by Gary J. Bass
Nixon and Kissinger enjoyed frightening India. Kissinger said that India’s ambassador “says he has unmistakable proof that we are planning a landing on the Bay of Bengal. Well, that’s okay with me.” “Yeah,” said Nixon, “that scares them.” Kissinger added with satisfaction, “That carrier move is good.”87
Still, the Pentagon said that the task force never got far into the Bay of Bengal, staying over a thousand miles away from Chittagong. Although admitting there were four or five Soviet ships in the same area, the Pentagon said that the Americans never saw any of them, nor any Indian or Pakistani ships. The Indian ambassador assured the State Department that the Soviet warships were not going to get close to the fighting. In the end, the Enterprise carrier group did rather little militarily.88
Even before the Enterprise task force entered the bay of Bengal, anti-Americanism in India had reached worrisome heights. After Pakistani jets bombed an Indian village in Punjab, the survivors found bombs with U.S. markings. With pieces of dead buffaloes strewn about and the smell of burned human flesh lingering, a college student who had just lost his sister screamed out that he blamed Nixon.89
Now the threat from the Enterprise drove Indians to a whole new level of wrath. Jaswant Singh, who would later become foreign minister, remembers the hollering of India’s newspapers as the carrier group steamed into the Bay of Bengal, becoming a lasting symbol of American hostility. Even he—as worldly as any person could be—seethes at the memory: “It served no purpose. What possible military purpose did it serve? Was it going to launch an attack on Calcutta?”90
That possibility was uppermost in the minds of anxious people in Calcutta. Arundhati Ghose, the Indian diplomat there, who is a Bengali Indian, remembers, “When it entered the Bay of Bengal, there’s a particular kind of fish called hilsa, which Bengalis love. And we said, ‘Don’t let them touch our hilsa.’ And a lot of people said, ‘They’ll bomb Calcutta,’ and we said, ‘Great, so we can rebuild it properly this time.’ ” There were “rubbish” rumors in Calcutta that the Americans “were making a nuclear threat on us, basically to stop our progress in West Pakistan, because they didn’t care about the Bangladeshis in any case.” Then, dropping her jocular tone, she intones, “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that the Americans were threatening us. I just couldn’t believe it.” She says, “We didn’t think the Americans would threaten us. We thought the Chinese might. But the Chinese didn’t. It was the Enterprise which threatened us.”
The Parliament went predictably berserk. Atal Bihari Vajpayee from the Jana Sangh joined a West Bengali legislator from the Communist Party (Marxist) in demanding that Gandhi’s government denounce the United States. Beyond Parliament, the perennial critic Jayaprakash Narayan was incandescent with rage at this attempt to “frighten India to submit to Nixon’s will.” If the Americans actually tried to establish a beachhead, he threatened “the most destructive war that history has yet witnessed.”91
Kissinger did not care about such Indian emotions. When a reporter asked if the deployment of the carrier group was meant to influence the outcome of the war, Kissinger said, “What the Indians are mad at is irrelevant.”92
But many Americans were appalled too. Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide for South Asia, says the Indians were right to be furious. In Delhi, Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador who had confronted Nixon and Kissinger in the Oval Office, had spent the war marinating in Indian grievances. At the start of the fighting, he had decried the hasty U.S. accusations that India was the aggressor, blaming Pakistan’s airstrikes. After Kissinger gave a press briefing, Keating cabled that much of it was misleading or outright false.93
Amid roiling rumors of possible U.S. direct intervention to help Pakistan, Keating cabled that if people in Washington were seriously considering doing so, or directly providing U.S. weapons to Pakistan, he wanted to evacuate American families and nonessential American personnel from India. When the Enterprise entered the Bay of Bengal, Keating—fearing that Yahya would be encouraged to fight on—objected that he could no longer defend U.S. policy.94
Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times reporter, was in Calcutta when he heard the news about the Enterprise. “I had a sinking feeling,” he says bitterly. “I’m an American, I’m standing in Calcutta, and my country is sailing up, and now I’m the enemy of my country? Because I’m living in India and thinking they’re on the right side? It was the worst feeling, to this day, one of the worst feelings in my life. You don’t want to hate your government. Somehow someone’s tipped the world upside down.”
