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One of the things I've learned from reading history and indeed talking to historians on
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this show is that history is deeply complex. We are a storytelling species, we make sense
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of the world through stories, but we prefer simple stories to complex ones. We look at
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history as a linear series of events, one thing following another, with everything seemingly
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inevitable. But that's the hindsight bias at play. When historical events are happening
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in the present tense, all possibilities seem open, everything seems chaotic, anything can
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happen. Also, there are far more factors at play that determine the course of history
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and most of those don't make it to the narrative that we later tell about it. Sometimes though,
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historians come along who look further, who look deeper and expand that narrative and
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our knowledge of the world. Srinath Raghavan is one such historian and Bangladesh is one
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Bhatma. Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My topic
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today is the Bangladesh war of 1971, but not the events of the war itself, but the global
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forces that shaped those circumstances. People often think of the breakup of Pakistan as
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if it was inevitable and people often see it as a bilateral conflict between India and
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Pakistan. None of those are quite true. Srinath Raghavan's book, 1971, The Global History
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of the Creation of Bangladesh, takes a deep look at the international events that led
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to the creation of Bangladesh and the actions of not just India and Pakistan, but also the
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USA, the Soviet Union and China. But before we get to my conversation with Srinath, let's
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take a quick commercial break.
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slash IVM. Srinath, welcome again to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you. Great to be here. So Srinath, I'm going to begin by exploring an angle I sort
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of explored with, you know, when I did a couple of episodes on Gandhi with Ramchandra Bhoja
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and where I asked him about the difficulty of being a historian given that we are wired
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for what is called the hindsight bias, that when you look back at history, everything
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seems inevitable. And it struck me when I was reading your book on Bangladesh, 1971,
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that that's one of your starting premises for the book is that that sense of inevitability
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plays out especially strongly with Bangladesh and it wasn't at all as inevitable and you
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examined the various reasons why. But just as a general question, if I may pose the same
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question to you that I posed to Ram, how do you sort of mentally take that step back from
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that sense of inevitability?
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Well, so historians have a saying that, you know, life is lived forwards but understood
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backwards, right? So in a sense, the challenge for the historian is how do you sort of try
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and find some kind of a point which does not exclusively privilege hindsight, but hindsight
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is absolutely important because that's the only way you can make sense of things together.
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And to have that sense of contingency but also causality in play is I think a bit of
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a balance that you strike as you go along. In a sense, there is no formula for it. It's
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more of a craft and how you sort of approach things, right? So this is great historian
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of the French Revolution who used to say that, you know, before it happens, every revolution
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seems impossible. But after it happens, it seems inevitable, right? And that's true
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of most great things like the Bangladesh emergence of an independent country and so on. So the
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challenge for me in writing this book was precisely to come to terms with that kind
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of a meta question of saying, how are we going to tell this story without making it all seem
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as if it was so predetermined, which in some ways also takes away agency from people at
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the end of the day, history is made by people themselves.
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And specifically, how did you arrive at Bangladesh?
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Well, I was actually working on a PhD thesis focusing on Indian foreign policy in the sort
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of early years, primarily focusing on the Nehru period. And I was working in the Nehru
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Memorial Museum and Library. This was in the early 2000s. And at that point of time, the
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papers of P. N. Huxer, who was Indira Gandhi's principal secretary during that period, were
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actually sort of deposited and made available to scholars. So I was one of the first people
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to sort of go through them. You know, it's a very large collection. Lately, we've had
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Jairam Ramesh writing a biography of P. N. Huxer, which makes very good, thorough use
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of all those sources. But I think I was one of the first people to actually see that.
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And it very quickly struck me that there was very interesting material on the Bangladesh
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crisis, which suggested very different points of view, even Abhinish Yo. And then I decided
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to sort of make that a project. But it also struck me that it would be useful to widen
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out the perspective and not just do an India-centered account of how the Indians approach the crisis,
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but to look at the crisis as a whole, to understand this very important historical event in postcolonial
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South Asia, which is the emergence of Bangladesh, and to sort of do it on a much wider canvas.
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So that's how the project really began. And then I started working in a range of other
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places. I've sort of worked in Britain, America, Canada, Australia, the Soviet Union, Germany.
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So all of these archives then kind of opened up a much more multifaceted sort of portrait
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of the period and of that particular event itself.
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And just as an aside, your book is full of these illuminations and insights from so-to-say
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big players like Huxer, D. P. Dhar, P. N. Dhar, who all sound like fairly evolved intellects,
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not what you would expect the typical stereotype of the babu or the bureaucrat is. And that
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was also fascinating to me to see those sort of influences upon our prime minister.
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Oh yeah, absolutely. I think one of the sort of key strengths which Indira Gandhi had,
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particularly in her early period of her sort of prime ministerial career, was to be able
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to accumulate this kind of very high quality talent of civil servants, people with sort
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of foreign policy experience, with intelligence background, to be able to sort of assist her.
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And at least in the case of the Bangladesh crisis, I think these people were not just
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big players. They were very important. And someone like P. N. Huxer was literally sort
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of the person holding various strands of crisis management together on behalf of the prime
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minister, of course. And looking through those notes and the letters that they wrote to each
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other about what Mrs. Gandhi told them in certain meetings and so on was absolutely
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Yeah, much more erudite and crisp and better articulated than many op-eds of the day, which
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you might find. So I'm intrigued by an early sentence in your book, which I found in the
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introduction to your book, which is, quote, professional historians of South Asia remain
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reluctant to venture beyond the boundary of 1947 stop-court. What do you mean by this?
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Well, what I meant to say was that the study of South Asian history, as it happens in universities,
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as it's done by historians who sort of teach and research in sort of universities and so
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on, is still very much focused either on the colonial period or the pre-colonial past.
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The immediate sort of post-independence period or the post-colonial period in South Asia
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as a whole still remains something that historians are reluctant to touch, partly because they
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see it as too close to their time, partly because the archives for the older period
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are much better organized, more easily. If you want to work on some topic to do with
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British India, you can go to the British Library in London. You can look at the National Archives
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in India. You'd get a reasonable. Whereas for the post-colonial period, especially when
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I was working on the book, things have changed a little bit since then. The official archives
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were almost had close to zero holdings. You had to sort of go through private papers,
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which is what I was doing, Huxer and others, and then use various other kinds of official
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archives from other countries. In a sense, that remains a challenge.
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The second thing is that there is some kind of a tacit intellectual or academic division
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of labor which has happened, which is to say that historians typically look at everything
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before independence, whereas it's the political scientists or international relations scholars
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who look at the more immediate past. But I think that then leaves out a very large arena
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of our contemporary existence, which I think needs to be bought under the domain of history
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proper and of historical investigation and writing.
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I'm happy to say that since I wrote those words, things do seem to be moving, though
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not as quickly as we'd like it to. But I think we definitely have a range of books
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now coming out which also try and treat the sort of post-independence, post-colonial period
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in the same historical fashion as you would do with anything in the distant past.
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And I'd imagine without the bedrock of history, even political science then has a problem
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just dealing with the material, right?
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Well, I mean, I think a big part of the problem with a lot of Indian political science writing
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is precisely that it's very historical and tends to treat the present as if it does not
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have a past and that the way that institutions, structures and processes have evolved historically
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is somehow not of any moment of concern. That the only thing which matters is what is the
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dynamic today. And I think that that ahistorical quality is, I think, been one of the significant
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drawbacks of Indian political science writing. But at the same time, I think the best Indian
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political scientists are people who have sort of, you know, used historical knowledge and
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historical materials really to throw light on political processes in more closer periods
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And could the converse also be true? Like as a historian, do you sometimes feel that
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you're wearing the hat of a political scientist also when writing parts of your text?
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Well, the way I sort of tend to approach all of these things is to say that, you know,
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not just political science, but social sciences more broadly are very important for me because
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that gives me heuristic devices with which I approach the archives. You know, archives
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and sources don't tell you any stories. You have to ask questions of them, you know, and
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for that you need to have some questions which come out of broader conceptual, theoretical
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sort of basis. Now, you know, I don't go out with the view of trying to prove or disprove
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this or that theory, but as a heuristic device, I think social sciences are very important
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for the historian's craft. But of course, you know, in terms of my own choice, I still
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prefer the narrative, which I think is the domain in which history is best explored and
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written and presented. And so I choose the narrative as the main device through which
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And is there sort of a fine balance there that a historian needs to maintain between
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the narrative that they're presenting and the perspectives that they might wish to bear
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Yeah. So, you know, historical narratives, contrary to sort of what, you know, other
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social sciences typically tend to think are not just about telling a story, right? I mean,
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you're trying to make a causal argument. I think the central difference between, say,
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most other social sciences and histories, and I say most because there are exceptions,
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is that historians are interested in change, whereas other social sciences are typically
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interested in trying to find longer term continuities, right? So they may use historical materials,
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but with a view to saying so-and-so process or so-and-so pattern is recurrent, if these
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are the initial conditions, these are likely to be the outcomes, right? So that is the
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kind of exercise that they are engaged in. Whereas for historians, the challenge is not
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that we are not interested in generalization. We are. But the bigger problem that you're
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interested in is in change. How does change happen? How does a country like Pakistan break
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up into two parts? It's exactly the kind of questions that historians are drawn to.
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And getting back to the breakup of Pakistan, again, early in your book, you say that the
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typical prisms through when one looks at Bangladesh are insularity and determinism. We've already
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spoken about determinism. And by insularity, I guess you mean that, you know, people tend
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to think of it as either something that concerns Bangladesh alone or it's an India-Pakistan
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dynamic. And what your book tries to bring out is that there are sort of these geopolitical
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waves of events and, you know, all with their unintended consequences, which are sweeping
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through at the time. And Bangladesh is really a result of those. I mean, as you said later,
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it's far from being predestined. It's a product of conjuncture and contingency, choice and
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Yeah, that's true. I mean, in a sense that much of the writing on the creation of Bangladesh,
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it tends to be either from the perspective of trying to tell the story of how Bangladeshi
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or Bengali nationalism sort of rose and attained its destiny as an independent nation, or it
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is about saying why Pakistan, as it was in 1947, kind of was an unworkable project and
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so on. So there is an implicit sort of teleology and determinism, which is built into most
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of our storylines to greater and lesser extents. But that's the standard way in which we think.
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And of course, in India, we have our own story of this being the most important sort of moment
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of India falsifying the two-nation theory and so on. Now, I don't for a minute say that
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any of these narratives is wrong. What I want to say is that they are incomplete and that
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if you really want a more satisfactory explanation of why this particular momentous event occurred,
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then you have to place it not just within a national or a regional frame, but actually
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in something of a global. It's an international and transnational frame. And that's what really
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the book attempts to do.
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And in a sense, all of this, all of what happened in Bangladesh in 71 has its roots, obviously,
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in the 60s under Ayub Khan. And specifically in the context of, say, 1968, when the student
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rebellion started and all of that, you talk about the three historical processes that
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shaped the global context of those years. The first being decolonization. Can you tell
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me a little bit more about that?
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Well, decolonization, you know, obviously, is the breakup of the old sort of European
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empires in the post Second World War period. India was in the first wave of decolonization.
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But by the late 1960s, you had several other countries across Asia and Africa, which have
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gone through a process of decolonization, but which are also in their postcolonial existence,
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coming up with various forms of other kinds of issues, borders, ethnicities, various kinds
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of rivalries left behind by older forms of colonial control and so on. So in a sense,
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what is happening in Bangladesh is therefore best understood as a continuation of this
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larger process of decolonization, even though it is happening within the context of a country
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which is already, you know, out of colonial control, which is Pakistan. But nevertheless,
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the imperatives and the processes seem to me to be very similar to what was happening
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with a number of other countries, particularly in Africa at that point of time. So it is
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very important, therefore, to sort of put it into that frame.
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Right. And the second process you mentioned, the frame of the Cold War.
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Yeah, the Cold War is again, you know, something which, depending on when you want to date,
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it starts somewhere after the Second World War and before the late 1940s. And the Cold
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War is typically understood as a sort of a geopolitical and ideological rivalry between
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the United States and its allies, the so-called free world, and the Soviet Union and its allies,
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the so-called communist bloc. But what is interesting is that by the late 1960s, you
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know, the Cold War no longer looks like this contest between two rigidly organized blocs.
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There is a lot of sort of, you know, moving and, you know, turning around of pieces within
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each of these blocks. And one of the big important things, of course, was the split between the
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Chinese and the Soviet Union, which was already coming to the fore by that time and which
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plays an important role in the story of Bangladesh as well. So in a sense, it was important,
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therefore, to suggest that, you know, this was an important moment in the Cold War, the
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realignment of the sort of important pieces of the Cold War geopolitics, the waning of
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some of the ideological competition in the context of the Cold War, and how that impacts
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on an event which is not anywhere in the center of things where the Cold War was playing out,
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which is in South Asia.
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And as you go on to sort of talk about in the book, and we'll discuss in the second half
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of this podcast, right, you know, that simplistic notion that many people have and that indeed
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I had before I read this book that, oh, the US was siding with Pakistan and the Soviet
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Union was with India and blah, blah, blah is actually not true at all. There was a lot
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of sort of negotiations and tools and flows happening in this period with China playing
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a major part. But we'll come to that later in the podcast. The next process you mentioned
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Yeah, so, you know, decolonization and Cold War, I think are, you know, you can reasonably
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sort of have a sense of what they are. But globalization is something that we, at least
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in our current context, tend to think of as something which is very much a post-Cold War
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kind of a moment, right? I mean, you want to think about Francis Fukuyama sometime in
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1989, announcing the end of history, saying that all kinds of, you know, ideological rivalries
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are coming out. That is a moment when Americans sort of attempt to, you know, to create an
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integrated capitalist global economy really takes off and so on. But one of the things
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which historians have been pointing to us and I sort of picked up on that literature
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and built it up was to say that, you know, what we think of as the current wave of globalization,
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you know, actually is something which begins in the early 70s and late 1960s, early 70s
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is when the first, you know, real wave of sort of globalization begins, by which I mean
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that there are a number of, you know, events and processes which are coming together, which
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are bringing disparate plots of the world in some sort of communication with one another,
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right? So you have the huge explosion of air travel during that period. So people are traveling
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to one place another, the whole story of containerization and so on, you know, already sort of starting
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to take off. There's a huge standardization of various kinds of, you know, economic processes,
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but also other kinds of things. There is a much greater spread of non-governmental organizations
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which are trying to bring standardization even in terms of values, right? I mean, the
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rise of something like human rights, for instance, happens in a much more global context in the
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same period. So in that sense, not just as a process of economic globalization and integration,
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but as one where events and processes which happen in one part of the world are quite
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tightly linked to what is happening elsewhere. And it seemed to me that this phenomenon is
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very well established already by the late 1960s. Of course, contemporary forms of globalization
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evolved historically from there on. But that was a very important moment when this began.
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And again, as I point out in the book, this had important implications for the way the
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Bangladesh crisis plays out.
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And elsewhere, you point out about how there was sort of a technological explosion during
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this time. For example, the first televisions came to Pakistan in 1968. And therefore it
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was a sort of an inflection point for this kind of cultural globalization, which seemed
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to me, you know, when I was reading it, that is very analogous to the current day when
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social media has, you know, sort of led to a similar sort of deepening of that whole
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process of cultural globalization. Give me a little bit of context into what Pakistan
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was like in 68. Ayub Khan had already been in charge for many years. People often said
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that, you know, under him, there was sort of a new Pakistan, which was emerging. Ayub
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himself stood for stability and growth. He got a fair amount of support from the US,
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which is, you know, a process that started a decade earlier. Just lay the context for
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me coming to 1968, you know, when it might seem say in the mid to late 60s that this
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guy is going to be here for a long time. And then like you said, over 90s gone.
