Bangladesh War #1: How the Stage was Set

This series is about the Bangladesh war of 1971, based on Gary Bass’s book The Blood Telegram (Blood is the name of an American consulate official in Dhaka).

 

Let’s start with the US, since it was their relation with Pakistan and the lack of it with India that played a major role in how events played out. Richard Nixon, America’s president at the time, was a man who took offense easily, and held grudges forever. His political career at/near the top spanned several decades (he was a Vice-President under Eisenhower, lost to Kennedy, and then became President), which meant his list of personal grudges was very long indeed.

 

At an ideological level, Nixon believed that US foreign policy should be based on what a country did outside its borders, not how it treated people within its borders. By that token, India was a problem: it called itself non-aligned, but clearly leaned towards the Soviets. Pakistan, on the other hand, was rabidly anti-communist. On top of that, there was the personal angle. Pakistan had treated Nixon well during his years in the political wilderness. And India?

“There was a mutual loathing between Nixon and Indira Gandhi. He had not cared for Nehru… but she had an extraordinary ability to get under his skin.”

Nixon even mocked the idea of “some woman running a country”.

 

Since 1969, Pakistan was under the military rule of General Yahya Khan. A country split into 2 halves (West P, and East P), separated by thousands of kilometres, would have been hard to govern even for the best governments in the world. Pakistan’s government didn’t even come close. Further, the Pakistani army was almost entirely made of West P folks, for historical reasons. They had contempt for the “soft” Bengalis, as the East P’s were called. The two halves didn’t even share common animosities: partition was a wound in one side, not the other. And Kashmir? What’s that got to do with us, asked East P?

 

Yahya abruptly announced elections. But before the elections could happen, a massive cyclone struck East P. More than 2 lakh people died. Being a poor country, it’s unlikely much could have been done, but it appeared as if West P didn’t even try to do what little could have been done. Resentment in East P had now reached boiling point and the “alienation was all but complete”.

 

With such resentment, and East P having the larger population, East P’s Mujibur Rehman won the elections. An absolute majority. This was unacceptable to both Yahya as well as the West P civilian politician, Zulfiqar Bhutto. The US didn’t care if democratic results were ignored because:

“Nixon dreaded the loss of its Cold War ally.”

The East P’s were furious:

“(They) were being robbed of their democratic victory.”

 

The stage was set…