The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 4: Casus Belli

==== INTRO =====

Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to Part 4 of a multi-part series on the 1971 Bangladesh War.

It goes without saying, if you haven’t listened to Parts 1, 2, and 3 yet, I’d highly recommend you do that first. We are deep into our story at this point – approaching the home stretch - and without all that context, you might find yourself struggling to follow along.

But before we dive right back into the narrative, y’all know the drill. Let’s take a few quick minutes to refresh our brains and remind ourselves what happened last episode.

In Part 3 – A Man Named Blood, the political/constitutional crisis in Pakistan finally boiled over into full-scale, military-grade violence. After months of circular arguments and rancid negotiations with the Awami League, Pakistan’s dictator, President Yahya Khan, had had enough. The time for talking was over; he was going to teach the Bengalis a lesson that their grandchildren’s grandchildren would never forget.

And so, on March 25^th, 1971, Yahya launched Operation Searchlight, a coordinated Army crackdown across East Pakistan. Under a pale, pearlescent moon, West Pakistani soldiers shot, hacked, burned and blasted their way through 24 square blocks of Dacca.

The leader of the Awami League and would-be Prime Minister of Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was arrested, cuffed, and dumped in a black site somewhere in the Punjab. Meanwhile, Dacca University, a key nerve center for Bengali nationalism, was raided and sacked. As many as 500 students and faculty members were murdered in their living quarters.

When a red sun rose the next day, Mujib’s power base had been all but dismantled. The Awami League was dead, and Dacca was its funeral pyre. That evening, Yahya read its obituary to the nation, painting Mujib and his movement as a traitorous band of secessionists. Rebels, terrorists, and ‘miscreants’, all. While he bloviated into a microphone, bulldozers were piling fresh, steaming earth over mass graves in Bengal.

AUDIO: Walter Cronkite: “…In a radio broadcast, Yahya Khan accused East Pakistan’s leader of treason and ordered the army to take steps necessary to restore the authority of the government. An independent radio station, voice of Bengal, broadcast that Rahman has declared east Pakistan an independent nation.”

And so, after spending a very, very long night in Dacca, we then turned our attention to the international response – specifically, the American response. The United States, after all, was a key ally and benefactor to Pakistan, ideally placed - and some would say morally obligated - to pump the brakes on this ongoing atrocity…and yet, Uncle Sam chose to sit on his star-spangled hands.

American foreign policy has always been what you might call…schizophrenic; perpetually torn between two competing impulses: Idealism and pragmatism. Americans want to save the world, but not at the expense of our own power, plans, or prosperity. And when it came to Bangladesh, therein lay the rub.

That fundamental contradiction between doing the right thing and doing the convenient thing was illustrated through the actions of two American diplomats in 1971: Dr Henry Kissinger and Archer Blood. Last episode, we spent a lot of time with these two guys, and on paper, they were quite similar. Both men were 48 years old at the time. Both were intelligent, dedicated, and patriotic public servants. And yet, their reactions to the crisis in East Pakistan were diametrically opposed.

Archer Blood, the American Consul General in Dacca, was disgusted and enraged by what he saw during Operation Searchlight. In his eyes, Yahya Khan was committing genocide and calling it justice. So, as the Pakistan Army burned and butchered its way through Bengal, Blood and his team on the ground barely slept, gathering evidence and sending a flurry of cables home to Washington using a secret transmitter they had hidden from Yahya’s government. To drive home the gravity of the situation, Blood officially invoked the dread word “genocide” to shock his audience into action. Archer Blood hoped that President Richard Nixon would be moved by the overwhelming evidence, and use his considerable leverage to yank Yahya’s chain.

But someone else had Nixon’s ear.

The President’s most trusted confidante, National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger, counseled against any intervention in East Pakistan. Some might’ve thought that Kissinger, of all people, would be able to summon empathy for the Bengalis as they experienced what amounted to an ethnic cleansing. Kissinger was, of course, a Jewish immigrant from Germany; no stranger to the unspeakable cost of genocidal regimes. As a teenager, Kissinger just barely managed to escape the long arm/fingers of Hitler’s Holocaust; his extended family, however, was not so lucky; they were gassed, shot or starved in the camps. Yes, if anyone could understand the plight of a refugee, it was Henry Kissinger – but the good doctor’s response was as flat and cool as a slab of granite.

Archer Blood could rant and rage and gnash his teeth. He had that luxury. It was the privilege (and comfort) of moral certainty. But Henry Kissinger, in the words of one writer, knew that the world was “painted in unsatisfying grays, not self-righteous blacks and white”

Nothing happens in a vacuum, not even genocide. As Kissinger said: “Foreign policy is a seamless web.”Carelessly disturb/pluck one strand over here, and it might unleash a greater disaster somewhere else. Where Archer Blood saw an inexcusable tide of human suffering, Kissinger saw an equation – and the math was clear as day. Helping the Bengalis was the right thing to do, but it would upset the larger, long-term goals of the United States, and therefore, it was the wrong thing to do.

In the spring of 1971, there were bigger stakes looming in Kissinger’s mind.

At the time, the Nixon administration was secretly negotiating the political deal of the century. After many long years of isolation and aggression, Communist China was finally willing to talk with the United States, willing to receive an American official for the first time 20 years.  If Nixon and Kissinger could pull this off – could open the door to China? It’d be one of the greatest accomplishments of the entire Cold War. As the writer Srinath Raghavan explains:

“By crafting a new relationship with China, Nixon and Kissinger hoped to transform the bilateral relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union into a triangular one, and to leverage this new equilibrium into arranging an honorable exit from Vietnam and preserving America’s wider global interests.”

And unfortunately for the Bengalis, the linchpin of that delicate dialogue was none other than President Yahya Khan. Yahya was the secret intermediary between America and China, the sole conduit for a series of letters between President Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong; Hard-drinking, twisty-eyebrowed Yahya Khan was the only person on earth whom both Nixon and Mao trusted to be their courier.  

Therefore, in Henry Kissinger’s eyes, Yahya and his government were indispensable….at least for now. If President Nixon were to publicly slap Yahya’s hand for the sake of a few East Pakistanis, it would look very, very bad to the Chinese. The elderly Chairman Mao would bare his rotten teeth say, ‘See? I knew it. Americans cannot be trusted. If they will not support their friends in dark times, how do you think they’ll treat us? The talks are off. What a shame. See you in another 20 years.”

“We had to demonstrate to China we were a reliable government to deal with,” said a former Kissinger staffer, “We had to show China that we respect a mutual friend.”

And so, Nixon and Kissinger, wary of alienating Yahya and by extension the Chinese, chose to look the other way; to avert their eyes from Operation Searchlight. To do, basically, nothing. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“They did not urge caution or impose conditions that might have discouraged the Pakistani military government from butchering its own citizenry. They did not threaten the loss of U.S. support or even sanctions if Pakistan took the wrong course. They allowed the army to sweep aside the results of Pakistan’s first truly free and fair democratic election, without even suggesting that the military strongmen try to work out a power-sharing deal with the Bengali leadership that had won the vote. They did not ask that Pakistan refrain from using U.S. weaponry to slaughter civilians, even though that could have impeded the military’s rampage, and might have deterred the army. There was no public condemnation—nor even a private threat of it—from the president, the secretary of state, or other senior officials. The administration almost entirely contented itself with making gentle, token suggestions behind closed doors that Pakistan might lessen its brutality.”

It was a shameless strategy/ tilt/ position that turned the stomach of one Archer Blood, the Consul General back in Dacca. On April 6^th, Blood’s team sent a blistering, final fuck-you back to Washington in the form of an official dissent cable. The Blood Telegram, as it came to be known, denounced America’s complicity in Yahya’s massacre in the strongest possible terms. In the telegram, Blood and his team accused the Nixon administration of ‘moral bankruptcy”, an assessment that has only been vindicated by the sobering distance of time. As Gary J Bass writes:

“A small number of atrocities are so awful that they stand outside of the normal day-to-day flow of diplomacy: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. When we think of U.S. leaders failing the test of decency in such moments, we usually think of uncaring disengagement: Franklin Roosevelt fighting World War II without taking serious steps to try to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet, or Bill Clinton standing idly by during the Rwandan genocide. But Pakistan’s slaughter of its Bengalis in 1971 is starkly different. Here the United States was allied with the killers. The White House was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. There was no question about whether the United States should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf of a military dictatorship decimating its own people. This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in U.S. foreign policy.”

To quote the late, great author John le Carre:

“Some things are necessary evils; some things are more evil than necessary.”

When it came to Bangladesh, Archer Blood may have been firmly on the moral high ground, but he could not hide from the rising flood of Kissinger’s revenge. Just a few weeks after he’d sent the infamous Telegram, Blood was unceremoniously canned and recalled to Washington. Blood was eventually honored with the Christian A. Herter Award for "extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, integrity, intellectual courage and creative dissent", but it provided little comfort to his broken, battered career. Archer Blood’s part in this story was over.

And as for Henry Kissinger? Well – he certainly didn’t lose any sleep over Operation Searchlight.

As he told the journalist Oriana Fallaci a couple years later, “The consequences of what I do, I mean the public’s judgment[s], have never bothered me.” No, he was on to bigger and better things. China was still singing its siren song from across the water, and Kissinger was determined to broker a deal that would secure his place in history.

->

The Bengalis meanwhile, had to look elsewhere for help. America would not intervene, but another regional power was being pulled into the fray. Every day, thousands and thousands and thousands of refugees from East Pakistan were spilling across the border into India. India, of course, was a longtime rival and sworn adversary of Pakistan, and they were not going to tolerate a mass migration into their territory.

In Delhi, the giant was beginning to stir; and anyone with a half a brain and a history book could tell…war was coming. As one writer (Srinath) put, “the summer of 1971 in South Asia seemed to have shades of the summer of 1914 in Europe.”

So now that we’re all caught up and ready to roll, we can jump into the next chapter of our story.

Today’s episode takes its title from a Latin phrase that means ‘cause for war’ or “occasion for war” – Casus Belli. As Pakistan and India hurtle towards a confrontation, we’re going to be examining the justifications, rationale, and motives that eventually drew the two nations into a hot conflict. This one’s a mile-a-minute, with lots of ground to cover, but I think you’re really gonna enjoy it.

So without further ado,

Welcome to The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 4: Casus Belli  

==== BEGIN =====

It’s May 27^th, 1964.

Seven years before Operation Searchlight.

We’re in Delhi, the capital of India.

