Children of War (2014 film)
Children of War, also known as The Bastard Child, is a 2014 Hindi drama film directed by Mrityunjay Devvrat based on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide and the Bangladesh Liberation War. The film released on 16 May 2014 in India and Bangladesh. The film stars Pavan Malhotra, Raima Sen, Tillotama Shome, Indraneil Sengupta, Farooq Sheikh, Shatrunjay Devvrat, Riddhi Sen, Rucha Inamdar, and Victor Banerjee. It was filmed in India with similar characters and places mimicking Bangladesh.
Press conference at IFFI 2014
The Bangladesh genocide was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis, especially Bengali Hindus, residing in East Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War, perpetrated by the Pakistan Armed Forces and the Razakars. It began on 25 March 1971, as Operation Searchlight was launched by West Pakistan to militarily subdue the Bengali population of East Pakistan; the Bengalis comprised the demographic majority and had been calling for independence from the Pakistani state. Seeking to curtail the Bengali self-determination movement, erstwhile Pakistani president Yahya Khan approved a large-scale military deployment, and in the nine-month-long conflict that ensued, Pakistani soldiers and local pro-Pakistan militias killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence. In their investigation of the genocide, the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists concluded that Pakistan's campaign involved the attempt to exterminate or forcibly remove a significant portion of the country's Hindu populace.
Corpses of Bengali nationalist intellectuals killed in Dhaka in December 1971, photographed by Rashid Talukdar
Human remains and war materiel from 1971 genocide in Liberation War Museum
Pile of bones of those killed in the Bangladesh Genocide
President of Pakistan Yahya Khan with United States President Richard Nixon, 1970.