by Gary J. Bass
India, keenly aware of world public opinion, pledged that it was not out for vengeance. It promised to protect Biharis and surrendered Pakistani soldiers from retribution, following the Geneva Conventions. Haksar ordered Indian diplomats to pound home to Bangladeshi leaders the need for mercy: “they should say that they have been victims of such bloodshed and would not wish to spill any blood and deal with their opponents with humanity as a civilised State. Bangla Desh is emerging as a State in the family of nations. Their representatives have everything to gain by appearing dignified, calm, and self-possessed.” After reading the warning from that UN official in Dacca, Haksar instructed General Manekshaw, the defense ministry, and other outlets to declare “that Indian Armed Forces will not resort to the barbarism of Pakistan Armed Forces, that everybody who peacefully surrenders will be treated with respect and his life safeguarded.”47
There were still many horrible revenge killings. The most that can be said is that Indian influence meant there were fewer than there otherwise might have been. This is cold comfort. Under Indian pressure, the Bangladesh government pledged to respect the Geneva Conventions, promising humane treatment for prisoners of war and civilians—a declaration that Haksar had broadcast on All India Radio and read out at a government press conference. On December 9, the CIA reported, “The Indians appear to be making good on their promise to try to protect these people from vengeance-seeking Bengalis.”48
Throughout the conflict, the Indian navy was eager to show its mettle. By severing maritime outlets to West Pakistan, it cut off the Pakistani troops in the east from reinforcement or resupply. And by choking the ports of Chittagong and Khulna, the navy relieved the army of the need to capture them on land.49
To blockade the key eastern port of Chittagong, India deployed its sole aircraft carrier, the British-built INS Vikrant, backed up with supporting ships and submarines. From the carrier, India could launch Sea Hawk fighter-bombers into battle. But only if it worked. Even in India’s motley navy, the creaky Vikrant—in constant need of repair—was the butt of countless jokes. Three months before the war, the navy deemed it inoperable, with a crack in its boiler. “What’s the bloody point of having an aircraft carrier if it cannot be used during a war?” spat Admiral S. M. Nanda, India’s top navy man. The Indians patched it up as best they could and deployed it, dreading attacks by Pakistan’s biggest and mightiest submarine, PNS Ghazi, which had been provided to the Pakistan navy by the United States.50
Yahya himself hoped his navy would sink the Vikrant. But the unlucky Ghazi suffered an underwater explosion so loud that it broke windows on dry land: the result of plowing into Indian depth charges, according to Indian naval officers, or of hitting one of its own mines, according to the Pakistan navy. The great submarine sank to the bottom. The Vikrant, freed from its fear of the Ghazi, led attacks on Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar, paralyzing these vital harbors, and setting Chittagong’s main oil refinery alight. India’s eastern naval commander signaled his sailors, “MOTTO FOR EASTERN FLEET IS—‘ATTACK—ATTACK—ATTACK.’ ” East Pakistan was blocked off from any sea outlet to West Pakistan.51
At the same time, in West Pakistan, where Pakistani warplanes still challenged them for the skies, the Indian air force launched frightening strikes on airports and military installations in Rawalpindi and—again and again—Karachi. In Lahore, the Indian warplanes mostly hit military targets, although they did buzz the U.S. consul’s residence. When Nixon heard that the Indians had blown up a U.S. plane at the Islamabad airport—which actually belonged to the famous test pilot Chuck Yeager—he flew into a wild, screaming rage, berating his staff: “Now goddamn it, what the hell is the shit-ass State Department doing about objecting with those planes?”52
The Indian air force and navy had planned a daring surprise assault on the heavily defended port of Karachi, to destroy Pakistan’s crucial oil storage facilities, which held four-fifths of Pakistan’s supply, vital to keeping Pakistan’s armor moving. Late at night on December 4, Indian warplanes struck, while India’s navy surreptitiously crept up the coast and unleashed missiles on the city’s oil depots. The massive blaze turned the sky a bizarre, unearthly pink.53
