The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 5: Thank God, They’ve Attacked Us

==== 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 the fifth and final episode of a multi-part series on the 1971 Bangladesh War.

It’s hard to believe…but we made it, guys.

After a long and arduous journey, we have reached the climax of our story. But before we close the book on Bangladesh, I want to take a moment to say thank you – not only for your words of encouragement and your kind, lovely messages, but also for your patience. I know the wait has been long between episodes; In an era of instant streaming and binge-listening, I totally understand how frustrating that can be. Unfortunately, that’s as fast as I can physically and mentally make them.

Sometimes I wish I could clone myself and have the other guy do all the boring stuff, but let’s be honest, he’d probably just try to replace/kill me and take over my life, so for now, you’ll have to settle for just me. But in all seriousness, I really do appreciate your patience. I hope the wait has been worth it. This series has meant a lot to me, and with any luck, it’s meant something to you too.

But enough hemming, hawing, and hand-wringing, let’s once again hop in our time machines, and return to the Bengal delta, fifty long years ago.

Last time, in Part 4: Casus Belli, we examined the rising tensions between India and Pakistan in the summer of ’71. By that time, it was clear that the two nations were on a path to war, and last episode we charted every morbid milestone.

It’s a fact of life that you don’t always get along with your neighbors. Sometimes they play loud music, or let their dog poop on your lawn; and sometimes, they drive 10 million sick, starving refugees into your backyard. That was the problem facing India in the summer of 1971.

In the wake of President Yahya Khan’s merciless crackdown on East Pakistan, Bengalis were desperate to escape the Pakistani Army. In most cases, they left everything they had behind – homes, possessions, even relatives – and fled for their lives across the border to India.

This put India in a very difficult position. Even wealthy nations do not have the resources or infrastructure to just casually absorb the population equivalent of New York City in the space of six months. And India was certainly not wealthy in 1971. All these people needed to be fed, clothed, housed, and kept healthy – and that costs money. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Billions, even. Like a leaky lifeboat taking on water and panicky passengers, India buckled under the financial strain. One Indian diplomat said that the city of Calcutta was so crowded at this time, that you could kill someone by setting off a firecracker. On India’s side of the border, refugee camps were organized, international aid was administered, but these were just short-term solutions. The refugees could not stay in India indefinitely. They had to go back to East Pakistan.

The problem was, Yahya’s Army had turned East Pakistan a charnel house of famine, mass executions, and industrialized rape. No one in their right mind would willingly go back to that. And no one with a conscience would force them to. Suffice to say, India had some very hard decisions to make. And those decisions fell to the country’s leader, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Indira Gandhi is a fascinating and complicated historical figure. Aside from Yahya Khan and Richard Nixon, she is the principal driver of events in 1971, so last episode, we spent a lot of time getting to know her. “Mrs. Gandhi,” writes historian John Keay, “could hardly be described as ungroomed for power.” As the daughter of India’s first Prime Minister, the legendary Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira had some big slippers to fill. Often dismissed as a vacuous nepo baby – a dumb doll with a famous last name - there were many in India who doubted her ability to tackle a crisis of this magnitude.

But Indira proved that she was more than up to the task.

Characterizing the refugee crisis as an act of “indirect aggression” against India by Pakistan, Mrs. Gandhi pursued a two-track approach to the problem in East Pakistan. First, she dispatched a small army of Indian diplomats across the world to rally support for India’s cause; She hoped that with enough political leverage, Yahya Khan could be forced to release Pakistan’s duly elected leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and come to some sort of settlement with the Awami League. But most nations in the West saw the crisis as a “internal matter’ of Pakistan, not something that India had any right to meddle in, no matter how many refugees they’d been forced to absorb. So, when that international support was not forthcoming, Indira pursued a second, more surreptitious approach.

She directed India’s armed forces to secretly train, arm, and fund a guerilla resistance inside East Pakistan. The Bengali freedom fighters – or “Mukti Bahini” as they were called - were supplied with weapons, money, and operational support from India with the goal of weakening the Pakistani army in Bengal. If diplomatic solutions failed, and war broke out, Indira wanted the Indian Army to be facing a drained and distracted enemy.

To further strengthen her position, Indira Gandhi broke with late father’s long-standing policy of Cold War non-alignment and signed a treaty with the Soviet Union. Since becoming independent in 1947, India had avoided siding with either superpower, but Indira believed that in this delicate moment, her country needed all the friends it could get.

Yahya Khan, after all, had powerful friends of his own: The Americans and the Chinese. It was a triumvirate that the Pakistani dictator had worked very hard to bring together.

In the summer of 1971, while refugees were pouring into India, US President Richard Nixon’s plan to open diplomatic relations with Communist China finally bore fruit. National Security Advisor, Dr. Henry Kissinger was sent as an envoy to Beijing, which was secretly facilitated by Yahya Khan. The trip went very well, and weeks later, a beaming President Nixon announced on live TV that he himself would soon be visiting Communist China, an achievement most Cold Warriors had thought impossible.

The only thing that could rain on Nixon’s parade was a war between India and Pakistan, which in the fall of 1971 was looking more likely with every passing day. Nixon and Kissinger believed that a war in South Asia would make the United States look weak and unreliable, which would jeopardize their fragile arrangement with the Chinese.

So, when Indira Gandhi visited the White House in early November of 1971, Nixon and Kissinger used the facetime to try and convince her that a war with Pakistan should be avoided at all costs. But the President’s stiff smile and Kissinger’s dazzling vocabulary did not have the effect they intended. Indira Gandhi, who could deploy silences like a nuclear strike, gave them the cold shoulder and accused them of making the crisis worse, not better. When Indira left Washington, relations between India the America had only decayed further. Even Kissinger considered the summit a nadir of Nixon’s presidency.

A month later, on December 3^rd, 1971, it all came to a head, when Pakistan launched a surprise attack against India, sparking the war that the superpowers had been trying to prevent. And that is where we left off last time.

This time, in our final episode, we’re going to bring everything to a nice conclusion and learn how Bangladesh first became a free and independent nation.

At first glance, this final stage of our story can seem very, very complicated. Important events are usually taking place simultaneously, on opposite sides of the world, in different time zones, and that can result in some narrative challenges. The pretzel of history does not always twist in convenient ways. But that said, I think I’ve managed to craft a structure that keeps things clear, digestible, and above all, entertaining.

But enough preamble. We have a lot of ground to cover today, (this is probably the longest episode of the series) so let’s jump right in and bring this thing home.

Welcome to The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 5: Thank God, They’ve Attacked Us.

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It’s December 7th, 1971.

9 months after Operation Searchlight.

We’re in a West Pakistani prison, about 150 miles southwest of Islamabad.

Pakistani prisons, of course, are not famous for their hospitality, and this one is no exception. Underfunded, overcrowded, and in dire need of some air freshener, this is where Pakistan sends its forgotten men. Some might call it a correctional facility, but only in the sense that your face will be ‘corrected’ by a baton, or your fingernails will be ‘corrected’ from their original positions.

Within this labyrinth of check points, cell blocks and guard posts, you will find all manner of criminals. Thieves, rapists, killers….journalists, politicians, that kind of thing. And deep within the bowels of this prison, there is a cell. And in this cell, which is guarded day and night by men with guns, Pakistan has placed its most dangerous criminal. Within these four walls, in a space no larger than a walk-in closet, is the most dangerous man in Pakistan.

He is not permitted to talk to other prisoners. He is not permitted to read newspapers or listen to the radio. He is only permitted to pray, read the Quran and choke down his daily meals. And one of those daily meals is arriving now - right on time. Hinges shriek, the door swings open, and the guard tosses a metal plate onto the cement floor. With a grunt, he is gone, and the cell door slams shut once more.

An unwashed hand picks up the plate, examining its contents in the light. Today’s meal is bread so hard and so flat that it could be considered aerodynamic. Meat and vegetables of questionable color and origin. Garnished, in all probability, with a glob of spit. In other words: same shit, different day. Speaking of days, the prisoner thinks, how many has it been now? How long, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman wonders, has he enjoyed the hospitality of President Yahya Khan?

While Mujib chews and swallows his dinner, his nimble mind does the math, and arrives at a depressing conclusion. If he’d been the type to scratch marks into walls, there would be 251 of them on the wall of this cell. 251 days in confinement, most of it solitary. 251 days since West Pakistani commandos had stormed his home in Dacca, shouting and shooting and killing.

Mujib had expected to die that night. But instead, the commandos put him in cuffs, stuffed him into a jeep, and drove him to the military base. Once there, they didn’t beat him or torture him; instead, they served him tea. The absurd gesture pushed Mujib to sarcasm: “That’s wonderful. Wonderful situation. This is the best time of my life to have tea.”

From there, they’d escorted him to the airport and put him on a military plane. Yahya Khan had no intentions of allowing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to stay in East Pakistan, where even a rumor of his survival might provoke a rescue attempt or a glimmer of hope. This disease of Bengali nationalism, this mind virus, it had all started with Mujib. And so, Yahya decided, patient zero needed to be quarantined and contained, far away from the rivers and waterways of Bengal.

And so, for the next 251 days, Mujib had spent the long, lonely hours staring at the walls of a cell in Punjab. 1,000 miles away from his movement, his people, his home.

But the worst part, Mujib reflected bitterly, worse than the dank cell, the shit food and the stupid tea, was that – to this day - he had no idea what was going on in East Pakistan. During his confinement, he had not been permitted to read any newspapers, to listen to any radio broadcasts, not to write or receive mail. He was, in essence, completely cut off from the world.

Thousands of unresolved questions burned in his mind like a fever that would not break. What had been happening back home in Dacca? Was his family safe? Had his people forgotten him? What had Yahya and his army been doing for nine long months? What had that snake, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto been up to? All of these questions were received in silence. He was both literally and figuratively in the dark. Once upon a time, Mujib had been hailed as the next Prime Minister of Pakistan – by Yahya Khan himself no less! And now, the diameter of his entire world could be measured in meters. His days counted in bathroom breaks and plates of stale roti.

Solitary confinement, of course, produces a type of mental anguish that few can truly understand. As Mujib described in his memoirs: “Only those who have endured this form of punishment can imagine how difficult it is to stay all by oneself in a dark room [..] I now begin to realize the truth of the expression ‘a jail within a jail, that’s what a solitary cell is’

The only human face Mujib saw, aside from his jailers, was his appointed lawyer, who in August of 1971, informed him that President Yahya Khan intended to try him for treason against the state. The penalty for which was death. In the end, Mujib’s ultimate fate would be decided by West Pakistanis, in a West Pakistani city, before a West Pakistani military tribunal. In other words, they might as well hang my here and now. Honestly, they should’ve just shot me in Dacca and gotten it over with. A saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammed, spoken 1300 years earlier, might’ve leapt to mind:

“None of you should wish for death because of a calamity befalling him; but if he has to wish for death, he should say: "O Allah! Keep me alive as long as life is better for me, and let me die if death is better for me."

By December of 1971, Mujib’s sentence was almost ready to be announced. After months of procedural purgatory, a final judgement was imminent. Yahya’s final bullet had taken nine months to arrive, but it would arrive all the same. And at this point, maybe death was better now.

But in the days approaching the verdict, Mujib had noticed something….odd. Something amiss. His jailers seemed jumpy, tense, and anxious. Something was happening out there in the world, something big.

What Mujib could sense, but could not know, was that the South Asian subcontinent was at war. India and Pakistan’s armies were killing each other on two fronts.

YAHYA’S DECISION

The war had officially begun four days earlier, on the evening of December 3^rd, 1971.

That morning, in the pre-dawn glow, President Yahya Khan was in a prison of his very own. But whereas Mujib’s cell was made of cement and brick and iron, Yahya’s ever-tightening enclosure was one of his own making. The walls, as they say, were closing in.

As a golden sunrise spilled over the horizon, Yahya Khan spilled a bit of his morning Scotch. Pakistan’s dictator had never been a temperate man, but in early December, in the nervous days before the war, the bottom of a bottle was the only place he could hide from his rapidly expanding list of problems. As his public relations officer, A.R. Siddiqi, recalled:

“Yahya seemed to be slipping deeper and deeper into his own Dionysian world of the two “w’s – wine and women.”

Nine months earlier, everything had been going his way. Operation Searchlight had been a resounding success. With one swift stroke, his army had snuffed out Bengali nationalism and scattered the Awami League like cockroaches. Mujib, the obstinate dog, was whimpering in a cell, awaiting a hangman’s noose. It was nice, tidy, clean. As spick and span as soldier’s cot.

But then, things had gotten…messy. The Bengalis, not having the good sense to sit still and die, had flooded over into India. Millions of them, lapping against the border like waves of refuse. And against all instincts of pragmatism, all notions of self-interest, the Indians had actually taken them in! They’d actually set up camps and tents and medical services. They’d opened their arms to someone else’s trash.

Yahya took another deep gulp of scotch. Of course India chose to shelter the refugees, to clutch them tightly to its bosom. The nation was, after all, led by a woman. Indira Gandhi – Jawaharlal Nehru’s brat. Yahya gripped his glass a little tighter; he could not even say her name aloud, preferring to refer to her simply as “that woman”. But woman or not, Indira’s response to what she called “indirect aggression” had been very effective.

In the months since Operation Searchlight, East Pakistan had been all but overrun by a guerilla resistance. The ‘Mukti Bahini’ they called themselves. Freedom fighters, rebels, terrorists. And they were not just farmers with pitchforks. These farmers carried AK-47s and grenades and anti-tank mines. They knew how to fight and hide and lay an ambush. And they were making life hell for the Pakistani army, nipping and nibbling like a hundred thousand rats. And despite what they told the world, the Mukti Bahini were not doing this all by themselves. They had help and lots of it. They were being secretly armed, trained, and funded by the Indian Army.

Of course, the Indians vociferously denied that fact to any reporter who dare raised the subject. Their diplomats swore up and down and all-around town that India was absolutely not supporting the Mukti Bahini. “But only fools were fooled,” noted one historian.