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Well, 1960s are a very important and interesting decade in the history of Pakistan, which is
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to say that, you know, that was a decade when Pakistan registered, at least in terms of
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GDP growth and quite an extraordinary accomplishment of almost averaging about 6% annual GDP growth
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over that decade. That was possible because, you know, Ayub Khan was sort of following
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a set of, you know, planned economic policies, which were actually a lot of it was crafted
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by American economists, the Harvard advisory group and others who were helping him, you
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know, do it. And Pakistan also got onto the bandwagon of the Green Revolution even before
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India did. They started in the early 60s itself. So in that sense, this was a decade when Pakistan
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actually witnessed considerable levels of economic growth. But that economic growth
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as by the end of the decade was it was becoming was was very, very lopsided. And some of the
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Howard economists who were advising the Pakistanis themselves conceded that in a sense, their
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policies were aimed towards fostering capital accumulation and investment. But the groups
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which are capable of doing it were very small. In fact, at one point of time, the head of
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the Pakistani Planning Commission said that there were just 22 families in Pakistan, which
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accounted for something like 85 to 90% of the country's wealth. So there was an extraordinary
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concentration of wealth by conscious government policy, you know, giving tax breaks, you know,
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basically all the things that you want to do to enable capitalist accumulation and investment
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was the game. And that, in the Pakistani context, got exacerbated because of the sort of geographical
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disparities between West Pakistan and East Pakistan. So if you can just take a step back,
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right, so in 1947, when Pakistan is created, you have this kind of completely geographically
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anomalous entity coming out, which is West Pakistan, which is today's Pakistan and, you
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know, East Pakistan, which is today's Bangladesh, being under sort of one particular sort of,
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you know, being a same country and in a similar regime. In fact, in this novel shame, Salman
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Rushdie has this fantastic line where he says that, United Pakistan was a strange bird,
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it was two wings without a body, right, because that body was effectively separated by India.
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So there was this tendency to assume, therefore, that, you know, divide between these two parts
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is not just geographic, but you know, there was sort of economic disparities, East Pakistan
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was the more sort of, you know, commodity producing area, things like Jews used to grow
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there, exports of those in, you know, earn dollars for the Pakistani government, but
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a lot of the investment and industrial development was actually happening in the West. So there
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was this regional disparity of economic growth as well, not just in terms of class sort of
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And there were of course language issues, like Urdu being the official language.
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And that sort of language issue was in some ways the first major trigger, right, the first
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sort of major movement in East Pakistan actually happens over the fact that Bengali is not
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initially accepted as an important language of the state, which is not just a cultural
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issue, but it's one to do with employment and stuff. So if you want to become a Pakistani
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civil servant, you will have to write exams in Urdu, right? I mean, in a sense, you know,
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your knowledge of Bengali doesn't count for very much.
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So all this time, it's interesting to me that, you know, that the Eastern wing of Pakistan
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is actually more populous.
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Yeah, it is in terms of just number of people, Eastern wing of Pakistan was always more populous
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and, you know, United Pakistan did not have an election till 1970. But if you had by that
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point of time, majority of the electorate was also in East Pakistan, right? So in a
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sense, the fact that the normal democratic pressures were not brought to bear in this
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period allowed this kind of, you know, disparate economic growth to happen.
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And the diversity between the two regions was there. So, you know, it's again, what
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is ironic and fascinating about this period is that, you know, the period of Pakistan's
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sort of immense, you know, an impressive sort of economic growth in the 1960s.
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The economists who are there in the Pakistani Planning Commission are primarily of Bengali
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origin. And by the end of the decade, it is those economists who are coming up with this
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critique of the economic system of Pakistan as effectively a neo-colonial one. They say
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that East Pakistan has become a commodity producing area, like all old colonies used
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to be. And all the sort of, you know, stuff in terms of, you know, new industries, investment,
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etc. is primarily happening in the West. So and East then becomes an importer of the commodities
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of the West. And it's in that context that a lot of these arguments came to be crystallized
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and the relationship came to be seen as fundamentally a neo-colonial one.
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In fact, a little later, there's a quote from Mujeeb, which I kind of mark down, which is
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quote, the basic truth that every Bengali has felt in his bones, that we have been treated
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for so long as a colony and a market. Exactly.
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Stop quote, which is, you know, so therefore, in a sense, you could say that the Bangladeshi
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fight for independence as it became due to circumstances was analogous to the Indian
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fight for independence.
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Yeah, it was analogous to the Indian fight for independence. I think the other analogy,
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of course, is the similar sorts of arguments which are being made around the same time
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in Latin America about dependency theories and so on. So you can see that, you know,
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here this argument is being extended to one single economy, which of course has got these
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two sort of geographic.
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Just can you elaborate on the Latin American argument?
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I mean, the Latin American argument was primarily to say that, you know, many of these countries,
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but Latin America, of course, you know, became formally decolonized much before Asia and
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Africa did. But the point was to say that, you know, in the post Second World War period,
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the patterns of capitalist development in the Western world were such that areas like
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Latin America were effectively seen as commodity producing in a similar sort of a relation,
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right? So that's not where the thing so there is a sort of a tendency to think that we need
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to have our own sort of, you know, model of economic development, which is kind of independent
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of this kind of thing. There were, of course, many economies attempted these import substitution
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policies during that period. But what is interesting, of course, is that all of this happening within
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the context of Pakistan, right? So the whole argument of a neo colonial sort of feeling
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which Mudeep's court captures was one which was being felt by people who belong to the
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same state. So in that sense, it was a much more I mean, you could have had similar policies
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in India, for instance, but the Indian government of the time, the Nehru government, you know,
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took a conscious decision to enable investment in various parts of India to precisely prevent
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this kind of a very lopsided economic growth and development and so on, which the Pakistanis
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never took seriously. And a lot of that investment did happen in the context of West Pakistan.
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So tell me a little bit about 1968, then, you know, there was youthful revolt in Pakistan,
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and it's not just in Pakistan, it was almost sort of a global thing that, you know, the
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youth was rising up everywhere in America, you had the anti Vietnam feeling, there was
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this anti establishment feeling everywhere. What's going on here? What are the kind of
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factors that go into something like this?
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Yeah, so 1968 is actually, I think, a good example of how the processes of incipient
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globalisation came to sort of impact what is happening in the context of Pakistan. Because,
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you know, the student revolt of 1968, as you said, was a global phenomenon. Of course,
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everywhere they had local particular sort of issues which were in play. But nevertheless,
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student groups across the world took the cues from one another, right? And it's important
#
to remember just how widespread this was.
#
And television came to Pakistan in 1968, so they can see everything.
#
Right. So you had, of course, student revolts happening in the United States, which was
#
also triggered by the civil rights, Vietnam War and that involvement. But you had similar
#
things happening in France, in Italy, in Germany. You also had it in the Soviet block, right?
#
In the post 1968, the Czechoslovakia incident, there was, you know, all of that story. There
#
was a student movement happening in Japan at the point of time. There was a cultural
#
revolution in China, which was again a student sort of led thing. So what is happening across
#
the world in some ways was, you know, ricocheting from one place to another. People were seeing
#
that this kind of mobilisation is happening. The forms of the mobilisation, the vocabularies
#
with local inflections, of course, were still quite strikingly reminiscent of one another.
#
And what is interesting is that in Pakistan, the student revolts kind of come towards the
#
tail end of 1968. And as you said, you know, television in Pakistan, people are seeing
#
all of this stuff. And of course, there are sort of individuals who also sort of bring
#
the story, like, you know, the sort of famous student revolutionary of the Oxford sit-ins
#
in the British context was Tariq Ali, who was from a very well-to-do Pakistani family.
#
And as many student revolutionaries tend to be, yeah. And Tariq Ali actually comes back
#
to Pakistan and, you know, and sees that there is this whole sort of movement against Ayub
#
Khan's sort of authoritarian regime. And what is interesting about the student movement
#
in Pakistan in late 1968, early 1969, is that it actually is in both wings of Pakistan.
#
It is not as if it's only in the eastern wing of Pakistan, as much in the western wing as
#
But are they coordinated or are they kind of spontaneous?
#
No, no. In a sense, they do sort of learn from each other. They sort of express solidarity
#
Are they fighting for the same thing?
#
Yeah. They all believe that the first step towards thing is to for democratisation of
#
Pakistan, right? So the authoritarian military government has to go and, you know, they see
#
that the first step is to sort of give expression to democracy. And of course, you know, they
#
do succeed. Ayub Khan is forced to step down, which I think is an important accomplishment
#
for student revolutionaries. I think they were more successful than almost students
#
anywhere else, possibly with the exception of France, where they managed to get de-gone.
#
Sometimes one feels like a dog chasing a car has finally caught the car. What do you do
#
Right. So it is a it was one of those, you know, situations where they sort of got there.
#
And then, of course, that sets the stage for not an immediate transfer of power to the
#
people, but, you know, power, you know, there's a military coup, actually, which deposes Ayub
#
Yahya Khan comes to power, but very clearly with an agenda of announcing elections and
#
managing some kind of a transition to democracy, which would nevertheless leave the military
#
in a controlling sort of position within the polity.
#
Yeah. And you know, when Yahya announces martial law, you quote him as saying that the army
#
court must be prepared to rule this unfortunate country for the next 14 years or so. I simply
#
can't throw this country to the wolves. Stop quote. And already in his mind, he's I mean,
#
even though Ayub Khan's resignation and his taking over is prompted by the student revolts,
#
he's not taking the students or their demands really that seriously. He's assumed that this
#
is a period of unrest and the army has to see the country through and stabilize it.
#
And it's almost like this sense of both entitlement and denial.
#
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think Ayub Khan was, you know, for so long seen as such an
#
unimpeachable force in Pakistani politics that, you know, he just couldn't bear to sort
#
of, you know, accept what the reality was as it was unfolding. But the scale of the
#
revolts, student uprisings, you know, movements by peasants, by various kinds of labor unions
#
and so on, was of such a scale that ultimately the Pakistan army felt that they had to sort
#
of intervene and persuade Ayub to move out so that, you know, they could then restore
#
a modicum of stability. So I think it was a very powerful moment at that point of time.
#
And there's another telling quote in your book about how the Old Guard court failed
#
to feel the pulse of an electorate, over half of whom had been born after the hairy days
#
of 1947. Stop quote. And it almost seemed analogous to me as of today, where in India
#
almost half, more than half the people are born after liberalization. And yet our politicians
#
on average are like these 60, 70 year old fogies who simply don't get it. And whatever
#
the pulse of the nation is, I'm not saying there is one that would be a simplistic narrative.
#
But if there was a pulse, those guys who are running the country aren't really equipped
#
to get what's going on, right? Yeah. And the generational gap was kind of one
#
of the major factors for the driver of this thing, in a way that actually was in many
#
of the other 1968 revolts. But in the context of Pakistan, particularly, I think that was
#
definitely a very important part of the story, which was to say that, you know, the military
#
and Ayub Khan in particular, but even Yahya Khan later, underestimated the extent to which
#
they would be able to sort of control these developments or call upon, you know, sort
#
of abstract calls for national unity, discipline, etc., as a way of mobilizing and harnessing
#
these energies, which proved to be wrong. And it seemed to me, correct me if I'm reading
#
it wrong, but it seemed to me that even with Mujibur Rahman, who actually eventually got
#
an independent Bangladesh and came to power because of all of these forces and these ferments,
#
was himself not in control of it at all. You know, he was a conventional politician within
#
the framework of Pakistan. He'd been a minister and all that. You know, in March 1966, he
#
comes out with a six point program for autonomy, where he wants more autonomy and I suppose
#
more of a federalist structure for where Bangladesh has more power within the thing. And instead
#
of becoming, you know, the starting tool with which you begin negotiations, that becomes
#
a minimum acceptable thing once the movement for Bangladeshi independence gets going, because
#
he is suddenly captive to the wishes of the student revolution and the extremists in his
#
party. And he is forced into all of those trends he might not otherwise take.
#
That's I think quite true. And I think that transformation is again something that is
#
peculiar to the late 1960s, which is why I don't buy into this argument that, you know,
#
Bangladesh was predestined to break up because, you know, you had this Bengali majority which
#
was never given its due and so on. Actually speaking, for politicians of Mujibur Rehman
#
generation, the real dream was to sort of not get an independent state, but to take
#
control of all of Pakistan, which a democratic majority could have put them in power, right?
#
And as we'll see, you know, even the Indians thought that that actually would not be such
#
a bad outcome for their own sort of...
#
That'd be a great outcome. Do you think they'd be fighting with us so much if that was the
#
Well, so that was the argument at that point in time, right? So the assumption was that,
#
as in the Bengalis are not interested in Kashmir, they are not interested in India, they want
#
better relations with us. All of it might have been reasonable assumptions, but that's
#
the framework within which people saw, which is why I think it's anachronistic to think
#
that that framework was already doomed to sort of extinction by the time that these
#
things were playing out. Not at all. So in the minds of contemporaries, these were important
#
structures which you could not break away so easily from. You know, it's never an easy
#
thing to be able to do. It's a bit... Actually, I think the best analogy is with what Jinnah
#
wanted in terms of his Pakistan in pre-independence India, right? I mean, it's not very clear
#
that even he believed that at all points that outcome was likely. So Mujibur Rahman, yes,
#
was very much someone who was there. The six-point agenda was very much a federal plan. But in
#
a sense, because of the radicalisation of the students who then sort of energised the
#
Awami League, took it to a very different level. And Mujib was a remarkable leader in
#
his own right. I mean, in a sense, he was able to harness those energies. He was able
#
to give them voice and expression in a way that I think was quite remarkable at that
#
point of time. But yes, he was also hamstrung by the fact that much of the energy behind
#
his sort of political party and the six-point demand was now being channeled through younger
#
people who wanted more.
#
And an interesting analogy that comes to mind, I did a recent episode with the historian
#
Gyan Prakash in The Emergency. And one of the things I sort of learned reading his book
#
was that, I mean, obviously, there were similar students sort of unrest in India as well.
#
And there, again, when there was a student unrest in 74-75, it starts as a student unrest
#
in Bihar with the likes of Lalu and Nitish, who are the student leaders. But it only really
#
gathers momentum when an older leader like Jayaprakash Narayan comes and kind of takes
#
it over. And I mean, again, a similar thing in Bangladesh, where it's a student revolt
#
proper and Mujib sort of becomes a figurehead of the thing. Is that something common to
#
kind of student movements, where they have to, you know?
#
Yeah. So, you know, the great historian Eric Hobsbawm used to say that, you know, the problem
#
with student politics is that, you know, each student generation is only about two or three
#
years in its time, right? I mean, it's a transient politics. It is difficult to give it kind
#
of institutional structure and framework, which will allow it to be played over a reasonable
#
period of time to bring about student change. Of course, one way of solving the problem
#
is the way that Indian political parties do, right? You have these youth wings which are
#
led by people who are in their forties, as if any of that counts as student politics.
#
But the real energy of student politics really is people who believe that, whose idealism
#
leads them to believe that, you know, all the structures of possibility can be done
#
away with and you can actually aim at something a lot more. But that needs to be channelized
#
through politics of a certain kind. And Mujibur Rahman was, I think, the right man at the
#
right time. And, you know, that's partly the reason he's so venerated in Bangladesh. I
#
mean, you know, he was named Bungabundu at that point of time. And partly because, you
#
know, he was a phenomenal writer, a very charismatic leader, someone who understood what the needs
#
of the time were, but was still trying to see if there could be some way out which did
#
not involve excessive sort of violence and bloodshed and so on.
