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Mrs Gandhi’s father was Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister. Just two years later, following her rise in popularity through the Kashmir crisis, she became the country’s first female prime minister in 1966.
Mrs Gandhi was tough. Charismatic when she wanted to be, she had a temperament that could rub people up the wrong way. Jacky Kennedy would describe her as “a real prune – bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” Early in Mrs Gandhi’s career, with folded hands and enigmatic smiles, she perfected the art of a noncommittal silence to freeze out difficult interlocuters. One of her top advisors described her as constantly tense from having to contend with the man’s world of Indian government.”
At the time of Indian independence, British India had been split in two along religious lines: the Hindu-dominated Union of India, and the Muslim-dominated republic of Pakistan. Pakistan was made up of two distinct wings, separated by thousands of miles of hostile Indian territory; West Pakistan to the northwest of India around the Punjab, and East Pakistan, to India’s east, comprising of what had been East Bengal.
The two wings were separated not only geographically but also ethnically and politically. West Pakistan was strongly antagonistic toward India. The people of East Pakistan were relaxed about India. Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, remained a favourite holiday destination for Bengalis in East Pakistan.
India and Pakistan took divergent paths in the Cold War that emerged in the decades following their independence. Pakistan pitched their camp alongside the Americans; while India led the global non-aligned movement. That being said, India was seen by many to tilt towards the Soviet Union. Few were more of this view than Richard Nixon, who became President of the United States in 1969.
No American president has entered the White House with greater experience in foreign policy, and greater exposure to the sub-continent, than Richard Nixon. Indian historian Srinath Raghavan writes that this proved not an asset but a liability.
“Nixon wheeled with him to office a trolley of biases against India and in favour of Pakistan. These prejudices were sown during the Eisenhower administration’s dalliance with Pakistan, which Vice President Nixon had enthusiastically endorsed, and they were nurtured during his subsequent travels to South Asia. Nixon’s biases were further fattened by the politics of US foreign policy. The pro-India leanings of the Democrats struck him as ‘a prime example of liberal soft-headedness.’”
Nixon’s hugely influential National Security advisor, and later Secretary of State, was Henry Kissinger. A Jewish refugee who has arrived from Germany in America in the 1930s, Kissinger argued that foreign policy ought not to be driven by the demands of justice. That, he believed, was the road to total war. Instead, Kissinger argued that a society’s principles had to be compromised in the name of international stability.
Kissinger was able to put his doctrine to the test in 1971. That year, the Bangladesh Liberation War pitted Nixon’s White House against Mrs Gandhi in New Delhi. In the last decades, state documents in both Washington and New Delhi, snaffled out by historians such as Raghavan and Gary J. Bass, shine a light on how the fierce animosity felt between these two protagonists directed world affairs that year. They are immensely entertaining. Nixon’s filthy invectives contrast with Kissinger’s own more quaint profanities: “balderdash” and “poppycock” preferred to Nixon’s really foul stuff.
More importantly, the records are a cautionary tale. Abul Maal A. Muhith, former government minister in Bangladesh, writes that the records in Washington, confirm “the very frightening theory that during the War of Liberation foreign policy of the mighty superpower was so personalized a decision-making process in which only President Richard Nixon and his Security Assistant Henry Kissinger mattered.”
Here we take a closer look at what happened in 1971 between President Nixon and Mrs Gandhi.
The Bengalis of East Pakistan had long felt that they were being exploited by West Pakistan and by the end of the 1960s there were loud grumblings of discontent.
General Yahya Khan had assumed the presidency of Pakistan in 1969, after the resignation of military dictator Ayub Khan. Yahya announced general elections for 1970, on the principal of one-man, one-vote. This made many in West Pakistan anxious, as East Pakistan had a larger population than the West. Much of East Pakistan was wildly in support of the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League political party, which called for greater autonomy. A victory for the Awami League, would shift the balance of power irrefutably in favour of the East.
As feared by the West, the Awami League won the election of 1970. However, Yahya postponed handing over power to Sheikh Mujib and in March 1971, West Pakistani forces initiated Operation Searchlight. They arrested Sheikh Mujib and massacred hundreds in a blood bath. The Bangladesh Liberation War had begun.
The brutality of the West Pakistani forces led to thousands of Bengalis fleeing over the border to India. In the month of May, the average daily influx of refugees was a staggering 102,000. That is approximately 71 refugees entering India every minute.