Indira Gandhi, Yahya fumed, was nothing but a hypocrite, publicly sermonizing about “indirect aggression”, while secretly fomenting actual aggression inside East Pakistan. But…Yahya consoled himself, ‘that woman’ did not have what he had. Pakistan had two very powerful friends. To his west, the United States of America. To his east, the People’s Republic of China. Two very large bouncers, watching his back.

And who had brought them together? Who had facilitated the thaw between the American capitalists and the Red Chinese? He had. President Yahya Khan. For months, he’d played his part, as matchmaker, done everything that his friend, President Richard Nixon, had asked him to do. He’d carried secret messages and translated letters. He’d fooled the entire world, even smuggled Nixon’s pet Jew, Henry Kissinger, into China. And now, he would be rewarded for that steadfast friendship.

When the time was right, when war with India finally came, the Americans and the Chinese would rush to Pakistan’s defense. It was a check Yahya knew he would need to cash very soon, because as the weather turned colder, things were getting hotter on the border.

While the Pakistani army withered in the marshes of Bengal, the Indians were growingbolder. By November of 1971, 12 divisions of the Indian army were camped out along the East Pakistani border, providing cover and artillery support to Mukti Bahini operations. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“Indian troops stepped up their border skirmishes with the Pakistanis, often sparked by India’s sponsorship of the Bengali insurgents. When the Mukti Bahini fought against Pakistani troops, the Pakistani soldiers would sometimes wind up in hot pursuit back across the Indian border—resulting in clashes with the Indian troops at the frontier. India, increasingly open about crossing onto Pakistani soil, sent troops into Pakistani territory in strength on two separate occasions.”

It was, Yahya complained to Nixon “unabashed and unprovoked aggression.” While Indira Gandhi traveled the world preaching compassion and moderation, her Army was flouting international law. Treating Pakistan’s sovereign border as something that could be bent rather than broken. When pressed by reporters, the Prime Minister lied shamelessly, saying that “it has never been our intention to escalate the situation. We have instructed our troops not to cross the border except in self-defense.”

->

‘That woman’ would never admit It publicly, but she was planning to wage a total war on Pakistan. Well, Yahya thought – not if I wage war on YOU first.

And so, another brilliant idea began fermenting in Yahya’s mind. On paper, the Indian Army held all the advantages. A larger force, shorter supply lines, guerilla support, international sympathy – you name it. In a fair fight, the Pakistani army had a snowball’s chance in Delhi. But what if Pakistan could nullify those advantages with a preemptive strike? A surprise attack that would cripple the Indian army before it knew what hit them?

As Yahya said at the time: “Pakistan will repay India in its own coin.”

Another smile. Another sip of scotch. Yes, that’s it. We’ll attack the Indians where they least expect it. Not in the East, but in the West. We’ll hit their airstrips along the Western border, knee-cap their air force, and gain supremacy over the skies. Then our friends in Washington and Beijing will finish the job. The United Nations will do what they do and call a ceasefire, the Indians will be forced to withdraw. And just like that – my ass is saved.

With that, Yahya picked up the phone and slurred his orders into the receiver. At 5:30pm on December 3^rd, 1971 – the Pakistani Army would launch a surprise attack against India.

If modern military history has proven anything, it’s that commanders love to give their operations big, scary names. Operation Overlord. Operation Rolling Thunder. Operation Dynamo. After all, what good is a successful attack if it doesn’t have a cool name for the history books? Not to be outdone by the generals of yesteryear, Yahya and his commanders came up with a very impressive title for their preemptive strike on India in 1971.

Operation Genghis Khan.

With a name like that, you’d expect an unstoppable onslaught of force. An attack so crushing, so overwhelming and so decisive that it would conjure images of Mongol hordes sweeping over the steppes, raining arrows and erecting mountains of skulls. But Yahya Khan was no Genghis Khan, and the impact of Pakistan’s big surprise attack landed with all the shock and awe of a Nerf gun. As Scott Carney and Jason Miklian write:

American-built B-57s and F-86s launched from airfields in West Pakistan and dropped hundreds of American-made bombs all across northwestern India. […] The air force modeled the attack on Israel’s offensive in the Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In that brief conflict Israel launched two hundred combat aircraft and all but eradicated the opposition in a few hours. The Pakistani strike force of just fifty planes hit eleven targets across India, striking as far inland as the home of the Taj Mahal in Agra as well as airfields in Rajasthan and Punjab. Pakistani artillery batteries shelled Indian Army positions along the western border. Unfortunately for Yahya, Pakistan’s imitation of overwhelming Israeli airpower fell far short of the mark. Casualties were light. India had moved the bulk of its air force inland a week earlier. Most Pakistani bombs exploded without doing any real damage.”

->

Operation Genghis Khan was designed to illicit screams of terror. Instead, it was met with a collective yawn. The Indians had been waiting for this, planning and preparing and strategizing for months. And now, Yahya Khan had just given them the perfect excuse to invade East Pakistan.

That evening, as Yahya chewed his fingernails listening to underwhelming after-action reports, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was striding across a tarmac in Calcutta, boarding a plane bound for the capital of Delhi. Despite her trademark bob of gray-black hair and twinkling silk saris, Indira was not really a showy or theatrical person – she was not prone to outbursts of enthusiasm or emotion, but that night a tiny little smile might have been tugging at the corners of her mouth.

“Thank God. They’ve attacked us.”

Those were her first words when she’d learned about Operation Genghis Khan.

Yahya, that genocidal buffoon, had served himself up on a plate. India’s escalations on the border had goaded him into making the first move, and now, they not only had military superiority but an ethical prerogative. The Indian army could invade East Pakistan and crush Yahya’s forces from the commanding heights of the moral high ground. They attacked us first, now if you’ll excuse us, we’re gonna make them wish they’d never been born. As one of Indira’s advisors commented at the time:

“The fool has done exactly what one had expected.”

As her personal aircraft soared back to Delhi on the evening of December 3^rd, Indira’s excitement was somewhat tempered by a remote, but very salient possibility. Up here, in the air, she was extremely vulnerable. Pakistani jets would be scouring the skies, monitoring radio frequencies, and if they intercepted her aircraft, they could and would shoot it down. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, killed on Day One of the war. That wouldn’t make for a very impressive headline in the history books, would it? But luck was on her side that night, and the Prime Minister’s plane arrived safely back in Delhi.

Indira was exhausted, but sleep was not going to happen tonight. There were speeches to write, offensives to approve, enemies to crush. Just after midnight, in the early hours of December 4^th, Indira gave a radio address to the nation:

“I speak to you at a moment of grave peril to our country and to our people. Some hours ago, soon after 5:30 pm on December 3^rd, Pakistan launched a full-scale war against us. The Pakistan Air Force suddenly struck our airfields. Their ground forces are shelling our defensive positions. Since last March, we have borne the heaviest burden and withstood the greatest pressure. Tremendous effort to urge the world to help in stopping the annihilation of an entire people, whose only crime was to vote for democracy. But the world ignored the basic causes and concerned itself only with certain repercussions.

The situation was bound to deteriorate and the courageous band of freedom fighter have been staking their all, in defence of values for which we have also struggled and which are basic to our way of life. Today, the war in Bangladesh has become a war on India.

This has imposed upon me, my government, and the people of India a great responsibility. We have no other option but to put our country on a war footing. Our brave officers and jawans are at their posts mobilized for the defece of the country. An emergency has been declared for the whole of India. Every necessary step is being taken, and we are prepared for all eventualities.

I have no doubt that it is the united will of our people that the wanton and unprovoked aggression should be decisively and finally repelled. In this resolve, the government is assured of all the unflinching support of all political parties and every Indian citizen. We must be prepared for a long period of hardship and sacrifice. “

Although there was one little detail, one little irony, that Indira chose to omit from her soaring speech. If Pakistan had not attacked on December 3^rd, India would’ve invaded East Pakistan anyway.

“We were going to attack on December 4,” recalled Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, India’s director of naval intelligence. “They guessed it, I suppose.”

Two days later, on December 6^th, 1971 – India recognized Bangladesh as an independent nation. In her remarks to Parliament, Indira acknowledged the incarcerated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, still languishing in a jail cell, still unaware of what was happening in his homeland:

“Our thoughts at this moment are with the father of this new State—Sheikh Mujib-ur Rehman. I am sure that this House would wish me to carry to their Excellencies the Acting President of Bangladesh and the Prime Minister and to their colleagues, our greetings and warm felicitations.”

As she spoke, the Indian army was tightening around East Pakistan like noose. The hot war, long awaited and long-feared, was finally here. But the mood in Delhi was equal parts jubilant and jingoistic. “We will break Pakistan into pieces,” one Indian politician declared. Another sneered:

“We will make shoes out of Yahya’s skin.”

==== MUSIC BREAK ===

It’s December 4^th, 1971.

24 hours after Pakistan’s preemptive strike against India.

We’re in the Arabian Sea, about 50 nautical miles off the West Pakistani coast.

It’s late at night, about 10:15 PM, and if you’ve ever been in the middle of the ocean in the wee hours, you know it is dark, dark, dark. All but pitch-black, except for the gentle glow of the moon and the ribbons of stars twinkling up above.

And out in this darkness, carving through the black waves, is a boat. Although the men aboard this vessel would be very quick to correct you and say that ‘no sir this is not a boat, this is a ship; and not only it is a ship, it a warship.

This, you ignorant landlubber, is the PNS Khyber [K-H-Y-B-E-R]. A battle-class destroyer of the Pakistani Navy, equipped with 10 torpedo tubes, 14 anti-aircraft guns, and two 114 mm guns. From tip to stern, she measures 116m (that’s 379 feet, if you’re American); and on a good clear day, her twin turbines can reach a top speed of 34 knots, thank you very much.

Like most ships in the Pakistani navy, the Khyber is an old girl, inherited from the British Raj, but she’s got grit where it counts. And tonight, she is patrolling the waters surrounding the all-important port city of Karachi, a vital artery of Pakistan’s trade network and headquarters of the nation’s navy.

As the Khyber prowls the waves, the sailors aboard are on high alert. After yesterday’s surprise attack against India, retaliation is all but certain. But this close to Karachi, well within the range of air cover from the Pakistani Air Force, they feel a modicum of safety and security. Attacking them this close to home would be all but suicidal.

And then, around 10:15 PM, the Khyber’s radar systems detect something. A ping. The green line of the radar, spinning clockwise, reveals a little lonely dot about 20 miles to the east.

The radar technicians immediately notify the captain. Currently, all merchant and civilian ship traffic is forbidden between sunset and dawn. So whatever’s out there, is either lost, stupid, or an enemy. As the Khyber swings its 3,000-ton bulk to investigate, more details emerge from the radar room. Their system is detecting not one, not two, but three signals – moving fast in tight formation.

Up on deck, ammunition is loaded, and prayers are whispered up at the sky. And in that sky, the Pakistani sailors notice something. It’s tiny little light, brighter than any star, faster than any comet. Over the course of a few seconds, the light gets bigger and brighter and louder. It’s fighter jet, they realize, heading right for them. The gun crews swing their anti-aircraft turrets in the direction of the threat, and in one deafening fusillade, pour a rain of explosive lead into the sky.

But no matter how much they fire, the fighter jet keeps getting closer. For a split second, the sailors wonder if this is some kind of insane suicide attack – a kamikaze. But then, in the final moments, the truth dawns on them like a supernova. It’s not a plane; it’s a missile.

The 19-foot projectile pierces through the Khyber’s starboard hull, burying itself deep within the ship. A millisecond later, it explodes, ripping open the boiler room, the mess hall, and flooding the narrow gangways with smoke. The electrical systems fail, and the lights go out. And just like that, the PNS Khyber, pride of the Pakistani navy, is an inert hunk of steel, bobbling like a cork in a black ocean. But despite the catastrophic damage, one thing still works aboard the ship: the radio transmitter, which the sailors use to send out a distress call.

That signal is picked up by a Pakistani minesweeper, a smaller ship called the PNS Muhafiz. Duty bound to investigate, the Muhafiiz immediately sets course for the Khyber’s call for help. And as they approach its position, they can see the Khyber, burning and flickering in the distance. As it happens, they have arrived just in time to see the second missile hit. The sailors aboard the Muhafiz see a bloom of light, and then watch, slack jawed, as the Khyber sinks beneath the waves, sucking down 222 men with it.

But ships are big, and the human will to live is strong, and a handful of sailors from the Khyber manage to stay afloat, clinging to wreckage and flotsam and a few scraps of hope. And for a brief moment, they think they’re going to be okay. Their ship is gone, but the PNS Muhafiz is here to save them.

But then another bright light appears in the sky. Before the sailors aboard the Muhafiz can understand what’s happening, a missile screams down from above and cracks the hull open with a direct hit. The Muhafiz is all but vaporized, and sinks so fast that a distress call cannot even be transmitted.

Over the next hour, the Pakistani Navy loses one ship after another. The Venus Challenger suffers a direct missile hit and is sunk. The PNS Shah Jahan is also hit, and disabled.

Meanwhile, back at Pakistani Navy Headquarters in Karachi, the phones are ringing off the hook. No one knows what is going on – all they know is that they are losing ships at an alarming rate. And then, from their desks, they hear a tremendous explosion outside, and see a flash of light. In a fog of disbelief, they realize that the fuel depots in Karachi harbor are burning, sending huge geysers of flame into the air. “The massive blaze,”writes Gary J. Bass, “turned the sky a bizarre, unearthly pink.”

The Indian military, they realize, has taken its revenge. Under cover of darkness, four missile boats from the Indian Navy wreaked havoc with advanced surface-to-surface missiles, courtesy of their friends in the Soviet Union. This near-flawless strike was called Operation Trident, and to this day, December 4^th is studied and celebrated in Indian military circles.