#
Yeah, I mean, another interesting sort of learning that came upon me from your book
#
was that contrary to popular hindsight perception, it's not like Mujib wanted independence from
#
the start. And even later, as we find, it's not like Indira was this great warrior who
#
wanted to bring Bangladesh to independence. They were both almost very reluctant for a
#
long part of their journey until events forced themselves upon these two people.
#
Yeah, I think that's certainly true of Mujibur Rahman. See, because the elections of 1970,
#
by the time the election results come out in December 1970, it is very clear that the
#
Awami League is the single largest party. But there is a structural problem in as much
#
as the Awami League has won pretty much every seat in East Pakistan, barring two, but has
#
won no seat in West Pakistan. And the biggest West Pakistani party was Pakistan's People's
#
Party, PPP, which still exists. Then a new party recently founded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
#
which did a reasonably good showing in West Pakistan, but managed to sort of do almost
#
nothing in the East. So there was this kind of cleavage between these two sides in a sense
#
that there was no political force which was able to bridge this kind of East-West barrier,
#
so to speak. But if you were talking about a normal parliamentary system of democracy,
#
the natural thing would have been to invite the leader of the largest party to form government.
#
And that is precisely what Mujib and the Awami League were hoping would happen. But the army
#
and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had different plans, and so things took a very different turn.
#
So Yahya was almost blindsided by the results. He didn't expect it. And in fact, because
#
he gave his prognosis to the Americans who trusted him so much, even they were blindsided
#
Well, I think everyone was taken to a greater or lesser extent by surprise of the outcome,
#
particularly of the Awami League's sort of extraordinary performance in the East. I think
#
that was something that the Pakistan army did not foresee. And of course, the Pakistan
#
military and its intelligence agencies had done their homework before the elections to
#
make sure that the outcome would not be very unfavorable to what they wanted. But that
#
turned out to be entirely wrong. And they were caught in a situation which they quite
#
did not anticipate would come out.
#
Tell me a little bit about Bhutto here, who's the other major player in this, who seems
#
to me almost as this sort of a moral genius who is ultimately, as we know in history by
#
hand side, thrust by, foiled by his own petard. But what kind of person is he and what's the
#
role that he's playing here? What does he want out of all this? Because he's also been
#
a conventional politician long before this. He's been with Ayub Khan, he's been a minister
#
Yeah, so Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto is, you know, is at least in sheer terms of a political
#
skill acumen, you know, something bordering on genius in terms of the way that he was
#
able to rise through the Pakistani system. You know, here was someone who sort of began
#
working in the Ayub Khan administration as a junior minister, then became very important,
#
you know, effectively sort of in charge of foreign affairs in that context, egged Ayub
#
Khan to sort of attack India in 1965. And then when the war went pear shaped, actually
#
turned around against his old patron, saying that, you know, Pakistan had been let down
#
and so on, and then went on to find the Pakistan People's Party, you know, came up with a political
#
style and platform, which was an interesting amalgam of the left and the sort of right
#
and so on nationalist, but also very leftist, you know, because of his role in Pakistan's
#
outreach to China post 1962, the war between India and China. You know, the leftists were
#
always sort of very wary of taking him on because he was seen as someone who had, you
#
know, those links with China and so on. So and it was an extraordinary demagogue, someone
#
who was a very charismatic figure, who was able to sort of tap into both older forms
#
of politics, you know, he himself came from Sindh, you know, so he is sort of a very important
#
landlord in the Sindh context, had all those other, you know, sort of, you know, the religious
#
leadership and the landed leadership there has sort of very close ties. So he was able
#
to draw on those kinds of tropes of conducting himself, but at the same time could also mouth
#
all this sort of radical slogan of roti, khapda or maqan, which, you know, he said, which
#
I was amazed to, I saw that I said, no, no, either Indira said it or is from Bollywood,
#
it cannot possibly be, but it is, it is very much his and he was able to craft a political
#
movement within a very short span of time, was able to sort of, you know, create a position
#
for itself, which is quite remarkable. It is all the more remarkable because, you know,
#
he had to do it obviously under the constraints of operating under a military rule of various
#
kinds and, and someone whom he had himself alienated, which was Ayub Khan. So I think,
#
you know, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was quite a remarkable figure in his time, both during
#
the war, but also subsequently. And I think, you know, Pakistani history is yet to give
#
him his due in not in a sense of appreciating his achievements. I think he was a very mercurial
#
figure with some, you know, really sort of nasty things to his credit as well, but just
#
acknowledging his importance as a historical figure in the history of Pakistan. I think
#
that that angle of it needs to be dealt with further by historians.
#
Yeah, moral genius went a long way. And as you mentioned, who could as a politician be
#
all things to all people, which, you know, is a skill Narendra Modi himself kind of demonstrated
#
in 2014. We don't know how much of it will sort of carry over. So tell me, so the elections
#
are over the end of 70 and Yaya is kind of blindsided by the whole result. And even Bhutto
#
isn't extremely happy because you know, what the hell, I mean, the Awami League has just
#
got many more seats than him and he's going to have to deal with them at some point. And
#
he had assumed that it will be like, he'll be the politician who will rule Pakistan with
#
the army at his wings. And so I think you quote somewhere in the book where he tells
#
Yaya that I'll be the politician, you'll be the general, and they'll kind of rule together.
#
And all that's gone. And both Yaya and Bhutto now sort of collude to stop Mujeeb from taking
#
over. Tell me about, you know, those months when that collusion is active.
#
Yeah, so that effectively happens between January and late March 1971 is the period
#
of post-elections sort of wrangling and negotiations. In a sense, stuff which would never have happened.
#
I mean, in any parliamentary democracy, the only job for Yaya Khan would have been to
#
sort of convene the sort of National Assembly and they also wanted to have a constituent
#
assembly and so on. You know, whatever it was, Mujibur Rahman should have been invited
#
to form the government. But instead of that, they sort of tried to get Mujibur Rahman to
#
accept what the outlines of a future constitutional settlement would be, primarily with a view
#
to securing the army's own role and getting assurances from him before anything else could
#
be done. And those negotiations then sort of went nowhere. And in that time, Bhutto
#
very quickly insinuated himself into the picture by saying that, you know, he was not the army's
#
favorite when this whole story began. But by the time the sort of negotiations are kind
#
of in the middle, Bhutto was able to play spoiler by telling the army on the one hand
#
that, listen, if you're going to do this kind of a deal and allow them to come without assurances
#
for the West Pakistanis and so on, it's going to be a non-starter. So he's on the one hand
#
raising the stakes constantly. But on the other hand, he's also giving them indications
#
saying that, listen, we can adopt what he calls a Turkish model at that point of time,
#
right? I mean, Turkey is a sort of example of the Islamic country that, you know, they
#
sort of want it to be, which is to say that, you know, you have the military, but you also
#
have civilians and, you know, you have some kind of a modus vivendi working out at that
#
point of time. And so in a sense, effectively, Yahya and the military regime and Zulfiqar
#
Ali Bhutto converge towards this point where they finally come to a decision that, you
#
know, Mujibur Rahman has to be stopped in his tracks and that this movement for the
#
creation of, you know, of a new polity where Mujibur and the Awami League would play such
#
an important role and the Punjabis and the West Pakistan military, et cetera, is going
#
to be downgraded in its importance, should not be allowed to pass. And it's at that moment
#
that things really start going downhill.
#
And in fact, there's a funky quote a little, when the crisis is a little later on, probably
#
from March, where a senior general tells Yahya Khan, quote, don't worry, we won't allow
#
these black bastards to rule over us, stop quote. And it's very clear even at that point
#
that Yahya doesn't want to sort of respect the democratic expression. And, you know,
#
he's trying to control the process. What is the outcome he's actually aiming for?
#
I mean, I think, I mean, it's, again, difficult to say, because nowhere is it very clearly
#
laid down. These were all things which were done under the guise of coming up with some
#
kind of a constitutional arrangement and so on. But I think what Yahya would have been
#
sort of quite satisfied with was, A, if, you know, you came up with some structure where
#
he remained president, where the army's budgets and its control over sort of, you know, various
#
kinds of important policy issues remained outside the purview of democratic politics.
#
And then basically, you know, as long as, say, Mujeeb was willing to, you know, take
#
on board some, you know, West Pakistani sort of representation in his government and so
#
on. So in a sense, those were the kinds of things that he wanted to do. And in effect,
#
all of that would have meant, from Mujeeb's standpoint, a significant dilution of the
#
views on which the elections were fought and won by the Awami League.
#
Especially because, you know, now, because of the radicalism of a lot of his support,
#
the student movement and all of that, he's kind of forced into a corner where he has
#
to insist on the six-point charter that he laid out for Bangladeshi autonomy as a minimum
#
condition that without that, he cannot proceed. And he's kind of forced into this corner.
#
And obviously, the army cannot accept that either because Yahya's self-interest, he's
#
trying to, you know, consolidate his own position. And on the side, you have Bhutto playing Yahya.
#
And I presume there's a fair degree of sort of West Pakistani, Urdu-speaking condescension
#
towards these, you know, these Bangladeshi, Bengali, East Pakistanis.
#
That's right. I mean, I think that cultural angle of it comes out quite clearly even the
#
quote that you mentioned. You know, there is a strong condescension of Bengalis as somehow
#
being culturally, physically and in every way inferior to the sort of, you know, the
#
West Pakistanis and so on, particularly the Punjabis. So there was very much that angle
#
to it. And in fact, that was part of the reason why once the military crackdown began, you
#
know, some of it is really hard because that kind of ethnic angle to, you know, that story
#
becomes much more important once the crackdown begins.
#
And how do those events play out? Like around March 71, how do events take Mujeeb from a
#
position of still trying to negotiate with Yahya Khan to actually going ahead and declaring
#
Well, the reality is that, you know, the convening of the National Assembly is postponed, adjourned,
#
signed, you know, without a sort of any date. That then leads to a sort of upsurge on the
#
streets in Bangladesh. And from that point on, Mujeeb has to play a careful role, right?
#
So on the one hand, he has to keep the momentum and the upsurge going because it allows him
#
to put pressure on the West Pakistanis. But at the same time, he doesn't want to be in
#
a position where the Pakistan army believes that the situation is getting so out of control
#
that the only option is to use force to sort of put them down, right? So he's trying to
#
sort of balance both of these.
#
There are other problems as well in a sense that there are non-Bengalis in East Pakistan
#
who are being targeted by the Bengalis as partly because they were seen as stooges.
#
So there's another one more layer of ethnic complexity to this. Many of these are Urdu
#
speaking migrants from Eastern India, like Bihar and other parts of Eastern India and
#
so on. So he has to keep those kinds of, you know, violence and that kind of tendencies
#
under check. So it's a very difficult time for him. And this is also the time when he's
#
tentatively sending feelers to India saying, listen, you know, if the Indians were to sort
#
of, you know, make some noises and tell the Pakistanis that, you know, we will disapprove
#
of any use of force, et cetera, then, you know, maybe the Pakistanis will back off.
#
So and then he's trying to tell similar things to the Americans. So Mujib is trying pretty
#
much every trick in the book to make sure that he can come out of the situation either,
#
you know, with the sort of mandate to form government or at least some kind of a power
#
sharing arrangement without tipping over into violence. And then that is what is this thing.
#
But the Pakistanis are very clear that at least from about the first week of March onwards
#
that talks are simply a fig leaf behind which a smoke screen behind which they will carry
#
on the military buildup. There was not that much of Pakistani military presence in what
#
later became Bangladesh. They had to sort of do a buildup. That buildup was also kind
#
of a little difficult for them to do because India and Pakistan, because of their own sort
#
of problems, Indians had shut off their airspace to Pakistani. So the Pakistanis had to do
#
the buildup by going through Sri Lanka, you know, so Colombo was a transit point between
#
the two wings. So all of that took a little bit of time. And of course, they wanted to
#
keep the element of surprise. And they decided that when they would crack down, they would
#
hit really hard. And Jaya was kind of pretending that he's still interested in talks with
#
Mujeeb while on the one hand the military buildup is proceeding and he knows he's going
#
to crack down. That's right. So, you know, Operation Searchlight as it's called starts
#
on March 25th. At what point does it become an inevitability that it is going to happen?
#
Well, I think already, you know, a few days before that it is becoming, you know, in fact,
#
in those few days, if you just look at the records of the negotiations which are happening,
#
it seems as if great progress is being made, you know, in fact, you know, there's a lot
#
of sense and in fact, Mujeeb's own sort of trusted lieutenants within the Awami League
#
are very conflicted about how this is going to play because on the one hand, it suddenly
#
seems like, you know, progress is happening. So, you know, you don't want to sort of, you
#
know, unnecessarily sort of burn that bridge, you want to try and see if things can sort
#
of move on. But at the same time, you know, they have their own doubts and concerns. And
#
in fact, just around the time when the operation begins, you know, people tell Mujeeb Rehman
#
that, listen, you have to sort of basically leave the country. And Mujeeb takes a call
#
saying that, you know, if he sort of flees, then the Pakistanis are going to really get
#
after his people. And he says that, no, you know, it's just not possible for me to sort
#
of take that kind of a move. And then he's captured by the Pakistanis.
#
Is that a principle stand or is he sort of just or he underestimates the inevitability
#
of the military crackdown?
#
Well, I mean, at that point, by that point of time, you know, by the time this kind of
#
discussion is happening, the military crackdown is already underway. They know it. They know
#
that the tanks are moving.
#
So he just chooses to say that, listen, instead of making it, you know, his own survival and
#
issue on which the Pakistanis will crack down very hard on the rest of the Bengali people,
#
it is better that, you know, he sort of takes a stand and decides what he wants to do and
#
We'll take a quick break at this point and we'll come back to talk about India and the
#
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another awesome week on the IVM Podcast Network. If you're
#
not following us on social media, please make sure that you do. We're IVM Podcast on Twitter,
#
Facebook and Instagram. So if you guys haven't been checking our Instagram, you should take
#
a look at the audiograms. We're giving you excerpts from different shows. This is available
#
both on our stories and on our feed. Also, we put these audiograms up on Facebook and
#
Twitter as well. So, I mean, like, do kind of keep an eye out for them. You kind of enjoy
#
On Cyrus Says, Cyrus is joined by Abuzar Akhtar, who talks about his difficult journey from
#
a businessman in Dubai to a playback singer in Bollywood. Film producer and close friend
#
of mine, Koki Gulati, also joins in to talk about his discovery of Abuzar. You should
#
also check out episode 350 of Cyrus Says, which was an AMA special. It featured a roundtable
#
of other IVM hosts like Varun Dugirala of Advertising Instead, Naren Chinoy from Simplify,
#
Dinkar Dubeidi from Geek Fruit, and of course, me and Abbas.
#
Anirudh Kanishwati is back with season two of Echoes of India from the 27th of March.
#
On the first episode of the season, Anirudh is going to start from where he left off,
#
the rise of the Gupta Empire. New episodes are out every Wednesday.
#
On Puliyabazi Pranay and Saurabh talk to Disha Malik and Kavita Devi, who run Khabar Lahariya,
#
a woman-run rural media network in UP. On Noyar Kanul, Ambarana is joined by wife and
#
model Hasleen Kaur to talk about the safety of women in the entertainment industry.
#
On Football Twaddle, Saru and Kanav talk about last week's FA Cup and EPL action as a race
#
for the title and top four heats up. On Thalle Harate last week, Uday Kumar joins
#
hosts Pawan and Ganesh to discuss the oldest descriptions thrown in Bengaluru, which opens
#
the historical understanding of the city. On the Spongebob podcast, Ami Parmeswaran
#
talks about the time when he was invited to present tax collection and communication strategies.
#
And with that, let's continue on with your show.