Off Karachi, Indian warships blasted in half and sank a massive Pakistani destroyer, PNS Khyber, and badly damaged a second, PNS Shahjehan. In a second big raid on December 8, the Indian navy fired another barrage on the Karachi area, blowing up fuel tanks and tankers. The next day, as the city weathered its thirteenth air raid, the fires spread, leaving half of the city’s oil storage up in flames. For seven terrifying days, Karachi burned.54
THE BATTLE OF CHHAMB
Although understandably nobody who lived through Karachi’s oily inferno could see it this way, India actually had to fight a relatively cautious land war against a thoroughly formidable West Pakistan. While India hoped to pummel Pakistan’s offensive war machine and to improve its position in Kashmir, there was no chance of the kind of decisive victories that it was scoring in the east.55
These military facts were well understood in Washington. The CIA, based on a source purportedly with access to Indian cabinet deliberations, explained that India planned a “defensive posture” in the west, preventing Pakistan from lunging deeper into Kashmir. Kissinger informed Nixon of this defensive Indian stance. The president thought India would face “real rough going up through those mountains” in West Pakistan. It would be, he said, “a good trade” if Pakistan grabbed Kashmir while India took East Pakistan.56
The combat in the west was sharp and devastating. Death came at every moment: in the dead of night, when a bright moon gave away Pakistani tanks moving in the desert; in daylight, when a twenty-two-year-old Indian lieutenant was killed instantly by a direct hit on his tank’s turret; or in a hurried breakfast, as a Border Security Force officer was eating chapatis when a Pakistani shell came out of nowhere to slice open his windpipe. Indian and Pakistani troops screamed back and forth with the filthiest Punjabi curses they knew.57
Pakistan launched massive thrusts in Kashmir and Rajasthan. In the Poonch sector in Kashmir, Indian troops struggled to hold fast against Pakistani artillery and machine guns. It was only after five days of hard fighting, with heavy casualties, that India thought Poonch was secure. Indian troops made a bold thrust into Sindh, as well as pressing hard into Pakistan’s Punjab. But the western front cast a shadow over the breakfast meetings where Indira Gandhi and General Manekshaw nervously updated each other. When the fighting bogged down on the sixth day of the war, she tried to buck him up: “But Sam, you can’t win every day.”58
In Kashmir, Pakistan attacked fiercely in the Chhamb sector. The combat there was the worst of the war. Pakistan had massed terrifying firepower: some two hundred heavy guns as well as medium ones, which rained down sixty thousand rounds on the Indians in under two days. Soon the hillsides were burned black. The Pakistanis would start deafening artillery barrages late in the afternoon and keep firing until long after midnight, eerily lighting up the night. The ground shook. The Indian soldiers had a sick sense of doom. The incoming shells cratered the battlefield, propelling solid rock and soil high into the air. They smashed sandbagged concrete bunkers. When they hit a trench, they blasted up a grotesque rain of mud and human limbs. A nearby shallow river reddened.59
The Pakistanis endured punishing attacks from Indian fighter-bombers, while the Indians faced a hellish combination of Pakistani airstrikes, artillery, and charges by infantry and tanks. On December 5, the battle reached a smoky, gory climax, with Pakistan’s notorious Lieutenant General Tikka Khan redoubling his troops’ attack. One Indian Sikh regiment used rocket launchers against the tanks, thrilling the troops at the sight of four of the metal behemoths immobilized by their own tank killers. The Indians’ machine guns jammed from overuse. After that, the Pakistanis took advantage of their superior numbers with an infantry charge, which the Indians tried to force back with gruesome hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets. “Let them know they are fighting a Sikh regiment,” bellow
ed the Indian major in command, who was himself a Hindu.60