The Enterprise task force could have reached east Pakistan by the early hours of December 16. But the day before, Pakistan’s General Niazi sent a message to General Manekshaw saying he wanted a cease-fire, passed along through the U.S. embassy in Delhi. In reply, Manekshaw repeated his promises to safeguard the surrendering Pakistanis and the minority Biharis. As a goodwill gesture, Manekshaw ordered a pause in air action over Dacca. Despite Bhutto’s theatrics at the United Nations, where he ripped up papers and stormed out of the chamber vowing to fight on, the war was all but over.95
Niazi’s cease-fire letter was delivered to Haksar by Galen Stone, a U.S. diplomat in the Delhi embassy who was possibly even more pro-Indian than Keating. Haksar asked him, “Galen, where are we heading?” Stone, according to Haksar, replied with high emotion, saying that the U.S. relationship with India was being destroyed and wondering if he should resign. Stone said that he—and many people in the State Department—simply did not understand Nixon’s policies. According to Stone, Haksar, in tears, asked what kind of relationships Indian and American children would have.96
Haksar pounced on this show of pro-Indian sentiment. He drew up a tough letter for the prime minister to send to Nixon, aiming directly at American hearts and minds, as a way of publicly refuting the accusations made against India by George H. W. Bush and other U.S. officials. Haksar took the United States’ own Declaration of Independence and repurposed it for Bangladesh. Thus Gandhi wrote to Nixon, “That Declaration stated whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, it was the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” This gave her a way to write off Pakistan’s sovereignty, like British rule of America: “while Pakistan’s integrity was certainly sacrosanct, human rights, liberty were no less so.” Professing grief at the downward spiral in relations with the United States, she bitterly blamed Nixon for not using U.S. influence over Yahya. But she did assure him, “We do not want any territory of what was East Pakistan and now constitutes Bangla Desh. We do not want any territory of West Pakistan.”97
Kissinger dismissed the letter as “defensive and plaintive,” but he told Nixon that a cease-fire was imminent: “we are home, now it’s done.” The Soviet Union had promised that India would not annex any West Pakistani territory. “It’s an absolute miracle, Mr. President,” Kissinger said, praising him for having “put it right on the line.” Although the cease-fire was a foregone conclusion, Nixon said, “I’d like to do it in a certain way that pisses on the Indians.”98
In private, Kissinger, still relying on the CIA mole in Delhi, remained convinced that India had meant “to knock over West Pakistan.” Nixon said, “Most people were ready to stand by and let her do it, bombing [Karachi] and all.” Kissinger agreed, “They really are bastards.”99
“Look, these people are savages,” said Nixon. Kissinger usually spoke of India raping Pakistan, but Nixon now had a better verb in mind. He wanted to put out the spin that “we cannot have a stable world if we allow one member of the United Nations to cannibalize another. Cannibalize, that’s the word. I should have thought of it earlier. You see, that really puts it to the Indians. It has, the connotation is savages. To cannibalize … that’s what the sons of bitches are up to.”100
SURRENDER
An exhausted group of Mukti Bahini fighters were ecstatic—and relieved—to hear that Pakistan was about to yield. Th
ey found abandoned buses and loaded them up with jubilant rebels bound for Dacca. People packed the streets and rooftops, chanting, “Joi Bangla!” Coming into the city, hearing the crowds, a rebel later wrote, “We felt liberated at last.” With the first column of Indian troops about to enter Dacca, the chumminess of elite South Asian officers was not to be disturbed by the minor matter of a war. An Indian commander sent a note to General Niazi, whom he knew personally: “My dear Abdullah, I am here. The game is up. I suggest you give yourself up to me, and I will look after you.”101
On December 16, Niazi, emphasizing the “paramount considerations of saving human lives,” offered his surrender on the eastern front. Manekshaw dispatched General Jacob, the chief of staff of the Eastern Command, by helicopter to Dacca, to negotiate a swift capitulation.102
Jacob remembers that India actually had only three thousand troops outside of Dacca, while Pakistan still had over twenty-six thousand in the city. “Just go and get a surrender,” Manekshaw told Jacob. He rushed onto a helicopter, joined by the wife of his superior, Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the general officer commanding-in-chief of the Eastern Command, who said that her place was with her husband. When they landed in Dacca, Jacob remembers, there was still fighting going on between the Mukti Bahini and Pakistani troops. As insurgents shot at his car, he jumped up to show them his olive green Indian army uniform, which stopped their firing. Once he got to Pakistani headquarters, Jacob remembers, General Niazi said, “Who said I’m surrendering? I only came here for a cease-fire.” Alone and acutely aware of how outnumbered the Indians really were at the moment, he took Niazi aside. Jacob recalls, “I said, ‘You surrender, we take care of you, your families, and ethnic minorities. If you don’t, what can I do? I wash my hands.’ He said I blackmailed him, to have him bayoneted. I said, ‘I’ll give you thirty minutes, and if you don’t agree, I’ll order the resumption of hostilities and the bombing of Dacca.’ ” As Jacob walked out, “I thought, my God, I have nothing in my hand.” But Niazi, surely knowing how many more Indian troops were following the tip of the spear outside Dacca, yielded.