#
Welcome back to the Scene in the On scene. I'm chatting with Srinath Raghavan about his
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billion book, 1971, which examines the Bangladesh war and all the multiple factors which led
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to it happening, which wasn't at all inevitable. And so far we've kind of been speaking about
#
the domestic situation in Pakistan as it then was because it was West Pakistan and East
#
Pakistan and Bangladesh didn't exist at the time. And now let's talk a little bit about
#
India Srinath. So Mujeeb decides that, okay, he is going to let himself be arrested and
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so on. But many of his lieutenants escaped to India. And all through this crisis as it's
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been building up, what's been sort of India's attitude towards the Bangladesh question?
#
So the Indian government is obviously tracking the situation very closely, particularly after
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the election results come out, because they know that the outcome of the elections is
#
something that the Pakistani, West Pakistani political establishment and the Pakistan army
#
certainly are going to be extremely unhappy with. And they know that there is a possibility
#
of some kind of a breakdown of talks entirely. So that is very much in the realm of possibility.
#
But at least broadly speaking, within the government of India, there are kind of differing
#
views, right? So on the one hand, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Pakistan High
#
Commissioner, their view is that in some ways, actually speaking, Mujeeb and the Pakistan
#
army will make a deal. And that's not such a bad thing for us at all, because it's better
#
for us to have a Bengali army like sort of prime minister in position than having military
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rule in Pakistan. Their stances on a range of issues, which sort of were of most concern
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to India, like Kashmir, etc., were seen as much more sort of moderate and acceptable.
#
But then, you know, the Indian intelligence agencies, particularly the newly created research
#
and analysis wing, the R&DW, which was headed by a man called R.N. Kao, who was sort of
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first person. And the intelligence agencies, however, felt that the possibility of a total
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breakdown and some kind of a resort to armed struggle by the Bengali people and the Vamili
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base was not something to be discounted. So there were these kind of two contending views.
#
The other thing the Indians are concerned is that, you know, maybe in order to divert
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attention from what is happening in East Pakistan, Yahya Khan might take some kind of military
#
action in the West, just as a sort of a diversionary thing and so on, right? I mean, so there are
#
all these kinds of things happening.
#
Now around the 2nd of March or so, just when the talks are kind of, it's looking like these
#
things are not going anywhere, the Indians get a couple of feelers from Mujibur Rahman
#
asking them to, you know, make some sort of military mobilization, etc., in order to put
#
the fear into the Pakistani minds and then prevent them from sort of deploying troops
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into Pakistan and so on. And Mujib even meets the Indian Deputy High Commissioner in Dhaka
#
to convey the point. But the Indians are still very unsure about what exactly Mujibur Rahman
#
sort of thinking on these issues is.
#
Now, again, it's important to remind ourselves that from the perspective of Indian decision
#
makers at that time, Mujibur Rahman was a Pakistani politician. You know, in a sense,
#
obviously they knew him and had some contacts with him. But ever since Mujib had sort of
#
gotten embroiled in this thing called the Agartala Conspiracy case, you know, where
#
he was alleged to have sort of waged a conspiracy to sort of, you know, break up Pakistan, etc.,
#
the Indians had been quite wary of being openly sort of in contact with him and so on.
#
So there is a period when Mujibur Rahman actually attempts to reach out, but the Indian political
#
reaction is a little confused. And again, the Indians are reading this development towards
#
the last week before the crackdown as the situation actually improved, right? That's
#
everyone, including the army leaders thought things were getting better. So as with any
#
such situation, you know, you have sort of conflicting assessments of what is likely
#
to happen. So in a sense, the Indians were also a little sort of surprised when the crackdown
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actually took place. So it was not something that they were absolutely sure was what the
#
next step was going to be.
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And it's kind of complicated by the fact that they would like Mujib to be Prime Minister
#
of Pakistan, for the reasons you discussed, but they're not so sure about Bangladesh.
#
So it's a sort of a, you know, they haven't yet reached the stage where that, you know,
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an independent Bangladesh is not necessarily in Indian wishes. Why invite chaos in the
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neighborhood? And also, you know, I think you mentioned there was a bit of a fear that
#
an independent Bangladesh, the leftist elements might get closer to the Chinese than to the
#
Soviets. And then that just complicates the geopolitics of the whole thing.
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Not just geopolitics, but also India's own domestic politics. India, the Indian government
#
at that time was cracking down very heavily on the Naxalite movement, which was, of course,
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in West Bengal was one of the main areas where that was happening. So there was this concern
#
that, you know, student and Naxal radicals in Indian part of Bengal might team up with
#
those on the other side, and so on. But I think more fundamentally, you know, at that
#
point of time, it is still too premature to think of an independent Bangladesh. And again,
#
that's where, you know, we have to allow for the distancing from the hindsight. You know,
#
it looks like obviously the right solution to us was not at all something which was easily
#
conceivable. You're talking of breaking up another country. And, you know, and that meant
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that, you know, the movement on the ground had to have the force. I mean, the Indians
#
were always, you know, they had to assess first whether the Awami League was serious.
#
What was its leadership in the absence of Mujibur Rahman? How much could you sort of
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trust the others to sort of carry on the struggle? Did they have the moral and physical sort
#
of, you know, reserves to be able to go on, even if India provided material support?
#
Right. So all of these issues were still to be debated, thought. So, you know, assuming
#
that the choice is only between either acquiescing in a Pakistani crackdown or plumping for independence
#
of Bangladesh, I think is a very dichotomous choice, which just was not in people's minds
#
And what was also partly complicated by sort of India taking the high moral ground when
#
it came to Kashmir and saying, hey, this is only our internal matter and no one else must
#
interfere. And having taken this stance, it would now be very awkward for them to interfere
#
in Pakistan's internal matter, as it were.
#
Exactly. Right. So when the first Bangladeshi politicians from the Awami League started coming
#
into India, established contact with the Indian security forces, the BSAF and the R&DW and
#
others, the Indians were still unsure whether they should be sort of seen as actively intervening
#
in this. For one, this whole principle of non-interference, which is a kind of an established
#
position of India in this whole story. The second reason why the Indians were not so
#
sure that they should be able to, they should actually sort of intervene in this issue in
#
any serious way was because they were just unsure of what the sort of movement would
#
look like in the absence of a leader like Mujibur Rahman. So, you know, you had to sort
#
of make some assessment about whether this would be a movement which was capable of actually
#
sort of pushing towards independence in a serious way. And the third thing, of course,
#
was that already by that time, there was a big hue and cry in the Indian parliament and
#
so on saying that, you know, India has to sort of act and such like things.
#
And it's interesting that, you know, this Indira Gandhi in the aftermath of the Bangladesh
#
war was, of course, praised hyperbolically by one opposition person as Madhurga.
#
Apparently, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, though it's difficult to figure out where exactly he said
#
that, but it's now part of the common lore. It's part of the common folklore. So it doesn't
#
matter if it happened or not it happened. And the interesting thing in your book is
#
that she's actually also very reluctant to kind of get involved, like exactly as you're
#
saying, she's very wary. And at one point, she remarks to someone that there must be,
#
you know, most of parliament wants her to act against Bangladesh and only it'll be hard
#
to find a couple of people who will actually support her stance on it. And she's playing
#
this very careful role. But at the same time, while India isn't actively thinking of an
#
independent Bangladesh or moving in to make that happen, the army is still providing support
#
to sort of the rebels and the militants outside. What is the sort of thinking behind that?
#
Like first thing, we don't want to get involved. It's your internal matter. God knows what
#
will happen. And but then actually still helping the rebellion.
#
Well, in fact, the help on the ground happens even before these political decisions started
#
to be made. Because see, the reality is that these are people who are fleeing military
#
sort of attacks and coming across the border. They're not just ordinary citizens, but also
#
let's remember, you know, there are units of the Bangladesh Pakistan army, which are
#
Bengali regiments, which also sort of come on to the Indian side. Right. So that's that
#
then becomes a nucleus of what would later become the main fighting force that you would
#
use. So and then, you know, many of them wanted sort of various kinds of assistance in order
#
to come together. There are senior army leaders, apart from Ujibur Rahman, were trickling into
#
India from various parts. So in a sense, not responding to any of that was also not an
#
option. But at the same time, I think the initial Indian feeling was very much that,
#
you know, yes, you sort of bring them in, you sort of create some kind of structures
#
to accommodate them in camps and various kinds of things. But that also then allow you to
#
keep a lid on what is happening. Right. It's not necessarily the case that you're already
#
thinking of them as being in fact, you know, the decision to sort of really scale up support
#
to the, you know, the Avamili and the Bengali fighters doesn't happen until later in the
#
summer of 1971. And in fact, some of the notes which are made by the R&DW, because they were
#
the ones who are directly dealing with many of these people, suggest a great degree of
#
unhappiness with India in the early months, you know, especially in May, June, July, saying
#
Indians are not giving us enough ammunition, they have rationed us to five rounds a day
#
and so on. All of that was, you know, partly because of material constraints on the part
#
of India, but also partly because you did not really think that, you know, you wanted
#
to sort of scale up support in that way. It's only in those months that the idea really
#
begins that yes, we have to sort of systematically start doing these, you establish training
#
camps. So everything happens somewhat gradually. And Mrs. Gandhi and P. N. Huxer and others
#
are genuinely quite cautious about what should be done. Right. In fact, there is another
#
sort of folklore around this is this claim by General Manik Shah, you know, well after
#
Mrs. Gandhi's death, you know, he's said in public quite a few times that Mrs. Gandhi
#
actually called him to a cabinet meeting and said that, listen, why can't the army go
#
into Bangladesh now? He says it's in May 1971. And then he said that, no, no, no, we have
#
to wait, the army has to be prepared, the monsoons have to get over, then we will sort
#
of go in. So, you know, and then she agreed. But, you know, that's a piece of myth making,
#
which I think does very little credit to any of the people involved.
#
And for all the myth making of both Mrs. Gandhi and Manik Shah as sort of hawks and these brave
#
figures, even Manik Shah was fairly reluctant in the sense that, you know, just before the
#
war starts, it's like he doesn't want to go all the way to Dhaka. And he's one of them.
#
He's one of the people who's kind of arguing for restraint, just taking enough territory
#
to send the migrants back and its junior officers, like a gentleman named Jacob, who sort of
#
say that, no, no, it's very much within the realm of possibility.
#
Yeah. So, you know, we'll talk about that aspect of it in a little bit. But at this
#
point of time, I think, you know, this point is worth making, because this is a most commonly
#
held notion in India that Indira Gandhi actually sort of wanted to, you know, or would have
#
asked Manik Shah to sort of do this, but actually it's untrue. In fact, right from the very
#
beginning, from the day the crackdown begins, the thinking of Mrs. Gandhi is shaped quite
#
decisively by P. N. Aksar, who's our closest advisor on these matters, and who's a very
#
experienced diplomat, and who makes it quite clear to her that, you know, we should not
#
be seen as overtly sort of intervening in the affairs of Pakistan, and that if anything,
#
we have to create the ground for the movement to become stronger, and for India to then
#
act decisively, if necessary. And the position that we should take is that the influx of
#
all of these refugees into India, the number becomes something like close to 10 million
#
by the end of that summer, is an unacceptable situation for a country like ours, and conditions
#
have to be created in Bangladesh where those people go back. And in fact, what is also
#
clear from the documents that are now available is that Mrs. Gandhi, even before that putative
#
meeting with the army chief, actually calls her, you know, the leaders of the opposition
#
and briefs them, saying that, please do not make this an issue. This is something that
#
is best sort of, you know, you should trust us, we will keep you informed, and, you know,
#
leaders like Adil Bihari Vajpayee sort of actually go along at that point of time. But
#
it is also true that there were sections within the Congress party, including her own cabinet,
#
people who believed that the, you know, the anger amongst Indian people on this was such
#
that, you know, you had to do something and, you know, this is a moment to act and so on.
#
And it's in that context that Mrs. Gandhi actually calls in Manik Shah for the meeting,
#
primarily to let her colleagues hear from the army chief, what is it that he thinks
#
is the military assessment. So I don't think it's at all true that Mrs. Gandhi wanted a
#
precipitated invasion and that she was persuaded otherwise by Manik Shah.
#
Yeah. And part of what seems to force her hand and change her mind, and again, it shows
#
how continuously plays a role is not just the amount of migration into India from Bangladesh,
#
but the composition of it. Like you point out how early on when migrants first came,
#
when refugees started coming in, they were majority Muslim, basically the same demographic
#
as Bangladesh itself. But gradually as the numbers grew to 5 million and then to alarmingly
#
to 8 million and beyond, as you point out, where the sheer number of refugees, number
#
one became a logistical impossibility and a huge fiscal burden on India. But also it
#
was now 80% Hindu, 20% Muslim, which therefore indicated that those Hindus were fleeing in
#
large numbers because there was a genocide underway and that the human rights violations,
#
which people sort of had a sense of, were far graver than people had suspected. And
#
in a sense, the combination of the fiscal burden of taking care of all these refugees
#
forced Indira Gandhi into a stand where she had to insist that number one, the refugees
#
have to go back. But number two, because there's the genocide underway, till you find a political
#
solution within Pakistan, you can't possibly go back, send them back. And a lot of the
#
other nations of the world, which we'll come to, but in the foreign, in the international
#
arena, refused to accept that these two could be tied together. They were like sort of saying
#
that, yeah, you have a migration problem, we'll help you with that in a humanitarian
#
sense, but this is not tied to the political problem where Indira Gandhi clearly saw that
#
Well, and it was in practical terms because you are talking about a number like 10 million
#
refugees coming onto a country like India, which was already a pretty poor country at
#
that point of time. I mean, we only have to look at the scale of say Syrian refugee influx
#
into Europe today and the kind of unrest that it has done in European politics. I mean,
#
what do you expect a poor country like India to be able to do? A place like Tripura suddenly
#
had three times the number of migrants as the total number of population in that state.
#
I mean, so it was a demographic sort of...
#
Yes. I mean, so that's again part of the sort of afterlife of the 1971 crisis. And even
#
in the context of Assam, we are still facing all of those things, right? Saying how many
#
people went, what is the right date and so on. So some of that is there. But for the
#
Indians, the key thing was to try and keep these people under reasonably sort of controlled
#
conditions so that you could ensure their eventual repatriation back to Bangladesh.
#
So that angle of it, the line that conditions have to be created such that people will go
#
back was a very carefully chosen one because the only imperative were that people have
#
to go back. What those conditions would be was left for Pakistan and the international
#
community and everyone else to sort of help arrive at, right? If Pakistanis sort of chose
#
to come to some kind of a modus vivendi with Mujeeb and came with some solution and refused
#
to go back, maybe the Indians would have been fine. If not, they would go back to an independent
#
country, right? I mean, but that transition had to happen over a period of time. So that
#
was one major consideration, right? Which is that just the sheer number of sort of people.
#
The second thing is about this, you know, the number of sort of Hindu refugees which
#
came in, which again is a number which the Indian government never ever during that crisis
#
revealed that there were so many Hindus, partly because they believed that if this was revealed,
#
it would lead to a backlash against Muslims in India. And again, we had seen that dynamic
#
in older migrations, you know, in 1950, there was a crisis between East Pakistan and West
#
Bengal, you know, and so on. So she was very keen not to allow those kinds of things to
#
happen. But at the same time, the other danger was that, you know, Hindu-Bengalis could sort
#
of, you know, if they sort of melted into local populations would then be even more
#
difficult to sort of identify than Muslim-Bengalis, right? I mean, so in that sense, you know,
#
you were concerned about what would be the aftermath of this kind of refugee flows and
#
so on. So there was this range of considerations for which, you know, by the summer of 1971,
#
the Indian government comes to this conclusion that the best way is to mount a big international
#
diplomatic campaign to get the big powers to put pressure on Pakistan to create conditions
#
under which this would happen. And the Indians were very careful never to specify what is
#
it that they wanted, because again, you know, you didn't want to be seen as interfering
#
in Pakistan's internal affairs. But gradually by that summer, the opinion is shifting to
#
saying that in the face of continued Pakistani reluctance and intransigence and refusal to
#
either stop military operations or to move towards a political settlement, the possibility
#
of a united Pakistan sticking together is getting increasingly remote.