This was Mrs Gandhi’s first major international crisis.
In the spring of 1971, she made a tour of the refugee camps. Too emotional to make any public remarks at the camps themselves, once back in Kolkata she said to a senior aide that India “cannot let Pakistan continue this holocaust.”
Mrs Gandhi’s government was motivated by a mix of lofty principle and brutal realpolitik. They were determined to end the slaughter of a civilian population and uphold the will of voters. But they were also keen to seize a prime opportunity to rip apart India’s hated enemy.
Durgar Prasad Dhar, a close adviser and confidant of Indira Gandhi, candidly laid out India’s awkward mix of lofty and low motives:
“Apart from the laudable cause of the Bengali aspirations for freedom and a life of respect and dignity, we have to remember our national interests. … [W]e have to create the whole of East Bengal into a bottomless ditch which will suck the strength and the resources of West Pakistan.”
Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam, an Indian international strategic affairs analyst, secretly urged the Indian government to escalate the crisis so to establish hegemony over all of South Asia. Subrahmanyam also saw the strategic uses of moralizing: if India could make “the Bangla Desh genocide” its cause for war, then the superpowers would find it hard to support Pakistan.
The Americans were aware of this “genocide”.
US Ambassador to India Kenneth Keating, had written to the State Department in Washington that spring: “I know of no word in the English language other than massacre which better describes the wanton slaughter of thousands of defenceless men, women and children.” Later in the Oval Office, Keating directly told Nixon and Kissinger that their ally Pakistan was committing genocide.
But the Americans would also play realpolitik.
In 1971, the foremost priority for Nixon was his clandestine outreach to Chairman Mao’s China, of which the US has been estranged since the Communist Party of China took power in 1949. Pakistan was one of the rare states that was allied to both countries and had been chosen as the go-between. At the beginning of 1971, while West Pakistani forces were rampaging through East Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger were on tenterhooks awaiting a response from Beijing. Human rights did not rank among the priorities of Nixon’s foreign policy, and he evinced not an iota of outrage at the atrocities.
Beyond the China question, Nixon had entered the White House with a deep distrust of India. He saw everything through the lens of the Cold War, and believed India to be effectively – albeit not officially – in the Soviet camp.
Finally, and not insignificantly, both Nixon and Kissinger liked Yahya Khan. And they despised Mrs Gandhi. Samuel Hoskinson, a staff member of the National Security Council in 1971, remembers Yahya through the eyes of Nixon and Kissinger as not the brightest person but “a man’s man. He wasn’t some woman running a country.”
President Nixon and Indira Gandhi were temperamentally ill-suited as geopolitical partners. Nixon’s brusque, often paranoid style clashed with Gandhi’s steely aloofness and moral certitude. He viewed her as condescending and cold; she saw him as crude and unreliable. “Nixon’s comments after meetings with her were not always printable,” Kissinger would later write, adding that the two “were not intended by fate to be personally congenial. Her assumption of almost hereditary moral superiority and her moody silences brought out all of Nixon’s latent insecurities.”
Mrs Gandhi’s visit to Washington in November 1971, to plead international support for East Pakistan against the West, did not go well. When Nixon and Kissinger met in the Oval Office the next morning to take stock of the previous day’s meeting, Nixon remarked that Mrs Gandhi was being “a bitch”. Kissinger observed that “the Indians are bastards anyway.”
With little international support, India’s hand was forced by Pakistan’s pre-emptive strikes on Indian airbases on 3 December 1971. That same night, Mrs Gandhi responded by declaring hostilities on Pakistan and recognising Bangladesh as an independent country.
Kissinger expected that the war would lead to Yahya’s overthrow. Bass writes that “Nixon was cut to the quick at the thought.” “It’s such a shame,” Nixon said mournfully. “So sad. So sad.” As India achieved quick success against Pakistan, the US President was eager for signs of Indian atrocities. “Here they are raping and murdering, and they talk about West Pakistan, these Indians are pretty vicious in there, aren’t they? Aren’t they killing a lot of people?”
