by Gary J. Bass
Despite pressure from more militant Bengalis, Mujib continued to insist to other East Pakistani politicians that he wanted to keep Pakistan’s wings together, perhaps in some kind of confederation. Bhutto, adamant about Pakistan’s unity, had been sitting out the negotiations. But on March 22, he came to Dacca to join in the talks with Yahya and Mujib. Blood happened to be at the Intercontinental Hotel for a lunch, and caught a glimpse of the politician in the lobby. The hatred of the Bengalis for Bhutto was palpable; people hollered obscenities at the grim-faced man, who was flanked by bodyguards with AK-47 assault rifles. Blood later remembered Bhutto staring straight ahead, his “reptilian eyes fixed on the wall. He was in the enemy’s camp and he knew it.” Another eyewitness saw eight truckloads of armed troops protecting Bhutto’s car. At a press conference at the Intercontinental Hotel, Bhutto announced that Yahya and Mujib had reached a general agreement that made a promising basis for future negotiations.67
Blood was satisfied with the prospect of a deal that gave Mujib “everything but independence and which, we believe, he could sell to people of Bangla Desh.” On March 24, Blood shrugged off a plea from Mujib, who wanted U.S. pressure on Yahya to avoid a crackdown. Blood saw little evidence that Yahya was “about to take a harder line.” As Yahya, Bhutto, and Mujib negotiated frenetically, Blood’s disastrously incorrect evaluation was agreeable to the higher-ups at the State Department, who preferred to avoid taking sides in Pakistan’s politics. But Mujib suspected that the West Pakistanis were dragging out the talks to buy time to reinforce their military.68
The defense attaché at the Dacca consulate, a U.S. Air Force colonel, visited two senior Pakistani officers. They were unbearably tense. One of them, a Pakistani wing commander, said that they would carry out their orders, but hoped they would not have to do the worst: “It is [a] terrible thing to shoot your own people.”69
Chapter 3
Mrs. Gandhi
Indira Gandhi had a personal connection to Bengal. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the great opponent of British colonialism who would become India’s founding prime minister, had given her a demanding if inconsistent education. In 1934, at the age of sixteen, with her father once again stuck in a cramped British jail, Indira Nehru—who would grow up to be the first woman prime minister of India—was packed off to study in the wilds of Bengal.
She had already had a singular schooling, of a kind: enduring an uncertain, anxious, and often lonely childhood, with her aristocratic grandfather, resolute father, and sickly mother campaigning for India’s freedom and paying for it with long, wretched tours in British prisons; sitting in on her father’s meeting with Albert Einstein; visiting her father’s dear friend and mentor Mohandas Gandhi—the revered Mahatma himself—in jail, where he would affectionately pull her ears.1
But Santiniketan (the Abode of Peace), in the glorious countryside of what today is West Bengal, north of Calcutta (now called Kolkata), was no common place to learn. The school there was founded by the celebrated Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, who would write the national anthems for two unborn states, India and Bangladesh. The Nobel laureate meant to realize Indians’ intellectual independence through learning, studying all of humanity, with a special attention to Japanese and Chinese civilization. The institution was determinedly unconventional: on arriving, Indira Nehru searched in vain for the classrooms and was startled to discover that her classes were held under the trees. “Everything is so artistic and beautiful and wild!” she wrote to Nehru. In a respite from all too much politics, she was transfixed by art and poetry. She was awed by Tagore himself, a humane prophet complete with cascading white beard and hair. Following his universalist vision, she took courses in French and English, in Hindi and Bengali.2
Nehru wanted his daughter to learn to speak some Bengali and “get to know the Bengalis a little better.” Later, when Bengalis were slaughtered and West Bengal was overrun with desperate refugees, Bengalis would often say that she had a special feeling for them. She was hardly the most sentimental individual, but she was familiar with Bengal’s heat and spring flowers, all the sounds and smells of the place. She had found Bengali “a very sweet & nice language,” and had soon gotten good enough that Tagore suggested she take literature classes in it. There was nothing abstract for her about the people who were suffering and dying. In a cruel twist, the site of this misery in 1971 was where she had tried to escape from politics long before. “I was away from politics, noise,” she once said. “It was a refuge and a new world.”3