#
And it's interesting how this is driven partly by Indira Gandhi just being very principled
#
against the human rights violation and the genocide and so on. And also the very admirable
#
stance she takes to not reveal the numbers of Hindus because she wants to, you know,
#
I'm a huge critic of Indira Gandhi, especially because of her disastrous economic policies,
#
many of which I consider a crime on humanity. But I have to say she comes out looking very
#
good in this book for some of the decisions she's taken. But equally, a lot of her imperatives
#
are just practical imperatives. There are too many refugees. India doesn't have the
#
money. It needs to get something done. And she talks of this political solution again
#
in vague terms and very correctly not specifying anything because it's not her prerogative
#
to do so. So Pakistan to sort out its internal affairs. At this point in time, you know,
#
as the summer proceeds, is there any possibility of such a political solution or has that ship
#
Well, that ship has sailed partly because the crackdown continues until quite late,
#
which is why the numbers are increasing as you go along through the summer. But the possibility
#
is also receding because the main power, external power, which could have done something in
#
this context was the United States of America under Richard Nixon, which had significant
#
sort of stakes in their relations with Pakistan, was totally unwilling to do anything to do
#
with Pakistan, right? I mean, in a sense, Nixon, you know, in a famous instruction to
#
his sort of, you know, White House staff and, you know, the State Department, etc., says,
#
do not squeeze Yaya, right? This is what he writes on the margins of a note. And the reason
#
he does not want to squeeze Yaya is because Yaya is very important to him at this point
#
of time, because the United States wants to reach out to Maoist China, right? And they
#
don't have, those countries don't have a relationship and China is kind of, you know, Pakistan is
#
acting as a conduit through which messages are being sent by the Nixon White House. And
#
I must say it's White House because, you know, Nixon is, all of this is clandestine and hidden
#
even from other parts of the US government at that time, the State Department.
#
Really funny how Nixon and Kissinger are sort of one party here and the State Department
#
is another party. It's like completely their antagonists.
#
Yeah, no, because they believe that if the news of such an attempt leaked out, there
#
would be such a political backlash that they would not be able to go through with it. So
#
they want to keep it totally secret. And of course, Nixon and Kissinger were, you know,
#
legendary sort of secretive, sort of characters. And, you know, the modest operandi was basically
#
that Henry Kissinger would call in the Pakistani ambassador in Washington and hand him a note.
#
The ambassador would then relate over secret cables to Islamabad. In Islamabad, the Foreign
#
Office would call the sort of Chinese ambassador and relate to him. And he would in turn then
#
relate to Beijing. And then vice versa, the messages used to come down the truth.
#
So this was a sort of complicated arrangement. And it was in, you know, the summer of 1971
#
that Henry Kissinger was to make his sort of secret path breaking visit to meet the
#
Chinese leadership. So at least till that happened, the Americans were absolutely clear
#
that they would not want to put any pressure on the Pakistanis, which meant that there
#
was hardly any serious pressure going on the Yahya Khan regime at that point of time.
#
I'm really glad you finally got the US into this because after talking about how your
#
book is a strike against the insularity of the way we look at the Bangladesh affair,
#
all we've done for more than an hour is speak about India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, entirely
#
my fault. Let's move on to the US now. I've already had a very illuminating episode with
#
you on the US and South Asia and how those relations evolved over the period of time.
#
That will be linked in the episode page. So listeners can listen to that to get a broader
#
sense of how the US viewed South Asia. But just to sort of give me a quick recap post
#
independence, like the US's attitude in 1947 in dealing with South Asia very much was to
#
just follow the British lead because there are allies, you know, they've been there,
#
they know the ground situation, we'll do whatever they say. How does it evolve from there?
#
So effectively, that's the American policy from about 1947 till 1950 when the Korean
#
War begins, right? So once the Korean War begins, the Americans are very concerned that
#
the Soviet Union and the communist bloc will sort of potentially carry out a similar kind
#
of a strike in the Persian Gulf. And you know, in order to prevent that they needed allies
#
who would sort of line up against the Soviet Union and so on. That then leads to the search
#
for various kinds of allies and Pakistan is identified as a significant other country
#
alongside Turkey and Iran, which would form the sort of Northern tier against the Soviet
#
Union. And then the US Pakistan alliance is consummated in 1954. But of course, the Americans
#
very quickly start having second thoughts because they realize that the Pakistanis
#
are not in a position really to deliver on much of the story. And so there is a tilt
#
towards sort of, you know, redressing the balance between India and Pakistan under John
#
F. Kennedy, initially. And by the time the sort of Lyndon Johnson comes to power, and
#
you have a 1965 when India and Pakistan are at war. So Johnson is kind of fed up of, you
#
know, United States having to mediate between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and this and
#
that. And he basically takes a sort of a plague on both the houses kind of attitude. And in
#
the 1965 war, the United States imposes an arms embargo on both India and Pakistan. And
#
of course, the Pakistanis because they have more American kit are, you know, feel the
#
pinch stronger. But after that, the United States kind of, you know, is more deeply involved
#
in Vietnam. There are these growing domestic sort of protests. You know, Johnson is kind
#
of bogged down. But when Richard Nixon comes to power, he is very keen to revive and resuscitate
#
the relationship with Pakistan. Now, let's remember, recall that Nixon was vice president
#
under, you know, President Eisenhower when the US-Pakistan military alliance was signed.
#
So he was one of the original votaries of the relationship with Pakistan. And he always
#
believed like many Americans share this common prejudice that Indians are this weak effect,
#
you know, useless, unreliable kind of people.
#
In fact, I got to interrupt you and quote Nixon on India where he describes Indians
#
as quote, a slippery treacherous people, devious and ruthlessly self-interested. And at various
#
times, of course, he called referred to Indira Gandhi as a bitch and a witch.
#
Yeah, so there is, there is cultural condescension for the Indians, which as we spoke in the
#
last sort of podcast has a long history going back to sort of, you know, American impressions
#
of India in the 19th century. And there is this extraordinary sort of gendered kind of
#
approach to dealing with someone like Indira Gandhi who they believe is, you know, can
#
sort of be taken care of and such like things. So the Americans, when they come, when Nixon
#
and Kissinger, you know, start formulating this policy, so they want to sort of, first
#
of all, rebalance towards Pakistan again. Then they want to reach out to the Chinese
#
and they decide that Pakistan can be one of the two main conduits through which that will
#
run. And eventually that Pakistan channel becomes a more important one. And in that
#
context, you know, they decide pretty much not to do. And Nixon and Kissinger have this
#
kind of totally insouciant attitude towards the whole human rights question. You know,
#
both of them see themselves as very tough minded, realist kind of people that, you know,
#
at one point they say, listen, the British ruled this country of 300 million people with,
#
you know, just about 100,000 sort of white people out there. You know, the Pakistanis
#
can sort out the Bengalis and so on. So there is a clear underestimation of the forces of
#
nationalism and what the sort of political sort of situation there was. And of course,
#
you know, despite being alerted to the scale of the genocidal violence, which was taking
#
place in Bangladesh, particularly by the sort of American deputy sort of, you know, head
#
of mission in Dhaka, a man called Archer Blood, who sends these telegrams, you know, which
#
have been covered very extensively in another very fine book by Gary Bass, which I again
#
recommend to all our sort of listeners to definitely read because-
#
Also linked in the episode page.
#
Yes, and covers the American sort of thing in very great detail. You know, but those
#
telegrams don't even sort of make a dent in terms of American policy. In fact, you know,
#
blood is kind of censured and pulled out of Dhaka and then cast into sort of oblivion.
#
So that is the sort of line that the Americans take, geopolitical imperatives of reaching
#
out to China, Trump, the realities of this India-Pakistan dynamic. But, and of course,
#
the human rights and, you know, the extraordinary sort of gross violations of that in terms
#
of murder of people, which is happening in Bangladesh. And the only thing Americans are
#
keen, however, from the very beginning is to make sure that India does not attack Pakistan.
#
Because obviously they don't want their ally to be in trouble. But at the same time, particularly
#
after the sort of Kissinger comes to India in July 1971, you know, has discussions with
#
Indians and goes to Pakistan and famously feigns a Delhi belly and, you know, takes
#
the secret plane out to China. And once he comes back, he basically tells the sort of
#
Indians that, listen, you know, we have this kind of, you know, informal sort of understanding
#
going back to the 1962 war, that if there is something, you know, serious by China,
#
you know, in terms of an attack on India, the United States would sort of stand by India.
#
But if the Chinese intervene in an India-Pakistan war, then you cannot count on us to sort of
#
going through with that understanding. And the Indians naturally see that as an attempt
#
to tighten the screws on them, which is part of Kissinger's sort of objective, very much
#
so. But the other thing which Kissinger is trying to do and the Nixon administration
#
is trying to do is that they are trying to signal to the Chinese that, listen, we will
#
stand by our allies come what may, because at the end of the day, they are trying to
#
establish a new relationship with China. And they want to establish their sort of credibility
#
as a dependable sort of partner, let alone an ally. And they feel that if they sort of
#
let down Yaya Khan at the moment of this crisis, the Chinese will say that, listen, who the
#
hell is going to antagonize the Soviet Union, depending on the Americans, right? I mean,
#
we might as well look after our own. So that whole thing will come through. So for a series
#
of geopolitical imperatives, the Nixon administration effectively turns a blind eye to what's happening
#
And China is very central to this, isn't it? I mean, is this again part of the sort of
#
the Cold War shifting shape that China is now fighting with the Soviet Union? And is
#
that why the US sort of wants to draw closer to China? Because it's obviously in their
#
interest, therefore, to have friendly relations with China.
#
Yeah, so the Sino-Soviet sort of relationship starts fraying from already the late 1950s,
#
right, from around the time of the Great Leap Forward. So there are a range of factors which
#
historians have studied. There is ideology, there is various kinds of conflicts of interest,
#
and so on. There is a sort of personality clash between Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership
#
and the Russian leadership and so on. But by 1969, that relationship and that hostility
#
is actually militarized. They have a disputed border along the Ussuri River in which Chinese
#
forces actually launch an unprovoked attack on the Soviets, and then that leads to a clash.
#
And thereafter, Mao Zedong sort of panics and says that we've got to sort of go into
#
national mobilization more because there's going to be a surprise attack by the Soviets
#
So in fact, after the 1969 sort of clash, Sino-Soviet clash, it is the Chinese also
#
who look to the sort of finding some kind of relationship with the United States, which
#
will allow them to balance. As far as the United States is concerned, and Nixon and
#
Kissinger are concerned, their primary consideration, of course, is one to sort of have a triangular
#
relationship between China, United States, and the Soviet Union. So you bring the Soviet
#
Union to balance. But the larger sort of objective is to make sure that both these sets of somewhat
#
independent relationships will allow them to extricate without loss of face from Vietnam,
#
because both the Soviets and the Chinese are on their own steam supporting the North Vietnamese.
#
So they believe that if the Soviets and the Chinese put pressure on the North Vietnamese,
#
that will allow for some kind of a face saving negotiated solution to come up and the Americans
#
can pull out. So that really is the geopolitical imperative in play.
#
So because of this sort of Nixon and Kissinger decide to go all in on Yaya Khan, but the state
#
department is of an entirely different view during this whole situation. Tell me a little
#
bit about that and what is kind of the genesis of the state departments being relatively
#
friendlier towards India?
#
Well, as I said, Nixon and Kissinger were driven primarily by the high geopolitics of
#
the Cold War and what they wanted to achieve.
#
And they didn't tell the State Department they were reaching out to China secretly?
#
No, it was a secret. It was all only known after Kissinger sort of goes there. And even
#
State Department officials were working within the Nixon White House and were in on this
#
very small circle of things were told in no uncertain terms that, you know, the Secretary
#
of State or others should not be informed. So it was a pretty extraordinary sort of bureaucratic
#
arrangement in there. But the State Department itself had regional experts, people who had
#
been in the region who understood something about what was happening. They had people
#
like Archibald who were sort of sending in telegrams. They had a much better sort of
#
sense of realities on the ground. And they kept insisting that, you know, the Pakistani
#
army's attempt to impose a solution by force was almost destined to fail because there
#
were just too many Bengalis and not enough force that you could use against all of them.
#
And, you know, in the context of third world nationalism, you know, this is not a game
#
which can be played to anybody's profit very easily. And they kind of understood that basic
#
truth. But the reality was that even senior officials like Assistant Secretaries of State
#
were basically shot down by Kissinger in interdepartmental sort of meetings and convenings
#
and so on. And were constantly reminded that, listen, the President is very keen that we
#
should not do down and so on and saying that, you know, I just don't understand what kind
#
of an administration this is that, you know, the President wants something and here you
#
are so-called experts who are sort of holding forth on a totally different policy line.
#
So Kissinger was really cracking the whip on them, you know, in a very serious way.
#
So the State Department officials who knew better in some ways were marginalized, again,
#
partly because, you know, it just didn't serve the larger geopolitical ambitions which the
#
Nixon administration had at that point of time.
#
So now, was the US during this point moving closer to actively intervening to make sure
#
India stays out because they obviously want to be seen by China for the sake of their
#
credibility as helping Pakistan out. They also want to unite Pakistan through all of
#
this and they're expecting Yaya to get things back together. And they're worried and they
#
know that India is sort of helping the insurgents on the border and all of that. I mean, that's
#
kind of open knowledge.
#
In fact, there is a very interesting CIA document which I came across while researching the
#
book, where in April 1971, the CIA tells, you know, they report up the channel saying
#
that Indians have actually approached them saying that, you know, they want some weapons
#
which they can pass on to the Golly Ribbon. So this was, as you can imagine, the intelligence
#
How do you come across CIA documents? Were these declassified or something?
#
So the good thing about the American system is that, you know, for all the crimes committed
#
by Richard Nixon in that period, a lot of material is very much out there. In fact,
#
Is it on the internet? Can I see it?
#
Oh, yeah. In fact, there's a, you know, I'm not sure if that there is an organization
#
called NixonTates.org, which was dedicated towards transcribing a lot of tapes, because
#
you know, one of the things that Richard Nixon did, which nobody actually expected him to
#
do was to tape pretty much every conversation which was happening in the White House and
#
so on, which came out later on in the Watergate kind of things. But those tapes are also very
#
revealing because a lot of the actual discussions were happening on telephones, you know, between
#
him and Kissinger and so on. So you can actually go and listen to some of that. There's a lot
#
of ranting going on as well. So be prepared for some.
#
That will also be linked from the episode page. I think hours of my life will now go
#
down this particular rabbit hole. And sounds like Nixon would have been a big selfie guy
#
and an Instagram guy if he's like taping himself back in the day, right?
#
You know, actually not. Richard Nixon is, you know, for a person who became the president
#
of the United States of America, and obviously such a successful politician, you know, the
#
highest office in the land, he was notoriously sort of reticent and uncomfortable with people.
#
So Richard Nixon was happiest when he could be cocooned inside the White House, when his,
#
you know, advisors and staff would make sure that nobody disturbed him and he would just
#
sit on his yellow legal pad, making notes on various things and sending things out.