But Operation Trident was only the start of India’s retaliation. The next night, and the night after that, the Indian Navy and Air Force attacked Karachi incessantly, all but evaporating the Pakistan’s precious fuel supplies. As former Indian Army Officer Hitesh Singh writes:

“During these attacks by Indian Navy and IAF on Karachi’s fuel and ammunition depots, more than 50 per cent of the total fuel requirement of Karachi zone was blown up. The result of this assault was a crippling economic blow to Pakistan. The damage was estimated at $3 billion, with most oil reserves and ammunition, warehouses and workshops having been destroyed. PAF was also badly hit because its ammunition and aviation fuel was also destroyed. Flames could be seen miles away. India had established complete control over the oil route from Persian Gulf to Pakistani ports. Shipping traffic to and from Karachi, Pakistan’s only major port at that time, ceased. Pakistani Navy’s main ships were either destroyed or forced to remain in port.

It’s difficult to overstate just how bad this was for Pakistan. In a war with India, they would need every drop of oil, every crate of bullets, every able-bodied sailor, soldier and pilot they could muster; because on paper, they were vastly outnumbered. India’s sheer size and population gave it an enormous numerical advantage, as Gary J. Bass writes:

“The CIA estimated that India’s army had 1.1 million soldiers overall, dwarfing Pakistan’s three hundred thousand.”

In the barracks and mess halls of Islamabad, it was often said that one Pakistani jawan – or soldier – was worth 10 Indian soldiers. But that maxim might’ve just been a coping mechanism to deal with the lopsided dynamic between the country’s forces. In that era, India was just punching in a completely different weight class, as historian Ramachandra Guha writes:

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

And so, from the start, Pakistan began its war with India at an extreme disadvantage. But that didn’t mean that Pakistan was a pushover. Along the Western front, in places like Kashmir and the Punjab, Pakistani forces fought tooth & nail for every yard of territory, as Gary J. Bass explains:

“West Pakistan itself was a tough redoubt, with invaders facing highly motivated Pakistani troops in bunkers and pillboxes, defenses such as antitank ditches, and, as one Indian general [Jacob] noted respectfully, a “well equipped force strong in armor.” Indian forces were only somewhat stronger than Pakistan’s there, without the kind of decisive superiority required for a successful offensive. So India and Pakistan became locked in a bloody but inconclusive stalemate, with tanks dustily clashing in the desert or in the mountains of Kashmir.”

To the soldiers fighting in the West, there would’ve been an oppressive sense of déjà vu. This was, of course, not the first time India and Pakistan had gone to war. The two nations had clashed in 1947 and 1965, but there was something different about the 1971 conflict. It felt meaner, nastier, crueler. As Bass continues:

“The combat in the west was sharp and devastating. Death came at every moment: in the dead of night, when a bright moon gave away Pakistani tanks moving in the desert; in daylight, when a twenty-two-year-old Indian lieutenant was killed instantly by a direct hit on his tank’s turret; or in a hurried breakfast, as a Border Security Force officer was eating chapatis when a Pakistani shell came out of nowhere to slice open his windpipe. Indian and Pakistani troops screamed back and forth with the filthiest Punjabi curses they knew.”

But for all its sound and fury, the Western front was a secondary consideration for the decision-makers in Delhi and Islamabad. This was, after all, a tale of two fronts. The real war – the one that mattered - was happening 1,000 miles from the bunkers and trenches of Punjab. The real war was raging in the East – among the swamps and mangroves of Bangladesh.

Even before the outbreak of hostilities with India, Pakistan’s situation in the delta had been deteriorating rapidly. The Mukti Bahini attacks, monsoon weather, overstretched supply lines – it was all taking its toll on Yahya’s demoralized army. As the local commander of those forces, Lieutenant General A. A. Niazi recalled with no sense of self-reflection or irony:

“I found that the provincial government machinery was not functioning. The Pakistan army and administration were completely isolated from the local population and the Bengali officials. The Bengalis were determined to give no help to the hated West Pakistanis. We had become unwanted foreigners in our own country. Markets and bazaars were more or less closed and life was paralysed. So far as Urdu-speaking people were concerned, they were stopped and mobbed at the airport. There was no regular supply system for the troops.

The whole province was in revolt. The Pakistan army was fighting in and around cantonments and camps and these became fortresses of power. Their only link with Dhaka and with each other was by air. All other communications were cut, blocked and out of commission. The rest of the country was under the control of Mukti Bahini, whose morale was sky high and had the initiative with them. Most of the ferries and ferry sites were in siege position. Soldiers could move about in big groups only. Individuals and small parties faced threats and ambush. If anybody dared to sneak out individually, he was murdered. In a nutshell disorganization was prevalent in the military, social, political and economic spheres and confusion prevailed.”

It was true, things were looking grim. And when war broke out with India on December 3^rd, the Pakistani forces in Bengal watched their situation go from bad to unsalvageable.

“Within a week of the hostilities,” writes Dilip Hiro, “Indian warplanes had grounded the entire air force of East Pakistan by raiding four major air bases and had gained almost total control of its air space. By attacking the three main ports of East Pakistan, India’s warships severed the escape routes for the stranded Pakistani troops.”

With mounting horror, Yahya Khan and his khaki entourage in Islamabad realized that their forces in Bangladesh – excuse me, East Pakistan – were completely cut off from the world. In 72 hours, the Indian armed forces had established a stranglehold over the land, sea, and air corridors to Bengal, which meant that the 90,000 Pakistani soldiers there had no hope of reinforcements, resupply, or evacuation.

They were, in a word, trapped.

By this point, the numbers of the Mukti Bahini had swelled to tens of thousands. And they were not green boys or scared refugees anymore. Nine months of war had hardened them into talented killers who knew every grove, river, and tributary better than the Punjabis every could. And while the Pakistani Army struggled to hold its own against 65 million angry Bengalis, the Indian army was closing around them like a fist.

East Pakistan, geographical oddity that it was, did not just share one border with India / touch India on one side, but three. If you look at it on the map, India sort of wraps around East Pakistan, effectively surrounding it on all sides, with the exception of the coastline that empties into the Bay of Bengal. That allowed the Indian army to mount land invasions into East Pakistan from 3 out of 4 cardinal directions, while the Indian navy cut off escape routes by water. And all of those operational thrusts, North, East and West, were converging on one shared objective. One light at the end of a bloody tunnel:

The capital city of Dacca.

Dacca, the Indian generals knew, was everything. If they could dislodge the Pakistani Army from Bangladesh’s capital, the war would be over. Thankfully, their job was made much easier by Yahya’s own strategic incompetence. To counter the Mukti Bahini and their ubiquitous attacks, Pakistan had spread its army out across Bengal, fragmenting those forces into a constellation of little forts and camps and towns. None of these little pockets were concentrated or strong enough to resist the full power of the Indian advance – any threat they posed would be negligible. So, the Indian commanders decided to just ignore those pockets completely, and focus all their efforts on capturing the capital. As the chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, Major General J.F.F Jacob explained to his subordinates:

“You go straight for Dacca. Ignore the subsidiary towns. Dacca is the center of gravity, the geopolitical heart of East Pakistan. Unless you take Dacca, the war cannot be completed.”

And so, the Indian Army moved hard and fast toward the city, leaving the pockets of Pakistani resistance in the countryside to be swallowed up by the Mukti Bahini. As Ramachandra Guha explains:

“The Indian army moved towards Dacca from four different directions. The delta was crisscrossed by rivers, but the Mukti Bahini knew where best to lay bridges, and which town housed what kind of enemy contingent. The Bahini was in turn helped by their civilian comrades: as the Pakistani Commander was to recall later, ‘the Indian Army knew of all our battle positions, down to the last bunker, through the locals’. Their path thus smoothed, the Indians made swift progress. Communications were snapped between Dacca and the other main city, Chittagong. Vital railheads were captured, rendering the defenders immobile. Within a week of war the Indian troops were within striking distance of Dacca. Artillery fire rained down on the city, with troops advancing from the north, south and east.”

The beleaguered Pakistani forces in Bengal realized that all their hopes now lay in the strategic alliances that Yahya had forged in recent months. Time was running out, but with any luck, the Americans and the Chinese would come to their rescues. East Pakistan’s fate rested in the hands of, as one General put it “Yellows from the North and Whites from the South” Meaning Chinese by land, and Americans by sea.

As the Indian army steamrolled toward its objectives in Bengal, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sat back in her chair in Delhi and heaved a sigh of relief. Things were going well – very well. One week into the war, and the Pakistani Army was all but on its knees. Another week of hard fighting, and this whole thing might be over. Then the refugees could go home, Mujib could take control of a liberated Bangladesh, and that brute Yahya Khan would be carrion for the flock of khaki vultures in Islamabad.

As she looked at battle maps, and listened to glowing reports from gung-ho generals, a warm feeling began to rise up in Indira’s body.

Since the war began, Indira had been noticing changes in her perception. A kind of… sharpening. A “intensity”, she called it. Oftentimes, in the fog and uncertainty of crisis, leaders will feel suffocated by fatigue or exhaustion, but Indira Gandhi did not; She was strangely energized and intoxicated by the war with Pakistan. Her cognition was clear as a diamond, and yet tinted with a kind of uncanny, hallucinatory awareness. What one historian called “mystical”. As Indira herself recalled:

‘Throughout the war, I had strange experiences—an extended vision I had known at times in my youth. On occasions I found myself speaking, saw things behind me which I could never have seen.”

But the oddest thing, the most striking thing about that time in her life, was that Indira suddenly became fixated on the color red. “The color red suffused me throughout the war,” she told her friend and biographer Pupul Jayakar.

The color red, of course, is not without significance. It is the color of blood and passion and kings and conquest. It is the color of war. Indira felt flush with power, her cheeks were hot with it. She started wearing saris fringed with scarlet and crimson; In those rooms packed with military men, looking to her for decisions, she felt powerful. Like a goddess of war.

And if Indira was beginning to feel like a goddess of war, it’s because she was quite literally being compared to one. In the Indian parliament, the same people who used to whisper behind her back and call her a ‘dumb doll’, were now likening her to the Hindu goddess, Durga.

Who is Durga, you might ask?

->

Well, once upon a time, the story goes, there was a powerful demon named Mahishasura. He was part man and part bull – with skin as blue as a winter moon and curved horns that tapered into fine points. But despite his fierce exterior, Mahishasuura was a clever, calculating demon. Through a show of great penance and devotion, he earned a boon from Brahma, the Creator God. As his reward, Mahishasura asked Brahma for the gift of immortality.

That, I cannot do, said Brahma. All things must end, even great demons such as you. So instead, I will grant you the gift of invincibility… but! this gift comes with a catch. You must choose the one type of being who can harm you. You must choose the thing that will bring about your end. Mahishashura considered this, and a bright idea blazed in his mind. Believing he had found a loophole, he answered quickly: a woman. A woman will be the one to end me. The demon believed that no woman, weak and soft as they were, could ever pose any real threat to him.

Brahma agreed to these terms, and Mahishashura was rendered invincible to the hands of gods or men. Mahishahura, drunk with his newfound power, betrayed the gods, conquered heaven, and plunged the world into terrible darkness.

But the gods knew Mahishashura’s weakness, and they channeled their combined energies to create a new deity – a female goddess of war: Durga. D-U-R-G-A. Durga was beautiful and terrifying. From her torso, ten arms sprouted, each holding a weapon of heaven. A trident, a mace, an axe, a chakra – a celestial arsenal that she would use to strike down the horned demon Mahishashura. And that is exactly what she did. It took Durga ten days and ten nights, but when the dust settled, the demon’s severed head sat impaled upon points of her trident. And once again, peace returned to the world.

It was an old story – an ancient story. One that Indira Gandhi knew very well. Despite her father’s stubborn atheism, she had grown to love and embrace the Hindu religion. And when her supporters started comparing her to Durga in the winter of 1971, she felt no embarrassment or humility. It was rightful praise, she believed, long overdue. In some ways, it felt like prophecy. As one of her aides remembered: 

“She loved being called Durga.”

But even Prime Ministers, like gods and demons, have weaknesses. And Indira Gandhi had one right under her nose. As she strategized with her generals and planned the liberation of Bangladesh, their conversations were not as private as they imagined. Unbeknownst to her, someone in her inner circle was passing information to the American CIA. There was a mole in her cabinet; and he, or she, was feeding everything back to Washington.

And Washington had plans of its own.

==== MUSIC BREAK ====

[AUDIO] https://nixontapes.org/ghwb/016-048.mp3

Operator introduces Bush. N: Hi George; I thought that was a fine vote. How do you feel about it? Bush: We feel very, very good about it. [0:00-0:16]

It’s December 8^th, 1971.

About 11 o’clock in the morning.

That’s President Richard Nixon on the phone, a voice that we know very well by now. The second voice belongs to the US Ambassador to the United Nations – a future President by the name of George H.W. Bush.

But in 1971, George Bush is a very long way from the Resolute Desk. On this crisp winter morning, the 47-year-old diplomat is calling from New York City, where he serves as the American representative to the United Nations.

The international family of nations is often a dysfunctional one, but George Bush is the perfect man for the job; Friendly to a fault, pliable to his superiors. He is nice and outgoing, even charming in an Andy Griffith, ‘aw-shucks’ sort of way. In those days, ‘ol George was a six-foot sentient smile, a walking handshake. As historian Jon Meacham writes: “The threshold for friendship in George H. W. Bush’s universe was pretty much just meeting George H. W. Bush.”

And on the morning of December 8^th, Ambassador Bush is in a very good mood. It’s not every day you get to call your boss and tell him exactly what he wants to hear. For the last five days, Bush has spent most of his waking hours in the United Nations Security Council chamber, surviving on burnt coffee and dry pastries.

Odds are, you’ve seen this room before in movies or pictures. It’s the big, cavernous chamber with the horseshoe-shaped table, where representatives from each nation listen to real-time translations of each other through plastic headsets and periodically pound their fists.

Since its inception in 1946, the UN Security Council has deliberated on many important issues and crises. From Eastern Europe to South America, wherever there is trouble brewing, the Security Council is committed to, if not solving the problem, talking about it very loudly. Composed of five permanent members – America, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and China, and ten rotating non-permanent members, the Security Council is essentially the world’s largest and most well-funded debate club.

And this week, they are debating the war between India and Pakistan.