She grew up to plunge back into the politics and the noise. Her idyll in West Bengal gave way to more standard schools, in India and Britain. There are not a lot of government chiefs trained at both Santiniketan and Oxford. In 1942, she married a worldly, outgoing politician and journalist, Feroze Gandhi, taking his last name. (She was no relation to Mahatma Gandhi.) In the family tradition, she was arrested by the British after speaking to a rally in Allahabad. She languished in a dirty gray prison cell, sleeping on a concrete bed in the freezing cold. In the violence of Partition, she on two separate occasions protected presumably Muslim men being chased by Hindu mobs. And she worked in filthy refugee camps for Muslims displaced by Partition.4
After all that, it is hard to say what the humane lessons of Tagore might have meant to a steely, calculating politician. Her wariness of others was heightened by a miserable marriage, which ended when her husband died of a sudden heart attack at the age of forty-seven. While Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister, she was uneasy around the courtiers and hacks crowding his grand Delhi residence, Teen Murti Bhavan. But in 1959, she threw herself into public life, becoming president of the dominant Indian National Congress, her father’s political party.5
All grown up, Indira Gandhi was nobody’s idea of a charmer. Jacqueline Kennedy, who scored rather higher in the social graces, found her “a real prune—bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” Even those who liked her found her remote and withdrawn. Her closest friend wrote that she had a sharp temper and nursed grudges, and was secretive and private. She worked relentlessly, with the disconcerting habit of reading papers while someone was talking to her. One of her top advisers explained sympathetically that she was constantly tense from having to contend with the man’s world of Indian government (her aunt once famously called her “the only man in her cabinet”), which earned her a reputation as “aloof, secretive and haughty.” K. C. Pant, then a young Indian official from a prominent political family who went on to be defense minister, and says he was on friendly terms with her, recalls, “She could be very cold. Occasionally she had to freeze somebody. She could freeze them just by looking at them. She listened, she absorbed, she didn’t speak much.”6
India was born democratic. Nehru had a bedrock devotion to freedom of thought, the verdict of the ballot box, and the independence of the courts. But Gandhi had inherited somewhat less than a full portion of her iconic father’s fundamental and sophisticated commitment to democracy. She was far more willing to manipulate people, and seemed quite aware that she lacked her father’s saintliness. Jaswant Singh—who has served as India’s foreign minister, defense minister, and finance minister in a rival party—remembers, “All along she felt, and she often said it, that ‘my father was a saint in politics. I am not.’ She had not the same tolerance and acceptance of a differing viewpoint.”7
Nehru died in 1964, leaving some people wondering if India could survive as a unified and democratic country. His daughter was given the modest job of running the ministry of information and broadcasting, but when the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, dropped dead of a heart attack early in 1966, her name was suddenly floated for prime minister. Many of the ruling Congress party’s grandees imagined that she could be easily shoved around. They were wrong. In January 1966, Indira Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister in the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan.8
She was a novice, just forty-seven years old and untested, abruptly in charge of the world’s largest democracy. It was
and is an impossible job. She was confronted with all of India’s problems: terrible poverty, widespread illiteracy, secessionist movements, bloody-minded revolutionaries, sclerotic government. But she quickly learned on the job. She reached out to the public, while presiding over a titanic patronage machine, doling out appointments and favors to every part of the country. She dedicated herself to fighting poverty. But it was rough going as she faced years of drought, a weak economy, and riots.9
Gandhi struggled to keep India united. She lived in dread of communal bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims in such vital states as Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. To quell violence, she reminded the state governments that the central government’s security forces, including the army, were available for use, and hoped “that these would be called in in time and not after the event.”10