On December 9, the CIA reported, “The Indians appear to be making good on their promise to try to protect these people from vengeance-seeking Bengalis.” Nixon wasn’t having it. He wanted to put out that spin that “we cannot have a stable world if we allow one member of the United Nations to cannibalize another. Cannibalize, that’s the word. I should have thought of it earlier. You see, that really puts it to the Indians. [… ] The connotation is savages. To cannibalize … that’s what the sons of bitches are up to.”
Upon Kissinger’s direction, Nixon deployed the U.S. aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India. Arundhati Ghose, an Indian diplomat in Kolkata recounts: “I couldn’t believe that the Americans were threatening us. We thought the Chinese might. But the Chinese didn’t. It was the Enterprise which threatened us.”
Mrs Gandhi was to later remark “Naturally, it the Americans had fired a shot, if the Seventh Fleet had done something more than sit there in the Bay of Bengal … yes, the Third World War would have exploded.”
The Enterprise never did fire a shot. In the space of two weeks the Indian Army, alongside the Bangladesh Liberation Forces, neutralised the West Pakistanis, and an unconditional surrender was secured in Dacca on 16 December 1971. To rousing cheers in the Indian parliament, Mrs Gandhi proclaimed that Dacca was now the capital of a free and independent Bangladesh.
In addition to the categorical defeat of their fiercest foe, India’s victory in Bangladesh in 1971 was regarded inside the country, and in many circles internationally, as an undeniably just war, where good had triumphed evil.
In the aftermath, Mrs Gandhi’s personal popularity across India reached cult levels. In parliament she was praised as a new Durga, the Hindu warrior goddess, and likened to Shakti, the manifestation of female power. That year marked a change in Mrs Gandhi, and emboldened her to act with cold-blooded decisiveness when it came to annexing the small independent Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim just four years later. “The Prime Minister had become very arrogant,” recalled one of her aides. “She loved being called Durga. The Bangladesh victory was the turning point.”
It is hard to see Mrs Gandhi as a guardian of human rights. Her own record in fighting insurgents in Mizoram, Nagaland, and in the suspensions of Indian democracy in the Emergency, shows little commitment to such ideals.
As for Nixon, in spite of his fierce hatred of India, he could see the bigger strategic picture. The Bangladesh Liberation War was just one crisis in just one part of the world, where the US was played a losing hand.
Although Nixon’s role in 1971 should be seen in the wider context of perhaps his greatest foreign policy success – the initiation of China into the global community – it does little to burnish a tattered foreign policy reputation.
Bass writes:
“Bangladesh ought to rank with Vietnam and Cambodia among the darkest incidents in Nixon’s presidency and the entire Cold War. But few Americans today remember anything about these atrocities, let alone about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s support for the government that was committing them. […] Faraway, poor, brown – the place is all too easily ignored or mocked.”
America’s actions in 1971 have not been forgotten in Bangladesh. Archer K. Blood, US Consul General in Dacca in 1971, recounts in his book The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh, a speech given by former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina decades later, where she “spoke with her gratitude of the countries which had been helpful to the Bangladesh struggle for independence. I thought it interesting that in this connection she cited India, Russia, Britain and Japan but used the phrase “the people of the US”.”
In an article written for Sampan’s magazine, Indian historian and author of December in Dacca who accompanied Sampan’s Bengal Rising tour in Bangladesh, argues that:
“1971 and its immediate aftermath represented a huge feel-good period for the new nation of Bangladesh, and for India. This was particularly true since it was accomplished in the teeth of American official obfuscation and denial, for abominable Cold War reasons. But the feel-good sense did not last, in either Bangladesh or India. Both countries have had to deal with significant traumas in the decades since then, Bangladesh more recently. The fading memory, in countries whose populations are both dominated by people too young to remember the period, is understandable.”
Even so, Nair writes, the war remains inappropriately remembered, both historically and in terms of popular media and culture. When remembered at all, it tends to be as a victory over an old foe, rather than the validation and remembrance of the high principles that both Bangladesh and India were founded on.
The books by Raghavan and Bass, and the sources from Washington and Delhi from which they draw upon, should act as call for a timely, closer look at the birth of Bangladesh, and the political characters that carried it to term.
This article has drawn heavily on work of others, principally: 1971 by Srinath Raghavan, The Blood Telegram by Gary J. Bass, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh by Archer K. Blood, and December in Dacca by K.S. Nair. Nair accompanies Sampan’s Bengal Rising tour in Bangladesh in December. Come join us.