[AUDIO] “This meeting of the Security Council is being held in one of the most extraordinary situations in the history of the UN. One member state of the UN, India, has not only launched aggression on the territory of another member state, Pakistan, but openly demanded that Pakistan dismember itself, and give up that part of its territory, which contains the majority of its population.”

That’s the Pakistani ambassador addressing the Council on December 4^th, suddenly rediscovering affection for his Bengali countrymen. The Indian ambassador, not to be outperformed, countered with his own diatribe.

[AUDIO] “We have suffered at the hands of Pakistan aggression, and we are not going to take it anymore. A very serious warning to the Council. We will not be a party to any solution that will continue oppression of Pakistani people.”

And when US ambassador George H.W. Bush spoke, it quickly became clear where the loyalties of the Unites States lay.

[AUDIO] “Indian officials have now announced that regular Indian forces have been instructed to move into East Pakistan in what they call a “no-holds-barred’ operation. The very purpose that draws us together here: building a peaceful world, will be thwarted if we allow a situation in which a government intervenes across its borders in the affairs of another with military force in violation of the UN charter.”

For George Bush, this war was as black & white as an episode of “I Love Lucy”. He expressed his feelings to the President a few days later.

[AUDIO] Bush: Look we’re talking about war and peace. We’re talking about invasion. Troops in the other guy’s country. We’re not trying to whitewash Yahya. We’re doing the right thing [3:30] https://nixontapes.org/ghwb/016-048.mp3

Like any loyal subordinate, Bush was just regurgitating his boss’s opinions back at him.

[AUDIO] Nixon: Whatever criticism of W-Pak and Yahya may be, and a lot of that criticism is justified, it does not justify the invasion of another country. If we ever allow the internal problems of one country to be cause for a bigger country to invade a smaller country, then international order is finished in the world. That’s really the principle isn’t it. [yes sir!] 4:30 https://nixontapes.org/ghwb/016-048.mp3

[AUDIO] Nixon: “aggression is wrong” diatribe [7:45] https://nixontapes.org/ghwb/016-048.mp3

Nixon and Bush did not see India’s decision to invade East Pakistan as a justifiable response to the refugee crisis and an ongoing genocide; they saw it as India illegally meddling in an ‘internal matter”. India could do anything it wanted inside its own border; it could feed refugees, clothe them, it could turn them away and send them back to Pakistan. But it did not have the right to send its troops into someone else’s country. Well, what about the Operation Genghis Khan?, some might have asked. What about Pakistan’s surprise attack on India? Well, Nixon and Bush weren’t moved by that argument either. In their eyes, India had struck the first blow by supporting the Mukti Bahini and incrementally encroaching into East Pakistan.

For all their talk of peace, the Indians were just putting on Kabuki theatre. / blowing smoke.

[AUDIO] N: The Indians put on this sanctimonious, peace, Gandhi-like, Christ-like attitude. […]https://nixontapes.org/ghwb/016-048.mp3  [time?]

And although Bush had elevated the act of saying ‘yes sir” into an art form, he was no one’s favorite person in the Nixon administration. // Despite his obsequiousness/servility // He was, of course, passed over for the secret trip to China, condemned as “soft and not sophisticated enough” by Dr. Henry Kissinger. But the folksy Texan politician has his uses, and in December of 1971, he displays them admirably in the UN Security Council.

On December 5^th, 1971 – Ambassador Bush put forth a resolution for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of troops, which according to Gary J. Bass “would undo the Indian campaign for Bangladesh” But at the long, omega-shaped table in the Security Council, there was more than one alpha. The Indians had powerful friends too, and the Soviet Union used its veto power to hobble Bush’s resolution immediately.

Indira Gandhi’s treaty with the Soviets, signed barely five months earlier, was paying off handsomely.

But Ambassador Bush was far from thwarted. On December 6^th, Somalia – of all nations – proposed a resolution that would take the issue of East Pakistan beyond the sanctum of the Security Council and put it in front of the entire UN General Assembly for consideration and a vote. Hands went up, and hands went down; and the results of that vote, were not good for India. As Gary J. Bass writes:

->

“The next day, December 7, India faced a global verdict on the war. In a crushingly lopsided tally, fully 104 countries voted for a resolution calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal. This was a worldwide repudiation of India’s case for liberating Bangladesh. Indians fumed that these same governments had been desultory in preventing carnage or providing for the refugees. Despite plangent appeals from Indira Gandhi and her team, India only won backing from the Soviet Union, a few Soviet satrapies and satellites, and neighboring little Bhutan.”

“When Nixon telephoned [BUSH] to congratulate him,” Bass continues, “he could hardly contain his joy. “We felt very, very good about it,” Bush told Nixon, who sounded like he could not get off the phone fast enough. Despite strong Soviet and Indian lobbying, Bush said, “all they got was their Iron Curtain.” He explained that “there was total agreement on the principle of ceasefire and withdrawal, which we had—you made fundamental to what was—and the fact also that India, in spite of its sanctimony, was really the aggressor.”

But India’s defeat on the floor of the UN had only been purely rhetorical. “General Assembly resolutions are merely recommendatory,” write Leo Rose and Richard Sisson, “and the issue then returned to the Security Council, where the internal debate continued.”

The United Nations, in other words, was a forum for discussing, but not resolving, the 1971 conflict. Sisson, Richard; Rose, Leo E

Bush was making progress in the UN, but he needed more time. Nixon wished him well.

[AUDIO] https://nixontapes.org/ghwb/016-048.mp3

“Anyway - You’ll knock ‘em dead. Goodbye.”

Nixon slammed the phone back onto its receiver and turned to his closest advisor, his real confidante, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Since the war began, Nixon had been in a suspended state of apoplexy, what Gary J. Bass called a “bitter rage”. And most of that ire was reserved for the person Nixon believed to be the villain of this entire debacle: That woman. That bitch.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

“By God,” growled Nixon, “I can’t emphasize too strongly how I feel.”

The memory of their contentious summit in early November still stung. After he had entertained her, indulged her, flattered her – even threatened her – Indira Gandhi had gone and invaded East Pakistan. The one thing that he had told her - in this very room! - not to do…. and she’d done it anyway. 

Yes, Pakistan had technically attacked first, but India had all but forced Yahya’s hand. Provoking and prodding and pestering. Like an older sibling playing a game of ‘I’m not touching you; I’m not touching you’. Could anyone really blame the Pakistanis for lashing out? For wanting to strike the first blow? Nixon and Kissinger certainly didn’t.

“It makes my heart sick,” Nixon told Henry, “For them to be done so by the Indians and after we have warned the bitch.”  […] We are not going to roll over after they have done this horrible thing. W]e will cut the gizzard out.” […] “She’s going to pay.” Nixon swore, “She’s going to pay.”

But if the battlefield reports were even remotely true, Indira was doing anything but paying for her invasion of East Pakistan; in fact, she was being rewarded with victory after victory. In the West, Yahya’s army was just barely holding the line; and in the East, their forces were essentially in full rout. If things continued like this, Indian tanks might be parading through downtown Dacca by the end of the week.

East Pakistan – “Bangladesh” – whatever they wanted to call themselves, was likely a lost cause. But India, Nixon and Kissinger feared, would not stop there. If Pakistan’s Eastern front collapsed, the Western one wouldn’t be far behind. And then, Indian tanks would keep going and going and going, until they were rumbling through Lahore and Islamabad and Karachi.

“He’ll be demolished,” said Nixon, meaning Yahya, “Pakistan will eventually disintegrate.”

It sounded far-fetched – fantastical, even - but Nixon and Kissinger believed they had good, credible reasons to believe that after liberating East Pakistan, the Indian would turn its  attention westward.

According to Gary J. Bass, the Nixon administration “depended heavily on raw intelligence from a CIA mole with access to Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. Based on this one source, the CIA reported that Gandhi meant to keep fighting until Bangladesh was liberated, India had seized a contested area of Kashmir currently controlled by Pakistan, and Pakistan’s armor and air force were “destroyed so that Pakistan will never again be in a position to plan another invasion of India.” It is still not certain who the mole was, nor how reliable he was. Many intelligence analysts doubted the report.”

But Henry Kissinger did not doubt the veracity of this anonymous mole in Indira’s orbit. In fact, he built a paranoid strategy around it. “The Indian plan,” Kissinger explained to a rattled, agitated Nixon, “is now clear. They’re going to move their forces from East Pakistan to the West. They will then smash the Pakistan land forces and air forces, annex the part of Kashmir that is in Pakistan and then call it off.”

Nixon agreed, “They really are bastards. Look, these people are savages.” […] We cannot have a stable world if we allow one member of the United Nations to cannibalize another. Cannibalize, that’s the word. I should have thought of it earlier. You see, that really puts it to the Indians. It has, the connotation is savages. To cannibalize … that’s what the sons of bitches are up to.”

Kissinger had a stronger word in mind. Pakistan, he lamented, was getting “raped” by India.

And if Pakistan got raped, the United States, their superpower protector, would be humiliated. Emasculated, even. As always, Henry Kissinger’s thoughts were never far from Moscow and Beijing, and he worried about how the Communists would view American impotence in South Asia. As Kissinger warned Nixon: “If we collapse now, the Soviets won’t respect us for it; the Chinese will despise us.”

No, something had to be done.

In the arena of international politics, there are two kinds of power. Two kinds of pressure you can apply to achieve the outcome you want. There is soft power and there is hard power. Soft power is about relationships. It’s about nuance and charm and getting other people to cooperate without using the big stick. Hard power is about the big stick – military force. And as Nixon and Kissinger raced to rescue Pakistan from certain dismemberment, they brought both kinds of power to bear. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“Kissinger now proposed three dangerous initiatives. The United States would illegally allow Iran and Jordan to send squadrons of U.S. aircraft to Pakistan, secretly ask China to mass its troops on the Indian border, and deploy a U.S. aircraft carrier group to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India. He urged Nixon to stun India with all three moves simultaneously.”

In his campaign for the Presidency, Richard Nixon had repeatedly invoked the idea of ‘law and order’ to carry him to victory; the idea that something was broken in America, a deep, systemic rot at the heart of society. It was a corruption he promised to cleanse with fastidious respect for the laws of the land. But in his own dealings, laws and statutes were little more than minor speedbumps. Paper handcuffs to be snapped at the earliest convenience.

As Gary J. Bass writes: “Nixon did not flinch at breaking the law.”

Was it technically illegal to launder military equipment through the Iranians and Jordanians to shore up Pakistan’s floundering war effort against India? Yes. Very much so. Henry Kissinger knew this, Nixon knew this, but as long as they did not get caught, they did not care. As Kissinger admitted to one of his Chinese contacts:

“We are barred by law from giving equipment to Pakistan in this situation. And we also are barred by law from permitting friendly countries which have American equipment to give their equipment to Pakistan.” 

But if caught, they intended to use a very old, very effective tactic. Deny, deny, deny. As Kissinger advised the President: “We’ll have to say we didn’t know about it, but we’ll cover it as soon as we can.”

After all, the American people didn’t really care what happened in Pakistan. They might give a couple bucks to the Red Cross after seeing some sad picture of a fly-covered infant, or buy a ticket to see George Harrison sob on stage with his hippie friends, but at the end of the day, no one really cared. As Nixon told Kissinger:

“People don’t give a shit whether we’re to blame—not to blame—because they don’t care if the whole goddamn thing goes down the cesspool. […] “They’re not going to touch us with this thing. Because, by God, the country doesn’t give a shit.”

And so, the Nixon administration pulled every lever it could to save Yahya Khan and his Army from certain destruction at the hands of India. But all the power in the world – soft, hard, or otherwise, could not stop the vengeance that was unfolding in Bangladesh.

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

RAZAKARS

It’s the first week of December (7), 1971.

We’re in a small town in Bangladesh, about 150 miles northeast of the city of Dacca.

Yesterday, this town was in East Pakistan, but today, with the arrival of the Mukti Bahini guerilla forces and the Indian Army, it is now in Bangladesh. Every day, in fact, Bangladesh gets a little bit bigger, and East Pakistan gets a little bit smaller.

Like a frightened turtle retracting into its shell, Yahya’s army is withdrawing back to Dacca as fast as its wheels and legs can carry it. And all over Bengal, villages just like this one are being, in the parlance of the guerillas, “liberated” from the tyranny of Yahya Khan.

And as the Mukti Bahini fighters amble through the deserted town, puffing on cigarettes and taking stock of their spoils, they find the detritus of a retreating army; the skin the snake has left behind. Things like abandoned ammunition crates, half-eaten provisions, empty buildings and banged-up equipment. Nothing particularly exciting.

But then, a tremor of energy ripples through the ranks. Rumor becomes gossip becomes fact, and before long, a crowd of guerillas is converging on the courtyard of the town. Today, they have captured something truly exciting.

In center of the courtyard is a tall, steel flagpole. And strapped to that flagpole, bound and gagged and begging for their lives, are three men dressed in street clothes. It’s difficult to hear exactly what the men are saying, but one thing is clear: They are speaking not in Bengali, but in Urdu. The language of the enemy.

An angry murmur passes through the crowd of freedom fighters. Someone spits. Someone curses. Someone unsheathes a machete. These men, they know, are the worst of the worst. In some ways, even worse than the West Pakistani soldiers themselves. These men are traitors, collaborators, razakars.

Razakar [R-A-Z-A-K-A-R] is an Urdu word that means “volunteer”. But by December 1971 it has become a slur, a pejorative, a blanket term to describe East Pakistanis who sided with Yahya’s government during the civil war.

No population is a monolith, of course, especially one with 75 million people, and that was the case with East Pakistan. Most East Pakistanis hated or at least resented Yahya’s government, true, but there was a portion of the populace whose interests were aligned with the military regime, and did not want to see an end to West Pakistani domination over Bengal. So, when the country slid into civil war, these loyalists (or razakars), sided with Yahya’s government.

That support took a variety of different forms. Some served as paramilitaries and enforcers, killing, arresting or intimidating on behalf of the Army. Others worked more surreptitiously, spying on their neighbors or gathering intel about Mukti Bahini hideouts. Others simply capitalized on the chaos, swooping in to take property or land from dead tenants in exchange for loyalty to Yahya’s government.