On a normal day, Delhi is one of the liveliest cities in the world – the oldest, grandest metropolis in the world's largest democracy. For three thousand years, Delhi has been the seat of kingdoms, sultanates, and empires – a place of power, where power is always shifting.

Over the centuries, many different flags have flown over Delhi, and everywhere you look, there are traces, stubborn echoes of those long-dead regimes. The imposing Red Fort, with its sandstone battlements, was erected and perfected by the Mughal emperors. The roads, railways and telegraph systems, were laid down by the British/colonial conquerors who supplanted them. And deep down in the earth, beneath temples and post offices and food stalls, bones of nameless kings lay undisturbed. Like tree rings, each layer of earth marks a fallen dynasty, a forgotten story.

But on this fine spring day in 1964, only one flag flies over Delhi. It is green and orange and white – with a blue chakra wheel at its center. The flag of the nation of India, free and independent and no longer thrall to vampiric colonial powers. After a grueling struggle for independence, the British Raj is long gone, formally evicted back in 1947.

But starting a brand-new country from scratch is not all sunshine and samosas. In the early days of independence, India faced an array of crippling problems: Ubiquitous poverty, single-digit literacy rates, high mortality, and a wobbly economy. Pundits in Washington and Moscow wondered if the world’s newest and largest democracy would simply collapse back into chaos.

Hardly a first for the third world.

But India defied the odds/critics, and that was largely due to the leadership of one man. A man who, in the 17 years since independence, helped guide his country through all the strife, all the uncertainty, all the growing pains of nationhood. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru – the first Prime Minister of India.

That’s Jawaharlal - J-A-W-A-H-A-R-L-A-L; Nehru-. N-E-H-R-U.

For those of you who have already listened to our six-part series on the 1947 Partition of India, the name “Jawaharlal Nehru’ will be very familiar. Nehru was the principal character, and arguably the protagonist, of that series.

It was Nehru who, alongside the famous Mohandas Gandhi, guided his people down the perilous road to independence. It was Nehru who sparred with the future founder of Pakistan, Muhammed Ali Jinnah in bitter negotiations with British officials. It was Nehru who confronted armed gangs in the streets of Delhi during the darkest days of Partition, risking his life to protect Muslim targets of mob violence.

And it was Nehru who, when India became independent on August 15^th, 1947, delivered one of the most famous speeches of the 20^th century.

[AUDIO] “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

Even before he became the first Prime Minister of India, Nehru was a legendary figure. Over the next 17 years he guided India through some of its worst crises, and despite some questionable policy decisions, he was widely revered and admired by his constituents. If Mahatma Gandhi was the father of the nation, Jawaharlal Nehru was its favorite uncle.

And so, on May 27^th, 1964, when a rumor begins sweeping through the city of Delhi, most people cannot believe their ears. Prime Minister Nehru, some are whispering/saying, is dead. At the age of 74, Nehru is no spring chicken, but it didn’t seem possible that the man who had dragged 400 million people to their feet could be struck down by something as mundane as old age.

Like salmon swimming upstream, huge crowds of people push and rush and crush through the narrow streets of Delhi towards Nehru’s official residence. And as they get nearer, as they see the police, the flowers, and the somber faces, that vaporous rumor hardens into cold, leaden truth.

Nehru was/is gone, killed in his sleep by a massive aortic rupture and complications from a stroke. In the coming hours, the Indian government moves quickly to organize a wake and a funeral. As the writer Alex von Tunzelmann describes:

“Two enormous blocks of ice were placed on either side of Jawahar’s body, which lay in state at Teen Murti Bhavan [Prime Minister’s residence] in temperatures of 110 degrees, surrounded by garlands of lilies, roses, bougainvillea and, of course, Indian marigolds. The crowds were so thick that cars could not pass, and Nehru’s sisters were obliged to struggle through on foot. His friends came to look upon his sad-looking but peaceful countenance and pay their respects.”

And looking down on Nehru’s body, her face frozen in a mask of grief, is Nehru’s 47-year-old daughter, Indira Gandhi. As the biographer Pupul Jayakar writes:

“Dressed in an immaculate white cotton handspun sari, and a long-sleeved blouse, her head covered, Indira sat beside her father’s body as thousands of people, presidents and prime ministers, peasants and the poor, filed past his body. Many wept.”

Indira Gandhi is about as complex a character as they come, and for the rest of this series, she will be a main driver of the events in 1971. So let’s take a moment to get to know her.

Indira Gandhi, I-N-D-I-R-A, Indira, was born with the last name ‘Nehru’, and all the expectations that came with it. The ‘Gandhi’ surname came to her later by marriage, although it must be noted that her deceased husband, Feroze (Feh-Rose) Gandhi, had no relation to the famous Mohandas Gandhi. Same name, different family. It’s a little confusing but I wanted to take time clarify that point.

As Jawaharlal Nehru’s only daughter, Indira had grown up with a front row seat to the Indian freedom struggle. As a little girl, she watched her father go to jail six times for protesting against the British Raj. As a teenager, she listened to him laugh, chatter and argue with his skeletal mentor, the Mahatma. And as a young woman, she worked closed with him as his secretary, political assistant, and eventual party leader. In short, she was with Nehru every step of the way, constantly at his side, and yet….she always felt like a disappointment. 

When someone burns as bright and hot as Jawaharlal Nehru, they cast some very long shadows, and his daughter Indira felt suffocated by that shade. As one historian put it:

“Indira from her childhood was used to a crowded house, people coming and going, the telephone constantly ringing, as an official hostess she had to take upon herself arduous responsibilities. Her father Jawaharlal was a legendary figure. Presidents and prime ministers lunched and dined at his table. There was a constant stream of scientists, political activists, philosophers, poets who visited Nehru. They hardly noticed the daughter; shy and reserved, she was always seen two steps behind her father.”

To a casual observer, Nehru’s plain, forgettable daughter didn’t have much to her credit besides a famous name. “She was not beautiful,” wrote one historian. In those days, she was not a fiery public speaker, or especially articulate. She was, in the words of one contemporary Indian politician, a “dumb doll”. Even her father - her noble, loving, supportive, compassionate father - seemed to have tempered his expectations for Indira as she grew older. As Nehru admitted in a letter to her in 1938:

“I used to dream that when you grew up, you would play a brave part in what is called public life in India, to shoulder this heavy burden, to help in putting brick upon brick in the building of the India of our dreams. And I wanted you to train and fit yourself in body and mind for this engrossing task. But I am not sure that I desire you to do this now, and to experience the heartache and the crushing of spirit that this involves. Each one of us had enough burden to carry, so we do much good by shouldering the burden of others? Yet we may not and cannot escape from them. But it is perhaps better for us to function in a limited sphere that we understand and to serve India in that restricted field, rather than presume to enter the wide expanse of Indian humanity.”

Mohandas Gandhi once said that Nehru had “the transparency of a crystal”. And his well-intentioned honesty could cut to the bone.

And so, as Indira stood in the Prime Minister’s residence on May 27^th, 1964, looking down at the waxy, wooden thing that had been her father, she felt a complicated mix of emotions. She loved him, hated him, admired him, resented him. She wanted to be him, and yet wanted to run as far away from his legacy as possible.

But some bureaucrats in the Indian government had other ideas. Nehru’s body was barely cold, but there were already whispers that Indira, his daughter, should succeed him as Prime Minister; that she should hoist up the family mantle and give India a comforting sense of continuity. To Indira, that seemed as likely as a raindrop succeeding a river.

How could Indira, or anyone for that matter, ever replace him? One Indian politician said it best: “The Prime Minister is like the great banyan tree. “Thousands shelter beneath it but nothing grows.”

As Indira wrote to a friend in June of that year:

Personal grief is so minute a part of the void he left. He burnt like a gem-like flame. How can I believe that can go out? I feel his presence all around and pray that it may always be so.’

But the light had gone out. Jawaharlal Nehru was gone, thrusting his country and his daughter into an uncertain future. And as she struggled to process her father’s death, Indira might’ve looked through the countless letters he’d written to her when she was little girl, when he was off campaigning or protesting or serving a prison sentence. Mountains of correspondence that she had saved, mementos of a simpler time. And as she reminisced, she might’ve stumbled across one letter dated November 1930. It was a letter from her Dad, given to her on her 13^th birthday. And in that letter, Jawaharlal had told a shy, insecure teenager:

“Be brave, and the rest will follow.”

In the difficult years following Nehru’s death, Indira embraced his advice. It would’ve been easy to retreat into obscurity, to reject the immensity of Nehru’s legacy. After all, as many, many detractors pointed out…she was a middle-aged woman – a widower at that, with two children. Maybe her time had come and gone – if it ever even existed.

But after Nehru died, Indira discovered a burning ambition that she did not know was there. Her father had literally bled in the streets for India; he’d endured jail cells and police batons and political humiliations. What was she going to do? Retreat to the spinster’s tower and say “Well, I just wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have it in me.”

Besides, her Dad had not been perfect. Even shining, beautiful, courageous Nehru had a tenure riddled with failure and controversy. He’d lost a small war with China, lost dominion over Kashmir, even lost the support of some of his closest allies.

No, Indira decided. She would not only inherit her father’s legacy, she would improve upon it. Where he had been weak, she would be strong. Where he had been flexible, she would be unyielding. Where he had been conciliatory, she would be ruthless. As Indira would later say:

“My father was a saint. I am not.”

“My father was a statesman. I’m a political woman. My father was a saint. I’m not.”

And so, she reached out and took power with both hands. By March of 1971, just 7 years after her father died, Indira Gandhi had achieved complete control over the majority Congress party. This woman that so many had underestimated, this dumb doll, this nepo baby, won an overwhelming victory in the national election. “It was the biggest election in the world,” writes Srinath Raghavan, “In the end, more than 151 million voters cast their ballots.”

Yet again, the house of Nehru occupied the Prime Ministerial residence.

As she swept into cabinet meetings, Prime Minister Gandhi cut quite the imposing figure. With flowing saris, inscrutable eyes, and a shock of grey curving through her black hair, Indira could silence a room full of men with a pointed glare. “She could freeze them just by looking at them,” one colleague recalled. Her father had wanted to be loved by all, and that made him weak. Indira had no such yearnings.

“Indira Gandhi was nobody’s idea of a charmer,” writes Gary J. Bass, “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.”

And yet, Indira had a certain allure. An intangible gravitas that was nothing short of magnetic in-person. As a writer named Welles Hengen described:

“At first glance there is something forbiddingly regal about this child of the Indian Revolution. Her long, thin Roman features are severe in repose—she enters the little sitting room where visitors are received so swiftly and noiselessly that I am always startled and slightly flustered—but her imperial aura and my confusion vanish as she greets me in a voice so soft that I must strain to hear.”

