White House Illusion: Global Diplomacy and the 1971 Indo-Pak War
Excerpt from Anger Management Chapter 10 “A Second Partition, Third Country” Part 2
Read Here Excerpt from Anger Management Chapter 10 “A Second Partition, Third Country” Part 1
“Vorontsov and Maskevich sent reports which alarmed Moscow. The Soviets in turn started leaning on India. Indira Gandhi had to pull out her diplomatic weapons. She sent her trusted adviser and former ambassador to Moscow D. P. Dhar with a letter to Premier Kosygin saying ‘we have no design on the territory of others nor do we have any desire to destroy Pakistan’. She reiterated the demand that Pakistan withdraw forces from Bangladesh and reach a peaceful settlement. Without such a settlement, ‘ten million refugees would not return to their homeland.”
Global forces had an important influence on the outcome of the war of 1971. The US had decided to tilt towards Pakistan, largely to protect their new channel and reputation with the Chinese. Nixon and Kissinger also worked themselves up to believe that India sought not only to liberate East Pakistan, but thereafter also wanted to launch a major attack on West Pakistan to incorporate into India some parts of POK. This inference, based on random CIA reports, fit well into the White House preconceptions about Indira Gandhi and Yahya Khan. The larger strategic goal of fighting the Cold War was blinding the American leadership to the realities on the ground. The US took multiple measures after the hostilities began on 4 December. Nixon cut off economic aid to India, sought to remove the arms embargo on Pakistan, and tried to draw China into the fray. Beyond the objective of challenging India and supporting Pakistan, as we have seen, the US was at this stage courting China to challenge its primary Cold War adversary—the Soviet Union. It wanted to enhance its reputation of reliability for Beijing. Kissinger and Nixon worked to bring every bit of diplomatic pressure on India. They used whatever levers they had with the Soviet Union and China. Kissinger was arguing to Nixon that it was necessary to rescue US credibility in a crisis ‘where a Soviet stooge, supported with Soviet arms, is overrunning a country that is an American ally’. The UN Security Council was ringing with calls for the cessation of hostilities and vetoes to counter them.
The issue was debated in the General Assembly in a marathon session that ran late into the night of 7 December. Both India and Pakistan sent their foreign ministers for the next round of diplomatic sparring at the United Nations. But the fate of the South Asian war was also being determined outside the UN, in some pointed diplomatic exchanges between two Cold War adversaries and Security Council members. Nixon made a clever argument to the Russians when Soviet agriculture minister Vladimir Muskievich visited Washington, ‘If the Indians continue to wipe out resistance in East Pakistan and then move against West Pakistan, we then, inevitably, look to a confrontation. Because you see the Soviet Union has a treaty with India; we have one with Pakistan.’ The references to a US–Pakistan treaty were significant, but a bluff. On 7 December, Kissinger had asked Pakistan’s ambassador to the US to communicate with the State Department and ‘invoke its mutual security treaty.’ However, there was no such treaty in place. The only extant agreement, which had been signed in March 1959 under the Eisenhower administration, pertained to commitments under Pakistan’s membership in the Baghdad Pact and dealt with the contingency of aggression by a communist country.
Under the Kennedy administration in late 1962, the US had given an ‘assurance’ to Pakistan through an aide memoire, of US aid in case of an attack by India. But neither of these amounted to a defence ‘treaty’.8 In order to complete the deception, or simply because he had not studied the details, Kissinger, in a meeting with Soviet diplomat Yuli Vorontsov on 10 December, referred to a secret protocol in the US–Pakistan agreement. This ploy succeeded in alarming the Russians. Vorontsov cabled Moscow that from Kissinger’s language he could infer that this military aid involved ‘moving US aircraft carriers and naval forces in general closer to the subcontinent’. He correctly assessed that the Americans were more interested in the western border between Pakistan and India and may have accepted the fact of the situation in East Pakistan being decided in favour of India.9 The same day, Nixon instructed the largest aircraft carrier in the US Navy, the USS Enterprise to move from South Vietnam into the Strait of Malacca and onward to the Bay of Bengal.
