Pakistani military placed for indiscriminate killing of innocent people, wide scale destruction of villages, raping of women and looting and plunder. By playing up religious sentiments they tried to instigate the simple unsophisticated Bengali Muslims to kill or drive out the Hindus who were painted as pro-Indian. By playing similar sentiments they created some auxiliary forces such as Al-Badr, Al-Shams and Razakars to collaborate with the military in identifying and eliminating all those sympathized with the war of liberation. The freedom fighters who were operating behind the enemy lines were to be hunted down and delivered to the military for torture and killing. So-called peace committees composed of collaborators were set up at different places to show that normalcy prevailed.

The repression grew in scale and intensity as the Pakistani military junta watched the freedom fighters grow in strength and achieve one success after another. To hoodwink the international community, it launched a worldwide campaign to paint the liberation war was rebellion against the sovereignty of Pakistan and that their arch enemy India was behind all this. The fact that about 10 million Bengalis had fled to India to escape the military repression was depicted as India’s own game to draw international sympathy. However, the truth about the character of the liberation war and the atrocities committed by the military became known to the wider world through independent reports by foreign journalists and dispatches sent home by the diplomatic community in Dhaka. About the crackdown of March 25, Simon Dring’s report to the Daily Telegraph of London smuggled out of Dhaka and published on March 30 was one of many such reports. It said;

‘An estimated three battalions of troops were used in the attacked on Dhaka-one of armored, one of artillery and one of infantry. They started leaving their barracks shortly before 10 pm. By 11, firing had broken out and the people who started to erect makeshift barricade overturned cars, tree stumps, furniture, concrete piping became early casualties.

‘Sheikh Mujibur was warned by telephone that something was happening but he refused to leave his house. "If I go into hiding they will burn the whole of Dhaka to find me," he told an aide who escaped arrest.

‘The students were also warned, but those who were still around later said that most of them thought they would only be arrested. Led by American supplied M-24 World War II tanks, one column of troops sped to Dhaka University shortly after midnight. Troops took over the British Council Library and used it as firebase from which to shell nearby dormitory areas.

‘Caught completely by surprise some 200 students were killed in Iqbal Hall, headquarters of the militantly anti-government students’ union.

The military removed many of the bodies, but the 30 bodies still there could never have accounted for all the blood in the corridors of Iqbal Hall.

The war against the Bengali population proceeded in classic genocidal fashion. According to Anthony Mascarenhas, "There is no doubt whatsoever about the targets of the genocide".

Mascarenhas's summary makes clear the linkages between gender and social class (the "intellectuals," "professors," "teachers," "office bearers," and -- obviously -- "militarymen" can all be expected to be overwhelmingly if not exclusively male, although in many cases their families died or fell victim to other atrocities alongside them). In this respect, the Bangladesh events can be classed as a combined gendercide and elitocide, with both strategies overwhelmingly targeting males for the most annihilatory excesses.

Younger men and adolescent boys, of whatever social class, were equally targets. According to Rounaq Jahan, "All through the liberation war, able-bodied young men were suspected of being actual or potential freedom fighters. Thousands were arrested, tortured, and killed. Eventually cities and towns became bereft of young males who either took refuge in India or joined the liberation war." Especially "during the first phase" of the genocide, he writes, "young able-bodied males were the victims of indiscriminate killings." R.J. Rummel likewise writes that "the Pakistan army out those especially likely to join the resistance -- young boys. Sweeps were conducted of young men who were never seen again. Bodies of youths would be found in fields, floating down rivers, or near army camps. As can be imagined, this terrorized all young men and their families within reach of the army. Most between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five began to flee from one village to another and toward India. Many of those reluctant to leave their homes were forced to flee by mothers and sisters concerned for their safety." (Death By Government, p. 329.) Rummel describes (p. 323) a chilling gendercidal ritual, reminiscent of Nazi procedure towards Jewish males: "In what became province-wide acts of genocide, Hindus were sought out and killed on the spot. As a matter of course, soldiers would check males for the obligated circumcision among Moslems. If circumcised, they might live; if not, sure death."

Robert Payne describes scenes of systematic mass slaughter around Dhaka that, while not explicitly "gendered" in his account, bear every hallmark of classic gender-selective roundups and gendercidal slaughters of non-combatant men:

In the dead region surrounding Dhaka, the military authorities conducted experiments in mass extermination in places unlikely to be seen by journalists. At Hariharpara, a once thriving village on the banks of the Buriganga River near Dkaka, they found the three elements necessary for killing people in large numbers: a prison in which to hold the victims, a place for executing the prisoners, and a method for disposing of the bodies. The prison was a large riverside warehouse, or godown, belonging to the Pakistan National Oil Company, the place of execution was the river edge, or the shallows near the shore, and the bodies were disposed of by the simple means of permitting them to float downstream. The killing took place night after night. Usually the prisoners were roped together and made to wade out into the river. They were in batches of six or eight, and in the light of a powerful electric arc lamp, they were easy targets, black against the silvery water. The executioners stood on the pier, shooting down at the compact bunches of prisoners wading in the water. There were screams in the hot night air, and then silence. The prisoners fell on their sides and their bodies lapped against the shore. Then a new bunch of prisoners was brought out, and the process was repeated. In the morning the village boatmen hauled the bodies into midstream and the ropes binding the bodies were cut so that each body drifted separately downstream. 

The road to freedom for the people of Bangladesh was arduous and tortuous smeared with blood, toils and sacrifices. In the contemporary history perhaps no nation paid so dearly as the Bengalis did for their emancipation. During the nine months of the war, the Pakistan military killed an estimated three million people and inflicted brutalities on millions more before their ignominious defeat and the surrender 95 thousand troops on 16 December 1971. Thousands of their well-armed troops were killed by the freedom fighters. The War of Liberation was literally fought in the name of Bangabandhu and under the leadership of the government, which his party formed during those trying and eventful days.