India, March 26 -- There is a particular kind of horror reserved for bureaucratic violence. Not the horror of rage or panic, but the horror of planning - of officers in rooms, weeks before the killing, writing down targets, timings, and force assignments. Operation Searchlight, launched on the night of 25-26 March 1971, belongs to that category. It was not a crackdown that spiralled. It was not an army that lost control. It was a programme, approved at the highest levels of the Pakistani state, to destroy the Bengali population of East Pakistan by organised military force. And it ran almost exactly as designed.

That distinction matters enormously and it is the one that Pakistani official memory has spent fifty-five years trying to collap...