The base camp hospitals were overrun with the shrieking wounded, ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets, bleeding out. Against their terror, the troops carried photographs of their wives and children, or a deity. One Indian soldier, firing in a frenzy at charging Pakistani columns, was blasted by a bomb, suffering horrible internal injuries. “Lord, save me for the sake of my one-month-old son and my wife,” he prayed. An officer, on the verge of death, kept shouting at the surgeons to let him return to the front to avenge his brother. Another soldier, who had kept on shooting because it was the only chance of surviving, was vomiting blood. Others had lost hands, feet, and legs.61
On December 6, ground down by combined barrages of airstrikes and artillery, the Indians had to fall back. They fought on afterward, but had been bested by the Pakistanis. The battlefield was left strewn with burned-out tanks, jeeps, and trucks, as well as abandoned guns. It reeked of human corpses rotting in the sun. With minefields in place, troops on both sides did not dare recover their dead.62
THE UNITED NATIONS AT WORK
Indira Gandhi had a mystical, hallucinatory experience of wartime leadership. She had “an extended vision I had known at times in my youth,” she told a startled friend. “The color red suffused me throughout the war.”63
More prosaically, the outbreak of war finally allowed her to recognize Bangladesh, on December 6. This was, the Indians hoped, the birth of a new democracy that respected human rights. Baiting Nixon, Gandhi invoked America’s own independence struggle, justifying Bangladesh’s statehood by misusing words from Thomas Jefferson: “the Government of Bangla Desh is supported by the ‘will of the nation, substantially expressed.’ ”64
India’s recognition of Bangladesh was not just about preventing chaos or a power vacuum, or enshrining the Awami League in power. It meant to prove that this was not a war of conquest. “The act of recognition shows a voluntary restraint which we have imposed upon ourselves,” Haksar instructed Indian officials. “It signifies our desire not to annex or occupy any territory.” To underline Bangladesh’s independence, Indian officials scrambled to find photographs and film of Bengali guerrillas fighting for their own country, or of Bengalis welcoming the Indian army as liberators. Gandhi publicly declared, “We do not want anybody’s territory.”65
In Washington, Nixon and Kissinger were usually contemptuously dismissive of the United Nations. But once the war started, they suddenly discovered the usefulness of the world organization—as a cudgel against India. By getting the United Nations Security Council to demand pulling back all troops, they could deny India its battlefield victory. As Nixon said, “the Indians are susceptible to this world public opinion crap.”66
So India’s war effort became reliant on Soviet diplomats in New York, temporizing or vetoing, buying enough time for General Manekshaw’s troops to win in Bangladesh. (This was particularly awkward since the Soviet Union had long warned India against a war in the subcontinent.) Kissinger bluntly explained to Nixon, “At the Security Council, the Indians and Soviets are going to delay long enough so a resolution cannot be passed. If it was, the Soviets would veto. UN will be impotent. So the Security Council is just a paper exercise—it will get the Post and Times off our backs. And the Libs will be happy that we turned it over to the UN.… [T]his proves that countries can get away with brutality.”67
For three exasperating days, while Indian troops battled toward Dacca, the Security Council debated and delayed. Confirming India’s worst fears of the United Nations, the Nixon administration secretly worked with China to poleax India. On December 4, George H. W. Bush, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, offered a resolution for an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of troops—which would undo the Indian campaign for Bangladesh. Nixon laid out their party line to Bush: “if you want to put it, we’re not pro-Pakistan or pro-Indian, but we are pro-peace.”68
Bush, while assiduously dodging any direct reference to Pakistani atrocities, condemned India for attacking “in violation of the United Nations Charter.” Brushing aside any discussion of the origins of the conflict, he said, “This has been a full-scale invasion in East Pakistan and it must stop.” The Indian foreign ministry, stung at being labeled an aggressor by a superpower at war in Vietnam, privately groused that the United States had encouraged Pakistan’s “unprovoked and naked aggression” and “genocide in East Pakistan.” When Pakistan decried India’s interference in its internal affairs as a brazen transgression of the United Nations Charter, Indian diplomats countered far and wide that “genocide in Bangla Desh … is not an internal matter of Pakistan and is the concern of the international community, under the Genocide Convention and other international instruments.”69