Why did they do this? Well, aside from basic tribalism or cynical opportunism, some were motivated by a genuine sense of loyalty to the united Pakistan that they had known all their lives, dysfunctional though it might have been. As Anam Zakaria writes: “There were others though who volunteered because they believed in the ‘cause’. They felt it was their patriotic duty to keep Pakistan united.”

And for a while, the razakars did very well for themselves. They grew fat under the protection and patronage of Yahya’s army. But now, in December, the tables have turned. The waters of fate have quickly receded, leaving the razakars flopping helplessly on the banks. And the Mukti Bahini are itching for revenge against the men and women who sold out them out for a few coins and a kind word.

That anecdote about the three razakars strapped to a flagpole comes from Scott Carney and Jason Miklian’s book, The Vortex, in an account from a Mukti Bahini officer named Hafiz Uddin Ahmad; and although their ultimate fate is left unspoken, there can be little doubt about what happened to those three razakars. As Professor Joya Chatterji puts it:

“There were two genocides in 1971. One against Bengalis, the ‘official national dead’, the officially recognized martyrs. […] The second was a genocide of reprisal against so-called collaborators […]”

In many cases, people branded as razakars were guilty of everything the Mukti Bahini said they were. But others were simply innocent people who found themselves swept up in a political riptide/undertow. As Chatterji continues:

“People were ‘violently settling scores’ that had nothing to do with the war. They were also hunting down and killing ‘collaborators’ in their thousands. These [people] ‘Biharis’ (not all of whom had been collaborators, some had been forced to join the rajaakaars) now became convenient internal enemies against whom ‘the nation’ could rally. Very few survived.”

This epidemic of reprisal killings was of particular concern to the Indian Army, whose entire military intervention rested on the premise that this was a just war, a righteous war, waged in defense of innocent people. If they sat back and let the Mukti Bahini run wild on thousands of collaborators, guilty or not, that mandate would be greatly undermined.

“If we don’t protect the Pakistanis and their collaborators,” an Indian officer told journalist Sydney Schanberg, “the Mukti Bahini will butcher them nicely and properly.”

With the stakes this high, with the eyes of the world upon them, the moral high ground had to be maintained. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“India, keenly aware of world public opinion, pledged that it was not out for vengeance. It promised to protect Biharis and surrendered Pakistani soldiers from retribution, following the Geneva Conventions. Haksar [Indira’s principle secretary] ordered Indian diplomats to pound home to Bangladeshi leaders the need for mercy: “they should say that they have been victims of such bloodshed and would not wish to spill any blood and deal with their opponents with humanity as a civilized State. Bangla Desh is emerging as a State in the family of nations. Their representatives have everything to gain by appearing dignified, calm, and self-possessed.”

To drive the point home, the Indian defense ministry put out an official statement, declaring:

“Indian Armed Forces will not resort to the barbarism of Pakistan Armed Forces, that everybody who peacefully surrenders will be treated with respect and his life safeguarded.”

And for the most part, the Indian Army kept that promise. A CIA report from December 9^th noted that:  

“The Indians appear to be making good on their promise to try to protect these people from vengeance-seeking Bengalis.”

But no army can be everywhere at once, and as the Mukti Bahini swept through the countryside, reclaiming the delta village by village, they took their revenge when and where they could find it. Everything they had endured for the past nine months was repaid in kind. Rape for rape, wound for wound, kill for kill. “The brutality of it all,” writes Joya Chatterji, “is best left to the imagination.”

But there is one particular person that the vengeful Bengalis cannot get their hands on.

Someone who, in their eyes, is worse than any razakar, any soldier, any collaborator. A man who many of them believe is responsible for all of this. The guilty hand that had tipped the first domino, resulting in untold death, displacement, and the dismemberment of Pakistan.

And yet, as much as they’d love to strap him to a flagpole and do their dirtiest work, he is beyond the reach of their long knives.

BHUTTO

Almost 8,000 miles away, in the dining room of the Manhattan Waldorf Astoria, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is cutting into an overpriced breakfast, dabbing his mouth with a linen napkin between bites.

->

It’s been a while since we caught up with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and political yin to Mujib’s yang. Last time we saw him, wayyyyy back in Part 2, Bhutto was in Dacca, staring out the window of the Intercontinental Hotel, watching the first salvo of explosions from Operation Searchlight.

Whether Bhutto saw any of flicker of his own culpability in those flashes of light is hard to say. But even gentle critics would be hard-pressed to overlook Bhutto’s role in the outbreak of Pakistan’s civil war.

During the 1970 election season, Bhutto had waxed poetic about the virtues of the democratic system. “All power to the people”, he had cried/shouted from podiums across Punjab.  But then, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League had swept the election, securing a commanding majority of the vote and rendering big bad Bhutto little more than a rock in their shoe. All of a sudden, “all power to the people”, didn’t sound all that great anymore. As Joya Chatterjee wrote: “Bhutto only liked democracy when he won elections.”

And so, in a political tantrum that would’ve put the most rebellious toddler to shame, Bhutto used his clout as the minority leader to obfuscate, vacillate and intimidate. In a few short months he had ground the entire process to a screeching halt and cemented a conspiratorial partnership with Yahya Khan.

Where ballots had failed, bullets would have to do.

Once Operation Searchlight began, Bhutto did not stay in Dacca long. That very night, he was

whisked away by an Army escort and flown safely back to West Pakistan, far away from the Bengalis and their bloodbath.

Since that night, Bhutto has been very busy, doing what he does best: talking and smiling and shaking hands. As East Pakistan burned, Bhutto shared coffee and cocktails with diplomats far and wide, using his natural eloquence to shore up allies and sway world opinion. He was, in many respects, perfectly suited to the task. As Sisson and Rose write:

“Bhutto was at once provocative and disarming, would play upon uncertainties, and could hint at possibilities in such a way as to evoke confirmation or correction.”

“He was born to charm,” wrote Oriana Fallaci “He looked like a banker who wants to get you to open an account in his bank.” And yet, for all his sweetness, there was something sour underneath. Something elusive, something off. As Fallaci continues:

“The more you study [Bhutto], the more you remain uncertain, confused. Like a prism turning on a pivot, he is forever offering you a different face, and at the same moment that he gives in to your scrutiny, he withdraws. So you can define him in countless ways, and all of them are true: liberal and authoritarian, fascist and communist. […]

Yes, Bhutto knew how to be all things to all people.

As Indira Gandhi once said of Bhutto: “People tell me that if I shake hands with him, I must count my fingers.”

And now, in the second week of December 1971, Bhutto is bringing all of his chameleonic charm to bear. Back home, his country is losing on the battlefield – badly. The Indian Army and the Mukti Bahini are making mince of Yahya’s forces in East Pakistan. In a few days, there might not even be an East Pakistan. The telegrams coming out of Dacca from Pakistani Army HQ were verging on hysteria. As one missive from General Niazi said:

“Troops are fighting heroically but against heavy odds without adequate artillery and air support. Rebels continue cutting the rear and losses in equipment and men are very heavy and cannot be replaced. The front in eastern and western sector has collapsed. Loss of whole corridor east of Meghna River cannot be avoided. Jessore has already fallen. Food and other supplies running short. Even Dacca city will be without food after 7 days. Without fuel and oil there will be complete paralysis. No amount of lip sympathy or even material help from world powers except direct physical intervention will help.”

In other words, we are running out of time. And so, Yahya Khan deployed Zulfikar Bhutto to the USA to wage a very different sort of war, on a very different sort of battlefield.

Bhutto is in New York this week to represent Pakistan’s interests in the United Nations. Acting as Yahya’s deputy Prime Minister, Bhutto has one job and one job alone: To stop the war. To help push through a binding ceasefire resolution on the floor of the UN. If he can do that, then India will have no choice but to respect the verdict of the international community. To halt its tanks, ground its jets, and stop the inexorable advance toward Dacca. To achieve that outcome, Bhutto will use every drop of charm in his considerable reservoir. He will not rest until the military regime is saved.

At least that’s what Yahya Khan expects him to do. 

But Zulfikar Ali Bhutto has other plans.

Astute politician that he is, Bhutto has seen the writing on the wall. And it does not spell out a promising future for President Yahya Khan. A whiff of regime change is in the air, and to Bhutto, it is the sweetest perfume. No matter the outcome of this war with India, Yahya is finished. 10 million people have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands killed. An entire nation cut in two. No one comes back from that.

Pakistan, whatever’s left of it, will need a new leader. A new executive to shepherd the nation into an uncertain future. With a tiny smile, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto glances at the gilded pillars and twinkling chandeliers of the Waldorf Astoria. In due time, with a bit of luck, he’ll be decorating the Prime Ministerial residence in a similar aesthetic.

THE CHINESE CONNECTION

While Bhutto plotted his bright future in a New York hotel, events were unfolding elsewhere at an increasingly rapid pace. On December 10^th, three miles north of the Waldorf Astoria, in the Upper East Side, red taillights halt in front of a non-descript apartment. The engine cools and the doors unlock. Out of the car, steps a pair of polished black shoes, reflecting the streetlamps like a mirror.

This fancy footwear belongs to Dr. Henry Kissinger. As his breath turns to smoke in the winter air, Kissinger looks left, and then he looks right. The National Security Advisor is a bit jump, if not outright nervous. He does not wish to be seen entering this particular apartment. Thankfully, there is no doorman to notice him, no tenants to recognize him, in fact this apartment is not really an apartment at all. It’s a CIA safehouse, offered up to the National Security Advisor as a venue for tonight’s clandestine meeting.

As Kissinger enters the safehouse, his guests rise to their feet. Chinese Representative to the UN, Huang Hua, extends a wrinkly hand in friendship. The Chinese have no direct Ambassador to the United States, no Embassy to speak of, so if Kissinger wants to talk to Mao’s people face-to-face, he either has to get on a plane to Beijing, or meet them here, in a dark corner furnished by the CIA.

President Nixon’s friendship with China is barely six months old, but Kissinger is already hoping to spend some of that political capital. As the situation in East Pakistan continues to deteriorate, the National Security Advisor is growing desperate. The military equipment Nixon illegally laundered through Iran and Jordan has done nothing to tip the scales. The Indian Army is still making swift progress toward Dacca. Any day now, it could fall. So, Kissinger is hoping that the Chinese can rattle their saber and put the fear of God into the war hawks in Delhi. As K.S. Nair writes:

“Kissinger conveyed a message from Nixon, couched in roundabout diplomatese, which was intended to encourage China, without saying so, to intervene militarily on its border with India or at least make threatening movements, in order to distract India from its operations in Bangladesh”

Huang Hua’s answer was polite, non-committal, and definitely not what Kissinger had hoped to hear. In the car ride to back the airport, Kissinger tried to optimistically twist the Chinese ambassador’s words into something resembling an affirmative. But the truth was, the Chinese would not move to save East Pakistan from the Indian Army.

After all he had done, all the messages he had conveyed, all the loyalty he had shown his superpower benefactors, Yahya Khan’s usefulness to the Chinese had officially expired.

But Kissinger has one last card to play. In his three-pronged plan to save Pakistan from certain dismemberment, two out of three initiatives had failed. The illegal weapons transfers had not made a difference, and the Chinese would not move their troops to the Indian border. All of Kissinger’s hopes now rest with the big stick.

In the absence of a better option, some good, old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy will have to do.

->

==== MUSIC BREAK ======

It’s December 15^th, 1971.

Five days after Kissinger’s fruitless meeting with the Chinese ambassador.

We’re in the Bay of Bengal, about 600 miles south of the coast of Bangladesh. Funny thing is, we’ve been out here before, among the choppy waves and endless ocean. In a nice bit of narrative symmetry, we’re right back where we started. Where this story first began in November of 1970.

This is the place where the Great Bhola Cyclone first began to form. Where warm air started to rise, sucking in colder air, twisting and turning and warping the weather into a mile-high vortex. A cyclone that would sling itself toward the coast and wipe away more than a quarter million people, setting off this whole chain of events.

But today, the seas are calm in the Bay of Bengal.

No cyclones are forming. No monsoons are looming. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. In fact, the middle of nowhere is about to become the epicenter of a different kind of storm. / tempest

Imagine you are sitting a rowboat, bobbing in the midst of this ocean. Imagine you lift a pair of binoculars and peer through the lenses toward the southern horizon. Initially you see…well, nothing. Just light blue sky, dark blue waves, and a fuzzy line in between. But you keep looking. You squint, strain your eyes, blink a few times when they get dry. And then, you see it. A small dark shape on the horizon. As the shape becomes bigger, it separates and becomes two shapes. The two shapes become four. Four shapes become eight.

And as the shapes get larger, you realize you are looking at ships. And not fishing boats or merchant vessels. No, you are looking at an armada of warships. And as this armada glides past you, churning up a frothy, choppy wake that sends buckets of seawater into your little rowboat, you see, through the spray, a flag snapping above the lead vessel. It is red, and white and blue. With 50 starts and 13 stripes.

The United States Seventh Fleet has arrived in the Bay of Bengal.

Task Force 47, as this armada is known, is a terrifying concentration of naval firepower. Seven destroyer-class battleships, one helicopter carrier, an oiler – all crewed by thousands of the best sailors the American military has ever trained. But the pride of the fleet, the flagship of this armada, cruises at the head of the pack. A nuclear aircraft carrier called the U.S.S Enterprise. As Scott Carney and Jason Miklian describe:

“It was the largest nuclear-propelled aircraft carrier ever constructed […] Whenever the United States needed to remind a country that America was, indeed, a superpower, that’s where the Enterprise went. This time, the Big E, as its sailors often called it, sailed from Vietnam. Three months earlier its air wing destroyed 198 North Vietnamese aircraft in one raid and didn’t take a single loss. Since then, it had flown hundreds more missions with a similar exemplary record. It parked off the coast of Cuba during the missile crisis. It was the sort of ship that could win a war all on its own. At a thousand feet long, its hangars could hold ninety planes. Its nuclear reactors could power the ship for up to ten years at sea without ever having to come back to port. It was all but unstoppable.