In this era of Cold War factionalism and constant uncertainty, India did not need a saint or a doll. It needed strength; and Indira Gandhi was determined to provide it. The nation, after all, was besieged by problems. Food shortages, illiteracy, and terrorist plots. But in the spring of 1971, the most pressing problem of all was coming from right next door…. Pakistan.

INDIA’S RESPONSE

Pakistan had been a thorn in India’s side – both of its sides - for almost two decades. The trauma and violence of the 1947 Partition had made bitter enemies of the two young nations, and time had only infected those wounds / widened that chasm. As historian Willem von Schendel explains:

“Pakistan and India shared a ‘legacy of misperception’ and had standard negative interpretations of each other’s motives and actions. As a result, the two states found themselves opposing each other on any South Asian issue.”

“The successor states in what was increasingly being called South Asia seemed set on quite contradictory paths,” adds historian John Keay, “India’s was democratic, ‘secular’ and avowedly unaligned, Pakistan’s authoritarian, sectarian and mostly pro-West.”

From Delhi, Indira Gandhi and her advisors quietly watched the crisis unfolding in East Pakistan. And initially, they allowed themselves a tiny smirk of satisfaction. / could not help but smirk with satisfaction. Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s wretched creation, the ‘land of the pure’, the fabled homeland for Muslims, had finally collapsed under its own contradictions. All that talk, all that pomp and puffery about ‘two-nation theory’, and in the end, Muslims were slaughtering other Muslims. As one of Indira’s advisors said, nose upturned:  “This clearly establishes the total inadmissibility of trying to found a nation on a religious basis.”

Yes, Jawaharlal Nehru was probably gloating from/in his grave. But as good as it felt to watch Pakistan fail, the Indians were deeply troubled by the plight of the Bengali people.

“Indians were horrified by the slaughter next door,” Gary J. Bass elaborates, “From the high hopes of establishing a Democratic and popular system of Government,” wrote a senior Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad, “Pakistan plunged into mediaeval barbarism when naked military force was used to eliminate the right of the elected majority.”

->

“Our entire country is seething with revulsion.” said one of Indira’s close advisors at the time. Bhutto’s obstructionism, Yahya’s bloody crackdown, the arrest of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – it all profoundly offended the Indians, for whom, writes Bass, “democratic precepts ran deep.”

During the previous year, India had been rooting hard for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League. His landslide victory in the December 1970 election was considered a boon for Indian interests. As Srinath Raghavan writes:

“An Awami League government was seen as offering the best hope for normalization of India’s relations with Pakistan. The Bengalis did not share the West Pakistanis’ obsession with perceived threats from India or with wresting back Kashmir.”

And so, when Operation Searchlight fell upon Dacca, and Mujib was arrested and imprisoned, India’s response was swift, harsh, and categorically negative. A week after Searchlight, on March 31^st, 1971, India’s parliament passed a resolution in favor of ‘the people of Bengal’ and unilaterally condemned Yahya’s violent suppression of a democratically elected majority.

Furthermore, India provided asylum to the members of the Awami League who had slipped through Yahya’s net – Mujib’s cadres and deputies were able to cross the border and establish a government-in-exile from the safe harbor of neighboring India. The Awami League and its dream of “Bangladesh” was not so dead after all.

The Indian government was outraged by what was happening in the Bengal delta, but… the potential breakup of Pakistan offered tantalizing geopolitical opportunities. As writer Faisal Khosa puts it: “India had much to gain from a divided, destabilized and hence, weaker Pakistani nation state.” If East Pakistan became Bangladesh - if Pakistan lost its entire Eastern wing – India’s ability to dominate the region would be greatly enhanced.

And so, for the briefest of moments, Indira Gandhi and her government were somewhat optimistic about the civil war in Pakistan.

And then….the refugees started coming across the border. Not in hundreds, or thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Eventually…millions of people, desperately fleeing the tanks and bombs and bayonets of Operation Searchlight.

REFUGEES

[AUDIO]

“Two months after fighting first broke out in the civil war in East Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of refugees are crossing over the border into the Indian province of west Bengal. It started as a trickle and become a flood. Crowding the camps. Many of the refugees have watched 60 or 70 miles. Arrived starving and penniless, wearing rags.”

“It was Biblical”, remembered Sydney Schanburg, a correspondent for the New York Times.

Schanburg was one of the foreign journalists who’d been kicked out of Dacca by Yahya’s Army - told to get on a plane, or stay and die. But Schanburg didn’t go home to America; instead, he hopped the border, sharpened his pencil, and started writing about the endless tide of refugees pouring into India. And what he saw on those excursions robbed him of his words and shattered his journalistic remove:

“There’s a numbness. Either that or you feel like crying. There was a tremendous loss of life on those treks out. Their bodies have adjusted to those germs in their water, but suddenly they’re drinking different water with different germs. Suddenly they’ve got cholera. People were dying all around us. You’d see that someone had left a body on the side of the road, wrapped in pieces of bamboo, and there’d be a vulture trying to get inside to eat the body. You would come into a schoolyard, and a mother was losing her child. He was in her lap. He coughed and coughed and then died. [..] They went through holy hell and back.”

Schanburg vividly remembered the sight of 5,000 refugees crammed together in a railway station:

“Someone vomits, someone moans. A baby wails. An old man lies writhing on his back on the floor, delirious, dying. Emaciated, fly-covered infants thrash and roll.” Filing from a border town in West Bengal, Schanberg reported the unclean sounds of the cholera epidemic: “coughing, vomiting, groaning and weeping.” An emaciated seventy-year-old man had just died. His son and granddaughter sat sobbing beside the body, as flies gathered. When a young mother died of cholera, her baby continued to nurse until a doctor pulled the infant away. The husband of that dead woman, a rice farmer, cried to Schanberg that the family had fled Pakistani soldiers who burned down their house. “My wife is dead,” he wailed. “Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?”

“By the end of April,” writes Gary J. Bass, “Indian officials in Pakistan were estimating that nearly a million refugees had fled into India’s impoverished, volatile border states of Assam, Tripura, and West Bengal.”

“In the month of May,” writes Srinath Raghavan, “the average daily influx [DAILY] of refugees was a staggering 102,000, with around seventy-one refugees entering India every minute. Even these numbers understated the magnitude of the problem, for they counted only the registered refugees. Many others merely melted into the landscape of northeast India.”

In the first 8 weeks, three million refugees crossed into India.

By July, there were 6.5 million of them.

By September, it was 8 million.

By December, 10.

“The flow of refugees was simply unstoppable,” one of Indira’s top advisors recalled.

Another Indian official remembered with horror: “It was as if we were reliving the Partition.”

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her government moved quickly to establish large refugee camps to absorb the torrent of people from East Pakistan – to provide food, water, housing and medical services; but India was not a rich country, and it wasn’t long before their provincial infrastructure was buckling under the weight of such a massive migration. Like a levee, creaking and cracking under the strain of monsoon floods, it was only a matter of time before it broke.

When asked about his government’s role in this biblical humanitarian crisis, President Yahya Khan’s response was basically… “what humanitarian crisis?”, what refugees?” Yahya flatly denied the reality of the situation. What the world saw with its own eyes and heard with its own ears - that wasn’t happening. Those were false facts, misinformation, Awami League propaganda.

[AUDIO]

“These people who you saw were not refugees from East Pakista….Q: You’re saying that the people I saw coming with kitchens on their heads are not refugees from Paksitan? A: No.

[:10-1:05]“Army has persecuted nobody. Army has tried to save 70 million people of E-Pak against armed rebels of E-Pak, who were excited and incited by philosophy of secession. The vast majority of E-Pak are heaving a sigh of relief. That this movement has stopped because of Army action. Q: to your knowledge, there is no selective policy of genocide. A: No! Utter lies.

Meanwhile, in the Indian capital of Delhi, Indira Gandhi and her closest advisors were grappling with the human catastrophe that had been thrust upon them. “What Pakistan did within its borders,” wrote one historian, “was having a massive impact outside its borders.”

Some hardliners urged Indira to close/seal the border off completely. To forcibly expel all refugees within India and turn new ones away at gunpoint. After all, why was it their responsibility to feed and shelter Pakistani citizens? Citizens the Pakistan Army itself had terrorized and driven away? As Indira’s principal secretary P. N. Haksar wrote:

“Even if the international community concedes to the military rulers of Pakistan the right to decimate their own people, I cannot see how that right could be extended to the throwing of unconscionable burden on us by forcible eviction of millions of Pakistani citizens.”

But Indira Gandhi knew, the refugees could not go back. Not yet. To send them back into the teeth of Yahya’s army now would be condemning many of them to rape, destitution and death. As Indira said at the time:

So massive a migration in so short a time is unprecedented in recorded history. . . . They are not refugees—they are victims of war who have sought refuge from the military terror across the frontier.’

By sheltering the Bengalis, India was taking the high road, crowded with vultures / littered with corpses though it was. As US Senator Ted Kennedy recalled:

“The government of India, as it first saw this tide of human misery begin to flow across its borders, could have cordoned off its land and refused entry. But, to its everlasting credit, India chose the way of compassion.”

But compassion has its costs. The refugees could not go back – that was clear - but they could not stay indefinitely either. As Indira told an interviewer:

“There is a limit to our capacity and resources. Even the attempt to provide minimum facilities of shelter, food and medical care is imposing an enormous burden on us.”

Here’s an exchange between Indira Gandhi and a journalist at that time:

[AUDIO]

“This whole situation has posed a very heavy burden on us. We think they should go back. Q: What would they go back to? A: Has to be worked out somehow. [anecdote]. Jeopardizes peace in the area.”

“We cannot run a country with ten million refugees,” one Indian minister said bluntly, “We have to get them back to their homes.”

By driving millions of people across the border, Pakistan had committed a “indirect act of aggression,” Indira said. And India had a right to defend the integrity of its own territory. 

In a May address to India’s congress, Prime Minister Gandhi alluded to the possible use of force: “if the world does not take heed, we shall be constrained to take all measures as may be necessary to insure our own security and the preservation and developments of the structure of our social and economic life.”

In other words, we’re running out of carrots. And when we do, Pakistan might get the stick.

And so, Indira weighed her options. And none of them were particularly / all that great.

ONE: She could shelter the refugees indefinitely, bankrupting and destabilizing the country in the process.

TWO:  She could send all or some of the refugees back to Pakistan, virtually guaranteeing their deaths.

