakurta, daughter of the martyred intellectual Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, said the Pakistani military were making rounds in the apartment compound on March 25, 1971, and a few of them went up to their house and started relentlessly banging on the door.
“My mother opened the door and asked them what they wanted,” said Meghna.
They asked where her father was: “Professor Saab kahan hain [Where is the professor]?”
Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta stepped up and put on his panjabi. The Pakistani army men then dragged him to the premises and asked him a few questions.
One of the questions was: “What is your religion?”
Then he was shot. He was taken to a hospital but breathed his last on March 30.
The family keeps the shells to remind themselves that Guhathakurta and many other martyrs still need justice to be done.
Meghna’s story resonates with tens of thousands of people who suffered losses on the darkest night in the history of Bangladesh.
In his book “The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat", Archer K Blood narrated the horrors of the night.
He wrote: “Together with our house guests, we spent a good part of the night of March 25-26 on the flat roof of the house, watching with horror the constant flash of tracer bullets across the dark sky and listening to the more ominous clatter of machine-gun fire and the heavy clump of tank guns.
“We were able to establish that there was particularly heavy firing in the vicinity of the police lines and the East Pakistan Rifles barracks. We could see many fires burning, some of them in Old Dhaka. Our head bearer told us that one particularly large fire was burning in a poor bazaar area where many of his family lived.”
According to the Liberation War Museum archive, Pakistani occupation forces ran rampant as the clock struck one and the night became part of one of the worst genocides to have ever taken place in history. In the crackdown known as “Operation Searchlight,” the military authorities plundered, looted, and murdered thousands of innocent people.
At 1am in the nlight, troops from the 22nd Baluch Regiment headed out for Pilkhana EPR. As soon as Pilkhana was attacked, all of Dhaka, including Rajarbagh, Dhaka University, and Shankhari Bazar, became the grounds of the Pakistani army’s war atrocities that continued for nine months.
In 2017, the Bangladesh Parliament declared 25th March as Genocide Day, in remembrance of the atrocities carried out by the Pakistani army during the Liberation War.