#
You know, he, meeting people was something that he loathed. I mean, he was much happier
#
and he was one of the most intellectual American presidents. You know, Alan Greenspan in his
#
memoir says that, you know, of all the American presidents that he has seen, Richard Nixon
#
and Bill Clinton are the two most intelligent people. And I can say from everything that
#
I've seen that Richard Nixon was, at least in terms of geopolitical thinking and so on,
#
are genuinely an original mind.
#
If any cartoonist is listening to this, I urge you to instantly draw the image that
#
came to my mind when you were saying this, which is Nixon sitting on his yellow legal
#
pad while taking notes on it simultaneously. Kindly do the needful.
#
Moving on now from, sort of from the US to the Soviet role in it. You know, how did Soviet
#
attitude towards South Asia, you know, India, Pakistan evolve since 1947?
#
Yeah. So one of the sort of, you know, very strongly held beliefs in India is that the
#
Soviet Union kind of was stood by India throughout this crisis. And, you know, the Indo-Soviet
#
Treaty of Friendship was signed in August 1971. All of that is seen as a very important
#
thing, which it undoubtedly was, you know, the Soviet Union did stand by. But again,
#
what that standing by meant is something that I think we need to unpack a little bit. And
#
again, you know, it's worth going back a little bit in history to understand how Soviet
#
relationship with India and Pakistan evolves during this period of time, right?
#
In the early years, neither India nor Pakistan has any particular relationship with the Soviet
#
Union. You know, in fact, the first Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union, Vidya Lakshmi
#
Pandit, who was Jawaharlal Nehru's own sister, couldn't even secure a meeting with Joseph
#
Stalin. In fact, in the first Indian ambassador to have an audience with Stalin was Saropali
#
Radhakrishnan, who was our second ambassador. And it's only after Stalin's death and the
#
advent of Nikita Khrushchev and the change in policy towards non-socialist third world
#
countries that India-Soviet relations starts evolving.
#
This would be around 1953.
#
1954-55 is when Khrushchev consolidates at home, then he sort of has this policy of,
#
you know, rejigging, moving away from a hard line, kind of saying we'll only support communist
#
countries to look at other non-aligned countries like India and so on. So Pakistan, because
#
of its alliance with the Soviet Union at that point of time, is seen as very much in the
#
US camp. Though the Pakistanis, interestingly enough, always try to sort of also maintain
#
a link with the Soviet Union. In fact, Ayub Khan, you know, in the post sort of 1962 phase
#
when US-India relations actually start improving because of the China factor, also makes an
#
attempt to sort of improve relations with the Soviet Union. And that actually has some payoffs
#
because in 1965, when India and Pakistan are at war, and the Johnson administration decides
#
that the hell with these guys, you know, we are not sort of going to get into it. It is
#
actually the Soviet Union which steps into the position of the mediator between the two
#
sides. The post-war conference is held in Tashkent. It is sort of done. And it's a Soviet
#
Union which actually prevails upon Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to return those parts
#
of Pakistani territory which were, or what, Azad Kashmir territory which were captured
#
by the Indian army at that point of time, including places like the Haji Pir Pass about
#
which there is endless sort of, you know, lamenting going on even nowadays on social
#
media saying if only we had Haji Pir, we could have sort of given a bloody nose to the terrorists
#
and so on. Right. I mean, so is there some logic to that? Well, I mean, the Soviet Union
#
basically believed from 1965 onwards that they were now positioned as the main external
#
player in the subcontinent, that they had supplanted the Americans. They had taken up
#
the American role, the traditional role, which the United States had as the most important
#
power. And in order to play that role, they actually believed that they had to maintain
#
some kind of balance between India and Pakistan. Far from sort of, you know, tilting very heavily
#
towards India. In the aftermath of Tashkent, the Soviet Union actually starts trying to
#
build a relationship with Pakistan. So like a benevolent and stern big brother. In 1967,
#
the Soviet Union actually announces arms sales to Pakistan. And, you know, the Indian government,
#
you know, domestic opinion in India throws a fit, you know, the questions in parliament
#
saying Soviet Union here is this thing and there's a, you know, excellent sort of record
#
of conversation between Indira Gandhi and Alexei Kosygin, who is the Soviet Premier.
#
And Mrs. Gandhi tells him in no uncertain terms that, you know, the India-Soviet relationship
#
has to have an exclusivity to it. And, you know, if the Soviet Union sort of wants to
#
build this kind of relationship with Pakistan, it's going to be very difficult for her to
#
justify the relationship, friendship with Soviet Union, right? So there is that kind
#
of phase through which the Soviet Union goes. But come 1969, when the Sino-Soviet relationship
#
gets militarized, the Soviet Union is now very keen to sort of make sure that India
#
and the Soviet Union come together much more strongly, primarily to send out a signal to
#
the Chinese. It is in that context that the Soviets first propose a draft of a treaty
#
of friendship, you know, which is there. And actually some negotiations happen in 1969.
#
But Mrs. Gandhi decides again signing it, primarily for domestic political reasons.
#
But she believes that, you know, signaling a move towards Soviet Union by signing a treaty
#
like that will not go down well. And, you know, she has elections coming up. She knows
#
her party is kind of, you know, sort of on the rocks after the 1967 general elections
#
and so on. So that is put off. And in the summer of 1971, once the Bangladesh crisis
#
really erupts, the Indians bring up the idea of this treaty once again in the Soviet Union
#
and say that, listen, this is what you had proposed then. Why don't we think of concluding
#
And in fact, I noticed in your book that it is pushed very hard by D.P. Dhar, the ambassador
#
there who's almost like a one man force trying to make the treaty happen, not just convincing
#
the Russians, but also convincing Indira Gandhi and the government.
#
He was very keen because partly because he believed that this treaty would align Soviet
#
position with India very closely in the crisis. Because again, that is very important to understand.
#
I mean, when Indian sort of foreign minister meets his Soviet counterpart, Swaran Singh
#
meets his Soviet counterpart, you know, the Soviets say that, listen, we know what you
#
guys are doing with the army league and so on. Right. I mean, that is fine. But just
#
make sure that this doesn't really sort of get out of control and so on, because there's
#
not going to be that much support and such like things. So the Soviets are kind of reluctant.
#
And they also have a certain kind of reading of how these various kinds of nationalist
#
revolutions and all happen. And they are not particularly convinced that the army league
#
was a particularly, you know, a revolutionary force in the context.
#
Yeah. And then saying, you know, very sort of, you know, compromised mainstream politics
#
and they are also concerned that there are a number of Maoist parties who might just
#
get their upper hand in an independent Bangladesh, right, which they don't want to because of
#
their relations with China.
#
So the Soviets actually are playing a very, this thing and DP Dhar and the Indian government
#
finally use the treaty as a way of trying to align Soviet position with India. That
#
is really the background to the way the treaty is signed.
#
And do the Soviets sort of come closer to agreeing to sign the treaty with India because
#
relations with China are getting worse?
#
That's right. I mean, the Soviets, I mean, they wanted to sign it two years ago, right.
#
But now the time was coming and they said, fine, we'll sign, we have no problem. But
#
what is interesting is that, you know, when the Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko comes
#
to India to sort of sign the agreement, after the signing of the agreement, he actually
#
has a meeting with Indira Gandhi, you know, of which we have a record. And he tells Mrs.
#
Gandhi in that meeting that, you know, we understand your position, but we have a saying
#
in a proverb in Russian that, you know, the heart should be warm, but the head should
#
be cool. Now, that only means that he is counseling India against any kind of precipitated action,
#
particularly by way of military action against this thing. And the Indians exactly get the
#
point and they are not very happy.
#
In fact, that's something that they probably, to an extent, the Indians already agree with
#
because they've been fairly cool through all of this, right. They haven't rushed into Pakistan
#
Yes, they don't want to. But at the same time, having the Soviet support is very important
#
because that brings the veto in the Security Council, because they know that the Americans
#
and the Chinese and the Chinese, of course, are not in the Security Council at that point
#
of time, but the Brits and others are unlikely to sort of really come out in support. And
#
the Soviet veto is critical. So you need at the Soviet Union to at least politically support
#
your move. So you're trying to create, I mean, again, I agree that the Indians had by this
#
time not made up their mind saying that this is what is going to happen. But the probability
#
of an armed intervention or some kind of assistance to enable the emergence of an Indian Bangladesh
#
is rapidly increasing by the time you're talking to August 1971.
#
So the treaty is a very big deal. India can go ahead with confidence now.
#
Not yet, because though the Soviets have signed the treaty, they have not actually sort of
#
said that that's going to happen. And there is an interesting sort of, you know, coda
#
to this because it is actually only in October 1971, just about two months before the war
#
happens, or not even in actual date terms, it's only about six weeks, that the Soviet
#
Union finally aligns itself with the Indian position, because that's when Mrs. Gandhi
#
goes to Moscow for a meeting. Now, it is very interesting when Indira Gandhi goes to Moscow,
#
you know, the Soviet general secretary who's sort of, you know, there's a troika, there
#
is General Secretary Brezhnev, there is Podgornyi, and there is Alexei Kasigin, who's the premier.
#
So at that point of time, Brezhnev, who's sort of by all accounts, the most important
#
figure of the troika, is actually not in Moscow. And she is surprised to learn that she will
#
not be able to meet Gromyko. And she takes a decision that she will not leave Moscow
#
without having met Brezhnev. And so finally, she actually decides to spend that evening
#
hosting a reception by the Indian sort of embassy in Moscow, meeting friends and so
#
on, and waits for another day, postpones her trip, in order to meet Brezhnev. And in that
#
meeting with Brezhnev, which goes on for almost five hours, is when, you know, they lay the
#
full background of the Bangladesh movement, convince the Russians that there is enough
#
political steam behind this, and that, you know, the emergence of this independent country
#
is now a foregone conclusion in some ways, and that, you know, the right policy for India
#
is only to sort of assist its emergence. And it's at that point of time that the Soviets
#
actually come around to accepting and supporting India. So, you know, it takes a lot of work
#
And quite a diplomatic go by her. And so at this point, what's happening internationally,
#
it's kind of, because already there is sort of outrage in the sense, you describe about
#
how Pakistan sent a bunch of journalists as observers to East Pakistan, as it was then
#
to report on the surroundings there. And one of those journalists then goes to England
#
and he decides that he simply has to report on the horrific atrocities that he's witnessed.
#
And after getting his family out of Pakistan, he actually publishes the sensational piece
#
and suddenly the West is aware of what is happening in Pakistan. And there's a lot of
#
outrage in favor of the East Pakistani rebels.
#
That's right. Anthony Mascarenes is the sort of Pakistani journalist who breaks the big
#
story and the Sunday Times in London breaks his story with a headline genocide. And there
#
is a lot of sort of public reaction to it. As I said, this is also a period when the
#
notion of human rights and, you know, various kinds of humanitarian NGOs like the Amnesty
#
and others are sort of getting very active in international politics. There are new forms
#
of mobilization around this kind of politics, which we see, you know, very interestingly
#
coming together, you know, people using advertisements, you know, for instance, NGOs placing sort
#
of, you know, ads in newspapers saying, here is a petition to your local MP in the UK saying
#
that we do not want, you know, whatever, that we want the government to sort of tell the
#
Pakistanis in no uncertain terms that this is not possible. And all you need to do is
#
to clip this and post it to your local MP and sign it, right?
#
And local MPs were inundated with that.
#
Yeah. So, so there are those kinds of new technologies of mobilizing public opinion
#
around these new ideas, because these are not ideas which have been around forever.
#
Nobody, you know, really believed that, you know, you know, because the idea of state
#
sovereignty always was the more established principle in the post-war period, you know,
#
the idea that, you know, human rights or humanitarian sort of, you know, sort of atrocities like
#
these needed to be actively condemned was a relatively new thing. There was also a Bengali
#
diaspora from Bangladesh, which was quite strong in Britain, of course, partly because
#
many of them were from select province of East Pakistan.
#
It's interesting, you point out most of the Pakistani immigrants in Britain were actually
#
Bangladeshis from select. So that, you know, they're mobilizing opinions.
#
Some of them actually sort of predate even the creation of Pakistan. I mean, you know,
#
the older generations of them were sort of seamen who sort of settled in England and
#
so on. So there is that diaspora, there is a similar diaspora of smaller size in the
#
United States. So all of these people do mobilize. And then, you know, they do get quite a degree
#
of sort of important public support from various iconic cultural figures of the time, you know,
#
like Joan Baez, you have Ravishankar and, you know, who do the concert for Bangladesh,
#
George Hammers, right. And then, you know, who's who of the rock music world turn up
#
for that concert. And again, you know, that ties in with the sort of countercultural moment
#
of the 1968 generations, right, for which a lot of this kind of politics was mediated
#
through music and rock music was kind of, you know, was a pretty important.
#
Is this sort of a cultural aside or was it more central to what actually happened? Because
#
one would imagine the geopolitical currents really shaped the emergence of Bangladeshis
#
and the independent nation. Did all of this sort of also matter what was happening in
#
Well, I mean, it mattered because it was a way of influencing public opinion, which was
#
quite important, right. I mean, again, you know, at the end of the day, the states, United
#
States government and other governments did what they did in pursuit of whatever national
#
interest as they defined it in various ways. But in as much as, you know, the war sort
#
of came at a moment when public opinion was already quite mobilized around issues like
#
Vietnam, these things were not negligible. I mean, you know, something like the concert
#
for Bangladesh was kind of was an important moment of creating awareness amongst the same.
#
I mean, you know, when you have someone like the great beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, writing
#
a poem about on the road to Jasore in the New York Times and the poem being produced
#
in its entirety, it has a certain kind of a cultural impact, which I think is important
#
for us to recover. Because at the end of the day, yes, you know, maybe Richard Nixon was
#
not reading Ginsberg and didn't getting influenced by anything. But the reality was that public
#
opinion in the United States was shaped. I mean, the, you know, sort of, you know, politicians
#
in the US Senate kind of voted against what the, you know, sort of supply of weapons to
#
Pakistan was and various kinds of things happened. So I think it's kind of important to both
#
underline the extent of that and also its limitations. And, you know, so in a sense,
#
Bangladesh becomes a poster child. But in geopolitical terms, it's still treated as
#
something of pariah, right? Because you still see it as an internal problem. You only need
#
to contrast what is happening in on the one hand, you have Madison Square Gardens and
#
the sort of concert for Bangladesh. And you know, a few streets down you in the UN sort
#
of discussions, you know, Bangladesh is treated as an issue of state sovereignty and saying
#
through the only thing which matters is Pakistan state sovereignty. If India has a problem,
#
the UN sort of, you know, a lot of a commission on human rights or somebody can come in, give
#
assistance for certain kinds of camps, but we really cannot do much more than that. And
#
the UN sort of, you know, Secretary General, you thank who's actually a Burmese at that
#
point of time, frames this, you know, in pretty conventionally as an issue of the real danger
#
is a war between India and Pakistan, breakdown of international peace and security. That
#
is his charter. His charter is not to sort of ensure human rights, even though the UN
#
charter also mentions human rights right up front, right? So, but the the the ideational
#
framework within which people were, that's the world in which they lived.
#
You have sovereign states dealing with each other and that's a whole thing.
#
These kinds of things are not really issues on which others should get.
#
Well, I mean, it has definitely changed, right? I mean, you only need to think about the kinds
#
of so called humanitarian interventions which happened in the 1990s onwards. But Bangladesh
#
is at the cusp of the beginning of that politics, of that breaking over from a world which is
#
seen as where sovereignty rules the rules at all times under all conditions to one where
#
it then becomes a more qualified objective. And Bangladesh is an important historical
#
sort of moment precisely because it shows how difficult the birth of this kind of politics
#
was. The fact that 10 million refugees, you know, larger than any other sort of, you know,
#
population movement in the post Second World War period could not lead to a more significant
#
level of international involvement should also tell us that international politics has
#
changed. It has evolved. Things have moved on, right? And as I said, as a historian,
#
I'm only interested in understanding that change.