THREE: She could put forth a resolution in the famously sluggish United Nations, which would no doubt be opposed and defeated by Pakistan’s powerful ally, the United States.

And finally, FOUR: She could choose the military option and send the Indian army into East Pakistan to install an Awami League government, which would mean all-out war with Pakistan and possibly China.

Rock, meet hard place.

It was a hell of a dilemma, one that carried the potential for dire consequences; As Indira said at the time: “a wrong step, a wrong word, can have an effect entirely different from the one that we all intend.”

But Indira knew she could not do nothing. Once again, the words of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, might have sprung to mind. In a letter he had written to her many, many years earlier, Nehru had talked about the challenges of life, how so often, there is no easy path. No clean answer:

“Circumstances have put you on the threshold of life and at every turn you will face a question mark. By the answers your future will be molded. The answers will not be pleasant ones.”

And so, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi picked up the phone and placed a call. If India could not confront Pakistan directly, she would do so indirectly.

The Bengalis were already being given everything they needed. Food, clothing, shelter, medicine. But there was one thing they did not have. One thing they required to turn the tide in their blood-soaked delta.

The Bengalis needed guns.

Lots of guns.

=== MUSIC BREAK ===

It’s July 9^th, 1971.

Three months after Operation Searchlight.

We’re about 35,000 feet in the air, somewhere over mainland China, sitting in the pressurized cabin of a Boeing 707. Now a plane like this can typically hold about 150 people. Bleary-eyed businessmen, overworked stewardesses, and fidgety toddlers wailing over the smells of stale coffee and aftershave.

But tonight, this Boeing 707 in almost completely empty. It is a very special plane, chartered for a very special person, with a very special purpose. As in-flight meals defrost in tiny microwaves, an old grudge is about to thaw.

Looking out the window, his face reflected in the black mirror of the glass, is the puffy, tired countenance of Dr. Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to President Richard Nixon. As Kissinger peers at his reflection, the man looking back at him does not look great. Short on sleep, long on years, and nursing a gurgle of indigestion. But despite his outward fatigue, Kissinger’s nerves are firing and alive; The word “excitement” does not even begin to describe what he is feeling. Aboard the plane, his body is moving at 350mph but his mind is racing even faster. This is, in some ways, the most important flight of his life.

In a few hours, the Boeing 707 will touch down in the city of Beijing.

And when it does, when he inhales his first breath of Chinese air, Henry Kissinger will be the first American official since 1949 to step foot into Communist China.

Technically, the first American to enter Chinese airspace that evening was a young staffer named Winston Lorde, who was dozing in a seat closer to the cockpit. But history, Kissinger knew, does not remember technicalities. This was his moment, his destiny, his triumph. And if this little expedition went well, it would burnish Kissinger’s already sparkling reputation.

->

“Beside Kissinger”, wrote a contemporary Italian journalist named Oriana Fallaci, “James Bond becomes a flavorless creation. Kissinger does not shoot, nor use his fists, nor leap from speeding automobiles like James Bond, but he advises on wars, ends wars, pretends to change our destiny, and does change it.”

And that night, Kissinger might’ve felt a little bit like James Bond as his plane descended towards Beijing. He was, after all, on a top-secret mission.

It had all started a couple months earlier, back in April 1971. On the 21^st of that month, President Nixon received a message from the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, through their mutual friend Yahya Khan, that the Americans were officially invited to send a secret envoy to Beijing. After many long months of waiting, the Reds had finally given the green light.

It was, in Kissinger’s opinion: “the most important message an American President had received since World War II.

“We have broken the ice,” Nixon observed “now we have to test the water to see how deep it is.” 

Ah, but who to send? The President/Nixon asked himself.

It needed to be someone that he could trust completely, someone who carried all the weight of his authority, someone who the Chinese would take seriously. But it also needed to be someone who would not arouse too much suspicion if they abruptly flew halfway across the world. The reporters and the Democrats were always sniffing around, always searching for ways to undermine him; So Nixon’s chosen emissary needed to be capable of avoiding the tangle of PR tripwires.

Initially, several different names were floated as options, but when Nixon asked Kissinger for his opinion, the National Security Advisor put the kibosh on almost all of the President’s suggestions. The Secretary of State, William Rogers, was too high profile, Kissinger cautioned. And when Nixon considered sending America’s UN ambassador, a future President named George H.W. Bush, Kissinger rolled his eyes: “Absolutely not, he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.”

That of course left only one option: Henry Kissinger himself would have to go. Which of course, had been Kissinger’s preference all along. As the National Security Advisor recalled: “Of all the potential emissaries I was the most subject to his control … my success would be a Presidential success.” Kissinger accepted the responsibility with well-rehearsed humility. Well, Mr. President if you insist, if you really want to twist my arm… I (sigh) I will shoulder this burden for my country.

And so, that was that: Henry Kissinger would travel to Beijing to meet with the Communist Chinese.

But first, he needed a good cover story. He needed a plausible reason to be in that part of the world. Thankfully, America had a few things going on in Asia at that time – namely, the Vietnam War. The conflict in Vietnam had been an inconvenient inheritance for Nixon, but now, in a rare moment of synchronicity, it served as a useful alibi.

“[Kissinger’s] The trip would be disguised as an “inspection” of Vietnam,” writes Chris Tudda, “followed by stopovers in Bangkok, Delhi, and Islamabad, then a secret twenty-four-hour visit to Southern China, and conclude with a visit to Tehran.”

And so, on July 6, 1971, Kissinger, select members of his staff, and a few nervous Secret Service agents departed from Washington D.C., bound for a grand tour of South Asian subterfuge.

“During all this,” writes Gary J. Bass, “Yahya was busily contriving an elaborate ruse to sneak Kissinger into China. Kissinger would go to Pakistan, fake sickness, retreat to Yahya’s hill resort to recover, and then secretly fly from there to Beijing. After his meetings with the Chinese leadership, he would fly back and return to public view in Pakistan, feeling much improved.”

It was an airtight plan. All Kissinger had to do was tour some military bases, shake a few hands, attend a couple dinners, and then he’d be off to China. But of all his pit-stops on the road to glory, Kissinger was dreading the Indian capital of Delhi most of all. Like his boss, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger did not like the Indians. They were, according to the President, “a slippery, treacherous people.” And the worst of them all, was their Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.

Henry Kissinger had met many tough leaders in his life, but Indira Gandhi was an especially nasty piece of work. An ice-cold, combative, harpy of a woman. While most civilized people rushed to fill uncomfortable silences, Indira would allow lulls in a negotiation to linger. She would just glare at you, with her heavy-lidded eyes, her thin lips, that ridiculous grey streak in her hair. She must’ve thought it was all very intimidating.

For Nixon and Kissinger, writes biographer Pupul Jayakar, there was “something in her manner,” “an austere distancing, that brought to the fore antagonistic feelings, a visceral feeling of dislike.”

In private conversations, Nixon and Kissinger referred to Indira simply as “that bitch”.

“Nixon’s comments after meetings with her,” Kissinger recalled, “were not always printable.”

But the path to China lay through India, so for a few horrible hours, Kissinger would have to brave the bitch before he could go to Pakistan. The US, after all, could not ignore the world’s largest democracy – not matter how much it may have wanted to. Truthfully, the relationship with India had never been warm, and with Nixon at the helm it was getting chillier by the day. As Kissinger recalled in his own sober style, “US-India relations had achieved a state of exasperatedly strained cordiality, like a couple that can neither separate nor get along.”

On July 7^{th (?)}, Henry Kissinger and Indira Gandhi sat down in opposite chairs for a private meeting in her office. The exchange was, according to Gary J. Bass, “contentious”.

In their meeting, Indira subtly accused Kissinger and the US of indulging Pakistan’s bad behavior. By giving Yahya Khan such a long leash, by arming him with US weapons, they were complicit in the humanitarian crisis in Bengal. Pakistan’s problem had become India’s problem. Bengali refugees were placing an intolerable financial burden on India, one that could not continue, as Indira told Kissinger: “We are just holding it together by sheer will power.”

The implicit threat hung in the air. Chain up your dog; control Yahya - or we will.

Kissinger did not like being hassled and heckled and harangued by this plain Prime Minister, this shrew in a sari… but the National Security Advisor controlled himself and politely replied that all the US needed was a little bit more time.

To Indira, that meant: Give us more time to convince Yahya to reach a peaceful political settlement with the Bengalis. But what Kissinger really meant, what Indira could not know, was this: Give us more time to use Yahya. He is our only access point to Communist China, and once he has served his purpose, he can dangle from a rope for all I care.

In one last grasp at cordiality, Kissinger invited Prime Minister Gandhi to visit Washington sometime later that year. Indira politely replied that she would like that. Her people might not, but she’d be happy to receive Nixon’s invitation.

With that unpleasantness concluded, Henry Kissinger was anxious to get the hell out of India and on his way to China. Before he left, Indian officials invited him to tour the refugee camps, to see the human toll of Yahya’s crackdown with his own eyes. But Kissinger’s staff discreetly deflected: “It’s not really Henry’s kind of thing.” 

But Henry Kissinger did leave India with one parting gift, one special souvenir. As it turned out, he could not stomach the local food any more than he could stomach visiting the camps. Kissinger came down with a case of ‘Delhi belly’ - which is just a cute name for spending a long night on the toilet.

The fake illness, the planned excuse that would allow him to disappear for a couple days in Pakistan, had ironically become very real. But despite his gastrointestinal distress, Kissinger carried on to Pakistan, where he received a much warmer welcome. In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, President Yahya Khan threw a grand banquet to celebrate Nixon’s most trusted advisor.

When Kissinger finally met Yahya Khan face-to-face, he was not impressed with Pakistan’s dictator, or his pointy eyebrows. As Kissinger recalled shortly after the trip:

“It is my impression that Yahya and his group would never win any prizes for high IQs or for the subtlety of their political comprehension. They are loyal, blunt soldiers, but I think they have a real intellectual problem in understanding why East Pakistan should not be part of West Pakistan.”

Yahya Khan may not have been anyone’s idea of a genius, true, but he planned Kissinger’s secret trip with a soldier’s eye for detail. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“To cover Kissinger’s forty-nine-hour absence, they planted stories in the newspapers about the comings and goings of top Pakistani officials to the indisposed American. In fact, Kissinger later recalled, he boarded a “Pakistani plane in pre-dawn obscurity.” Yahya provided a PIA Boeing 707 flown by his personal pilot, who knew to beware of radio intercepts. On board, Kissinger was greeted by several top Chinese officials, who had flown in from Beijing just for the trip. The journey, he later grandly wrote, was so extraordinary that it jolted him back to childhood “when every day was a precious adventure in defining the meaning of life. That is how it was for me as the aircraft crossed the snow-capped Himalayas, thrusting toward the heavens in the roseate glow of a rising sun.”