The Big E is Nixon’s big stick. His last card to play in an attempt to chasten/frighten the Indians. To halt their imminent conquest of (East) Pakistan. And as an instrument of intimidation, it is very effective. As Carney and Miklian continue:

“Five thousand sailors kept the vast war machine running. Its magazine held one hundred nuclear gravity bombs, each one up to twenty times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Flight crews could load weapons and send them airborne in less than thirty minutes from the moment the captain issued the order. The Enterprise carried enough firepower to obliterate every major city in South Asia. Flanked by two quick-strike missile destroyers, the Enterprise sailed up the Bay of Bengal at a measured fifteen nautical miles an hour, about the same pace as the Great Bhola Cyclone one year earlier. An American nuclear-attack submarine shadowed the carrier group somewhere below the surface. “

On December 15^th, the Enterprise is closing fast on the Bengal delta. In less than 24 hours, it will be within striking range, free to transform the Indian army into a collection of smoking craters at the push of a button.

1500 miles to the northwest, in the capital of Delhi, there are some very hard decisions that need to be made. The arrival of the USS Enterprise in the Bay of Bengal has presented Indira Gandhi and her cabinet with a vexing dilemma:

Do we stop now? Or do we keep going?

On the morning of December 15th, 1971, the Indian Army was on Dacca’s doorstep, having encircled the city and trapped the Pakistani troops inside. As K.S. Nair writes:

“Indian troops were now on the very point of entry into Dacca, from several different directions. Lieutenant General Niazi [The Pakistani commander in the city’ had no real reserves, having wasted his men by distributing them around border garrisons and fortress towns. Indian troops had captured several of these towns on the way, mostly communication centers, but had bypassed others, leaving garrisons of Pakistani troops isolated and with paralyzed communications.”

[AUDIO]“After 11 days – ready? – after 11 days, the Indian Air Force are still attacking Dacca. This time they’ve changed their target… firing rockets

As Indira listened to frontline reports and surveyed battle maps, she weighed her options. Nixon and Kissinger were probably just bluffing, waving the Enterprise at her like a large nuclear appendage. With US troops already tied down in Vietnam, they wouldn’t dare open another front and risk the ire of the American public. But with Nixon, anything was possible. Who knew how far he would go to prop up his pet dictator in Islamabad?

Indira looked at the maps.

They were so, so close. Inches from the goal line. Was now really the time to call a time out and drop the ball? If they bent to American pressure now and agreed to some kind of ceasefire, all the progress of the last two weeks would be lost; Yahya Khan would simply regroup, reload, and reconsolidate his hold over East Pakistan. Millions of refugees would remain in India, more innocent Bengalis would die, and India would be branded the aggressor anyway.

No - nothing short of a complete and unconditional surrender from the Pakistani troops in Dacca would be acceptable. But so far, no surrender had been forthcoming. And if the Indian Army actually moved armor and infantry into Dacca, it was not going to be an easy fight. As K.S. Nair continues:

“There remained perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Pakistani troops in Dacca […] These did not amount to an organized force with a unified chain of command. […] The men in Dacca lacked cohesion and heavy weaponry was unevenly distributed. […] Still, in the built-up environment of a sizable city, they would have been enough to mount a fairly extended resistance, should they have chosen to fight, street by street and house-to-house. Urban warfare is one of the most unpleasant forms of combat and inevitably results in civilian casualties. It is no disgrace to the Indian Army that they wanted to avoid it if possible.”

A direct assault against Dacca would be a bloodbath.

As Indira Gandhi brooded, the phones started ringing again. More bad news. This time from New York. After weeks of bickering and badgering, opinion was once again turning hard against India on the floor of the United Nations. And this time, it was not just a performative smack on the wrist. Since the outbreak of war, many ceasefire resolutions had been proposed, argued and ultimately rejected. But this new one looked like it was going to stick. It was called the Polish Resolution. As Leo Rose and Richard Sisson explain:

->

“For the Government of India the most controversial and potentially embarrassing of the resolutions presented to the Security Council was that submitted by Poland, since it was the only resolution that had a high probability of adoption.

The Polish resolution, like the earlier Soviet resolutions, called for the transfer of power in East Pakistan to the representatives elected in December 1970— that is, the Awami League—and this was, of course, Indian policy as well. But unlike the Soviet resolutions, the Polish proposal also called for an immediate cease-fire and troop withdrawals by both sides, as well as the renunciation of claims to any territories acquired by force during the war.

These provisions aroused considerable distress in New Delhi. A cease-fire and immediate mutual withdrawal before the capture of Dhaka, as specified in the Polish resolution, would have deprived India of the clear military victory in East Pakistan symbolized by the surrender of the Pakistani armed forces on that front. But even more important, a quick withdrawal of its forces would have vastly complicated India’s capacity to assist the Awami League in establishing a stable and moderate regime in Bangladesh once both the Indian and Pakistani forces were withdrawn and the conglomeration of Bangladeshi resistance groups commenced their own civil war for control of the new country under circumstances that would have been difficult for India to influence.”

Yes, on December 15^th, India’s chances of a clean victory were looking dire. The Polish Resolution would pass, Bangladesh would be condemned to political purgatory, and Yahya Khan’s army would be spared the humiliation of surrender.

But then, at the last moment, help arrived from the most unlikely source/person imaginable:

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, deputy Prime Minister of Pakistan. / Yahya’s man in New York.

The night before, Yahya and Bhutto had spoken on the phone. The subject of their discussion was the Polish Resolution. During their phone call, Yahya instructed Bhutto to support the Resolution and bring this whole embarrassing ordeal to a close. A binding UN ceasefire agreement, Yahya reluctantly admitted, was the only way Pakistan could snatch a symbolic victory from the jaws of certain defeat. As K.S. Nair writes:

“The Polish Resolution, if accepted, would have given Pakistan the opportunity to escape the trauma of public surrender.”

But Zulfikar Bhutto, as usual, was already several steps ahead of his intellectually inferior superior. Bhutto did not want to spare Yahya Khan any trauma or humiliation. He wanted to ensure that Yahya’s political career would not survive this debacle. Nor did Bhutto want to be seen as having played a role in the willing concession of East Pakistan – He did not want to be tainted with Yahya’s stink. The military regime was going down, and Bhutto needed to create as much distance between himself and this disaster as possible. To preserve his own political career, Bhutto needed to appear defiant to the very end, on the largest, most public stage possible.

So, while speaking on the phone with his boss, Bhutto pretended to have bad connection:

“What?” Bhutto said, acting like the phone was breaking up.

“We should accept it, Bhutto.” Yahya repeated.

“What?” replied Bhutto.

“Accept the deal!” shouted Yahya. All he got in response, was a dial tone. His deputy Prime Minister had already hung up.

You can’t make this stuff up, folks, but yes, it is true, Zulfikar Bhutto avoided a direct order from his President by pretending he could not hear him on the phone. It was unsubtle and unsophisticated, but Bhutto had always been willing to embrace blunt tactics if they served his greater purpose. For Zulfikar, the ends always justified the means.

The next day, on the floor of the United Nations, Bhutto channeled his very real anger at the situation in Bengal into the performance of a lifetime, denouncing the Polish Resolution as a “document of surrender”.

[AUDIO]

"I find it disgraceful to my person and to my country to remain here a moment longer than is necessary. I am not boycotting. Impose any decision, have a treaty worse than Treaty of Versailles, legalise aggression, legalise occupation, legalise everything that has been illegal up to 15 December 1971. I will not be a party to it. We will fight; we will go back and fight. My country beckons me. Why should I waste my time here in the Security Council? I will not be a party to the ignominious surrender of a part of my country. You can take your Security Council. Here you are. [ripping the papers] I am going.’7

With tears literally running down his cheeks, Bhutto ripped up a copy of Polish Resolution in front of the entire chamber and stormed out in a Shakespearean flourish. And with that, any hope of a UN-negotiated ceasefire was dead, murdered by the very man Yahya had sent to make it happen.

+real audience

The irony of it all was just too much, as K.S. Nair writes: “It would have been hilarious, if it had not been built on possibly three million deaths.”

Back in Islamabad, at the Presidential Residence, Yahya Khan realized there wasn’t much left to do at this point except get blind, reeling, blackout drunk. But before he did, before he fully succumbed to the blessed oblivion of his favorite Scotch, he had a telegram to type up. A message to send.

The message was for the Commander of Pakistan’s armed forces in Dacca:

“For Governor and General Niazi from President. You have fought a heroic battle against overwhelming odds. The nation is proud of you and the world full of admiration. I have done all that is humanly possible to find an acceptable solution to the problem. You have now reached a stage where further resistance is no longer humanly possible nor will it serve any useful purpose. You should now take all necessary measures to stop the fighting and preserve the lives of all armed forces personnel all those from West Pakistan and all loyal elements.”

And with that, President Yahya Khan was set to retire to his quarters. He had Scotch to drink, call girls to screw, and a resignation speech to write. But before he slipped into a stupor, one comforting thought might’ve flickered in the back of his mind.

At least Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was dead.

Yahya checked his watch. Or at least, he should be dead by now.

Days earlier, Yahya had sent orders down the chai-of-command to the Punjabi prison where Mujib was being held. The plan was simple. On the morning of December 15^th, Mujib was going to die in a tragic, unforeseeable prison riot. It had all been arranged. Just before dawn, the prison guards would whip up anti-Bengali sentiment among the other inmates, open the cell doors at the pre-arranged time, and let Mujib get beaten to a bloody paste. Then they’d scrape up what was left and dump it in a shallow grave. In a satisfying irony, the great Bengali orator would be buried hundreds of miles from his beloved Bangladesh.

To Yahya’s mind, unburdened by nuance, it was an airtight plan. And it had happened hours ago. Of course, Yahya had not yet received confirmation that the killing had been carried out, but he had every confidence in the loyalty and competence of his men. He sat back in his chair, gripped his glass, and cracked his toes. Mujib was dead. It felt good to think the words.

All this time, all these long months, and Mujib still had no idea that Bangladesh was days, hours from being real. And, Yahya noted, he never will.

If he could not have Bengal, then neither would Mujib.

==== MUSIC BREAK =====

It’s December 15^th, 1971.

About 4 o’clock in the morning.

We’re in the cell block of a Pakistani prison, about 150 miles southwest of Islamabad.

At this early hour, most of the prisoners are still sleeping, but as the morning light begins to filter through the iron-bar windows, a  sharp sound breaks the silence.

It’s rhythmic. Not loud necessarily, but persistent.

It sounds like scraping. Like metal against rock. Like roots tearing, or earth being disturbed.

A bit longer, and the sound takes shape in the mind’s eye.

Someone is digging.

In an open area in the prison compound, the prison guards are using spades and shovels to dig a hole in the ground. When prisoners ask them what the hole is for, the guards assure them that it’s just a trench. A precaution in case of Indian air raids.

But this hole is not a trench. It’s a grave. And as the guards dig this grave, making it wider and deeper with every stab of the shovel, their minds begin to wander.

Funny thing about graves: they’re one-size-fits-all. Big men, small men, tall men. Smart men, funny men, stupid men. At the end of the day, they all fit in the same box. Return to sender. It doesn’t matter how great a man is, how much trouble he’s caused, how much devotion he’s inspired – a grave is a grave is a grave.

Over the last nine months, there’d been quite a few graves dug across Pakistan. Most of them in the East. Most of them designed to fit dozens of people, rather than just one. Those graves would’ve been a little easier to dig, the guards think jealously. Nice, soft, river clay. Like digging in custard. Not this hard, pebbly, Punjabi soil. But thankfully, this grave doesn’t have to be very deep. Just large enough to toss the body in and pack it up with earth. Fill it and forget it.

And watching all of this from his cell, just yards away, is the grave’s future occupant: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

->

Mujib had long suspected that Yahya would have him killed. Honestly, he was shocked it’d taken him this long to do it. One of the many advantages of being a murderous dictator is that you don’t have to ask permission to kill people. But today, it seems, is the big day.

As Mujib watches the grave get deeper and deeper, he wonders how they’re going to do it. Will they shoot him? Strangle him? Poison him? Well, whatever they plan to do, Mujib hopes they’ll do it quickly. And as Mujib contemplates his imminent demise, someone opens the door of his cell.

Mujib looks up, expecting to see a pair of executioners, but instead, he sees the prison’s superintendent. “Are you taking me to hang me?” Mujib askes. The superintendent, wide-eyed and whispering, answers “No, no”. After nine months in prison, Mujib has no patience for tricks; he replies,” If you’re going to execute me, then please give me a few minutes to say my last prayers.”

“No, no there’s no time!” the superintendent says, “You must come with me quickly”.

As he leads Mujib through the maze of cells and corridors, the superintendent explains that Yahya has arranged for Mujib to be murdered by other prisoners. At the appointed time, the cell doors would open, and the prisoners would beat Mujib to death. It would look like an accident, ostensibly absolving Yahya’s regime of any blame. But the superintendent is a friendly face, a kind man who does not want Mujib to die. So, he sneaks Mujib out of the prison and hides him in his house for the next nine days. 

The leader of Bengali nationalism, saved from death by a West Pakistani. Strange times, Mujib must’ve thought. Very strange times. And as he emerges from the black chasm of confinement, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman begins to learn what has been happening in his country. Like a man stepping out into the sun for the first time in a long time, he is blinded by information. By the sheer scale of the tragedy. Genocide, insurgency, a war on two fronts. Millions killed.

But thankfully, he learns, that war is coming to an end. There’s only one grave being filled now, and the corpse going inside is that of a united Pakistan. The West has been defeated, and in a few hours, Bangladesh will finally be free.

SURRENDER

1,200 miles away, in the blasted, battered city of Dacca, 93,000 Pakistani soldiers prepare to surrender to the Indian Army. A few days earlier, the commander of Pakistani forces in Dacca, General Niazi, had been all piss and vinegar for the cameras.