#
To go back to that moment, then, you know, as public opinion in the West is changing,
#
India's diplomatic efforts to convince people of the rightness of the cause is not really
#
working out because while people are essentially while the US and England and all seem to be
#
saying that, yeah, we recognize that you have a refugee problem, but we are not going to
#
tie that with the political solution in Bangladesh and does Pakistan's internal matter, don't
#
leave them alone and hey, don't go to war. That's that's kind of the message that's
#
That's right. And I think the Americans were, of course, the most important player. They
#
were the strongest in taking that line. The countries of Europe, however, had a slightly
#
different kind of thing, right? I mean, the Britain at that point of time had a conservative
#
government under Ted Heath and the conservative government actually sort of ended up supporting
#
India a lot more. They understood Mrs Gandhi's meetings with Heath were actually very successful.
#
They understood the point of view that this situation now kind of completely spiraled
#
out of hand and so on. The West Germany at that point of time under Willy Brandt again
#
took a quite a sort of a line which was sympathetic to India's predicament and of course to the
#
issue at hand, which was the sort of plight of the people. So I think, you know, they
#
were but at the end of the day, the United States still had the dominant hand in terms
#
of how these issues played out. So to that extent, you know, Mrs Gandhi's last sort
#
of stop was to go to the United States and her meetings with Nixon in November 1971 really
#
go nowhere. They only sort of show up the gulf between the two sides.
#
Is there a tape of that?
#
Well, I don't think there's a tape of that. But you can listen to a lot of things that
#
Nixon had to say, not just about Mrs Gandhi, but about the Indians subsequently, right?
#
His motivation at that point of time is to tell India and Mrs Gandhi in no uncertain
#
terms that an attack on Pakistan would be the worst thing that they could do.
#
And once, of course, India sort of decides to pull the trigger, then, you know, Nixon
#
is mad. And, you know, he then goes on to sort of terminate economic aid to India, which
#
is India was the largest recipient of economic aid till that point of time, pulls off military
#
assistance to India of various kinds. And, you know, then begins, you know, all the other
#
things which happened thereafter.
#
So take me to the pulling of the trigger, you know, we've reached, say, September, October
#
of the crisis, and we are reaching a point where India simply cannot take any more refugees.
#
What is the point at which they decide that we must do something and what is it that they
#
So the Indians are training the sort of the Bengalis in the Muktibahini and others in
#
a series of training camps. By October 1971, the Indians decide that, you know, it is important
#
now to sort of take this crisis to its culmination, because the longer this goes on, the more
#
difficult it is going to be for India to hold together this kind of somewhat disparate coalition
#
of people who have come together under this.
#
And they're already fighting with each other as you put it in.
#
They had internal tensions. The Indians also were supporting, you know, the R&DW had raised
#
another militia called the Mujeeb Bahini, which was some of Mujibur Rahman's nephews
#
and some of the radical students and their followers and so on. So there were all these
#
kinds of games going on. And the Indians just believed that it was important to now take
#
the crisis to its logical conclusion. So their entire approach was to sort of keep assisting
#
the Muktibahini militarily to sort of make deeper forays into Pakistan, East Pakistan.
#
And by 1971, the Indians were operating, the Indian army used to give artillery support
#
and other kinds of things. And, you know, Indian soldiers along with this thing, you
#
know, used to go in, they were, you know, attacking Pakistani positions, capturing territory,
#
fighting deep inside Pakistan. And the Pakistanis, of course, know all of this stuff, you know,
#
and they are getting quite sort of unnerved by this kind of escalation in the East. And
#
the Indian position is that, you know, we will just continue to do this till the Pakistanis
#
themselves pull the trigger. And, you know, which in effect is what happens. You know,
#
P. N. Dhar, who was Mrs. Gandhi's secretary at that point of time, has this important
#
quote, right? He tells the other D. P. Dhar that, you know, he quotes Napoleon's maxim
#
that you never interrupt an enemy when he's making a mistake. Yeah. And he says that he
#
don't, Yahya Khan is sort of going to make this mistake. So let's just wait and do this.
#
And that's exactly what happens.
#
Which is kind of brilliant and which is the kind of thing you read in storybooks, because
#
in real life, it's so messy. It doesn't always work out like that. The enemy doesn't always
#
do what you want him to. But in this case, the enemy read exactly what you wanted him
#
Yeah. In fact, you know, when the Pakistanis sort of bomb or attempt to bomb the Indian
#
airfields on 3rd of December, Mrs. Gandhi is on a plane back from Calcutta to Delhi.
#
And when they get the message saying that, you know, the Pakistanis have attacked, you
#
know, D. P. Dhar is on the flight with her and he comes back and tells a very young diplomat
#
who later became very prominent called J. N. Dixit. He says this fool has done exactly
#
what we wanted him to do. Right. I mean, so this was something they were expecting and
#
they were hoping that the Pakistanis would actually begin this war. And till date, you
#
know, the Indian position is that the war was begun by the Pakistanis on 3rd of December
#
1971, which is true in a sense that the formal declaration of war actually happened on that
#
day. But the reality was that the Indians were already escalating and putting the squeeze
#
on the Pakistanis throughout November.
#
This is brilliant maneuvering. If someone from Bollywood is listening to this episode
#
of The Scene in the Unseen, and they must be because everybody listens to The Scene
#
in the Unseen, kindly make a film on this brilliant book. So moving on from there, at
#
the time then 3rd December, Pakistanis attacked and India is like, yeah, we are going in now.
#
They've started the war. We can do what we want. What is the Indian plan?
#
Well, the Indian military planning has been sort of evolving, you know, as these plans
#
tend to evolve in various iterations. And the broad plan, even by the time the war begins,
#
is that the Indian army should sort of enter East Pakistan from three different directions
#
because you have landlocked in that way. And you would capture enough territory in which
#
to sort of put the provisional government of Bangladesh and then declare war, just to
#
sort of go back a little bit.
#
So in April 1971, when the Awami League politicians come to India and a significant number of
#
them are there, they come up with this idea of establishing a provisional independent
#
government of Bangladesh and seek India's recognition of it. And the Indian government
#
actually sort of is reluctant to give that recognition because under international law,
#
a government can be recognized as sovereign only if it controls significant amounts of
#
territory. And at that point of time, they don't have any territory. They are effectively
#
operating out of the R&DW's office in Calcutta, though the headquarters are supposed to be
#
in this place called Mujeeb Nagar in inside East Pakistan. And in fact, those of your
#
listeners who are sort of interested can go on YouTube and check out this very nice video
#
of the formation of the provisional government of Bangladesh. You know, there's a ceremony
#
which happens actually inside East Pakistan. But you know, that ceremony is entirely facilitated
#
by the Indians. It's the BSF, which clears the road to allow everyone to have.
#
Send me the link. I'll put it in the episode page.
#
Yeah, it's a very interesting sort of episode. And so the provisional government therefore
#
exists, but Indians have not formally recognized it. So the plan is that you sort of capture
#
enough territory so that you can recognize the provisional government and then sort of
#
create conditions where the people can eventually go back and so on, right? And that's really
#
the hope. The provisional government is recognized on the 6th of December, 1971, once the war
#
gets underway. Because they've taken some territory. They've captured territory and
#
they're sort of moving with the Indian troops and so on. So all of that has happened. But
#
nowhere does the Indian sort of military plan mention the capture of Dhaka as a particular
#
objective of the plans. The plans are still about saying that you want to do it. And this
#
is partly because of the experience of the 1965 war and other things. Indians know that
#
the international community will intervene. There is likely to be some kind of a UN Security
#
Council push to sort of calling for a ceasefire. So the important thing is to have enough territory
#
quickly to sort of recognize this. Once that is done, that's a fate accompli. Then you
#
know, other things will fall into place and so on. So there is no really no plan to capture
#
Dhaka per se. And that was something of a fortuitous occurrence during the war itself.
#
Right. And internationally, what's happening? War has broken out in India, Pakistan. What
#
everybody feared has happened because none of the other players really want this to happen.
#
What are the maneuverings in the UN and behind the scenes?
#
So again, I mean, you know, there are a couple of sort of resolutions which are tabled. The
#
Soviet Union sort of vetoes them and so on. And that's what is happening in the UN stage.
#
It's sort of a predictable kind of a game, at least to the very end, which is kind of
#
being played out. What is more important is the moves which are made by the Nixon administration
#
at that point of time. So the Nixon administration starts putting a lot of pressure on the Soviet
#
Union, saying that India is effectively your client state and you guys have egged on the
#
Indians. And if this crisis becomes more important, we have an alliance with Pakistan. So we are
#
going to get involved. And we then you just don't know what's going to happen between
#
you and us. You have this treaty with them. We have this treaty with Pakistan. So, you
#
know, this is going to be a major bust up. And, you know, we are supposed to be having
#
better relations as part of detente and other kinds of things. Now, is this what the Soviet
#
Union wants? And the Soviet Union is actually under a bit of pressure. You know, not to
#
say that they cave in before the Americans, but they also then start telling the Indians
#
that listen, this has to sort of kind of be finished. Finish it fast. Finish it fast and
#
move quickly and do what you can kind of story. So there is that dynamic to it which is playing.
#
The second thing the Americans do is that they reach out to the Chinese and tell them
#
saying, you know, if China diverts a few divisions of its troops to the border, then the Indians
#
are going to get scared. They will then be forced to divert their attention from the
#
operations in East Pakistan. And that will then enable the Pakistanis to sort of hold
#
their own. And the Chinese hear out this proposal, which is related to by Kissinger to their
#
representative in the UN. And about two days later, around 10th of December, they come
#
back and say, yes, thank you, but no, thanks. You know, we don't think that's what we're
#
interested in. Partly because the Chinese have, you know, they are realists, whatever
#
else, you know, their ideology.
#
What is very interesting that they are not asking China to intervene. They are just saying
#
take some troops to the border and distract them. You know, this reminds me of an old
#
chess anecdote. I forget. I think it involves Botvinnik. I'm not very sure. So there's
#
a world championship match where someone is supposed to be playing Botvinnik. There's
#
a match of some sort. I hope it's Botvinnik and I'm not messing it up. Let's just say
#
the Soviet grandmaster who smokes a lot and the rules are that he can't smoke. But this
#
gentleman just sits with a cigarette in his mouth and he doesn't light it. And the other
#
guy is completely perturbed and eventually loses a game. And finally he says, why did
#
you sit like that? You weren't going to light the cigarette. And he said the threat is greater
#
than the execution, which seems to me quite what, sorry, digression.
#
Yeah, no, I think that that's kind of what the Americans had in mind, but it's interesting.
#
The Americans actually thought the Chinese would go forward. Why didn't the Chinese go
#
forward? So Nixon and Kissinger's expectation very much was that the Chinese will intervene
#
in some fashion. In fact, there is this fantastic sort of, you know, it's generally like fantastic
#
in a sense of a fantasy, right, of a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, where they sort
#
of are, you know, literally carrying on in this sort of, you know, almost sort of delusionary
#
way of saying, oh, so the Chinese come in and if the Chinese come in, then the Soviets
#
are going to get into it. And if the Soviets are going to get into it, then what's going
#
to happen? And you know, then are we going to get into it? Is there going to be a nuclear
#
war? I mean, it's just a, you know, a sequence of sort of imaginations. And all of that is
#
deflated when the Chinese come and say that, listen, we're not going to. And the Chinese
#
don't want to do it because the Chinese have been telling Yaya Khan from the time the crisis
#
broke out that you have to have some kind of a political solution. The Chinese also
#
have some of their Maoist allies in the East Pakistani parties, the Bengali parties. And
#
they say that, listen, this kind of a military solution is not going to work. So by the time
#
the war breaks out, the Chinese are quite clear that, you know, the situation on the
#
ground is such that the Pakistanis cannot hold their own. You know, so they'd say that,
#
you know, the better to sort of take a realistic view. It's a losing cause, just stay away.
#
You know, and then ultimately you can have better influence with the independent state
#
of Bangladesh whenever it comes up, right? Rather than trying to sort of, you know, put
#
all the chips into the Pakistan. But they don't actually want Bangladesh. Well, I mean,
#
again, you know, I don't think they sort of wanted the breakup of Pakistan. Pakistan
#
was a very important sort of state and a friend of theirs. But when things kind of reached
#
the point where the war began, I think they sort of reconciled themselves to what would
#
be the inevitable realities. Of course, they were unhappy with the fact that India would
#
sort of emerge in such a strong position and so on, but they managed to sort of, you know,
#
hold their own. So this is the sort of broader geopolitics and the American maneuvering.
#
And then, of course, the United States decides as a last measure to send the sort of, you
#
know, the seventh fleet into the Bay of Bengal, which, you know, is a sort of a straightforward
#
threat at Indian sort of forces. And the Indians also kind of panic and, you know, their assessments
#
suggest that the Americans might actually be landing a Vidalino Marines somewhere in
#
East Pakistan to evacuate, you know, senior Pakistani officials or American citizens and
#
so on. So there is a concern that the American intervention is going to be much more direct.
#
The Soviets send a submarine to tail the Americans on the seventh fleet. So, you know, there
#
is this entire story going on. But the paradoxical outcome of all of this is that India, which
#
until that point of time is kind of broadly still thinking in terms of, you know, maximum
#
capture of territory, consolidating position and so on, then feels that now there is a
#
need to really sort of reach this to a sort of a finality which they had not envisioned
#
before. And because the Indian forces had sort of made significant gains by bypassing
#
Pakistani positions and sort of converging in the interior of the country, they now decide
#
to make a quick dash for Dhaka and to force the surrender of Dhaka. And that then, you
#
know, was an outcome which was not foreseen at that point of time. And as you mentioned
#
upfront, you know, as late as 12th of December, General Manik Shah actually was giving orders
#
that, listen, maybe we should go back to some of the towns we have bypassed and hold them
#
because there's going to be a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate
#
ceasefire at some point. So we need to sort of have the territory. But, you know, there
#
are others in the army headquarters and people like General Jacob, who was the chief of staff
#
of the Eastern Command, which was the operational command dealing with this, who believed that
#
actually this was a moment when they could actually force not just a quick move into
#
Dhaka, but also a surrender by the Pakistanis at Dhaka.
#
So what's the significance of taking over Dhaka in particular? Is it that basically
#
you've conquered East Pakistan, you know, Pakistan has to surrender and Bangladesh is
#
So not only was it about sort of capturing Dhaka as a city, which was a capital city
#
and you know, the symbolic meaning of it, but the fact that the Pakistanis gave an unconditional
#
surrender with 93,000 troops being there, that was an extraordinary sort of an outcome,
#
which I don't think was what was envisioned at the beginning of the war at all.
#
Is beyond even Indira Gandhi's wildest dreams, I guess?
#
Well, I mean, in a sense, once it came to it, I think, you know, obviously the scale of
#
the victory then is changed, right? I mean, that's when, you know, outcomes also then,
#
Yeah, then you see that, listen, I mean, this is just the most extraordinary thing which
#
happened. And in fact, even there, there was one last sort of, you know, slip between the
#
cup and the lip, so to speak, you know, probably, which was that as the Indians were making
#
this drive towards Dhaka in the last 48 hours of the war, there is a resolution introduced
#
in the UN Security Council calling for an immediate halt to hostilities and the withdrawal
#
of all armed forces from Bangladesh. Now, that would have effectively meant if that
#
resolution had passed, that the fighting forces would have had to stop wherever they were,
#
some kind of a ceasefire, you know, it would have been imposed between the two sides, policed
#
by some UN personnel and both Indian and Pakistani troops would have had to withdraw, right?
