India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  From the beginning, the Indian government had followed an ‘open door’ policy; anyone who came was allowed in. Significantly, the responsibility for the camps vested with the centre, not the states. In fact, from the beginning of the conflict New Delhi had taken a very keen interest in the future of what was already being referred to in secret official communications as the ‘struggle for Bangladesh’. On the other side, Islamabad spoke darkly of ‘an Indo-Zionist plot against Islamic Pakistan’.21 This was an exaggeration; for the origins of the problem were internal to Pakistan, while Israel was nowhere in the picture at all. Still, once the dispute presented itself, India was not above stoking it for its own ends.

  A key player here was the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), an intelligence agency set up in 1968 on the model of the CIA, its aims the pursuit of Indian interests worldwide, its activities screened from parliamentary enquiry, its orders to report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office. The head of RAW was (perhaps inevitably) a Kashmiri Brahmin, R. N. Kao, while its officers were taken from the police and, on occasion, the army. No sooner had the Pakistani elections been called than RAW was being kept busy writing reports on that country. A memorandum of January 1971 presented a somewhat alarmist picture of Pakistan’s armed strength: listing numbers of troops, tanks, aircraft and ships, it claimed that the country had ‘achieved a good state of military preparedness for any confrontation with India’. It thought the ‘potential threat’ of an attack on India ‘quite real, particularly in view of the Sino-Pakistan collusion’. Besides, the constitutional crisis might encourage the generals to undertake a diversionary adventure, to begin, as in 1965, with an ‘infiltration campaign in Jammu and Kashmir’.22

  Whether Yahya Khan had any such plans in January 1971 only the Pakistani archives can reveal. The archives on the Indian side tell us that India had certain designs of its own, aimed naturally at Pakistan. Thinking through these designs were P. N. Haksar and his colleague D. P. Dhar, then Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union. In April 1971 Dhar wrote to Haksar expressing pleasure that India was winning the propaganda war with Pakistan – chiefly by providing succour to the victims of its repression. Some analysts wanted swift military action but, advised Dhar, instead of ‘policies and programmes of impetuosity’, what India had to plan for ‘is not an immediate defeat of the highly trained [army] of West Pakistan; we have to create the whole of East Bengal into a bottomless ditch which will suck the strength and resources of West Pakistan. Let us think in terms of a year or two, not in terms of a week or two.’23

  IV

  By the summer of 1971, along with the hundreds of camps for refugees, India was also hosting training camps for Bengali guerrillas. Known as the Mukti Bahini, these fighters numbered some 20,000 in all; regular officers and soldiers of the once united Pakistani army, plus younger volunteers learning how to use light arms. The instruction was at first in the hands of the paramilitary Border Security Force, but by the autumn the Indian army had assumed direct charge. From their bases in India, the guerrillas would venture into East Pakistan, there to attack army camps and disrupt communications.24

  In April 1971 the Chinese prime minister wrote to the Pakistani president deploring the ‘gross interference’ by India in the ‘internal problems’ of his country. He dismissed the resistance as the work of ‘a handful of persons who want to sabotage the unification of Pakistan’. He assured Yahya Khan that ‘should the Indian expansionists dare to launch aggression against Pakistan, the Chinese Government and people will, as always, support the Pakistan Government and people in their just struggle to safeguard state sovereignty and national independence’.25

  Chou En-lai’s letter was reproduced in the Pakistani press, and must certainly have been read across the border as well. Meanwhile, New Delhi dispatched senior Cabinet ministers to countries in Europe and Africa, to speak there of the unfolding tragedy, and India’s efforts to manage it. The prime minister wrote to world leaders urging them to rein in the Pakistani army. In the first week of July 1971 Dr Henry Kissinger – at the time national security adviser to President Nixon – met Mrs Gandhi in New Delhi, where he was acquainted for the first time with ‘the intensity of feelings on the East Bengal issue’. The refugee influx had placed a great burden on India – ‘we were holding things together by sheer will-power’, said the prime minister. The crisis could be resolved only when ‘a settlement which satisfied the people of East Bengal was reached with their true leaders’. America was asked to press such a settlement on the military rulers of West Pakistan.26