But on December 16^th, 1971, he is singing a very different tune. No amount of bravado can change what is happening. There are many unpleasant documents we sometimes have to sign in life – loan agreements, termination notices, divorce papers – but instruments of surrender are right up there at the top of the list. No one wants be the person holding that particular pen. As Faisal Khosa writes:

The commander-in-chief of the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, General Niazi, signed the Pakistani Instrument of Surrender in Dhaka’s racecourse the following afternoon, on 16 December 1971. He gave up his entire army—93,000 of Pakistan’s soldiers, supporters and civilian officials—at the ornate administrative office of the Ramna Racecourse, the formerly exclusive club of the British officers stationed in Dhaka. It was at this very venue on 6 March 1971 that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had declared in his historic speech.”

But for the thousands of Mukti Bahini guerillas and Bengali civilians who had flooded back into the city to witness the surrender, a shameful flick of the pen is poor payment for the crimes this man and his soldiers had perpetrated. If there were any justice in the world, that pen would go right through his eyeball. But the Indian commanders kept their word, and safeguarded Niazi and his men from any mob justice. As K.S. Nair writes:

“After signing, Niazi removed his epaulettes, took out the revolver in his holster, and handed it to Aurora (the Indian commander) with tears rolling down his cheeks. The crowd at the Race Course began shouting anti-Pakistan slogans and threats to lynch Niazi. The Indian officers present formed a cordon around Niazi, and had him whisked off in an Indian jeep.”

To Bangladeshis, standing in the ruins of their home, it was cold comfort. Pakistan had surrendered, yes, but they had surrendered to the Indian Army, not to the Mukti Bahini or the Awami League or the hundreds of thousands of people who they had terrorized. As Bass writes:

“No official representatives from the Bangladesh forces were present at the surrender ceremony. The only exception was Group Captain A.K. Khandaker, who seems to have been pushed into a corner and isn’t visible in the cropped-up versions of the surrender photograph which often circulates. 11 The absence of Bangladeshi representatives at the surrender is for many Bangladeshis symbolic of how the people’s struggle has been overshadowed by India–Pakistan war rhetoric.

Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam writes that: After intervening in the war, the Indian Army did what armies do—they behaved like victorious soldiers. Pakistan did not surrender to Bangladesh—the treaty signed on 16 December 1971 was between an Indian general and a Pakistani general. Suddenly the war that Bangladeshi freedom fighters had been waging became yet another skirmish between the two elder children of partition. And those same freedom fighters were forced to surrender their arms to the Indian troops. It was a symbolic wound that would fester.”

Lack of representation was a familiar grievance for Bengalis. And even in victory, their voices were not fully heard. But nevertheless, the war was over. And that was cause for some celebration.

Especially back in India.

In the capital of Delhi, a phone rang in Indira Gandhi’s office. She snatched up the receiver and listened intently. The voice on the other end informed her that Dacca, stronghold of Pakistani power in Bangladesh and ground zero for one of the worst humanitarian crimes of the Cold War, had fallen.

Sari swirling, smile beaming, Indira informed the Indian Congress: “Dacca is now the free capital of a free country. We hail the people of Bangladesh in their hour of triumph.” With Dacca captured, and the Pakistani forces in the east neutralized, all eyes now turned to the Western Front, where fighting between the Indian and Pakistani armies still raged.

This was the moment that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger dreaded most. Fearing that Indira Gandhi, emboldened by the fall of Dacca, would turn West and hurl all her strength at West Pakistan. That she would march into Lahore, and Karachi, even Islamabad, and crack the Land of the Pure into pieces.

But once again, the Americans had misjudged her. As Bass continues:

“The same day that Pakistan surrendered in the east, Gandhi declared, “India has no territorial ambitions. Now that the Pakistani Armed Forces have surrendered in Bangla Desh and Bangla Desh is free, it is pointless in our view to continue the present conflict.” She unilaterally ordered India’s armed forces to cease fire all along the western front as of 8 p.m. on December 17, The guns fell silent.”

But Indira did fire one parting shot at her American adversaries. She wrote a letter (Dec 14^th) to the White House, in which she castigated Nixon for all that he had done to inflame the crisis and nurture Yahya’s worse instincts:

 “This tragic war could have been averted if the power, influence and authority of all the states, and above all the United States, had got Sheikh Mujibur Rahman released. Lip service was paid to the need for a political solution but not a single worthwhile step was taken to bring this about. We seek nothing for ourselves. We do not want any territory of what was East Pakistan and now constitutes Bangladesh. We do not want any territory of West Pakistan. We do want lasting peace with Pakistan. But will Pakistan give up its ceaseless and yet pointless agitation of the last 24 years over Kashmir? Are they willing to give up their hateful campaign and posture of perpetual hostility towards India? How many times in the last 24 years have my father and I offered a pact of non-aggression to Pakistan. It is a matter of recorded history that each time such an offer was made, Pakistan rejected it out of hand. We are deeply hurt by the innuendos and insinuations that it was we who have precipitated the crisis and have in wany way thwarted the emergence of solutions. I emphasized publicly and privately the need for a political settlement. We have waited nine months for it. But we have not received, even to this day, the barest framework of a settlement that would take into account the facts.”

It was, writes biographer Katherine Frank, a “provocative, indignant, and forthright letter, guaranteed to infuriate Nixon.”

And Nixon was indeed infuriated. That woman, that bitch, had won. As he moped: “She shouldn’t get credit for starting the fire and then calling in the fire department.”

But truth be told, Nixon was tired of thinking about South Asia. Tired of thinking about Yahya and Gandhi and Mujib and the whole dysfunctional cesspool. The South Asian crisis was just one of many things on his Presidential platter, and Nixon relished the opportunity to simply scrape it off to the side and pretend it didn’t exist for a bit. That willful amnesia was abetted by the encouraging, ego-inflating words of Dr. Henry Kissinger, who told Nixon:

“Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved West Pakistan.”

By deploying the U.S.S. Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal, by shaking their big stick in India’s face, they had deterred Indira Gandhi from continuing her war of aggression on the Western front. In the process, they’d looked strong in front of the Chinese and made the Soviet Union look ineffectual and weak / “scare the pants off the Russians”/// “We have turned disaster into defeat”, Kissinger told members of his staff.

“It was equal parts face-saving and self-delusion,” write Carney and Miklian.

Other members of the administration were not so ebullient. George H.W. Bush, the UN Ambassador, was exhausted by the entire ordeal. As he complained to Kissinger:

“I want a transfer when this is over. I want a nice quiet place like Rwanda.”

If the White House had any regrets or sympathy, it was for their stalwart, steadfast, unfortunate friend, President Yahya Khan. In West Pakistan, now just called “Pakistan”, the mood had turned against the rotund dictator. Military regimes can do a lot of things; they oppress, the suppress, they can even muzzle the press, but they absolutely cannot lose a war. As M.J Akbar writes:

The shock in the West was so intense that there was a near revolt among junior officers. Instinctively, they connected failure to betrayal of Islam. They demanded immediate prohibition in the messes, the implication being that infidel vices had been punished by defeat. An Urdu newspaper from Lahore gave a memorable headline on 19 December 1971: (One voice, one demand, Nation’s killer is Yahya Khan).”

“Large crowds gathered in Islamabad chanting “Death to Yahya Khan!”,” write Carney and Miklian, “Another mob burned a Yahya effigy and torched a house they thought he owned. Wives of fallen soldiers stormed the gates of President House, throwing their marriage bangles over the wall to signify their disgust at how callous Yahya had been with their husbands’ lives.”

Yahya Khan, who had envisioned a lightning offensive in the mold of Israel’s preemptive strike during the Six-Day War, had been right about one thing. The war was over quickly. The whole ordeal, from the first strikes of Operation Genghis Khan to the unconditional surrender in Dacca, had only lasted two weeks. (14 days)

“It’s such a shame,” Nixon commented at one point, “So sad. So sad.” In his view, President Yahya Khan was a “thoroughly decent and reasonable man. Not always smart politically, but he’s a decent man.”

Richard Nixon, the ultimate authority on reason and decency, was very sad about his friend’s imminent overthrow. Henry Kissinger was a bit less distraught, as Bass writes: “The worst he would say about Yahya was that he thought the man was stupid, and Kissinger thought that almost everyone was stupid.”

But thankfully, the United States had a promising new partner in Pakistan. With no other option, facing immense pressure from his senior officers, Yahya Khan was going to resign in disgrace and pass the torch to a successor. Someone younger, someone smarter, someone sober-er. Someone who Henry Kissinger personally found “brilliant, charming, of global stature in his perceptions.”

The one, the only, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

When Bhutto left Pakistan in early December to represent his country at the United Nations, he was just someone else’s employee. An errand boy. A week later, he returned the presumptive leader of a nation. As Dilip Hiro writes:

“In the end, the forty-three-year-old wily politician found himself president, commander in chief, and chief martial law administrator of Pakistan.”

->

The transfer of power was swift and unsentimental. By December 20^th, Yahya had been deposed, retired and exiled. Bhutto meanwhile, settled comfortably into his new role. As Carney and Miklian write:

“That night, Bhutto drank a bottle of champagne alone at President House and then delivered his first presidential address. He promised the people hope after darkness. “My dear countrymen, my dear friends, my dear students, laborers, peasants, those who fought for Pakistan. We are facing the worst crisis in our country’s life, a deadly crisis.” Bhutto always could hold his liquor better than Yahya. There was no trace of slurring in his eloquent elocution. “We have to pick up the pieces, very small pieces, but [from them] we will make a new Pakistan. A prosperous and progressive Pakistan. A Pakistan free of exploitation.” The speech was wildly popular. As they had done for Yahya two short years before, journalists sang Bhutto’s praises.”

Just like that, Bhutto had achieved all the power he’d ever dreamed of. He held Pakistan, truncated though it was, in the palm of his hand. And in that hand, he held something else. A valuable bargaining chip.

An old friend.   

On the evening of December 23^rd, Bhutto took the Presidential car to an army bungalow near the airport. He slicked back his hair, straightened his lapel, and stepped inside. As he looked into the room, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman looked up. Since dodging death a week earlier, Mujib had been laying low, slowly absorbing whispers and rumors of what was happening.

But seeing Bhutto came as a shock. “What brings you here?”, Mujib asked.

“I am the President and Chief Marshal Law Administrator of Pakistan,” Bhutto replied, “East Pakistan has fallen and Pakistan surrendered to India. General Yahya Khan resigned.’

The conversations in the days that followed were confused and contradictory, spackled with old grievances and new anxieties. Honestly, every time I try and get to the truth of what these two actually said to each other, I find half-a-dozen different versions of it. But in the end, Bhutto decided it was prudent to send Mujib safely back to Bangladesh. He framed it as a magnanimous decision, but the reality was, Bhutto had no other choice. Indira Gandhi herself had recognized Mujib as the rightful leader of the free nation of Bangladesh, and so, Bhutto had to hand over the prize that Yahya had stolen.

10 months earlier, Mujib had left his home a prisoner, but in January of 1972, he returned to a hero’s welcome.

[AUDIO]

“Sheikh Mujibur Rahman returned to his native soil today as President of the new nation of Bangladesh. In Dacca, capital of what used to be East Pakistan, the Sheikh said he felt no bitterness towards West Pakistan.  [transfer to correspondent] jubilant crowds victory, etc.

Mujib’s return to Bangladesh was a cathartic, emotional, and overwhelming moment for millions of people. But the euphoria was tinged with an undeniable sense of tragedy. Because although the Sheikh had escaped his brush with death, many others had not. Nine months under the boot of Yahya’s army had taken an enormous human toll on the Bengali delta. In every village, down every road, under every tree, there were reminders of that brutality. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“Soon after the surrender, Sydney Schanberg took a trip across the traumatized new country of Bangladesh. Everywhere the New York Times reporter went, people showed him “all the killing grounds” where people were lined up and shot. “You could see the bones in the river, because it was a killing place.” In Dacca, he went to a hillside burial place. “There were shrubs and bushes, and there was a little boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, he was on his hands and knees, scratching the earth, looking for things. He looked disturbed. He was looking for his father, who he said was buried there. If you scratched enough there—it was shallow graves—you’d find a skull or bones. There were cemeteries everywhere. There was no doubt in my mind, evil was done.”

The 1971 Bangladesh War, like all conflicts that involve ethnic cleansing and cross-cultural violence, presents certain difficulties in quantifying just how many people actually died. Each nation, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, has its own national narrative about what happened, and the statistics they cling to tend to support those perceptions. As Dilip Hiro writes:

“The estimate of the deaths by violence in East Pakistan from March 26 to December 16, 1971, has varied wildly - from twenty-six thousand to three million. Going by the records of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, seen by the Hamoodur Rehman Inquiry Commission, the military killed twenty-six thousand people in action, with the commission noting that the officers always gave a low count. The figure of three million—five times the estimate for the unparalleled communal butchery in Punjab during 1947—first mentioned by Shaikh Rahman in his interview with British TV personality David Frost in January 1972 after his return to Dacca as a free man is now universally regarded as excessively inflated. The statistic given by Indian officials to Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, authors of War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh, was one hundred thousand.”

The 14-day war in December between the Indian and Pakistani armies was short, but inflicted a heavy cost as well, according to Hiro:

“The war on both fronts cost India the lives of 3,850 servicemen and Pakistan 9,000.”

Now if you listen to all those different numbers, and your ears start to glaze over a bit, that’s to understandable. It’s a scientific fact, that our brains aren’t really wired to process tragedy on that large of a scale. Many lengthy and insightful articles have been written about that peculiar cognitive bias our brains seem to have, but a 20^thcentury Hungarian scientist named Albert Szent Gyorgi might’ve said it best:

“I am unable to multiply one man’s suffering by 100 million”.

But no matter which national abacus you use to count the cost of the 1971 conflict, it was an undeniable, and most believe, avoidable tragedy. The survivors of the war had to pick up the pieces of their lives, learn to carry on with deep scars, both physical and emotional. And one of those survivors, one person who made it through the war, is someone we’ve come to know well over the course of this series:

Muhammed Hai, the teenage boy who lost most of his family in the Great Bhola Cyclone, supported the Awami League in the elections, and went on to join the Mukti Bahini in the aftermath of Operation Searchlight. In January of 1972, Muhammed Hai traveled all the way from his home in the southern delta to Dacca, the epicenter of the independence celebrations. 