With battalions of the Indian army and Mukti Bahini guerrillas crowding into the city, the short eastern war came to an abrupt end. On the afternoon of December 16, General Niazi tearfully surrendered to General Aurora at the Dacca Race Course, surrounded by Hindu neighborhoods that had been destroyed by some of the Pakistan army back in the spring. Preserving the Pakistanis’ dignity, Jacob says, they set up solemn ceremonies at the Race Course. Niazi handed a pistol to Aurora. When Sydney Schanberg, covering it for the New York Times, told Jacob that the surrender of a Pakistani general to a Jewish Indian general made one hell of a story, Jacob indignantly told him not to write it. General Aurora, beaming, was hoisted aloft by crowds of leaping, cheering Bengalis. While street skirmishes continued, crowds thronged into the streets shouting “Joi Bangla!” and shooting bullets into the skies.103
General Manekshaw telephoned Indira Gandhi with the welcome tidings. She ran into the Lok Sabha, exuberant. She informed the Parliament of the unconditional surrender of Pakistan’s forces in the east. “Dacca is now the free capital of a free country,” she declared with satisfaction. “We hail the people of Bangla Desh in their hour of triumph.”104
Gandhi got big cheers when she praised India’s military and the Mukti Bahini, and when she said that Indian forces were under orders to treat Pakistani prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, and that the Bangladesh government would do the same. “Our objectives were limited—to assist the gallant people of Bangla Desh and their Mukti Bahini to liberate their country from a reign of terror and to resist aggression on our own land.” There was exuberant jubilation throughout the chamber, with lawmakers giving her thunderous standing ovations and throwing papers and hats into the air.105
Yet there was also an uglier side to the surrender. General Aurora was bound by India’s promise of protection for West Pakistanis and ethnic minorities. “If we don’t protect the Pakistanis and their collaborators,” an Indian officer told Schanberg, “the Mukti Bahini will butcher them nicely and properly.” Indian soldiers kept surrendering Pakistanis off the roads lest they be attacked. Aurora even allowed thousands of Pakistani troops who had surrendered to keep their weapons for protection against vengeful Bengalis.106
But the Indian army could not stop an awful wave of revenge killings. Gandhi admitted that her generals—although officially in command of the Bangladeshi forces—could not meaningfully promise that there would be no reprisals against loyalists. In Dacca, a Los Angeles Times reporter saw five civilians lying dead in the street, executed as collaborators. The CIA noted “blood-chilling reports of atrocities being perpetrated by revenge-seeking Bengalis in Dacca.” Still, India worked to disarm guerrillas roaming Dacca, and detained one Mukti Bahini leader who whipped up a crowd to torture and murder four men at a public rally. After a few horrific days of bloodshed, the CIA reported that the situation had calmed down.107
Meanwhile in the west, there were still tank battles going on. This was the moment of truth for India’s war goals. India could declare victory in Bangladesh and go home, or launch a new and more aggressive phase, trying to capture land and cities in West Pakistan.
