India, Dec. 14 -- On a cold night in December 1971, Bangladesh suffered a loss that went far beyond the immediate human toll. It lost the foundation of its intellectual future. More than 200 of its brightest minds-professors, doctors, journalists, poets-were systematically abducted, tortured and executed by the Al-Badr militia group operating under Pakistan's military command. This was not a chaotic outcome of war. It was a deliberate, meticulously planned genocide aimed at obliterating Bangladesh's intellectual backbone and crippling its ability to govern itself in the post-war era. This dark episode remains one of the most brutal attempts in modern history to annihilate a nation's thought leadership.

The intellectual massacre was a col...