The 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke away from West Pakistan to become independent Bangladesh — a country built on a single religion that tore in two over language and political power. After the Pakistani army's crackdown on 25 March 1971 unleashed mass killing, rape, and the flight of roughly ten million refugees into India, Bengali guerrillas and an Indian military intervention forced the Pakistani surrender on 16 December 1971. The death toll is bitterly contested, ranging from official Bangladeshi figures of three million to independent estimates in the hundreds of thousands.
In 1947, British India was partitioned to create Pakistan as a Muslim homeland. But Pakistan was born in two pieces, a western wing and an eastern wing, separated by more than a thousand miles of India and joined mainly by religion and the new state of 1947. Twenty-four years later, the experiment failed. The Bengali-speaking east broke away to become Bangladesh, after the Pakistani army launched a campaign of mass killing against the very people it claimed to share a nation with. A country founded on the idea that faith could hold a people together split apart over language and power, at a cost in human life that is still fought over today.