A Democratic congressman from Ohio has introduced a formal resolution in the US House of Representatives calling on the United States government to officially recognize the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military and its Islamist allies against Bengali Hindus in 1971 as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Greg Landsman, who represents Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, moved the resolution on Friday. It has since been referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee — the first formal step in a process that could lead to the U.S. government taking an official position on one of the most controversial and under-recognized mass atrocities of the twentieth century.
What the resolution says about Operation Searchlight
The resolution focuses on the night of March 25, 1971, when the Pakistani government jailed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—Bangladesh’s founding father and the most prominent voice of Bengali self-determination—while simultaneously unleashing its military across East Pakistan in a coordinated campaign of violence codenamed Operation Searchlight.
According to the resolution, Pakistani military forces, acting in conjunction with radical Islamist groups inspired by the Jamaat-e-Islami ideology, launched a general crackdown that included widespread massacres of civilians. The resolution does not limit its language in any way.
It states that the Pakistani military and its Islamist allies “indiscriminately massacred ethnic Bengalis regardless of their religion and gender, killed their political leaders, intellectuals, professionals and students, and forced tens of thousands of women to serve as their sex slaves”.
It goes further and states that Pakistani forces have “specifically targeted the Hindu religious minority for extermination through mass killing, gangrape, conversion and forcible expulsion”.
What was Operation Searchlight?
Operation Searchlight was a systematic military intervention launched by the Pakistan Army on the night of 25 March 1971 against the civilian population of East Pakistan – the territory that became the independent state of Bangladesh in December of that year.
The operation was conceived and ordered by the Pakistani military leadership under General Yahya Khan, who had seized power in a military coup in 1969. Its stated aim was to suppress the Bengali nationalist movement, which had gained extraordinary momentum following the landslide electoral victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League party in December 1970 – all for the Pakistani military establishment and a victory for Pakistan.
How Operation Searchlight Was Done
The operation began simultaneously across several cities in East Pakistan, with Dhaka – then spelled Dacca – bearing the brunt of the initial attack. Pakistani army units swept through the city under cover of darkness, targeting university dormitories, Hindu neighborhoods, political offices and homes of intellectuals, journalists and professionals.
The University of Dhaka was among the first places attacked. Students and teachers were killed in their residences. The Hindu community of the old city was subjected to concentrated, deliberate violence—houses burned, residents killed, women assaulted. The operation was not accidental. Soldiers worked from lists. The goals were predetermined.
Beyond Dhaka, the operation quickly spread to Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna and Jessore. In the weeks and months that followed, what began as a military crackdown evolved into a prolonged terror campaign throughout East Pakistan that lasted until the formal surrender of the Pakistani military to Indian and Bangladeshi forces on 16 December 1971.
Role of Jamaat-e-Islami and Razakar militias
The Pakistan Army did not operate alone. Aligned Islamist groups—primarily those inspired by Jamaat-e-Islami ideology—provided auxiliary forces to help identify, target, and kill Bengali civilians. These collaborators, known collectively as the Razakars, as well as the Al-Badr and Al-Shams militias, played a particularly notorious role in the systematic killing of Bengali intellectuals in the last days of the war – a targeted killing campaign now known as the 1971 Intellectual Massacre.
The involvement of these groups in the atrocities committed during Operation Searchlight and its aftermath is central to Landsman’s Congressional resolution, which specifically names Jamaat-e-Islami as complicit in the violence directed against Bengali Hindus.
Death toll: A figure that remains disputed
The human cost of Operation Searchlight and the nine-month war it sparked remains one of the most contentious figures in modern South Asian history. The Bangladeshi government and many historians put the death toll at three million. Pakistani government investigations and some Western academic sources put the number considerably lower, in the range of 300,000 to 500,000. Independent scholars generally place the number somewhere between the two.
What is not in dispute is the scale of the displacement—some ten million refugees fled East Pakistan to neighboring India during the conflict—nor the systematic nature of the violence directed against specific communities, particularly Bengali Hindus, who at the time made up roughly 20 percent of East Pakistan’s population and bore a disproportionate share of the killing.
The Bloody Telegram: When an American Diplomat Called It Genocide
One of the strongest elements of Landsman’s resolution is the invocation of the Bloody Telegram—a piece of diplomatic history that remains one of the most remarkable acts of conscience in the annals of the U.S. Foreign Service.
On March 28, 1971, the American Consul General in Dacca, Archer Blood, sent a telegram to Washington titled simply Selective Genocide. In it, Blood wrote with unmistakable clarity: “Furthermore, with the support of the Pak army, non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people’s neighborhoods and murdering Bengalis and Hindus.”
Washington has said nothing publicly. Nine days later, on April 6, 1971, Blood moved on. In what became formally known as the Bloody Telegram, he sent a direct objection to the US government’s official silence on the unfolding disaster – a dissenting cable signed by 20 members of the Dacca Consulate General. The telegram said: “But we have decided not to intervene, not even morally, on the basis that the conflict in Awami, in which the reworked term genocide is unfortunately used, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state.”
The fact that a senior American diplomat used the word genocide in an official government statement in 1971—and that Washington chose to remain silent regardless—is the moral core of Landsman’s resolution more than five decades later.
Who is Greg Landsman? Congressman from Ohio behind the resolution
Greg Landsman is a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives and serves in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, a seat that includes the city of Cincinnati and its surrounding communities.
Landsman was first elected to Congress in November 2022, defeating Republican incumbent Steve Chabot in a race that drew national attention. Before coming to Washington, he served on the Cincinnati City Council, where he built a reputation as a pragmatic, community-oriented legislator with a particular focus on education, child poverty and social justice.
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Landsman comes from a family with deep roots in public service and civic engagement. He is Jewish—a biographical detail that lends particular resonance to his decision to push for a resolution recognizing the genocide, given his community’s historical relationship to the word and the weight it carries under international law.
Landsman sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee and has been outspoken on human rights issues since taking office. His introduction of the resolution signals a willingness to address historical injustices that have long been sidelined in mainstream American foreign policy discourse — particularly those involving South Asia, a region that receives relatively limited attention from Congress given its geopolitical importance.
His office has yet to issue a detailed public statement beyond the resolution itself, but the move has already attracted considerable attention from Bangladeshi diaspora communities and Hindu advocacy organizations across the United States.
What the resolution formally requires
The resolution calls on the House of Representatives to condemn the atrocities committed by the Pakistani armed forces against the people of Bangladesh on March 25, 1971. It also calls on the President of the United States to formally recognize these atrocities—specifically those directed against ethnic Bengali Hindus—as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.
The resolution carefully notes that entire ethnic groups or religious communities cannot be held collectively responsible for crimes committed by their members, a standard legal and moral qualifier in genocide recognition frameworks, before making its main demand for presidential recognition.