The new prime minister had to face secessionist revolts far from the country’s center: Nagaland, Mizoram, and of course Kashmir. And while Indians preferred to point to their success stories—where democratic federalism managed to hold the country together—the Indian state sometimes harshly used force. When in March 1966 Mizo insurgents in the hill country declared their independence from India, Gandhi’s government sent in both the army and the air force—the first time that the Indian air force had been unleashed against Indian citizens. India marched troops against rebels in Nagaland too, where a peace effort fell apart, followed by brutal Naga terrorist attacks on civilians.11
Gandhi had been installed in office by the politicos, but in 1967 she won her first electoral mandate from the Indian public. In elections for the Lok Sabha (House of the People), the lower house of India’s Parliament, her Congress party managed to hold on to a majority, but was much weakened (which had the benefit of getting rid of some of her rivals inside the party). In 1969, the party split between the leftist Gandhi and her more conservative competitors, with intense sparring among them.12
By then, Gandhi was already chafing against the democratic restraints on her authority, eerily foreshadowing her notorious 1975 declaration of Emergency rule—the terrible rupture in India’s long history of democratic governance. When she first became prime minister, she was skeptical not just about the civil service and her own Congress party, but also about parliamentary democracy itself. She bridled at the incrementalism of the unwieldy Indian political system, with its thousands of daily compromises: “Sometimes I wish … we had a real revolution— like France or Russia—at the time of independence.” She had a penchant for crude censorship. In some of this, she had a little more in common with Richard Nixon than either of them would have liked to admit.13
THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN
Indira Gandhi’s most important adviser by far was P. N. Haksar, the principal secretary to the prime minister. Of all the self-important mandarins in South Block, arriving each morning to have their briefcases carried from the car up to the office by a servant striding ahead of them, he was the top. The job title is much too humble: he functioned essentially as her chief of staff and foremost foreign policy adviser. (Henry Kissinger once called him “my opposite number there, Haksar, who is probably a communist.”) In terms of the Nixon administration, P. N. Haksar was something like the Indian equivalent of H. R. Haldeman and Kissinger combined. He got vastly more face time with the new prime minister than any cabinet official, and exercised tremendous influence on her.14
Haksar was given to daydreaming and liked to dawdle in his bed, but, as he wrote late in his life, was driven to diligent toil out of “moral obligation, or out of a sense of duty.” Like Nehru, he hailed from an eminent family of Kashmiri Pandits, and strove to live up to the legacy. He inherited both a sense of perfectionism and a dread of dishonor, which was, he reflected, “probably imbibed through constantly hearing since early childhood that our family could never be bribed, bought or made to bend. Such, at any rate, was the mythology of our family. And mythologies have a way of taking hold of one’s mind, just as gravity holds one’s body.”15
He studied both mathematics and history, and became a conspicuously erudite lawyer, educated at Allahabad and the London School of Economics. His background was sufficiently posh that one of his uncles, who was prime minister of Jaipur under the British Empire, always served the teatime cake iced with the colors of the Union Jack. But Haksar grew up amid political turmoil, surrounded by talk of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s freedom struggle, with his mother telling him that the English were a nation of scoundrels. “Gandhi had appeared on our horizon,” he later said. “And he grew larger every day, until he covered the entire sky.” As a young man, dreaming of doing extraordinary deeds, Haksar gambled on an independent India.16
After Partition, which he said made him “spiritually sick,” he hitched his fortunes to the Nehru family. This paid off handsomely. Haksar first met Indira Nehru Gandhi in his childhood: a tiny girl, perched on a servant’s shoulder, was brought over to the Haksars’ house in Nagpur, fondly announced as the only child of the great Nehru. Haksar later remembered only that “her eyes seemed to get bigger and brighter the more my mother fussed over her.” Nehru himself encouraged the promising young man to join India’s new foreign service, extolling his flair for political work.17