The hawks were in full cry. Pakistan was in chaos and vulnerable, and there were some indications that Indian troops were gaining the upper hand in the west. But Manekshaw, as he later claimed, told the prime minister that a unilateral cease-fire in the west was “the right thing to do.” Haksar agreed. “I must order a cease-fire on the western front also,” Gandhi told an aide, wary of the country’s euphoric mood. “If I don’t do it today, I shall not be able to do it tomorrow.” According to her closest friend, Gandhi heard discussions from the army’s chief and her top advisers about the feasibility of seizing one of Pakistan’s cities. The military said that such a battle against Pakistan’s well-trained soldiers would cost roughly thirty thousand casualties. She sat silently for a while. She knew that the United States and China would have to react. She decided it was time to end the war.108
The same day that Pakistan surrendered in the east, Gandhi declared, “India has no territorial ambitions. Now that the Pakistani Armed Forces have surrendered in Bangla Desh and Bangla Desh is free, it is pointless in our view to continue the present conflict.” She unilaterally ordered India’s armed forces to cease fire all along the western front as of 8 p.m. on December 17.109
The guns fell silent. India said that 2,307 of its warfighters had been killed, 6,163 wounded, and 2,163 were missing. The death toll was slightly higher in the west, where 1,206 Indians had been killed, against 1,021 in the east. And Pakistan’s losses were presumably worse.110
These were terrible human losses. Even so, vastly more Bangladeshi civilians died than Indian and Pakistani soldiers combined. A senior Indian official put the Bengali death toll at three hundred thousand, while Sydney Schanberg, who had excellent sources, noted in the New York Times that diplomats in Dacca thought that hundreds of thousands of Bengalis—maybe even a million or more—had been killed since the crackdown started on March 25. Even the lowest credible Pakistani estimates are in the tens of thousands, while India sought vindication with bigger numbers: Swaran Singh quickly claimed that a million people had been killed in Bangladesh. A few days before the end of the war, Gita Mehta, an Indian journalist working for NBC, showed Indira Gandhi a film on the Bengali refugees. The prime minister, watching with her son Rajiv Gandhi, wept as she saw the images of young and old refugees.111
General Jacob, when asked about violating Pakistan’s sovereignty, explodes in anger. “If you knew what was happening there,” he thunders. “You know the rape and massacres that were taking place there? When we get ten million refugees, what do we do with them?” In Bangladesh, he had picked up a diary and read about Bengalis being bayoneted. He is convinced it was an “awful genocide,” although “I didn’t think it was like what the Nazis did.” His fury unabated, Jacob continues
hotly, “They had raped, they had killed, several hundred thousand. I was listening to Dacca University on the twenty-fifth–twenty-sixth March night. They slaughtered the students. So we should keep quiet? So I have no problem.” Finally cooling down, he finishes, “I have no second thoughts on it. I’m proud of it.”
Soon after the surrender, Schanberg took a trip across the traumatized new country of Bangladesh. Everywhere the New York Times reporter went, people showed him “all the killing grounds” where people were lined up and shot. “You could see the bones in the river, because it was a killing place.” In Dacca, he went to a hillside burial place. “There were shrubs and bushes, and there was a little boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, he was on his hands and knees, scratching the earth, looking for things. He looked disturbed. He was looking for his father, who he said was buried there. If you scratched enough there—it was shallow graves—you’d find a skull or bones. There were cemeteries everywhere. There was no doubt in my mind, evil was done.”
Kissinger, H. R. Haldeman noted, was “practically ecstatic” at the imminent cease-fire. Nixon was not. “Dacca has surrendered,” the president told Kissinger glumly.112
Sharing none of Kissinger’s ebullience, Nixon was sunk in bitterness at Pakistan’s defeat. He was, he said, “outraged” at India’s media advocacy, and “really teed off” that Kissinger had not adequately publicized their accusations of an Indian plan to destroy Pakistan. With Kissinger’s assent, he wanted to move toward a conflict with India: “If the Indians continue the course they are on we have even got to break diplomatic relations with them.”