There, at a ceremony in the city stadium honoring the Mukti Bahini fighters, Hai found himself standing in front of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself. Inches away from the man he had idolized and fought for. It was a surreal experience. As Carney and Miklian describe, rather poetically:

Hai held [his] gun with two hands and kneeled down at Mujib’s feet. His outstretched arms revealed the jagged scars he’d gotten holding on to the trunk of the palm tree in his family’s yard. Mujib bent down and picked up the gun. Hai opened his mouth to speak. Mujib looked him in the eyes and nodded. Hai closed his mouth and nodded back. He realized that he didn’t need to say anything at all. Mujib knew exactly what men like him had sacrificed to make this new country. Hai and Malik took [his] place in the crowd while the remaining fighters surrendered the last guns. When it was all over, Mujib addressed them. “I could not give you arms, but I still asked you to resist the enemy. I am proud of you.” The typically booming Mujib spoke quietly. His voice quivered while tears rolled down his cheeks. “Today you have made history by surrendering your arms. You have created an example for others to follow. I salute you.”

In January of 1972, change was in the air. As Sheikh Mujibur Rahman waved to huge throngs of adoring supporters, as Mukti Bahini guerillas sang patriotic anthems, as family members reunited, embraced and mourned their dead, a feeling of optimism was palpable. Of the ten million refugees who had been driven into India, about 9 million returned. The nightmare was finally over. Bangladesh was not just a concept anymore, it was real, tangible, flesh & blood.

That month, more than 50 years ago, shouts of ‘Joi Bangla” could be heard all across the delta.

NO HAPPY ENDINGS

And if this were a Hollywood adaptation, the story might’ve ended there. Our camera would sweep over a massive crowd, millions of people chanting Mujib’s name while a triumphant Hans Zimmer score blares in the background. Or maybe, as a little callback to the charity concert in Madison Square Garden, we might hear George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun.” The camera would slowly pan up, revealing a golden Bengali sunrise as the Bangladeshi flag flutters and snaps in the wind.

But history does not roll on credits.

->

The characters in our story did not live happily ever after.  And because we have spent so much time with them, I think it would be narrative malpractice to gloss over what happened to these people. The sad truth is, less than 15 years after the events of 1971, all three South Asian leaders – Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – would be dead. Assassinated by rivals or executed by their own people. And not without cause, unfortunately.

It was certainly not an outcome that anyone foresaw for Indira Gandhi in the heady days after India’s victory against Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter had forged a historical legacy of her very own. In less than one year, she broken Pakistan over her knee, established a free state of Bangladesh, forged an alliance with the Soviet Union, and resisted immense pressure from the United States. In the afterglow of that triumph, the comparisons to Durga, Goddess of War, were looking very apt.

“In the coming days and weeks, thousands of female babies born all over India were named Indira,” writes Katherine Frank.

Indira may have fancied herself a goddess, but she was not a saint. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“I am no longer the same person,” Indira euphorically told her closest friend. That friend was worried: adrift in all the adulation, the prime minister seemed to be losing the ability to doubt herself. The war had fostered something close to a cult of personality around Gandhi. The Congress—which tellingly eventually came to be known as the Congress (I), for “Indira”—was more than ever her instrument. She weakened the restraints of India’s democratic institutions, installing loyalists to run key states, packing the civil service, and even trying to hold sway over the judiciary. But Durga still had a poor country to run. India’s coffers were drained by waging war, sheltering refugees, and sponsoring an insurgency. India had also lost U.S. economic aid. As the monsoons failed, the economy was in a shambles, battered by high oil prices and inflation. The country fell into labor strikes, with factories shuttered and people in misery. “The Prime Minister had become very arrogant,” recalled one of her aides. “She loved being called Durga. The Bangladesh victory was the turning point.”

“The war had made her a hero,” Zakaria Anam elaborates, “the champion of human rights, the vanguard of democracy. She had freed Bangladesh from the shackles of West Pakistani dictators. She was their savior. But barely four years after the war, she imposed Emergency in India. Opposition politicians, students and unionists were jailed, the press was censored and basic human rights guaranteed by the Constitution were suspended. The guardian of liberty and freedom suddenly seemed to bear eerie similarities to the dictators that she had taken a moral stand against.”

Well, on October 31^st, 1984, while walking in her garden, Indira was machine-gunned by two of her closest bodyguards. That is an entire topic unto itself, one that we will definitely do a series on in the future, but suffice to say, it was a sad and violent end for the daughter that Jawaharlal Nehru had hoped would lead India into a brighter future.

Back in 1971, while India was riding high on the fumes of victory, few could have predicted such a tragic end to that story. Pakistan on the other hand, had never been lower. By losing a war with India and the entirety of East Pakistan in the process, they had been humiliated under the hot lights of the world stage. As Dilip Hiro writes:

“Pakistan had lost more than half of its population, as well as its main source of foreign exchange earned by the export of jute from its eastern wing. Far more importantly, the breakaway of East Pakistan undercut the founding doctrine of [the nation][…]  The secession of East Pakistan proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different languages, cuisines, cultures, and historical backgrounds. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism was a bitter pill to swallow not only for West Pakistani people and politicians but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan. West Pakistanis also lamented the fact that for the first time in eight centuries Hindus had defeated Muslims in the Indian subcontinent.”

The nation’s new Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, certainly had his work cut out for him. In the weeks and months that followed the surrender, there was a lot of finger-pointing. And many of those fingers settled squarely on Bhutto.

Zulfikar, however, was fiercely defensive when confronted with the suggestion that he was responsible for the breakup of Pakistan, that his obstructionism following the 1970 elections had been the final crack in the foundation. This was a long time coming, Bhutto insisted. Nothing I did, nothing any one individual did, could have caused or stopped this. As he said in a sarcastic address to Pakistan’s National Assembly: 

“Do you think Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Larkana is responsible for the separation of East Pakistan? That this individual who was not even involved in the politics of Pakistan until 1954…is the person who is finally, exclusively and completely responsible for the separation of Pakistan? If you want that, well I say I can take this burden on myself…I did it. Yahya Khan did not. Ayub Khan did not. The policy of exploitation did not. One thousand miles of separation did not. The fact that East Pakistan was in the majority and spoke a different language did not... It is all my fault. The crisis was in our stars… It was boiling… Nobody could stop it in 1971. It could have been stopped in 1950…over the language issue… I was nowhere on the scene… Let’s face the truth, hang me by all means, but the fact remains that I am not responsible for the separation.”

Hang me, by all means, Bhutto said.

Well eventually, they did.

Just six years after the 1971 war, Zulfikar was undone by the very men in khaki he had spent so long manipulating. In a roundabout way, it was simple, stupid Yahya Khan who got the last laugh. As Faisal Khosa writes:

“Though the army had obediently tolerated Bhutto and his widespread ‘political stardom’ for six years, it was during the 1977 general elections that the commanding officers decided enough was enough.”

To make a long story short, Bhutto was overthrown in yet another coup, arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to death. As Khosa continues:

“Bhutto spent his 51st—and last—birthday in a prison cell at Rawalpindi jail, scarcely able to eat because of untreated gum disease. The man who had once dined with kings and foreign dignitaries in their castles and been adorned in ‘savile row suits and silk handkerchiefs’ was now starving and withering away in solitary confinement in a cold, dark prison cell. This Bhutto looked nothing like the poised world statesman who exuded confidence and commanded respect everywhere he went; this Bhutto was frail and weak, living out the last moments of his life at the mercy of his captors. While in jail, Bhutto sent a letter to his daughter, Benazir Bhutto, in which he compared Benazir to Indira [Gandji], writing, ‘One thing you have in common: both of you are equally brave. Both of you are made of pure damascene steel. But where will your talent take you? Normally, it should take you to the very top. But we are living in a society where talent is a drawback and suffocating mediocrity an asset.’47 In the early morning hours of 4 April 1979, Bhutto was executed by hanging at the Central Jail Rawalpindi in Pakistan.”

West Pakistan’s leader came to a grisly end, but how did Bangladesh and its new leader fare? Now that he had finally acquired the power Bengali voters had given to him, did Sheikh Mujibur Rahman lead his people to a utopian era of prosperity, fairness, and democracy?

Sadly, no.

Sometimes, good agitators make for poor administrators. Mujib knew how to spit fire on the stump and whip up angry crowds, but when it came to running a country, he struggled. As Joya Chatterjee writes:

Adept at leading protest against governments, he found it harder to create or lead a government of his own. Mujib failed to persuade sections of the public, and the army, that his efforts at development would lift Bangladesh out of poverty. (To be fair, he was given barely two years to succeed.) After the Liberation War, people wanted wholesale transformation. They wanted change, and they wanted it now. They wanted renewal, and something on which to rest hopes for the future. Just as their sacrifices had been great, their hopes were boundless.

Mujib tried. He was tireless in pursuit of agrarian upliftment projects, more so even than India and Pakistan had been. But gigantic development projects – it was being realized in newly independent countries the world over – can put a blight on economies because of their inflationary effects on everyday commodities, including food, their ecological impact, and their disastrous effect on inhabitants of the regions chosen for development. Small was beautiful. So Mujib’s well-intentioned but inexperienced government went against the grain of a growing global consensus. Indeed, they seemed to be driving the country ever deeper into an abyss: by 1973, agrarian production had fallen to eighty-four per cent of what it had been before the war, industrial production had shrunk to sixty-six per cent of pre-war levels, and the cost of living for agricultural laborers had risen by 150 per cent.201 By 1974, full-scale famine had broken out. One and a half million people are thought to have died of starvation and hunger-related illness between 1974 and 1975, a demographic catastrophe no less shocking than the war itself.

Before long, the jubilant shouts of “Joi Bangla” had curdled into protests and dissident factions. Like Indira Gandhi, Mujib responded to these challenges by undermining the very principles he had espoused. As Faisal Khosa elaborates:

“Amid rising political and economic discontent and rampant unemployment, poverty and corruption, Mujib violated several principles of the Constitution, including constitutionalism, freedom of speech, the rule of law, the right to dissent and equal opportunity of employment.12 As the polarization between his centrist Awami League and the radical revolutionaries became more severe by the end of 1974, Sheikh Mujib ‘gave up the façade’ of parliamentary government.13 On 28 December 1974, Mujib proclaimed a state of Emergency, suspending fundamental rights and completely stripping the courts of their power to intervene in any of his actions.14 In January 1975, he used his party’s influence to amend the Constitution to establish a presidential system and Mujib was now the president. Using this executive power, Mujib banned all political parties and formed one single political party, to which all government employees were required to belong. The courts were enjoined to quit enforcing fundamental rights enumerated in the Constitution. The man who led its independence movement had now transformed Bangladesh from a democracy into personal dictatorship.”

[…]  In effect, in the years following Bengali independence, Prime Minister Mujib cast-off everything that Bangladesh theoretically represented and after assuming power, he defied the very politics he himself had instilled.22 Primary among those who took offence were a number of mid-level military officers who were already aggrieved by Mujib’s actions toward the army, especially his creation of the national security force and its superiority to the army. They saw his moves towards dictatorship as harmful to their interests and the pretext for action to force a change.

According to Joya Chatterjee:

“In 1975, in the midst of the famine, the army, by now composed of some 55,000 men, began to plot Mujib’s overthrow. India is said to have warned him that something was afoot, ‘but he laughed at the suggestion that any Bengali could raise his hand against him, “No, no. They’re all my children.”’202 Mujib was too complacent. On 15 August 1975, three strike forces of junior officers based at Dacca headed to his home, where they assassinated him and murdered no fewer than forty members of his household.”

One by one, in 1975, 1977, and 1984 – Mujib, Indira, and Bhutto, in that order, were all murdered by their own militaries. But what about the meddling Americans? How did things turn out for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Well, most people know what happened to Nixon. His paranoid fixation on internal enemies, combined with his flexible stance on the law, finally caught up with him. The Watergate scandal, which I will not dare attempt to summarize here, culminated in his resigning of the Presidency on August 8^th, 1974. It was reported that in the days before that resignation, Nixon openly wept in front of his closest advisor, Dr. Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, of course, is the real survivor of this tale. He lived a long and prosperous life, before dying peacefully at the age of 100 in November of 2023.

The unhappy fates of our principal cast members bring to mind a tongue-in-cheek quote from a favorite author of mine, Terry Pratchett:

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” 

In this case, however, I think Pratchett is wrong. There were many good people on both sides of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Courageous, compassionate people who stood firm against a tide of casual murder, hypocrisy, and corruption. People who, in their own small, limited ways, tried to stop the bleeding in the Bengal delta. Freedom fighters and relief workers, statesmen and soldiers, nurses and doctors and musicians and refugees. So many good people, forgotten and uncelebrated, whose names are unlikely to appear on any high school history tests.

And so, I think it’s only fitting that we end on one of those good people.

Archer Blood, the American Consul General who had raged against the Nixon administration from Dacca, paid a very high price for his dissent. As Blood himself recalled:

“Nixon ordered my transfer from Dacca and for the next six years, while Kissinger was still in power, I was in professional exile, excluded from any work having to do with foreign policy.”

“It was only in the Carter administration,” writes Gary J. Bass, “that Archer Blood could try to launch a late restart of his career. In 1979, at last, he went back to Delhi as deputy chief of mission. “It was serious,” says Scott Butcher (one of his peers), “but far beneath what he would have otherwise aspired to. He had the adulation of his peers but not the success he would have had had he not stuck his neck out.”

Blood returned to Washington in 1981. He was discouraged by his job options. The only assignment he was offered was a hardship post as chargé d’affaires in Kabul. He started learning Dari, but the communist government refused to give him a visa. They would, he was sure, take anyone except him. Despondent, Blood decided to retire from the Foreign Service in May 1982. He became a diplomat-in-residence at Allegheny College, which was certainly a pleasant life. After his death in 2004 at the age of eighty-one, the U.S. embassy in Dacca named its library for him.

His wife, Meg Blood says, “He wasn’t robbed of everything, as they would have liked.”

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

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