  From New Delhi, Kissinger proceeded to Islamabad, and from there – in secret – to the Chinese capital, Peking. Pakistan had brokered this breaking of the ice between two countries long hostile to one another. Their help with China was another reason for the United States to stand solidly behind the generals in Islamabad. Thus Kissinger had carried a letter from Nixon to Mrs Gandhi, asking her to help in the peaceful return of the refugees and the maintenance of Pakistan as a united entity. In a combative reply, the prime minister lamented the fact that arms supplied by the Americans to Pakistan, directed in 1965 against India, were now ‘being used against their own people, whose only fault appears to be that they took seriously President Yahya Khan’s promises to restore democracy’. The president had asked for UN observers to supervise refugee repatriation but, asked Mrs Gandhi, ‘would the League of Nations observers have succeeded in persuading the refugees who fled from Hitler’s tyranny to return even whilst the pogroms against the Jews and political opponents of Nazism continued unabated?’27

  Recently declassified documents point to a distinct difference of perspective between President Nixon and his chief adviser. The historian in Kissinger could foresee that ‘there will some day be an independent Bangla Desh’. He also sensed – as he told the Indian ambassador to Washington – that while ‘India was a potential world power, Pakistan would always be a regional power’.

  Nixon, however, laid hopes on a military solution to the East Bengal problem. He had a deep dislike of one country – ‘the Indians are no goddamn good’, he told Kissinger – and a sentimental attachment to the leader of the other. In Nixon’s opinion, Yahya Khan was ‘a decent and reasonable man’, whose loyalty to the US had to be rewarded by supporting his suppression of the East Bengal revolt. When, in April 1971, Kissinger prepared a note suggesting that the future for East Pakistan was ‘greater autonomy and, perhaps, eventual independence’, the president scribbled on it: ‘Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time’.

  As Kissinger somewhat despairingly told a colleague, ‘the President has a special feeling for President Yahya. One cannot make policy on that basis, but it is a fact of life.’ Nixon expressed his prejudices forcefully: speaking to his staff in August 1971 he said that, while the Pakistanis were ‘straightforward’, if ‘sometimes extremely stupid’, the ‘Indians are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line’. The president insisted that the US ‘must not – cannot – allow India to use the refugees as a pretext for breaking up Pakistan’.28

  As India drew apart from one superpower, it was coming closer to the other.29 Moscow concurred with New Delhi’s assessment that the ‘twains of East and West Pakistan are not likely to meet again’. The USSR and India were now contemplating closer economic co-operation, through a greater flow of raw materials and finished goods between the two countries. As an inducement, the Russians offered to sell the Indian air force a number of their TU-22 bombers. Recommending the proposal, the Indian ambassador, D. P. Dhar, admitted that while these were inferior to Western models, to buy the planes from a NATO country would involve conditions that were both ‘politically unacceptable and financially prohibitive’.30

  In June1971 the Indian foreign minister, Sardar Swaran Singh, was due to visit Moscow. On the eve of his arrival the Soviet Foreign Ministry approached D. P. Dhar with the suggestion that the USSR and India sign a treaty of friendship, which would ‘act as a strong deterrent to force Pakistan and China to a
bandon any idea of military adventure’. Dhar was told that ‘India need not be worried about Pakistan, but should take into account the unpredictable enemy from the North’ (i.e. China).31 Later, when the two foreign ministers met, the common suspicion of China figured high on the agenda. Swaran Singh remarked that China was the only country to give ‘all out, full and unequivocal support’ to the Pakistani military regime. Andrei Gromyko answered that ‘the Chinese are always against whatever the USSR stands for. Any cause which we support invites their opposition and anything which we consider unworthy of our support secures their support. I cannot think of any particular exception to this general rule.’32

