Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In this concluding blog, I’ll look at Gary Bass’ take from The Blood Telegram on the after-effects of the Bangladesh war on the different countries.   First up, Bangladesh itself. Its development would have been a challenge in any case, but things were even worse than normal: “(It was made far worse by) the loss of so many people… the decimation of the ranks of the educated… the devastation of infrastructure… the widespread availability of leftover weapons from the insurgency, and the burden of getting the refugees back home.” It was left, as one of Indira’s advisors said, as “a primordial slime. Out of this chaos, cosmos has to be created”. War crime tribunals were setup but they did nothing other than becoming a way to harass one’s political opponents. Mujib returned as the democratic leader, a lot of corruption followed, and in 1974, he seized emergency powers “gutting the constitution”. In turn he was assassinated during an army coup. It reminded me of that line from t...

The war finally started. And it happened on both the West and East P fronts. Yet another Yahya gamble had backfired: he had amassed troops on the Punjab border, hoping to spook India. Instead, India just used it as a justification to amass their own troops ensuring that the war, whenever it started, would be on both fronts. It got even better (for India). Pakistan attacked first on the west: “(Indira) had wanted Pakistan to get the blame. Now it would.” It had given India the moral high ground on yet another front.   You can make out how successful the war was from these lines in Gary Bass’ The Blood Telegram : “It is a measure of how well the war went that India’s generals have squabbled about credit ever since.” On the Bangladesh side, India knew it would not just be fighting Pakistan but also the clock. The US would try and stop the war as early as possible, preferably before India’s aims were achieved. So the army decided to race to Dhaka, and ignored other cities t...

As war looked inevitable, India went around the world capitals to gauge which way they’d lean in case of war, writes Gary Bass in The Blood Telegram . The response was disastrous, unsurprisingly. Western countries toed America’s line. South East Asia didn’t see any reason to stick their neck out, one way or the other. The Middle East openly backed Pakistan. Only Israel was supportive.   Was America likely to get involved militarily, when war came? India was confident that would never happen: “With the United State painfully trying to extricate itself from Vietnam, nobody wanted more military involvement in Asia.” To make sure, India also took its case publicly to the American public and media. Their aim? Make the optics of it (America supporting a genocidal regime) impossible for Nixon to intervene militarily. Remember Kennedy’s visit to the refugee camps from the earlier blog? Well, that helped too. India, being a democracy with a free press, knew how to play that game wit...

As the refugee count in India kept increasing, surely the US could see that the situation was becoming unbearable for India. War was looking inevitable, unless the refugees would return to East P. That would never happen with Yahya in charge, so why didn’t the US just dump Yahya? After all, countries have no loyalties to other countries. Replace Yahya, avoid a war, and the US would continue to have Pakistan as its Cold War ally. Gary Bass’ The Blood Telegram has the answer to these questions.   The answer starts off a few decades earlier. Mao had just taken control of China. The US refused to recognize Mao under China. Until war broke out between the Soviets and China. The US now saw an opening: the enemy of my enemy…   There was a problem though. Since the US didn’t recognize China, it didn’t have any embassy in Beijing. Ergo, they needed a middleman - Yahya fit the bill. He was a common friend of China and Nixon. The initiative started in 1970, before the elections...

It soon became clear, writes Gary Bass in The Blood Telegram that West P would not accept the outcome of the elections. They stalled, and as the resentment grew, started flying more and more troops into East P.   These events set off alarm bells in India. Would Yahya start a war with India to divert attention? To justify his martial law? So India suspended West P’s flights carrying troop from flying over Indian skies. That move raised fears in West P: was India trying to isolate East P? Would India foment rebellion in East P?   In parallel, Yahya had Mujib arrested, and his party was banned. And then the killings began. Yahya assumed that the “soft” Bengalis wouldn’t last long, and he could wipe out those who harped about election results and greater autonomy quickly. Had he and the West P army focussed on that agenda alone, they would have almost certainly succeeded. With America looking the other way, nobody else would have intervened (it was an “internal” matter, a...

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 ...