By July 9^th, Henry Kissinger was shaking hands with Mao’s number two, Premier Zhou (Choo) Enlai in Beijing, fumbling with chopsticks and laughing at jokes he didn’t understand. The discussions, Kissinger recalled, ““had all the flavor, texture, variety and delicacy of a Chinese banquet.”

Overall, the trip was a resounding success. As Carney and Miklian write:

Kissinger got along famously with the Chinese, and now a meeting between Nixon and Mao was in the works. Even better, Kissinger’s trip succeeded in its mission of total secrecy; nobody had discovered the ruse. Kissinger called it one of the greatest feats in the history of diplomacy and international relations. And Yahya got his greatest wish: Just as he’d promised, Kissinger confirmed for Yahya that the United States and China would offer Pakistan their full support if India ever dared to try and go to war over East Pakistan. They sent a telegram to Nixon: WE HAVE LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR YOU AND MAO TO TURN A PAGE IN HISTORY. THE PROCESS WE HAVE STARTED WILL SEND ENORMOUS SHOCK WAVES AROUND THE WORLD.

Less than a week later, Richard Nixon was unveiling the big news on national television.

[AUDIO]

For Nixon and Kissinger, aglow with the pride of their achievement, East Pakistan and the Bengalis and Operation Searchlight must’ve seemed like a distant dream, an unimportant, half-remembered reality/memo. But the rest of the world was taking notice of Bangladesh, and they were doing so in a big way.

CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH

[AUDIO] 1971 Bangladesh Concert – Crowd Warming Up

It’s August 1^st, 1971.

Three weeks after Kissinger’s big trip to China.

We’re at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There are 19,500 seats in this venue ^, and every single one is occupied. It’s a sold-out show; a packed house. Even backstage, the roar of the massive crowd is almost deafening. And somewhere in that maze of roadies and rockstars and Rolling Stone photographers is a dressing room. And in that dressing room, a man named Eric Clapton is slipping into the deepest circle of a private hell.

Eric Clapton, of course, is one of the most famous rock stars in the world. And in 1971, he is at a pinnacle of his fame and prestige - considered by many to be one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. On paper, Clapton has it made. He is famous, talented and rich. But right now, backstage at Madison Square Garden, all Eric Clapton wants to do is curl up in a ball and die. There are many unpleasant sensations in the world, but few of them can compare to the agony of heroin withdrawal.

When it came to the menu of illicit narcotics, Clapton had an adventurous palate. He has tried everything under the sun, and a few more things that grow in the absence of sun. Mushrooms, hash, cocaine, LSD – he’s done it all. But lately, his drug of choice has been heroin.

What started as an occasional thing quickly became a full-blown addiction. “Suddenly,” writes Clapton in his autobiography, “from taking it every two weeks, it was once, then twice or three times a week, then once a day. It was so insidious, it took over my life without my really noticing.”

By 1971, Clapton cannot go more than a few hours without a hit.

“The best heroin looked like brown sugar,” he recalled, “It was in little nuggets the color and consistency of rock candy, and it came in clear plastic bags with a red paper label that had Chinese writing and a little white elephant on it. We’d get a pestle and mortar and grind it up, leaving us with about an ounce, which ought to last us about a week. But we were wasteful junkies and chose to snort it like cocaine rather than inject it, mainly because I was terrified of needles, a fear that went back to primary school. […] “The stuff I was using was pretty strong. It came from Gerard Street in Soho and was raw and pure.”

But tonight, Clapton is not in Soho; He is in New York City, 3,000 miles away from his usual dealer and already noticing the quality difference in local product.

“What they had scored for me was street-cut, with a very low amount of actual heroin in it and cut with something nasty, like strychnine, so that it was about a tenth as strong as what I was used to. The result was that I went cold turkey.”

And going cold turkey on heroin is not a pleasant experience. “It was as if I had been poisoned,” Clapton remembered, “Every nerve and muscle in my body went into cramp spasms, I curled up in the fetal position, and howled with agony. I had never known pain like it, not even when I was a kid and had scarlet fever. There was no comparison. It took all of three days, and not a wink of sleep in that time. And the worst thing was, being drug-free and clean felt terrible. My skin felt raw, my nerves all stood on end, and I couldn’t wait to take some more, to slip back into comfort.”

But tonight, on August 1^st 1971, Clapton cannot just lay in bed and sweat it out. He is here in New York for a very special reason. Tonight, he is here to….wait, why was he here again? What in God’s good name could have lured him away from the comfort of London and his trusted dealer? What possible reason could he have for being here tonight in so much pain? And then suddenly, somewhere in the sticky mass of pentatonic scales and heroin resin that is his brain, a brighter purpose rises from the sludge like a dock at low tide.

He's here to play a concert! He remembers, A very special concert. All his friends are here, all the greats. George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Leon Russel, Billy Preston. An all-star lineup of rock royalty, assembled together for an unprecedented, record-shattering show. It’s a benefit concert, Clapton remembers, an effort to raise money for…some people, somewhere. Starts with a “B”.

“Bangla Desh.” That’s it. He is here to play a concert for Bangladesh. And so Clapton pushes through the pain of heroin withdrawal, grabs his guitar, and shuffles on stage to play music with his friends.

“The 1971 Concert of Bangladesh”, write Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, “was the birth of a new phenomenon in American music: the rock-and-roll charity benefit concert. The idea was as simple as it was unorthodox: leverage the power of celebrity musicians to draw attention to an under-recognized human rights issue and raise money for or ganizations working in the field.”

The genesis of the idea had been a conversation between George Harrison of the Beatles and a Bengali virtuoso named Ravi Shankar in Los Angeles.

AUDIO:

Q: Mr. Harrison with all the enormous problems in the world, how did you happen to choose this one to do something about. A: Because I was asked by my friend if I’d help.

Ravi Shankar, a prolific sitarist and composer from Bengal, told his friend George Harrison about what was happening in East Pakistan. How people were dying in droves of starvation, disease, and Army bullets. Some of Shankar’s own relatives had been affected by the crisis. And maybe George Harrison, the ex-Beatle, with his international fame and stratospheric popularity, could help raise money for a relief effort. Harrison was moved by Shankar’s appeal, even if the politics were a bit over his head.

AUDIO  

“My purpose in being here is really trying to raise the money. Ravi came to me, and we decided to…I came along. I can generate money. The political side I’m not interested in. Any war is wrong. Bad situation. All I’m trying to do is make money to relieve some of the agony. Not interested in the politics.”

So Harrison started making calls, and to his pleasant surprise, quite a few people picked up the phone. His old Beatles band-mate and drummer, Ringo Starr. The reclusive troubadour Bob Dylan. Even the junkie Eric Clapton, deep in throes of heroin addiction, agreed to come. And so, on August 1^st 1971, 40,000 people gathered for two shows at Madison Square Garden to see their favorite rock stars play in support of Bangladesh.

Ravi Shankar gently explained the show’s purpose to the crowd.

[AUDIO] Ravi Shankar introduction

 “Friends. As George told you just now. First part is going to be us, playing Indian music for you. This music takes concentration. I know you’re impatient to see stars, but we’re doing this program because it has a message. To make you aware of a very serious situation. We are artists, through our music, feel the agony and pain of sad happenings in Bangladesh and refuges who have come to India.“

By all accounts, the concert for Bangladesh was a massive success. As Carney and Miklian write:

“The concert was just one of dozens of public outpourings in support of the Bengali cause during that summer and fall. West Pakistan imprisoned a pregnant woman from Philadelphia for illegally crossing from India to East Pakistan to deliver saris. A Dutch man stole a famous Vermeer painting and tried to fence it for millions of dollars in order to give the sum in relief aid. Children in thirty thousand schools across America fasted for a day so that they could donate their lunch money to the cause. Activists built a refugee camp out of sewer pipes in front of the UN, about a mile and a half northeast of Madison Square Garden. They tried to shock the diplomats and ate the same single daily meal of rice and lentils that refugees did, while Allen Ginsberg read poetry. […] Yet none of those protests captured the imagination quite like the Concert for Bangladesh.”

In the end, Harrison and Shankar’s concert raised $250,000 to benefit Bengali refugees. Revenues from the concert album and film eventually generated a further $11 million dollars. Ravi Shankar was thrilled with the result:

`        "In one day, the whole world knew the name of Bangladesh. It was a fantastic occasion.”

It was an endeavor that all participants walked away from with no small amount of pride. All except one. Eric Clapton’s memory of the night is crusted over and foggy, and although he did play well that evening, he was not proud of the shape he was in.

“Although I have a vague memory of this, and then of playing the show, the truth is I wasn’t really there, and I felt ashamed. No matter how I’ve tried to rationalize it to myself over the years, I let a lot of people down that night, most of all myself.”

Nevertheless, the Concert for Bangladesh is considered to be, according to one music journalist: “one of the most important gigs in music history.”

“If there had not been the concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden,” one radio personality reflected,“there would be no LiveAid or BandAid or FarmAid, or all/any of the great money-raising concerts for great causes that there are.”

Such a high-profile event shined a harsh, bright light on the crisis in East Pakistan; the concert did not even escape the attention of the White House and all the squares within. Back in Washington D.C., President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger scoffed at the self-righteous ex-Beatle and his famous friends.

[AUDIO][

To help defuse the rising tension between India and Pakistan, the United States government had grudgingly provided millions in relief funding for the refugees. And now George Harrison and the burnout brigade were getting all the credit.

In any case, the last thing Nixon needed was more attention being paid to East Pakistan. That stupid little swamp was endangering everything.

When Henry Kissinger had met with Indira Gandhi the previous month on his way to China, he could sense a hawkishness in her that alarmed him. The bitch was itching for a war, and a regional conflict in South Asia would jeopardize everything Nixon and Kissinger had labored so hard to achieve. Somehow, they had to support Yahya, keep the Chinese happy, and placate India all at the same time.

[AUDIO][ “If we screw Pakistan too outrageously, and if a war starts there, that could blow up everything. I think we should get a refugee relief program started. Eventually there’s going to be autonomy if East Bengal, in two years, but not in the next six months. If we can defuse the refugee and famine problem, we deprive India of a reason to start the war”

Whatever happened, Pakistan and India must not go to war.

