Abstract
The birth of Bangladesh and India’s role in it is a seminal part of the history of the Indian subcontinent. Bangladesh was born through a bloodbath, which took the lives of hundreds of thousands and created millions of refugees. The role of the two superpowers—the US and the former Soviet Union—and other international actors during this crisis remains under-reported and under-studied in the West.
The book under review attempts to address this gap. The title of the book comes from a telegram sent by the then American Consul General, Archer Blood, in Dhaka, expressing his and his staff’s opposition to the US stance on the freedom struggle in what was then East Pakistan. Based on declassified archival material from India and the US, White House tapes and substantial interviews, the book records in excruciating detail the events of 1971 when, after the elections, the Pakistani military ruler, General Yahya Khan, and his troops bore down on freedom fighters. Bass also details how two of the greatest democracies, the US and India, reacted to these events and attempts to explain why they reacted the way they did.
The roots of the crisis can be traced to India’s partition by the British. The partition left Pakistan in control of two territories (East Pakistan dominated by Bengalis and West Pakistan dominated by Punjabis) with India in the middle. Subsequently, the Punjabis took control of government and took over all the top posts despite the Bengalis being numerically stronger. This naturally bred resentment in East Pakistan. Things came to a head in 1970 when Yahya Khan ordered elections. The elections were won by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of East Pakistan. His public support for federal autonomy for both wings and private promotion of the idea of independence for East Pakistan enraged the Pakistan military, which was overwhelmingly manned by West Pakistanis, leading to a crackdown that Bass describes as ‘one of the most terrible humanitarian crises of the twentieth century’ (xiii). The crackdown was genocidal, with Hindu Bengalis being the worst affected as they were considered to be close to India. The US Consulate in Dacca sent details about the atrocities to Washington D.C., asking for intervention, only to be met with what Blood later called ‘deafening silence’. The US Ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, also backed the Dacca Consul General’s reading of the situation although the embassy in Islamabad did not. Washington refused to stop the Pakistani army from using American weapons against the Bengalis, despite appeals. Finally, most of the staff in the Dacca Consulate got so fed up with the silence from Washington that they sent in a dissent cable, recording their strong opposition to the ‘morally bankrupt’ US policy and describing the slaughter as a ‘genocide’ (pp. 75–78). The cable criticized the US for failing to denounce the suppression of democracy and the atrocities. This cable with the subject line ‘Dissent from US Policy towards East Pakistan’, signed by Archer Blood and his staff, is what Bass calls the ‘Blood telegram’. The Blood telegram provoked rage at the highest levels in Washington (p. 79) and led to Blood being reprimanded.
What explains Washington’s silence? Pakistan was a key ally of the US during the Cold War. All this was happening at a time when President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, were using Pakistan as a secret conduit to mend ties with China. For the Nixon Administration, winning over China was important to its plans to win the Vietnam War and to exploit the differences between the USSR and China to weaken the Communist bloc. The White House did not want the Chinese leadership to feel that the US was a fickle friend, cutting Pakistan loose for what it did to its own people (p. 175). It further saw the war as Pakistan’s domestic affair. Both Kissinger and Nixon liked Yahya Khan personally and saw him as a friend. India, on the other hand, was non-aligned and perceived by the US to be close to the USSR. Indira Gandhi was disliked by the Nixon-Kissinger duo. Added to this was Nixon’s and Kissinger’s personal distaste for India and Indians, with Nixon even describing Indians as ‘a slippery, treacherous people’ (p. 177).
While Washington could ignore what was happening in East Pakistan, its neighbour India could not for both humanitarian and strategic reasons. For many Indians, the atrocities in East Pakistan proved that the two-nation theory was wrong. After the Indian media wrote about the atrocities next door, there was surge of public sentiment against the goings on in its neighbourhood in India. Added to this was the massive influx of refugees (over 10 million), which the West Bengal government could not handle on its own. India feared that the influx of refugees could create social, economic and religious tensions in India’s border-states, in addition to imposing a financially unsustainable burden.
India knew that Pakistan would never be able to win a two-front war with India. India also realized that if it was to use the ‘genocide’ as a cause for war, not even China would come to Pakistan’s rescue (p. 93). If Pakistan was to divide into two, India would dominate South Asia. However, Indira Gandhi did not launch a war immediately, following advice from General Manekshaw that India was not prepared for war and should wait for another six months. So it supported the insurgency. Bass records in some detail India’s training and support for the Mukti Bahini and the role of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Meanwhile, Blood was sacked from his position as Consul General in Dacca. Despite India’s diplomacy going into overdrive about the atrocities next door and the need to help the refugees, only the Soviet Union came out in support of India and sent a message to Yahya Khan, asking him to stop the repression in East Pakistan. Even its non-aligned friends, except for Yugoslavia, refused to support India. The US refused to help the refugees initially, although it later gave some token aid through the UN and its agencies while continuing with arms shipments to Pakistan. Faced with the prospect of a war with a hostile US, India signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in August 1971. This made Nixon ‘livid’ (p. 221). Eventually, it was Pakistan which launched the war on 3 December, giving India the high moral ground. The US reacted with fury, pushing through a resolution in the UN asking for a ceasefire. Kissinger even suggested to the Chinese that they amass troops on their border with India (pp. 292–293, 301), advice which the Chinese wisely did not follow. The Nixon-Kissinger duo also unlawfully transferred weapons from Jordan and Iran to Pakistan. Further, the US sent the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India. Despite this, India defeated Pakistan convincingly. Soon after, Bangladesh was recognized as a separate country by the international community. The 1971 war changed the balance of power in the subcontinent irrevocably in favour of India.
Bass is scathing in his indictment of the policy of Nixon and Kissinger, stating that their reputations as statesmen are undeserved. While their opening to China certainly brought strategic gains for the US, it was at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of Bengalis in East Pakistan. The book is also a tribute to the courageous diplomat, Archer Blood, who put his career on the line for truth and justice.
The book is useful for anyone interested in South Asian history. The meticulously researched book should be of interest to students of international relations and Indian and American foreign policies as well as to policy-makers. It should remind those of our strategic thinkers, who openly advocate an alliance with the US, of how the US treated India in what was its hour of need. Bass provides interesting insights into the personalities of key players like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, P.N. Haskar and Indira Gandhi, showing how often personalities and prejudices matter as much as strategic reasons in foreign policy decision making. The author does a good job of viewing the East Pakistan crisis from the perspectives of the key policy makers in the US, Pakistan and India. Perhaps the only weakness in the book is the lack of enough archival material from India. But that is something for which the author cannot be blamed; it is India’s laws on declassifying documents that are responsible.