Haksar, with a beaky nose and bushy eyebrows, was more of a professional civil servant than a politico. His government service centered on the Ministry of External Affairs, with tours of duty in Nigeria, Austria, and Britain. His British posting particularly helped him clamber upward: Indira Gandhi was then studying at Oxford, and he got to know her. His loyalty to the family was smoothly extended to her.18
Where Gandhi lacked a well-considered political philosophy, Haksar was there to help provide it. He anchored her in democratic politics. His words could sometimes echo Nehru’s. In the great fight against poverty, Haksar wanted to work within the existing secular democratic system. He struck liberal notes on minority rights, expansively declaring his commitment to freedom of speech, assembly, and worship for every single Indian citizen.19
Like Kissinger, Haksar was brainy, witty, verbose, arrogant, and abrasive. He took a long-range view—again like Kissinger—sometimes to the annoyance of those who wanted immediate policy and were less indulgent of intellectualism. He consolidated power over foreign policy in his office, pushing aside foreign ministers who came belatedly to realize who the real boss was. Haksar could be merciless to underlings, while always cultivating his relationship with the prime minister.20
Under Haksar, the prime minister’s secretariat dominated the government. His senior colleagues found him warm and approachable, running the prime minister’s team with a combination of energy and confidence, although, as one top aide noted, he “tended to pontificate.” Arundhati Ghose, a diplomat who served under Haksar in Vienna and after, who would later read to an elderly Haksar as he slowly went blind, remembers him fondly. “Haksar had a very wry sense of humor. He was extremely well read, very affectionate, and very warm.” She recalls his outsized influence, with all the powers of the prime minister’s office, and his guiding role in India’s foreign policy.21
According to Nehru’s grand vision of nonalignment, India was to stand warily above the quarrelsome superpowers of the Cold War. But Haksar was in the thick of it—firmly committed to the Soviet side. He was staunchly leftist at home and abroad, leaning toward the Soviet Union so much that it alarmed other Indian officials. He was joined in this by some of the other leading pro-Soviet Indians who were Gandhi’s closest advisers—all of them Kashmiri Brahmins like her, thus quickly dubbed the “Kashmiri Mafia.” Ghose remembers that her mentor never hid his left-wing views. Although he did not impose his leftism on his subordinates, she says, “It came out in everything that he said or did.”22
Indira Gandhi was not as pro-Soviet as Haksar, but she was already leery of the United States. On her first visit to Washington as prime minister in 1966, she got along well with Lyndon Johnson, and tried to get him to restart U.S. economic aid to India, which had been suspend
ed during the India-Pakistan war of 1965. But they sparred over the devaluation of the rupee and, later, over the Middle East and the Vietnam War. She was stung by Johnson’s attempts to use food aid for leverage and by lectures from other U.S. officials. Facing famine in 1966, she resented the slowness of U.S. food shipments. Meanwhile, Haksar pushed her further toward the Soviet Union. She sought more Soviet arms sales, helping India to build up a formidable military machine. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, India refused to vote for a United Nations resolution condemning the brutal crackdown on Czech liberals. Gandhi’s government was grateful to the Soviet Union for help with industrialization and nurturing India’s defense industry. Ghose says that largely “as a result of Haksar-sahib’s influence,” the government had a “distrust of the Americans. They didn’t trust us, we didn’t trust them.”23
For that, the Nixon administration loathed him. Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s staffer for South Asia at the White House, shudders operatically at the mention of his name. “It brings back nothing but bad memories,” he says. “He was an arrogant Brahmin, pretty far left, difficult to discuss anything with. He always wants the upper hand. You don’t have a discussion. He fires verbal volleys.” Hoskinson hated his pro-Soviet politics too. “He was quite far left. He may have been a communist.” (He wasn’t.) Although Hoskinson doubted it, some U.S. officials felt that “he might be controlled by the Russians, that he was actually an asset of the KGB.”24
Indira Gandhi’s power was limited by her party’s standing in Parliament. Frustratingly dependent on socialist and leftist parties, she was in a weak position, while her more conservative foes were maneuvering against her. She had no patience for the opposition. In December 1970, taking advantage of her popularity, she boldly chose a democratic way out: calling new general elections.25