The Indian foreign ministry secretly slammed Bush as “completely pro-Pakistan,” ignoring the Bangladeshis’ plight. For his part, Bush took showy offense at Indian advocacy. He boasted to Nixon that when one of India’s diplomats had dared to mention the president by name, Bush had “climbed on him.” He was having fun. He told Nixon, “it’s been fantastic.”70
Nixon and Kissinger relished the absurdity of the pinstriped show in New York. The U.S. resolution overpoweringly carried the day, winning eleven votes, with only the Soviet Union—which cast a veto—and its satellite Poland defending India. If there was an anti-Indian resolution, Kissinger explained, “the Russians will veto it,” and if “it’s anti-Pakistan, the Chinese will veto it.” Nixon burst out laughing. Standing firm, they had Bush introduce another similar resolution, daring the Soviet Union to veto again. As draft resolutions piled up, the Soviet Union made a second veto for India, despite another embarrassing vote of eleven to two. Kissinger told Nixon, about the Soviets, “They are having a good time.”71
Kissinger warned the Soviet Union that “we are at a watershed in our relationship,” while Nixon sent Leonid Brezhnev a letter harshly complaining that he was supporting Indian force against Pakistan’s independence and integrity. Kissinger urged Nixon to confront the Soviets: “Every time we’ve been tough with them they’ve backed off.”72
By the night of December 6, the hopelessly deadlocked Security Council gave up, punting the whole mess to the General Assembly. Bush neatly elided the difference between the atrocities against Bengali civilians and his own accusations of Indian aggression: “Stopping the slaughter, stopping the invasion somehow seems to our people to be desperately important.” He eagerly told Nixon that “there was a strong groundswell. The minute we made our resolution, in that first resolution, the U.S. resolution, that got beat eleven to two, many ambassadors, not on the Security Council, that had never voted with us, Zambia, Tanzania, Morocco, came up and said we ought to go to the General Assembly. This is an excellent position. We don’t sometimes vote with the U.S. but you’re absolutely right.”73
The next day, December 7, India faced a global verdict on the war. In a crushingly lopsided tally, fully 104 countries voted for a resolution calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal.74
This was a worldwide repudiation of India’s case for liberating Bangladesh. Indians fumed that these same governments had been desultory in preventing carnage or providing for the refugees. Despite plangent appeals from Indira Gandhi and her team, India only won backing from the Soviet Union, a few Soviet satrapies and satellites, and neighboring little Bhutan (Nixon snapped, “Bhutan isn’t a country, for Christ’s sake”)—just eleven votes, a tenth of what the United States and China together mustered. Bush told Nixon that “we got strong support through Africa and through the Arab countries.” India was abandoned by the Non-Aligned Movement, including Yugoslavia, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. This vote had no binding authority, but it was tremendously humiliating.75
Nixon and Kissinger were jubilant. “Hoh, Christ!” laughed Nixon. He told Kissinger, “The Indian lovers are a breed apart. But by God they don’t rule in the UN, do they?” The president gloated at the slap to India’s supporters in the United States, particularly
Ted Kennedy. Kissinger concurred: “these damn liberals, what can they say? Security Council eleven to two? And the General Assembly 104 to eleven?”76
The most ebullient American was George Bush, who sounded like he had just won the war himself. When Nixon telephoned to congratulate him, he could hardly contain his joy. “We felt very, very good about it,” Bush told Nixon, who sounded like he could not get off the phone fast enough. Despite strong Soviet and Indian lobbying, Bush said, “all they got was their Iron Curtain.” He explained that “there was total agreement on the principle of ceasefire and withdrawal, which we had—you made fundamental to what was—and the fact also that India, in spite of its sanctimony, was really the aggressor.”