“But Dr Kissinger…”, some of his more courageous staff members might have noted…in a sense, they already are at war. India did not have boots on the proverbial ground, but they were covertly supporting a full-on guerilla insurgency inside East Pakistan. Since Yahya’s Army had fired the first shots back in March, a proxy war had been raging.

The Bengalis were fighting back.

==== MUSIC BREAK ====

It’s the fall [November] of 1971.

About 6 months after Operation Searchlight.

2 months after the Concert for Bangladesh.

We’re on the slippery deck of a Pakistani gunboat, patrolling the cappuccino waters of the Bengal delta. It’s late at night, and the soldiers on this patrol boat are struggling to keep their eyes open. They are exhausted – fatigued at a molecular level. They’re tired of East Pakistan, this rancid, rotting, perpetually wet place, so far from their homes in West Pakistan. They are tired of mosquitos and maggoty rice and the fishy stench of low tide. They are tired of shooting peasants, and chasing rumors, tired even, of raping the dark-skinned women in this godforsaken marsh.

But most of all, they are tired of the Mukti Bahini.

[AUDIO] The Mukti Bahini, or Bengali freedom fighters, who want to turn E-Pak into their own independent republic of Bangladesh. The core of the MB was formed from some 20000 Bengali troops who fled the government side earlier this year after the army’s bloody purge. They’ve been joined by many more. They may not all have boots, but they have guns and enthusiasm.”

In the weeks and months following Operation Searchlight, the Mukti Bahini (M-U-K-T-I, B-A-H-I-N-I) sprang up all over East Pakistan like a persistent rash. And the more Yahya’s army scratched at it, the worse it got. As Scott Carney and Jason Miklian write:

“One could think of the one hundred thousand Mukti Bahini soldiers as a swarm of mosquitoes. The invisible guerrilla forces would give just a touch of resistance at a time. But they would give it at every turn, at every village, on every road. They would harass the enemy at every juncture, but not be so forceful as to warrant a full-scale counter-operation. A thousand little speed bumps all over the country, delaying things by a couple of hours each time.”

In short, the Mukti Bahini are not aiming to defeat the Pakistani army outright, but to drive them insane. They will blow up bridges, sabotage supply lines, and string/carve up collaborators. And they will do this every hour, every day, every week. They will delay, distract and disable, until the tide eventually turns. Until help arrives.

And tonight, all the Pakistani soldiers on this patrol can do is stare into the dark. Scan the mangroves and mudbanks for any sign of these elusive guerillas as their boat squeezes through the labyrinthine waterways. And truth be told, no one on this boat is hoping for contact. With any luck, inshallah, this night will be uneventful.

But those hopes are shattered by the sudden crack of gunfire, and the scrape of bullets puncturing the metal hull of their boat. Muzzle flashes wink in distance, accompanied by the clatter of automatic weapons. The Pakistan patrolmen swing a searchlight into the gloom, and lob a few desperate rounds of ordinance into the tall grass….but no screams follow. Just distant, defiant shouts of ‘Joi Bangla’. Another night, another Mukti Bahini attack. Another blow to the crumbling West Pakistani morale.

A few hundred yards away, sprinting through the dark, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, is an old friend of ours. A teenage boy named Muhammed Hai.

Eagle-eared listeners will recall that Muhammed Hai (that’s H-A-I, Hai) was the lens through which we experienced the Great Bhola Cyclone of November 1970, the calamitous weather event that killed a quarter of a million people and set the stage for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s electoral victory the following month. Hai lost 19 family members in that cyclone, drowned in their own house as he clung to a palm tree outside. 

The last time we checked in with Muhammed Hai was on March 7^th, 1971, the day that Mujib gave his famous speech in Dacca, calling for a mass civil disobedience campaign to protest Yahya’s indefinite postponement of the National Assembly. As he listened to Mujib’s speech on the radio, Hai and millions like him were brimming with pride and hope.

And then, Yahya Khan launched Operation Searchlight, imprisoned Mujib, and drove the Awami League into exile.

After March 25^th, the only thing Hai’s radio played was the Pakistani national anthem. No news, no updates, and certainly no speeches from Mujib. Visitors to Hai’s isolated island community in the southern delta said that something horrible had happened in Dacca. A massacre that beggared belief. The rumors were thicker than gnats, so Hai decided he needed to see it for himself. In early May, he made the trek upriver to Dacca to gather supplies for his village, and that is when he saw firsthand the devastation the Army had wrought.

“The usually bustling market was almost vacant,” write Carney and Miklian, “There weren’t any Awami League signs this time; their slogans had all been scrubbed away. The few people Hai saw darted off before he could ask them what was happening in the city. Only the army was out in full force. It felt like every time Hai turned a corner he came to another checkpoint.”

->

As a registered member of the Awami League, Hai knew that staying in Dacca for more than a few hours was a death sentence, so he got the hell out of Dodge and returned to his island home in the southern delta. On the way, he would’ve heard story after story after story about what Yahya’s Army had been doing in East Pakistan. Fueled by bone-deep bigotry and a permissive attitude from High Command, Yahya’s army had, in the words of one writer, “gone berserk.”

As Ayesha Jalal explains: “Once orders had been given to put boots on the ground and enforce law and order, pent-up frustrations shredded the last remnants of humanity still adorning the hearts of the West Pakistani troops. The ethical dilemma of killing fellow Muslims was quickly overcome. Bengalis were not just black men; they were Muslims in name only and had to be purged of their infidelity. Whatever the reasoning of the perpetrators, nothing can justify the horrendous crimes committed in the name of a false sense of nationalism.”

“In spite of strict censorship, reports of inhuman brutality, rape, torture and murder appeared in the world press,” writes Pupul Jayakar, ”Even ‘children did not escape the horror: the lucky ones were killed with their parents; but many thousands of others must go through what life-remained for them with eyes gouged and limbs roughly amputated. This brutality was to continue relentlessly for over six months.”

A British relief worker, Reverend John Hastings of Norwich, related a story about an Army raid on one Bengali village:

“Women and girls were then put on one side and told they could go home. Men and boys were told to sit on the sand and they were all machine-gunned. Many were killed instantly, others pretended to be dead and then they were all picked up and piled like wood in a bonfire. Petrol was poured over them but when the fire started, they of course couldn’t pretend to be dead anymore.”

The Army’s operations in the Delta took on a stomach-turning pattern. Shoot the men, round up the women. And for the latter, falling into Army hands was very often a fate worse than death. As Time Magazine reported in October 1971:

‘…One of the more horrible revelations concerns 563 young Bengali women, some only 18, who have been held captive inside Dhaka’s dingy military cantonment since the first days of fighting. Seized from Dhaka University and private homes and forced into military brothels, the girls are all three to five months pregnant.

Rape and sexual assault became one of the favored weapons in the Pakistani Army’s arsenal. It was more psychologically devastating than any bomb, bullet, or barrage. “Rape was used to terrorize the populace,”writes former Indian army officer Nitesh Singh, “to extract information about insurgents, boost the morale of soldiers, and crush the burgeoning Bangladeshi national identity.”

Worst of all, it was unequivocally encouraged by the Top Brass. Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, the overseeing commander in East Pakistan, is reported to have said in the spring of 1971:

“I am here to change the race of this bastard nation. Bengalis are enemies of the people. And I will let my soldiers loose on the women.”

And that is exactly what happened. One young man named Asif, who worked on a Pakistani military base, recalled:

“‘One very shameful and painful memory I have is from the army mess. I heard two young officers talking to each other, asking (What’s your score?)” The other soldiers started to respond, shouting, (My score is 20, mine is 15, mine is 10). I turned towards my old school friend, who was a captain in the army, and asked, Score? (What nonsense are they saying? What score are they talking about?)” It was then that he told me that they were discussing how many girls, how many Bengalis, they had raped. (That was how they kept score).”

“Later studies estimated,“ write Carney and Miklian, “that army troops raped 250,000 women in the spring of 1971 alone.”

By the time Muhammed Hai returned to his island community, he was burning alive with righteous anger. For so long, he had felt powerless. Powerless against the cyclone that had killed his family. Powerless against an electoral process that had thrown his vote in the garbage. Powerless against a military that butchered its own citizens and raped women on a biblical scale. Hai decided he did not want to be powerless anymore. So, he joined the freedom fighters. He joined the local cell of the Mukti Bahini.

In his conversations with the writers Scott Carney and Jason Miklian for their excellent book The Vortex, Hai described the first time he held a weapon – not a scythe, not a pitchfork, not a club – a real weapon. In September of 1971, at the local Mukti Bahini headquarters, the regional commander pried open a wooden crate marked “FOOD”. And when Hai looked inside, he saw row after row of AK-47-style assault rifles – brushed and oiled and ready for combat.  Hai picked up a rifle, and felt the weight in his hands. This was the instrument of his revenge.

But life is not a video game/round of Fortnite, and machine guns do not just materialize out of thin air. They have to be manufactured, paid for, shipped and smuggled. And these particular weapons had been provided by a very powerful patron: the nation of India.

Just as the United States was arming the Pakistani military, India was arming their adversaries, the Mukti Bahini. All over East Pakistan, crates were being pried open. Crates full of guns and ammunition, mortars, mines, and grenades. Everything the Mukti Bahini would need to turn Bengal into Yahya Khan’s own personal Vietnam. But they would also need training, money, and operational support. That too, India provided generously, if quietly. As one historian explains:

“India secretly had its army and security forces use bases on Indian soil to support Bengali guerrillas in their fight against the Pakistani state. India devoted enormous resources to covertly sponsoring the Bengali insurgency inside East Pakistan, providing the guerrillas with arms, training, camps, and safe passage back and forth across a porous border. Indian officials, from [Prime Minister Indira] Gandhi on down, evaded or lied with verve, denying that they were maintaining the insurgency. But in fact, as India’s own secret records prove, this massive clandestine enterprise was approved at the highest levels, involving India’s intelligence services, border security forces, and army.”

Publicly, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her government disavowed all involvement with the Bengali insurgency. When asked directly about India’s ties to the Mukti Bahini, Indira responded with a coy shrug, “The freedom-fighters have many resources.”. Privately, however, she was full-throated in her support for the rebels and their guerilla campaigns. Indian military personnel were even permitted to cross the border and accompany the Mukti Bahini in their operations. As Indira reportedly told a member of India’s Border Security Force responsible for training, arming, and directing the guerillas: “Do what you like, but don’t get caught.”

The ultimate goal, of course, was to bleed Yahya’s army white. When winter came, and the monsoon rains lifted, the Indian army could move into East Pakistan and sweep away Yahya’s goons like driftwood. As one of Indira’s advisors put it: “our main and only aim should be to ensure that the marshes and quagmires of East Bengal swallow up the military potential which West Pakistan can muster.”