Vorontsov and Maskevich sent reports which alarmed Moscow. The Soviets in turn started leaning on India. Indira Gandhi had to pull out her diplomatic weapons. She sent her trusted adviser and former ambassador to Moscow D. P. Dhar with a letter to Premier Kosygin saying ‘we have no design on the territory of others nor do we have any desire to destroy Pakistan’. She reiterated the demand that Pakistan withdraw forces from Bangladesh and reach a peaceful settlement. Without such a settlement, ‘ten million refugees would not return to their homeland.’ India was in no mood to rattle the cage in West Pakistan and open up a western front giving the Americans an excuse for intervention. Haksar had written to the Indian defence secretary K. B. Lall not to give any impression of wanting to ‘detach parts of West Pakistan as well as that of Azad Kashmir’. India was repeatedly reassuring the Soviet leadership that ‘we have no repeat no territorial ambitions either in West or East Pakistan. Our recognition of Bangladesh is a guarantee against any territorial ambitions in the east and our position in the West is purely defensive.’12 Pakistan had correctly gauged India’s reluctance to open a western front. But by attacking from the west, the Pakistan Army was hoping to relieve pressure in the east, and to ‘buy time for international action’ to dampen the conflict.
The Pakistani army’s concern about an Indian invasion was accompanied ironically by an irrational ‘overconfidence’ in the ‘innate superiority of the Muslim soldier’ and an institutional myth that this human strength differential had overcome India in 1965. This was reinforced by the gendered negative view of India’s leadership where Mrs Gandhi was seen as not tough enough to match the macho leaders of Pakistan.13 As the hostilities ramped up, India asked the Soviet Union to make a public announcement that intervention by any third parties—a reference to both US and China—could not but aggravate the situation in every way. The Soviets were reassured of India’s intentions, but did not wish to make any public announcement. Nixon and Kissinger were now on tenterhooks. The Soviet Union was not stemming the war in East Pakistan.
The new geopolitics involving China was confusing them. White House chief of staff Alexander Haig interrupted an Oval Office conversation on 12 December to say that the Chinese wanted to meet urgently. Kissinger thought this was totally unprecedented and felt ‘they are going to move’. Kissinger warned Nixon: ‘If the Soviets move against them [the Chinese], and we don’t do anything, we’ll be finished.’ Nixon asked, ‘So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?’ Kissinger replied, ‘Well, if the Soviets move against them in these conditions and succeed, that will be the final showdown.’ He added, ‘If the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese and if the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis…. We may be looking right down the gun barrel.’14 Nixon and Kissinger were both inaccurate and irresponsible in this reckless speculation. The Chinese had in fact sent a message to the US to the effect that they had carefully studied the options and felt that the Security Council should reconvene and push for a resolution calling for a ceasefire and mutual withdrawals.
They were thus favouring diplomatic rather than military action. There was not a word about moving against India. Or a posture against the Soviet Union. Kissinger’s gambit with China to check the war had failed. The Chinese had refrained from acting because they were not inclined to militarily back Pakistan, they did not want to aggravate their problems with India and push it closer to the Soviet Union. India’s diplomacy was also working. Indira Gandhi had written to China the previous day seeking its understanding of India’s predicament and asking Zhou to exercise his undoubted influence on Yahya to acknowledge the will of the Bengalis.15 With both the Russian and Chinese gambits having failed, and its appetite for direct intervention lost, the US reluctantly directed its attention to multilateral diplomacy at the United Nations. On 14 December, the Soviet leadership sent a message to Nixon that, ‘we have firm assurances by the Indian leadership that India had no plans of seizing West Pakistan territory’.16 The same day, a draft resolution came up in the Security Council, tabled by Poland, then a Soviet proxy, outlining conditions of the ceasefire.