  Indian hostility to China dated back to the border conflict of 1959–62. Soviet hostility was more recent, a product of rivalry for leadership of the world communist movement. Mao Zedong had spoken sneeringly of ‘Russian revisionism’; the armies of the two sides had clashed on the Uri river in 1969. India and the Soviet Union did not touch one another at any point, but each had a very long border with China. A closer alliance was in the interest of both. The secret documents quoted above, however, reveal that, contrary to the received wisdom, the alliance was first suggested not by the poor underdeveloped country but by the powerful superpower.

  After meeting Gromyko, Swaran Singh discussed a possible treaty with the chairman of the USSR Praesidium, Alexei Kosygin. Drafts were exchanged before a final document was signed in New Delhi on 9 August 1971 by the foreign ministers of the two sides. For the most part, the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation between the Republic of India and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was pure boilerplate: declarations of undying friendship between the ‘High Contracting Parties’. The crux lay in a single sentence of Article IX, to wit:

  In the event of either Party being subjected to an attack or a threat thereof, the High Contracting Parties shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.33

  By the late summer of 1971, the axes of alliance on the subcontinent were pretty clear: on the one side, there was (West) Pakistan with China and the United States; on the other, (East) Pakistan with India and the Soviet Union.

  V

  In the last week of September 1971 the prime minister travelled to the Soviet Union. The next month she visited a series of Western cities, ending in the capital of the free world. Everywhere, she spoke of the deepening crisis in East Pakistan. As she told the National Press Club in Washington, this was ‘not a civil war, in the ordinary sense of the word; it is a genocidal punishment of civilians for having voted democratically’. ‘The suppression of democracy is the original cause of all the trouble in Pakistan,’ she said, adding, ‘If democracy is good for you, it is good for us in India, and it is good for the people of East Bengal.’34

  On her November visit Mrs Gandhi had two meetings with President Nixon. Kissinger had the impression that this was ‘a classic dialogue of the deaf’. Nixon said that the US would not be a party to the overthrow of Yahya Khan, and warned India that ‘the consequences of military action were incalculably dangerous’. Mrs Gandhi answered that it was the Pakistanis who spoke of waging a ‘holy war’. She also pointed out that while the West Pakistanis had ‘dealt with the Bengali people in a treacherous and deceitful way and . . . always relegated them to an inferior role’, India, ‘on the other hand, has always reflected a degree of forbearance toward its own separatist elements’.35

  While Mrs Gandhi was away, the conflict had intensified. From the end of October the shelling along the border became more fierce, encouraged by the Indian army, which saw the exchanges as a cover for insurgents to creep in and out. By the third week of November heavy artillery was in action. In a battle on the 21st the Pakistanis were said to have lost up to thirteen tanks.36 Reporting this to Nixon, Yahya Khan complained that India had ‘chosen the path of unabashed and unprovoked aggression’. Twelve Indian divisions were massed near East Pakistan, seeking to turn ‘localized attacks to open and large-scale warfare’.37

  At this time in their history, the armies of the two sides were grossly mismatched. In the past decade the Indian armed forces had augmented its equipment, modernized its organization and laid the foundations of an indigenous weapons industry. While Indian intelligence had exaggerated Pakistani strength, a study by the International Institute of Strategic Studies showed that India in fact had twice as many tanks and artillery guns as its neighbour. Further, the morale of the Pakistan army had been deeply affected by the civil war, by the defection of Bengali officers and the effect of having to fight those presumed to be one’s own people.38

  In the event it was the weaker side that sought to seize the initiative. On the afternoon of 3 December Pakistani bombers attacked airfields all along the western border. Simultaneously, seven regiments of artillery attacked positions in Kashmir.