#
And this was still a possibility at this moment. And why was it a possibility was because this
#
resolution was actually introduced by Poland. Now, you know, nobody in their right mind,
#
particularly Indian diplomats, believe that it was a resolution which was introduced by
#
Poland. It was actually a resolution supported by the Soviet Union, right? Which again tells
#
you that, you know, at this point of time, the Soviets had no more to veto a third resolution.
#
They actually felt that, listen, if India cannot finish the job, you know, we've got
#
to table some kind of a resolution.
#
What if the resolution actually happened and India just went ahead anyway?
#
Well, yeah, you could have sort of done that kind of a fate accompli. But if that resolution
#
actually passed, then you might have been in a diplomatic pickle of some kind, because
#
then you would have had to antagonize the Soviets in order to sort of get to that particular
#
Now, it's very interesting that one of the people who didn't want that resolution to
#
pass and in fact stood in its way is Bhutto.
#
Yeah. So Bhutto had just come to Pakistan to join the delegation at the UN. And Bhutto,
#
when he sort of, you know, sees the text of this resolution, he makes a very impassioned
#
speech, once again, which you can listen to it on YouTube. You know, basically saying
#
that, you know, Poland is a country which has been partitioned so many times in its
#
history. And of all countries, I'm most disappointed that Poland, you know, and there are very
#
few South Asian historians of his generation, politicians who would have known about the
#
partition of Poland in the 18th century and so on, tells you something about Bhutto. Makes
#
this fantastic speech and theatrically sort of tears up that resolution.
#
This will also be linked by the way.
#
Walks away. Right. And the, it is interesting to speculate because there's no other way
#
of sort of dealing with this. There's no evidence. Why Bhutto sort of decided to sort of, you
#
know, more or less walk away from the UN and not allow the resolution to sort of be passed
#
or even be debated in a serious way. And the best answer, it seems to me, is that Bhutto
#
knew that the Pakistan army was at the brink of an extraordinary defeat. And he knew that
#
power would then pass to him in West Pakistan. And it would pass to him under conditions
#
of when the army was totally humiliated, which was in some ways the best political outcome
#
for him on which to begin constructing a new.
#
Yeah. So he actually, in a sense, supported the partition of Pakistan to advance his personal
#
career. And I can see why the incentives make sense for him because in a democratic, united
#
Pakistan, in any case, the majority of the people are in Bangladesh. You're always going
#
to have a Mujib like figure who will get more votes than you. And you know, you will never
#
get that kind of political power. And here you have East Pakistan cut off. You are the
#
dominant political figure in West Pakistan. And the army is suddenly much weaker. And
#
in fact, that's exactly what happened. Yaya had to quit at the end of the war.
#
Exactly. Right. And so in a sense, I mean, yeah, I mean, whether it was his personal
#
agenda or whether you say that success in politics is about riding the waves of history.
#
You describe the hilarious phone call here. Kindly, kindly tell us about it.
#
Well, I mean, basically, Yaya Khan is trying to sort of tell Bhutto that listen, this resolution
#
works in our interest in some ways.
#
And Bhutto pretends as if that line is bad and says, sorry, I can't hear you and just
#
hangs up and the operator says, no, I can hear him pretty clear. What the hell with
#
you? Because he's quite determined not to sort of go down this road. Now, of course,
#
you know, you can interpret it in other ways of saying that Bhutto did not want to sort
#
of be seen as presiding over the humiliation of the various kinds of things. But the reality
#
was that he understood that this outcome now was going to happen in this particular way.
#
And that if it happened, you know, here was an opportunity to sort of, you know, come
#
back to power in Pakistan and do something different, which is exactly what he managed
#
So at this crucial moment in a manner of speaking, Bhutto was India's friend. So what happens
#
when the dust settles? Like this is all very fascinating and it's kind of clear from reading
#
your account of everything that the whole thing is so multifactorial and so contingent
#
upon events just happening to work out the way they did. And, you know, but after all
#
the dust has settled, what happens? How are India Bangladesh relations? How do those kind
#
of go over the years? And, you know, how does the rest of the Cold War play out for the
#
time that the Cold War is still running? Where do the Soviets go? Where does the US go? What
#
So, yeah, so in terms of India Bangladesh relations, what happens is that basically
#
Mudibur Rahman comes back in January 1972 to independent Bangladesh, you know, becomes
#
the leader. There is a new constitution of Bangladesh, which is written in the year 1972,
#
drafted by a group of young lawyers, including a man called Kamal Hussain, who has been news
#
lately in Bangladesh for having been the figurehead of the opposition against Sheikh Hasina in
#
the last elections which happened. So Kamal Hussain was a, I think, a 35 year old lawyer
#
at that point of time and wrote this, what was for its time a pretty extraordinarily
#
progressive constitution. You know, it is actually, even the Indian constitution did
#
not have the word secular in its preamble at that point of time. The Bangladeshi constitution
#
had it and they were determined to create a progressive state, you know, within the
#
parameters of that time. So it was a constitution of some vision and some ambition for a new
#
state. But of course, the reality was that, you know, Bangladesh had a series of problems.
#
First of all, it was not getting international recognition until 1974. Basically, the Pakistanis
#
got the Chinese to veto Bangladesh's entry twice into the UN. Without having that kind
#
of recognition, Bangladesh could not access international aid in any significant way.
#
The only countries which were giving aid to it were India and the Soviet Union. And then
#
eventually that led the Bangladeshis to sort of give an, you know, Mudibur Rahman gave
#
an olive branch to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, attended a meeting of the OIC, the Organization of
#
Islamic Countries, in Pakistan in 1974. That was seen as a moment of post-war rapprochement
#
between the two of them. And, you know, then of course the following year, Mujib himself
#
was overthrown in a military coup and assassinated in Bangladesh. And then of course, you know,
#
that history of that country takes a very different turn from that point onwards. So
#
in a sense, all the sort of pro-India forces are kind of marginalized for a long period
#
of time and that has its own dynamic within Bangladesh.
#
The India-Pakistan relationship, of course, is kind of interesting because that's when
#
you have the post-war conference, which results in something called the Simla Agreement, which
#
is again in popular Indian consciousness and other, you know, area of almost incessant
#
heartburn about why we did not impose a solution on Kashmir at the time when we had the upper
#
hand and so on. And I think the answer to that is what the record suggests is actually
#
quite straightforward. The assumption is that we had these 93,000 prisoners of war and that
#
we could have used that to get the Pakistanis to sign on to whatever it is that we wanted
#
them to sign on to. But the reality was that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was very clear that even
#
if India took all of those 93,000 prisoners of war and kept them in India forever, he
#
would not sort of survive the signing of an agreement on Kashmir in that sense.
#
Politically. And I think the Indians understood that dynamic and they felt that, you know,
#
it was better to invest in a politician like Bhutto and not to impose a solution. You know,
#
P. N. Haq Sir used to say that, he used to constantly say, and even in his written notes,
#
talk about the Treaty of Versailles. He used to say that we can impose a punitive treaty
#
on Pakistan today, but a democratic politician will not survive it. And whenever you have
#
another group of revanchists coming into power, this treaty will be overthrown by the force
#
Much like Germany between World War I and II.
#
So his whole entire framework was to say that this is not going to be a workable solution,
#
which I think was the right judgment at that point.
#
And very enlightened, though obviously eventually Zia-ul-Haq comes to power.
#
Yeah, everyone. And you know, in retrospect, in India, we can keep sort of, you know, beating
#
up the rest about why this happened or did not happen. The second dynamic of it, which
#
I think in India, we still do not understand, is the role played by Soviet Union in the
#
post-war position. The first country that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto visits in January 1972
#
with the Soviet Union, because he knows that that's the country which holds the key to
#
the peace solution. And it's the Soviets who tell the Indians that India has to give up
#
their treaty, which is sort of unpacked, and will have to sort of repatriate prisoners
#
Let's also remember under international law, holding on to prisoners of war after this
#
thing is illegal. In a sense, it was an embarrassment for us to be holding on to them. The only
#
reason we held on to them, actually speaking, was because we were technically not the people
#
who are holding the prisoners of war, even though they were physically in our custody.
#
We were holding them on behalf of the government of Bangladesh. And Mujibur Rahman was very
#
keen that India should not repatriate these prisoners. Till such time, the Pakistanis
#
agreed to try about 180 Pakistani officers whom they had identified as war criminals.
#
So he wanted to have a war crimes trial. There was a legislation which was passed in Bangladesh
#
at that point of time to do that. But ultimately, in order to strike this deal with Pakistan
#
and get international recognition, UN admission, etc., Mujib reluctantly allowed to let go
#
of that war crimes trial. And subsequently, that paved the way for repatriation of prisoners
#
So it was a complex situation. I think the scale of India's victory once again blinds
#
us to what the political realities of the time were, which was that the Indians strongly
#
felt and quite rightly that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would not survive a day in office if he managed
#
to sort of sign some agreement which legitimized either the status quo in Kashmir or something
#
else or that the Soviet Union, which was your only key partner at that point of time, would
#
acquiesce in some such arrangement. Nobody was willing to do it. So in that sense, I
#
think the Simla agreement basically worked on the premise that you would have the border
#
between India and Pakistan will become the line of control, the ceasefire line. And that
#
over a period of time, the ceasefire line would come to acquire the characteristics
#
of an international border. In a sense, it would kind of become a de facto border, which
#
in effect is what is the situation even today.
#
So you described the 1971 war as the most significant geopolitical event in the subcontinent
#
since partition in 1947. Few contemporary conflicts have been so brief and localized,
#
but had such protracted and global ramifications. Elaborate on that a bit.
#
Well, I think the ramifications of the war, as I said, were quite extraordinary. You had
#
a country like Bangladesh, which is a very large, populous country coming into independence
#
on its own steam. As I said, I think it changed the Bangladesh war, changes the sort of geopolitics
#
of the subcontinent in significant ways. I mean, just to give you one example, it's in
#
the period after the 1971 war that Pakistan, first under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, subsequent
#
as Zia ul Haq, actually starts identifying itself a lot more with the Islamic autocracies
#
In fact, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto says very clearly that we do not want to be seen as a South
#
Asian country anymore. Our natural inclination is towards our friends in West Asia. That's
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when the relationship between Saudi and Pakistan, and we've had Mohammed bin Salman coming recently
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and saying all those things. The starting point for that in many ways was the post-1971
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Should be addressing the Islam argument rather than the geographical argument.
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Yeah, absolutely, right? Then.
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Doesn't it kind of go further back? Because since the 19th century, there's sort of been
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this tension within the Indian subcontinent of Muslims feeling, you know, dual loyalties.
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One to Qom, which is a larger Muslim global nation, so to say, and another to whatever
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the local loyalties might have been to the nation of India itself. Not that the two are
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necessarily incompatible, I'm not saying that, but these stresses of identity have...
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Yeah, but I mean, see, the identification with the wider Islamic Ummah is one part of
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the identity of many Indians as, you know, people have these kinds of identities. I mean,
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but here you are talking about a relationship between Pakistan as a sovereign state and
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a set of countries in the Middle East, which becomes very strong, you know, or at least
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that's the building of that. The second, I think, important and in some ways very long-lasting
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consequence of the sort of 1971 war is a nuclearization of the Indian subcontinent, right? I mean,
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the Indian decision to sort of ultimately, you know, proceed its nuclear program to the
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point where it can start being tested happens in the aftermath of 1971 against the backdrop
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of the Americans having sent a nuclear armed aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal. So,
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Indians want to be sure that we cannot be sort of, you know, put into that position
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of blackmail ever again. And even before the Indians do it, already in early 1972, Zulfiqar
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Ali Bhutto gets together the few nuclear scientists that Pakistan has and says that come what
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may, Pakistan has to build nuclear weapons. You know, it's in that context that, you know,
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he says the famous thing about eating grass and all that stuff. So, there is that dimension,
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which is again a reality of the subcontinent as we live with. And the third thing, I think,
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you know, in a way that is kind of, you know, significant and, you know, really sort of,
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you know, has had a long-lasting impact on the subcontinent is Pakistan's desire to get
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even with India for 1971, you know, which is still given sort of as an ideological justification
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for its support of terrorism in the subcontinent. You know, every sort of laws of innocent life
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is justified as a sort of some kind of a payback for 1971. But the reality is that for a lot
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of people, you know, that was a formative moment, you know, particularly for officers
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in the Pakistan army. You know, I remember, you know, I think it's in Parvez Musharraf's
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autobiography, he says that he was a young officer when he heard of the Pakistan army
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surrender and he said, I just burst into tears, you know, because it's such a humiliating
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moment for us to be defeated by our, you know, single largest adversary in this way.
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And quite honestly, any Indian officer would react in the same way if India had to surrender.
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I'd imagine. And just like the 1962 war has left scars in our collective sort of consciousness.
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But I think the scale of what happened in Bangladesh was remarkably different, right?
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I mean, the country was broken up into two. One of the two wings of the bodiless bird.
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Exactly. Right. And then it had to then you had to sort of begin rebuilding in totally
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different ways. So I think, you know, it's in that context that I believe that, you know,
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many of the sort of current challenges that we face in the subcontinent in terms of India-Pakistan
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relations, where the subcontinent relates to the wider world, all of which were decisively
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shaped by this crisis of 1971.
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So you know, this episode has already taken more than two hours. You know, the Bangladesh
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war could have been over in this time. So I'll ask for your last comments as, you know,
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people often say history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes. So looking back on
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all the flow of events that led to the Bangladesh war and everything that happened, are there
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any lessons of history that you can extrapolate to the current day that you wish that politicians
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in South Asia were more aware of?
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Well, you know, in a sense, history doesn't offer any lessons, right? Historians only
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So yeah, and I'm one of those historians who actually has a bit of a suspicion of any
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straightforward lessons to be learned from history, so to speak. But I think what the
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Bangladesh crisis does tell us, and it's kind of worth remembering, you know, even as we
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are sort of talking about this episode, India and Pakistan are in the middle of another
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kind of a crisis and so on, is that no subcontinental crisis is ever a subcontinental affair. There
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will invariably be wider geopolitical forces, which will impinge upon the way that we act,
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right? And much as we would like to believe that, you know, we are a strong power, we
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are capable of sort of acting on our own and so on, these wider geopolitical factors and
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the way that they shape outcomes and events in the subcontinent are always worth bearing
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in mind. And what is also more important than it was even in the context of 1971 is that
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the subcontinent, particularly India today, is sort of, you know, connected to the rest
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of the world in a much more deeper way, right? And those kinds of issues will also bring
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their own sort of considerations and pressures to bear on anything. So the only thing I'll
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say is that, you know, perhaps the most important thing is to understand that, you know, the
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subcontinent is not some kind of island unto itself, right? I mean, you know, what happens
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here, the politics, the dynamics of India, Pakistan, or even other kinds of regional
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crises are invariably going to shape by sort of the wider global context. So I think even
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as we are trying to make sense of some of our current things, it is always useful to
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bring that frame into mind while we are sort of trying to figure out, you know, where things
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Thank you for your time and your wise words, Srinath. Thanks for coming on the show.
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Thanks. Thanks for having me.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
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or offline and pick up Srinath Raghavan's fantastic book, 1971, A Global History of the Creation
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of Bangladesh, unput downable, you'll read it in one session. You can follow Srinath
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on Twitter at SrinathRaghava3. At SrinathRaghava3, that's his name only, instead of the last
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letter there's an N. You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A,
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and you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen on sceneunseen.in and thinkpragathi.com.
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Thank you for listening.
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Hey, everybody. We have a brand new podcast series by Bloomberg Quint called BQ Conversations,
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