Bhutto on the telephone and told him that the Polish resolution looked good: ‘We should accept it.’ Bhutto had replied, ‘I can’t hear you.’ When Yahya repeated himself several times Bhutto only said, ‘What what?’ When the phone operator in New York intervened to inform them that there was nothing wrong with the connection, Bhutto told her to ‘shut up’. Clearly, Bhutto had no intention of following Yahya’s instructions. Bhutto went on to make a moving speech at the Security Council meeting and closed by declaring, ‘I will not be a party to the ignominious surrender of part of my country. You can take your Security Council. Here you are. I am going.’ Bhutto then tore up the resolution papers with a dramatic flourish and stormed out of the meeting.17 That spelt the end of the Polish resolution. Bhutto’s decision to walk out of the UN triggered Pakistan’s surrender on the battlefield and a decisive victory for India. The war ended at 4.55 p.m. on 16 December, thirteen days after it began, when in Dacca, General Niazi unbuttoned his epaulettes, removed his revolver and handed it to Lieutenant General J. S. Arora. He then went on to sign the Instrument of Surrender. The speed and scale of the operation made the victory decisive. India held 93,000 prisoners of war.18 The same evening, India announced a unilateral ceasefire on the western front, effective from 17 December. The eventual outcome was influenced by chance and circumstance; it was not what the planners began with. The contingency plan drawn up by the Indian Army did not specify the capture of Dacca as the military aim, nor did the subsequent modifications to the war plan identify it as the main objective or earmark resources for each capture.19 Had Bhutto accepted Yahya’s advice and accepted the UN resolution, Pakistani troops may not have needed to surrender. Bhutto seems to have played a larger and more clever game. Military analyst Raghavan plausibly observed:
Singed by his experiences with the military, both under Ayub and Yahya, Bhutto seems to have concluded that the new Pakistan must be built on the ash heap of the army’s decisive defeat. He was not wrong. Bhutto’s decision to walk out of the Security Council saved the day for India and precipitated the ceasefire, leading to a decisive and unambiguous victory for India.
For the Americans, the creation of Bangladesh was a done deal and the saving of West Pakistan was the illusion of success they created. For Indira Gandhi, it was unthinkable for India to enter West Pakistan where it had no political base, as against Bangladesh, where it had political allies in Mujib and his forces.21 ‘It’s the Russians working for us,’ said Nixon when he met Kissinger.
‘Congratulations Mr President,’ said Kissinger, ‘you have saved West Pakistan.’ Writing their respective self-congratulatory memoirs later, both Nixon and Kissinger claimed credit for saving West Pakistan. ‘By using diplomatic signals and behind the scenes pressures,’ wrote Nixon, ‘we had been able to save West Pakistan from the imminent threat of Indian aggression and domination.’ Kissinger went a step further, ‘There is no doubt in my mind, that it (the declaration of ceasefire) was a reluctant decision resulting from severe pressure which in turn grew out of American insistence, including the fleet movement.’ However, India never had West Pakistan in its sights. In February 1972, Ambassador L. K. Jha wrote to P. N. Haksar about the effort to track down the alleged cabinet source for the intelligence report on the prime minister’s intention to attack Pakistan. Indira Gandhi wrote on the margins of that letter: ‘At NO time have I ever made such a statement. Besides even a discussion had not taken place at any Cabinet meeting.’22 Clearly, Nixon and Kissinger had overplayed the importance of an intelligence source that helped them rationalize their desire to project resolve to China and the Soviet Union. The problem, concludes Raghavan, was not just deception but also self-deception:
The only practical consequence of the aggressive US posturing was to spur the Indians to capture Dacca and seal their victory—objectives that had not been on their strategic horizons when the war began. This was Nixon and Kissinger’s war of illusions. In retrospect, they came across not as tough statesmen tilting toward their ally but as a picaresque pair tilting at windmills.