  The Indians retaliated with a series of massive air strikes. In Kashmir and Punjab they answered back on the ground while, in the seas beyond, the navy saw action for the first time, moving towards Karachi. The eruption of conflict in the west provided the perfect excuse for India to move its troops and tanks across the border into East Pakistan, turning a shadowy struggle into a very open one.39

  Yahya Khan’s decision to attack India from the west was, at first and subsequent glance, somewhat surprising; a military historian has even described it as ‘barely credible’.40 Perhaps the Pakistanis hoped to effect quick strikes, calling for UN or American intervention before the conflict got out of hand. Some generals in Islamabad also believed that succour would come from the Chinese. Thus, on 5 December, the commander of the Pakistani troops in East Pakistan, Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, received a message from Army Headquarters informing him that there was ‘every hope of Chinese activities very soon’.41

  Such help may not have come anyway, but in December it was made impossible by the snows that covered the Himalaya. This, indeed, was the perfect season for the Indians to effect their march on Dacca. Three months earlier the rains from the monsoon would have made the ground soft underfoot; three months later the Chinese would have had the option of crossing into the border area they shared with India and East Pakistan. The weather was in favour of the Indians, as was the support of the local population; this to add to an overwhelming superiority in numbers.

  The Indian army moved towards Dacca from four different directions. The delta was criss-crossed by rivers, but the Mukti Bahini knew where best to lay bridges, and which town housed what kind of enemy contingent. The Bahini was in turn helped by their civilian comrades: as the Pakistani Commander was to recall later, ‘the Indian Army knew of all our battle positions, down to the last bunker, through the locals’.42 Their path thus smoothed, the Indians made swift progress. Communications were snapped between Dacca and the other main city, Chittagong. Vital rail heads were captured, rendering the defenders immobile.43

  On 6 December the government of India officially revealed an intention it had long nurtured – namely, to support and catalyse the formation of a new nation-state to replace the old East Pakistan. On this day it formally recognized ‘The Provisional Government of the Peoples’ Republic of Bangladesh’. In Mujibur Rahman’s absence, Syed Nazrul Islam served as acting president of the new state; he had a full-fledged Cabinet in tow. These men were to the Indians as de Gaulle’s Free French forces had been to the Allies; waiting, not very patiently, while Big Brother recaptured their beloved city and handed it over to them. Within a week of war the Indian troops were within striking distance of Dacca. Artillery fire rained down on the city, with troops advancing from the north, south and east. A temporary hiccup was provided by an aircraft carrier of the American 7th Fleet, which moved into the Bay of Bengal, by means – to quote Henry Kissinger – of ‘registering our position’.44

  The threat was an idle one. Tied down in Vietnam, the Americans could scarcely jump into another war which might – give
n the Indo-Soviet Treaty – get horribly out of hand. As the collapse of Dacca became imminent, an argument broke out between East Pakistan’s civilian governor, who wanted to surrender, and the general in command of the besieged troops, who wanted to fight on. On 9 December, the governor sent a telegram to Islamabad asking them to sue for an ‘immediate ceasefire and political settlement’. Otherwise, ‘once Indian troops are free from East Wing in a few days even West Wing will be in jeopardy’. He considered the ‘sacrifice of West Pakistan meaningless’, noting that ‘General Niazi does not agree as he considers that his orders are to fight to the last and it would amount to giving up Dhaka’.45

  The governor’s views were independently confirmed by Pakistan’s two main allies, China and the United States. On the 10th, Kissinger met ambassador Huang Hua in Washington. The Chinese diplomat bitterly remarked that the creation of Bangladesh would create a ‘new edition of Manchukuo’, an Indian puppet regime on the model of the one the Japanese had once run in China. Kissinger replied that ‘it is our judgement, with great sorrow, that the Pakistan army in two weeks will disintegrate in the West as it has disintegrated in the East’. ‘We are looking for a way to protect what is left of Pakistan,’ he said, adding by way of consolation, ‘We will not recognize Bangla Desh. We will not negotiate with Bangla Desh.’46