“If the struggle could be sustained over a period of 6 to 8 months,” Indira commented, “it is not unreasonable to expect that the sheer burden of Pakistan carrying on this struggle will become, sooner or later, unbearable.”

And luckily, the Mukti Bahini were never in short supply of willing recruits. Young men like Hai, who had lost everything and wanted payback, could be found in every village, every town, every crossroads. The ideal guerilla was young man who had hate in his heart, and wanted, needed, to let it out. As one Indian border officer recalled: “I wanted volunteers, those whose sisters were raped, whose mothers had been killed.”

And while the Mukti Bahini drove the Pakistani army to the brink of sanity in the Bengal delta, India deployed a different kind of offensive in the capitals and embassies of the world.

“India dispatched a small army of ministers and diplomats to plead its case around the world,” writes Gary J. Bass, “everywhere from Afghanistan to Kenya to Chile.”

“In May, Gandhi sent out a global appeal for help, accusing Pakistan of “trying to solve its internal problems by cutting down the size of its population in East Bengal.” She candidly admitted, “The regions which the refugees are entering are over-crowded and politically the most sensitive parts of India. The situation in these areas can very easily become explosive. The influx of refugees thus constitutes a grave security risk which no responsible government can allow to develop.[…]

“India frantically blanketed the world with almost identical copies of Gandhi’s letter, sent to sixty-one countries.”

But the international community was hesitant to involve itself in what many classified as the internal business of a sovereign nation: Pakistan. “Bangladesh” was still just an idea; an abstraction. it was not real until the rebels made it real. Then and only then, when the Pakistani army had been defeated and expelled, would they recognize an independent Bengali nation. And so, India was left alone to foot the bill, bear the cost, and absorb the refugees while Pakistan ate itself alive next door.

“In the end,” continues Bass, “India’s global diplomatic rounds proved crushingly disappointing. Nobody was going to put serious pressure on Pakistan—the kind that might have averted a war. Most countries only offered sympathetic words or token relief aid.”

In early August, around the same time that George Harrison and Ravi Shankar were playing a sold-out show in Madison Square Garden, Indira Gandhi realized that she had run out of options.

Since March, it had been a non-stop parade of problems. The civil war next door, the ensuing refugee crisis, a flaccid/impotent international community. And now, the ripe red cherry on top of it all, was that Richard Nixon and his pet toad Kissinger had been secretly snuggling up to the one superpower on this continent who could seriously threaten India’s borders: China.

The Pakistanis, the Americans, the Chinese - they were all in bed together. It was an unbeatable axis, a set of shackles that would constrain her from doing what needed to be done. And what we need to do, Indira thought, is go into East Pakistan, crush Yahya’s Army, and establish a friendly Bangladesh government in Dacca. But if I do that, the US and China will immediately rush to Yahya Khan’s defense, diplomatically, militarily, or god forbid, both.

And so, as she brooded in her office, deep in one of her famous silences, Indira Gandhi might’ve wondered what her late father would have done in this situation. Well, she knew exactly what the great, venerable Jawaharlal Nehru would’ve done. He would’ve charmed and cajoled and pleaded and persuaded….and in the end, accomplished nothing. He would’ve given soaring speeches about integrity and dignity and destiny. He would’ve dug latrines in the refugee camps, cradled dying babies, and given old men the shirt off his back…and still, nothing would change. Not really.

Indira had loved her father, very much, but as a Prime Minister, he did not have the strength to take the low road, to do the hard things, the things that do not look good in history books. My father was a saint, she said – but I am not.

And in her moments of reflection, Indira might’ve recalled another childhood letter from her father. One he had sent when she was just a teenage girl. In it, he encouraged her by quoting the composer Beethoven, who after being stricken with deafness had said:

“I shall seize fate by the throat. It shall never wholly overcome me.”

In that moment, Indira decided that she was going to have to do something drastic. Something that her father would have strongly disapproved of. But Nehru was dead, and this was no time for sentimentality. / And yet, it had to be done. If the Americans and Chinese wanted to gang up on India, to ignore a genocide and coddle a dictator - so be it. They were not the only nuclear-armed superpowers in the world. Indira sighed a weary sigh, pinched the bridge of her nose, and gathered her advisors. It was time to call Moscow.

It was time to make a deal with the Soviet Union.

==== MUSIC BREAK =====

It’s September 28^th, 1971.

We’re in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union.

Under a grey slab of sky, unbroken by sunshine, a black car makes its way from the airport towards the seat of Soviet power, the Kremlin. Inside this car, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi pulls her heavy coat a little bit tighter to ward off the Russian chill. Moscow in September is a far cry from the balmy temperatures in Delhi.

In fact, Moscow is different from Delhi in almost every way. For one, the Soviet capital is impeccably clean, with orderly traffic, tidy streets, and not a beggar in sight. No, Indira knows, there are no beggars in Moscow today, at least not along the route my car will take.

And yet, beneath the wallpaper veneer of cleanliness is a whiff of decay. Compared to the lively markets of Delhi, Moscow has all the charm of a mausoleum. In 1971, the Soviet Union has grown sluggish and stagnant. Like a grand, impressive fountain that cannot pump water anymore, where mold grows freely and microbes multiply in the dark. 

Indira looks out the window. This is what Nixon and Kissinger and all the rest are so afraid of.

But despite the drab atmosphere, food shortages, and stifling poverty, the Soviets do have one thing in abundance: jokes. To cope with its systemic problems, Mother Russia has given birth to a vibrant, singular sense of humor. For every indignity, there is a punchline to soften the sting. One of these oft-whispered jokes concerns the Soviet leadership. It goes like this.

A man on the Red Square shouts, “Brezhnev is an idiot!” He gets sentenced to 15 years: five years for insulting the Soviet leader, and 10 years for revealing a state secret. 

But jokes like that can’t be told too loudly or too frequently, because the KGB, the state’s dreaded and overdeveloped intelligence appendage is always watching, always listening. Russia does at least one thing well – and that is spy on its own citizens.

There’s even a joke for that too.

“A man calls the KGB headquarters after a major fire,” it goes, “We cannot do anything. The KGB has burned down,’ he is told. Five minutes later he calls back and again, is told the KGB has been burned. When he calls back a third time, the telephone operator recognizes his voice and asks, “why do you keep calling back, I just told you, the KGB has burned down!’. “I know,’ the man replies, “I just like to hear it / hearing it.”

But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is not in Moscow today to hear a good joke, or even a bad one. No, she is here to nurture relations with her brand-new ally. India and the Soviet Union have just signed a treaty, cementing a new, everlasting relationship between the two countries.

In early August, not coincidentally a few weeks after Kissinger’s landmark trip to China, India and the Soviets dipped their pens in ink and sealed a friendship of their own.  

“On 9 August 1971, the foreign ministers of India and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) signed a treaty of “Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.”, writes Srinath Raghavan, “The treaty, valid for twenty years, was aimed at “expanding and consolidating the existing relationship of sincere friendship” between the two countries.”

“If either country was attacked,” elaborates Gary J. Bass, “the other would consult to “remove such threat” and “take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.” This stopped short of an actual promise of defense, but, as the Indian embassy in

Moscow proudly noted, was widely seen as a “deterrent warning to both China and Pakistan.”

In other words - India, long and proudly non-aligned, had finally put on a team jersey, and joined one of the Cold War camps. It had been a long coming, too. The Soviet Union had made offers of an official treaty as early as 1969, hoping to establish a client state of its own in South Asia, just as the US had done with Pakistan. But Indira Gandhi, then still a fledgling Prime Minister, had kept the Russians at arm’s length, for a variety of reasons. Not least of all the long, lingering shadow of her father.

Jawaharlal Nehru, in his time, had built his entire foreign policy on what he called ‘non-alignment”. That’s a ten-dollar word that means ‘not taking sides’. As historian Odd Arne Westad writes:

“Nehru was fiercely opposed to the concept of power blocs. The Cold War, as an international system, repelled him. In Nehru’s view, it was in its essence based on European preoccupations and drew attention away from the real problems the majority of the world’s population faced: underdevelopment, hunger, and colonial oppression.”

“According to Nehru’s grand vision of nonalignment,” writes Bass, “India was to stand warily above the quarrelsome superpowers of the Cold War.”

It was, Indira acknowledged, such a typical stance from her father. Honorable, idealistic, naïve. The time had come for India to unshackle itself from the ghosts of the past. But when accused by critics in India of betraying her father’s legacy, Indira’s temper was quick to flare.

“Do not tell me I do not know Nehru’s ideology. We worked together. I was intimately connected with all his thinking. In any case I do not see myself in the role of an imitation of Nehru. If I think it is necessary to depart from his policies in the interest of the country, I shall not hesitate to do so.”

And signing an official treaty with the Soviet Union was the ultimate departure. For better or worse, no one could ever accuse Indira Gandhi of being a clone of her father.

But the new treaty with the Soviet Union provided India with something it desperately needed to resolve the crisis on its eastern flank: leverage. Now the scales were balanced. Now Yahya Khan was not the only one with a superpower on his side / at his back. In making a deal with the Soviets, Indira was hoping to apply pressure on Yahya Khan and dull the claws of the burgeoning US-China-Pakistan axis. If war broke out between India and Pakistan over Bangladesh, it was now much less likely that the US or China would militarily intervene to save Yahya. They would not want to risk a larger confrontation with their nuclear-armed rival, the Soviet Union.

Still, Indira’s government sought to reassure the United States that this new treaty did not compromise their long tradition of non-aligned neutrality. Maybe, someday soon, we could even sign a similar Treaty with the United States! One big happy family. Which was, of course, a bit absurd. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“The magical incantation of the words could not obscure the plain meaning of a signing with one superpower against the other one.  The Nehruvian ideal of nonalignment had imagined India standing aloof from the Cold War. But this crisis had now pulled in both the superpowers, as well as China. With the White House’s opening to China and now India’s Soviet treaty, the Cold War enveloped the subcontinent.”

As the days grew shorter and the weather turned colder, a hot war in South Asia was looking more and more likely.

But Indira Gandhi was not ready to raise the banners just yet. She wanted to be absolutely sure, that if and when Indian tanks did roll into East Pakistan, there wouldn’t be 8 divisions of the Chinese Army pouring over the Himalayas to meet them. And that meant waiting for Winter.

->

“Ever since Indira Gandhi had first asked her generals for war plans,” writes Gary J. Bass, “they had told her to wait for winter, when the Chinese army would be blocked off from an attack by the coming of the winter snows in the Himalayas.”