The day the ceasefire came into effect on 17 December, India’s chancery in Islamabad faced chaos—Pakistan Army guards disappeared and threatening mobs appeared on the scene. However, the situation was eventually contained, no one was injured. Atal and all Indian personnel from Karachi and Islamabad finally made it home on 22 December on a Swissair aircraft. Atal and his 159 colleagues had left behind much of their personal possessions in Pakistan and most of their earnings in Pakistani bank accounts. These savings were not returned till a year later at miserably depreciated rates. They felt bitter about the Indian government being more generous in allowing Pakistani nationals to withdraw their money, move out of their homes and residences, and for Pakistani students to even take exams in Agra. But Atal asked his colleagues to refrain from speaking of this publicly in order not to further aggravate the post-war hostility. The fate of the Indian team in Islamabad had been replicated in Karachi.
K. N. Bakshi, assistant high commissioner during the war, was living in Clifton at the former ambassadorial residence, a neighbour of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bakshi had watched with horror the ‘Rape of Bangladesh’ in March and was put under house arrest along with his colleagues on 3 December, when the war began. Bakshi then spent the next few days in the chancery, sleeping on sofas and eating the ‘meagre emergency rations we had kept for such a situation’. He was eventually shifted to his residence but not allowed to meet anyone, except the Swiss consul general. The officials from Karachi were then repatriated to India along with their colleagues from Islamabad, in the same Swissair flight on 22 December. By the time India’s diplomatic prisoners were released after the war, power in Pakistan had moved from Yahya to Bhutto. A weakened army had yielded power in what was effectively a civilian coup. Atal was even taken for a farewell call on Bhutto on 21 December, now the new President of Pakistan. Atal spoke from his pre-war brief, about asking for the release of Mujibur Rahman. Bhutto countered that the 93,000 prisoners India had taken from East Pakistan should be released as well. Atal softly said to him he would try. Bhutto spun this polite assurance from the departing Indian envoy—just released from house arrest—to mean that India had promised an exchange of prisoners for the leader of East Pakistan.
Three Nation Solution
The complex interplay of global forces that precipitated the events of 1971 did not permit any simplistic conclusion about the inevitability of the birth of Bangladesh. The creation of the new nation must no doubt be located in the larger context of the rapid geopolitical realignment of the era. But human agency and human folly contributed to it, as much as global realignment. Raghavan has credibly argued that the break-up of Pakistan can only be understood by situating these events in a wider global context and by examining the interplay between domestic, regional, and international realities. The geopolitical context of the late 1960s and early 1970s was shaped by three broad historical processes, suggests Raghavan, each poised at an interesting conjuncture. The decolonization of the European empires that had begun in the aftermath of World War II gathered pace in the late 1950s. Then there was the Cold War which had begun in Europe as an ideological and security competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, backed by their allies. By the mid-1960s, the rivalry in Europe had stabilized, but the Cold War had gone global, and its hottest locales were in the developing world. The third and incipient historical current that swirled through the period was globalization, spurred by unprecedented improvements in transport, communications, and information technology. The confluence of these three processes shaped the origins, course, and outcome of the Bangladesh crisis. Against this backdrop, India’s diplomacy had its finest hour.
India’s politicians, military leaders, and diplomats came together to craft and improvise an approach that helped India realize its internal, regional, and global objectives. Pakistan, in contrast, lost half its territory as it failed to manage its internal contradictions or its military strategy or to use the shifting geopolitical currents. An important question to be asked is whether India’s intervention early in the crisis of 1971 could have saved lives. In his first meeting with D. P. Dhar in January 1972, Mujibur Rahman asked, ‘Why did India not intervene soon after the army crackdown in Bangladesh?’ Such an intervention would surely have saved so much suffering and lives. Such an intervention had been proposed by K. Subrahmanyam. In retrospect, concludes Raghavan, the case for an early intervention in May 1971 seems strong. For one thing the Pakistani military deployment in the eastern wing had not yet reached the levels that it eventually would. A swift intervention may not have been as adverse as the Indian military and political leadership had assumed it could be.
The article is an excerpt from the book Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan written by Ajay Bisaria.