Dacca military crackdown and Mujib’s arrest

The Dacca military crackdown and Mujib’s arrest is the March 25, 1971 operation that followed the collapse of talks between Yahya Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman. The novel places Saleem among the CUTIA trackers sent to Dacca, where his exceptional sense of smell is used to locate Mujib. The account makes the arrest part of a wider assault on the city, while its shifting distance from events exposes the tension between witnessed violence and official denial.

Deployment and political background

On March 15, twenty CUTIA units assembled in a hut before being flown to Dacca by way of Ceylon. The unit’s sixty-one men and nineteen dogs were told to remove their uniforms and identifying collars, disguising the force as it prepared to travel. Among the trackers were Shaheed Dar, Farooq Rashid, and Ayooba Baloch, with Saleem serving as their “buddha.” At the same time, sixty thousand troops from the West Wing were also sent east in civilian clothing. Tikka Khan was the General Officer Commanding, and Tiger Niazi was assigned responsibility for Dacca and its eventual surrender.

The deployment preceded a final turn in negotiations. Yahya Khan had offered immediate talks with Bhutto and Mujib, but on March 25 Yahya and Bhutto abruptly ended the talks and returned to the West Wing. Saleem marks that breakdown as the immediate political context for the military operation. On the same date, Mujib proclaimed the state of Bangladesh, a declaration the narrative places alongside the impending assault rather than apart from it.

The operation begins

After several days, the CUTIA men received their uniforms again. That night, Brigadier Iskandar, Sergeant-Major Najmuddin, and Lala Moin entered the unit’s barracks with the uniforms and dog collars. The men and dogs were ordered to prepare for action; Iskandar disclosed that their mission concerned Mujib. The unit then left in jeeps as the recorded patriotic hymns of Jamila Singer played over the military base loudspeakers.

At midnight, the larger force also moved out: troops who had arrived as civilian passengers started tanks. Ayooba, Shaheed, Farooq, and Saleem were selected to accompany Iskandar on the operation to find Mujib. Saleem explains that the trackers were given one of Mujib’s old shirts and that he identified the target by its smell. In the sequence, his gift is made into a military instrument: he helps locate a political leader whom the army intends to arrest.

Arrest and assault on Dacca

The tracking party passed the university, which was being shelled, and reached Mujib’s location. Students and lecturers came out of the hostels amid the attack. Mujib was not shot; he was captured and taken to a waiting van, with Ayooba leading him. Saleem recalls Mujib wearing green-and-yellow striped pajamas, a detail that sets the vulnerable domestic image against the military machinery surrounding the arrest.

As the party drove through Dacca, Shaheed saw soldiers entering women’s hostels and taking women into the street. The narrative also records the destruction of newspaper and trade-union offices and people killed in the city. Mujib was brought to the airport and sent by aircraft into West Wing captivity. Saleem says that he closed his eyes during the journey, framing the arrest not as an isolated capture but as one part of an assault unfolding across the city.

The operation continued through arrests carried out by the CUTIA units and their dogs. Saleem describes the trackers searching the damaged city for people identified as enemies of national unity, while soldiers pursued those who were fleeing. The narrative does not settle the number of arrests made by Saleem’s own Number 22 Unit: it offers competing possible totals and leaves the count unresolved. That uncertainty is explicit, not incidental; Saleem says that some events of the night must remain confused.

Witness, memory, and official account

The episode is narrated retrospectively by Saleem, who speaks directly to Padma and identifies himself as the tracker who found Mujib. But his account also records how the unit’s language and training narrow what its members attend to: the trackers are ordered to find people, while the soldiers carry out the rest of the operation. Some soldiers become physically sick during their work, whereas Saleem continues his assigned task. His focus on tracking therefore sits uneasily beside the consequences of the mission.

That unease continues in a later recollection of the return to Dacca. Saleem remembers himself and Shaheed seeing killings and the destruction of the city, then measuring those sights against claims that the soldiers could not have acted so badly and that Tiger Niazi was a decent man. The remembered scenes are treated as impossible because they contradict the account the men have been given. Across the episode, the arrest is therefore both a military action and a problem of narration: Saleem recounts what he witnessed while showing how official explanations and self-protective disbelief can make the same history difficult to acknowledge.