In the meantime, Indira embarked on a tour of Western nations, a last-ditch attempt to rally support for India’s cause and force a peaceful settlement with Pakistan - without military intervention. As Bass continues:

“On October 24, Gandhi […] left India for a three-week Western tour, including stops in Britain, France, and West Germany, with the most important encounter scheduled for Washington on November 4 and 5.”

As Indira made her way from city to city, press conference to press conference, without gaining any traction with Western governments, she became increasingly angry. As before, the international community did not seem to want to do anything of substance. As Leo Rose and Richard Sisson, write:

“The general reaction in most world capitals had been to remonstrate with West Pakistan over its excessive use of force in East Pakistan, but then to back off by calling these developments an “internal matter.”

By the time she arrived in London, Indira’s patience was threadbare; When a British journalist chided her for allegedly arming and supporting the Mukti Bahini guerillas, she lost it:

“So we should allow the massacre to continue? Do you mean we should support genocide? When Hitler was on the rampage, did you tell us keep quiet and let’s have peace in Germany and let the Jews die, or let Belgium die, let France die? This would never have happened if the world community woke up to the fact when we first drew their attention to it.”

As Indira Gandhi’s diplomatic warpath drew closer and closer to Washington D.C, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger braced for a heated confrontation. When Kissinger reminded the President of their upcoming visit from the Indian Prime Minister, Nixon simply replied: “Jesus Christ.”

In the months since Kissinger’ China trip, and Nixon’s triumphant announcement on TV, the crisis in South Asia had soured their hard-earned champagne high. And the root of the problem, in their eyes, was Indira Gandhi. At every turn, she had done nothing but make a bad situation worse.

This should have been a nice, contained, quiet little civil war. At the end of the day, this was Pakistan’s business and no one else’s. Yes, Yahya Khan’s crackdown had been a bit…overly enthusiastic/overzealous; and the ten million refugees flooding into India were a valid humanitarian problem. But did it really merit all this fuss? Was it really grounds for a hot conflict? As Kissinger told India’s ambassador in Washington: “You can’t go to war over refugees”.[…]  “There is absolutely no justification for it—, “he later told the President, “they don’t have a right to invade Pakistan no matter what Pakistan does in its territory.”

Besides, Nixon and Kissinger noted with indignation. the United States had actually thrown quite a lot of money at the refugee problem in hopes of defusing the tension. To date, America had provided $89 million in relief aid – more than all other nations combined, by the way, Henry - with $250 million more tied up in Congress. Although some Indian critics might have noted that, compared to the $700 million annual cost of keeping the refugees, America’s contribution was pittance, and performative at that.

But still! the Nixon White House groaned, are we not doing everything we can, within reason? As Nixon complained Kissinger to: “Goddamn, why don’t they give us any credit for that?”

And yet, despite American generosity, Indira Gandhi had chosen to escalate the situation. She hadn’t sent in the tanks just yet, and had demonstrated what could charitably be called restraint, but her government hadbeen flagrantly training, funding, and arming a terrorist insurgency inside Pakistan’s sovereign borders. The Mukti Bahini called themselves ‘freedom fighters” and ‘liberators’, but they were violent, vicious rebels, Nixon maintained.

Basically, India was speaking out of both sides of its mouth. Claiming an intrusion on their national sovereignty, while undermining the sovereignty of Pakistan with a proxy war. Taking refugees in with one hand, sending back guerillas with the other. It was hypocrisy of the highest order.

And now, to make matters worse, Indira had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union. Now the Russians were involved. It was “like throwing a lighted match into a powder keg,” Kissinger later said. With the Russian bear at her back/in her corner, Indira would feel much more comfortable invading East Pakistan / would be emboldened to invade East Pakistan.  It didn’t matter if India actually had a reasonable pretext for war - they believed they did.  And as Nixon and Kissinger stewed in the Oval Office, they knew that if the Indian Army marched into Dacca tomorrow, there wasn’t a whole lot the United States could do to stop it.

It might even endanger the budding friendship with China. “Nixon and Kissinger believed that if they allowed India to humiliate Pakistan” writes Srinath Raghavan, “their reputation in the eyes of China would suffer irreparable damage.”

That was why this upcoming meeting with Indira Gandhi was so important. She would be here, in the White House, trapped and on their turf. Kissinger and Nixon would be able to flex and flatter and cajole and placate and deploy all the sweaty charisma at their disposal. They would try and convince her, and if that didn’t work, they would try and scare her. As Nixon assured Kissinger:

“I’m going to be extremely tough.”

And so, on November 4^th, 1971, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi arrived at the White House. The long-awaited meeting was, in the words of Bass, “explosive. He thought she was a warmonger; she thought he was helping along a genocide. Summits are often pretty placid affairs, but this was a cathartic brawl, propelled not just by totally opposite views of a brewing war, but by the hearty personal contempt that the president and prime minister had for each other.”

Years later, Kissinger would remember it as “a classic dialogue of the deaf.”

For Richard Nixon, it was physically painful to be polite to Indira Gandhi, a woman who he had, days earlier, referred to as “that old bitch.” But when they sat down together in the Oval Office, Nixon suppressed the hatred and put on a vaudeville smile. What Kissinger called “glassy-eyed politeness”.

But Nixon’s niceties broke like a wave against Indira Gandhi’s stony exterior. Swatting away his superficial courtesy, she tore into him. America had not done enough, she said. Not to relieve the refugee crisis, not to bring Yahya to the bargaining table, and certainly not to stem the genocide the Pakistani army was waging. Yahya’s soldiers, at this very moment, were machine-gunning innocent Bengalis with American weapons.

Years later, Kissinger recalled that it was like watching a professor rebuke/address a student.

Naturally, the veil of civility began to slip from Nixon’s face like a cheap Halloween mask; Kissinger noticed his boss was having a hard time controlling himself. Through gritted teeth, the President raised concerns about India’s sponsorship of the Mukti Bahini, which Indira promptly dodged, listening with what Kissinger remembered as a “aloof indifference”. Nixon, hackles rising, warned that a war between India and Pakistan would be “incalculably dangerous.”

Nixon finally concluded the meeting with tacit threat: “It would be impossible to calculate with precision the steps which other great powers might take if India were to initiate hostilities.”

In other words, go ahead. Defy the most powerful country on earth and see what happens. Indira Gandhi smiled a closed-mouth smile and thanked the President for his time. And with that, the meeting was over.

Afterwards, Nixon and Kissinger paced around the Oval in a shit-talk session for the ages. The President regretted being so courteous: “We really slobbered over the old witch.”

Henry Kissinger may have been Nixon’s National Security Advisor. But he was also the National Security Consoler, National Security Confider, National Security Encourager, National Security Cheerleader. If the White House handed out honorary psychiatry degrees, Kissinger would’ve probably left with several. Whenever Nixon ranted and raged at the enemy du jour, ‘ol Henry was always there with a word praise and a second finger of bourbon. Yes, Mr President; Absolutely, Mr. President. You’re quite right, Mr. President.

And in the aftermath of the Indira Gandhi meeting, Kissinger had his work cut out for him. Mrs. Gandhi, Kissinger wrote later, “brought out of all of Nixon’s latent insecurities.”

Kissinger knew when to shut up and when to suck up, and he moved quickly to soothe Nixon’s bruised ego. Throughout their conversation, Kissinger dropped more affirmations than a life coach.  “You didn’t give her an inch […] You didn’t give her a goddamn thing. […] You stuck it to her. […]

Nixon, his temper cooling, his confidence healing, agreed: “I hit it hard[..] I raised my voice a little.”

The important thing, Kissinger assured his boss, was optics. They’d rolled out the red carpet for India’s Prime Minister, they’d given her an audience, listened to her concerns, and heard her out:. As Kissinger cooed: “While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too … she will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn’t give her a warm reception and therefore, in despair, she’s got to go to war.”

But despite the silver lining Henry Kissinger tried weave from thin air, the truth was, the meeting had been a disaster. And believe it or not, the second meeting between Nixon and Gandhi the following day was even worse. Out of spite, the President kept Indira waiting in the White House lobby for 45 minutes. “It was a kind of one-upmanship,” remembered one American aide, “Nixon felt he had to show her he was in control. […] “They were standing her up a little bit. You wait for the president of the United States, lady.”

Indira Gandhi did not, understandably, take this well at all. White House staff remembered that the Prime Minister was “totally pissed”, “frosty as hell” and “flabbergasted”. When she did finally gain access to the Oval Office, Indira Gandhi appeared completely disinterested in the conversation, offering curt questions and monosyllabic replies.

“Kissinger later declared,” writes Gary J. Bass, “that these were undoubtedly the worst meetings Nixon held with any foreign leader. […] The main discernible outcome of the summit was that the two leaders of these massive democracies now hated each other rather more. The last big chance to prevent a war had slipped away.”

Indira Gandhi flew back to India. Henry Kissinger fretted. And President Nixon poured himself a very large glass of bourbon.

With a sense of glacial inevitability, the subcontinent prepared for war during the month of November. High in the Himalayas, the snow got deeper and the ice got thicker. In the Bengal delta, the monsoon waters receded and the roads began to dry. From Islamabad to Lahore to Delhi to Dacca, weapons were checked, fortifications were reinforced, and battle maps were unrolled. Even the spires of the famous Taj Mahal were draped with camouflage tarps. And all the while, the world waited with a collective cringe.

But then, on December 3^rd, 1971 something happened that shocked everyone.  

That evening, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was in the city of Calcutta, giving a speech. She waved and smiled and pounded the podium, promising an end to the misery that had befallen the people of Bengal. After her speech, a breathless messenger rushed up to her, pale as a ghost. Indira told him to spit it out. The aide told her that at approximately 5:30 PM, the Pakistani military had launched a preemptive strike – a surprise attack - along India’s western border. 11 key targets had been simultaneously hit by air strikes and artillery barrages. The Pakistani army had fully mobilized for war.

Indira looked at the messenger for a brief moment. And if President Yahya Khan could’ve heard her response all the way from Islamabad, it would’ve chilled him to the bone. Prime Minister Gandhi replied:

“Thank God, they’ve attacked us.”

==== OUTRO ======

Well folks, that is all the time we have for today. We covered a lot of ground today, so I appreciate you sticking with me through all the twists and turns. We’re in the home stretch, I promise. Next time, on the fifth and final episode of this series, we will cover the war between India and Pakistan, and bring all these threads to a nice and hopefully tidy conclusion.

As always, thanks for spending your valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see you next time.

==== END =====