by Gary J. Bass
Some Indian strategists had hoped that a dismembered and defeated Pakistan would be finished as a threat. But despite Pakistan’s losses—and some ninety-three thousand Pakistani prisoners of war—it rearmed and girded for future confrontation. Although Indira Gandhi’s government had to insincerely welcome Bhutto as a democratically elected president, his fear and hostility toward India were radically increased. Under Bhutto, defense spending rocketed up. Just over two months after the war, the Indian army saw that Pakistan was replacing its losses, modernizing its tank units, and bolstering its infantry. “A defeated army will naturally seek revenge to restore its image in the country,” General Sam Manekshaw said. “They will therefore want another round of hostilities for which we should be fully prepared.”21
Gandhi, bargaining from strength, met Bhutto in a summit at Simla in June 1972. (He brought along his daughter, Benazir Bhutto.) Although they sparred over Kashmir, she gave him generous terms: the return of some five thousand square miles of Pakistani territory seized by Indian troops, and the repatriation of ninety-three thousand Pakistani prisoners of war, with the approval of Mujib’s government in Bangladesh. Many Indians were startled by Bhutto’s success at Simla, with the opposition arguing that Gandhi had lost at the negotiating table what the army had won in war. But the Indian foreign ministry hailed the Simla agreement as a generous peace, not imposed on the defeated, the diametrical opposite of the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Bhutto assured her that he would get his people to accept the upgrading of the line of control in Kashmir into an actual border, but then gave a hard-line speech about Kashmir.22
Pervez Musharraf, a young Pakistani commando officer during the 1971 war, flung his jacket on the floor in disgust at the humiliating defeat. He wanted revenge against India—something still on his mind in 1999 when he seized power in a military coup to become Pakistan’s military dictator. The old vendetta between Pakistan and India, freshly intensified after 1971, has had terrible consequences far beyond the region. The rout of Pakistan’s army drove home as never before to Pakistan’s leadership the need for alternative ways of fighting India. It did this in three ways, all of them tragic.23
First, the army, always strong, has become an overweening force in Pakistan’s political life. After the humiliating skunking of Pakistan’s military, Bhutto at first sought to limit the generals’ power. But confronted with an insurrection in Baluchistan in 1973, Bhutto showed hardly more imagination than the far less intelligent Yahya, sending in some eighty thousand troops. Once again, Pakistan went to war with its own people. In recent years, the generals have pushed aside civilian control and weakened the prospects for deepening democracy. “We are almost a failed state,” Musharraf recently said. “This is what democracy brings Pakistan.”24
Second, Pakistan has turned to guerrillas and terrorists to carry on the struggle against India for Kashmir. Zia, who sought to install a politicized Islam at the core of Pakistan’s politics, turned to young Islamist fighters as his beleaguered country’s last hope against Indian and Soviet armies. After guerrillas proved successful against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence deployed similar means against India in Kashmir. In the 1990s, Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence secretly backed and armed the Taliban, with the undeclared support of the Pakistan army and much of the civilian leadership. By 1999, the Pakistan army’s chiefs were convinced that jihadists were the only reliable way to challenge the Indian army—even indulging Osama bin Laden. Until 2001, the ISI nurtured Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group aiming against India but today with a much wider reach. (Of course, this kind of covert sponsorship was out of India’s playbook for the Mukti Bahini.) Still, such support has proved to be a catastrophic strategy for Pakistan. Both inside and outside Pakistan’s borders, terrorist attacks have become a grimly regular part of life, often from groups that have been the secret beneficiaries of the Pakistani state. Untold Pakistani civilians have been murdered.25
In Afghanistan today, Pakistan’s fear of India drives some of the policies that are most dangerous to the United States. Pakistani politicians and generals worry that a rising India will dominate Afghanistan, leaving it with another hostile state on its border. To offset that, Pakistan’s ISI has kept up its ties with the Taliban, which serves as a way of balancing India’s influence in Afghanistan. Scott Butcher says, “You look at Afghanistan, it’s all colored by Pakistan’s fear of India.”26
Third, there is Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Bhutto had long argued that Pakistan needed its own atomic bomb, even if its people had to go hungry. Soon after losing the Bangladesh war, he decided to produce one. This was the genesis of the burgeoning nuclear program that has grown into one of the biggest nightmares of U.S. national security officials. Pakistan nurtures a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and short-range missiles to deliver them, and is reckoned to have between seventy and 120 nuclear devices. When Benazir Bhutto was asked why nuclear weapons are popular among Pakistanis, she replied, “In 1971, our country was disintegrated.” A. Q. Khan, the chief of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program—who remains a nationalist hero even though his smuggling network evidently sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya, and Iran—recently invoked the Bangladesh war as an apology for his dangerous brand of nuclear proliferation: “Had Iraq and Libya been nuclear powers, they wouldn’t have been destroyed in the way we have seen recently. If we had had nuclear capability before 1971, we would not have lost half of our country—present-day Bangladesh—after disgraceful defeat.”27
INDIA
India, accustomed to military humiliations, largely remembers the war as a famous victory—unlike the two previous wars against Pakistan and the 1962 drubbing by China. India’s euphoric government hailed its 1971 victory as decisive, and for at least a little while it loomed as the dominant power in the subcontinent. To this day, Indians recall the Bangladesh war with a rare triumphalism. In a country that often dwells on its failures, this heady moment stands out. Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the war, the Hindustan Times ran the proud headline 1971 WAR: INDIA’S GREATEST TRIUMPH.28
Indians see the war as a moral triumph too, a victory for democracy and human rights. As the leading Indian scholar and analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote, “India’s 1971 armed intervention in East Pakistan—undertaken for a mixture of reasons—is widely and fairly regarded as one of the world’s most successful cases of humanitarian intervention against genocide. Indeed, India in effect applied what we would now call the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) principle, and applied it well.”29
Some of the best political thinkers outside of India agree. Michael Walzer, probably the most distinguished philosopher of justice in war, repeatedly points to India’s Bangladesh war as a canonical example of a justifiable humanitarian intervention, in a radical emergency when there was no other plausible way to save innocent human lives. In recent years, when dictators quashed democratic movements—in Haiti in 1994, in Syria since 2011—and sent refugees fleeing for their lives into neighboring countries, it looks like a small-scale version of what India faced. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, recently echoed Indira Gandhi’s argument that Pakistan’s internal problem had become India’s: “We do not see the Syria issue as an external one. It is an internal issue for us.”30
Still, this was at best a war of mixed motives. As Arundhati Ghose astutely asks, “Yes, Mrs. Gandhi got the support of the people because of the atrocities, but was the decision taken because of the atrocities?” It is impossible to see Indira Gandhi as much of a guardian of human rights. Her own record—in Mizoram, Nagaland, Kashmir, and West Bengal; in a bloody crackdown in Punjab in 1984; and nationwide in her suspension of Indian democracy in the Emergency—shows scant commitment to such ideals. At the same time, as both Walzer and Mehta rightly note, she certainly saw the chance to smash Pakistan. Indian officials were sincere in their outrage at the slaughter of the Bengalis, but also keenly aware of the strategic opportunity handed t
o them. The Indian government wanted to hurt Pakistan, to resist China, to heighten its dominance over South Asia, to shore up its border states from Naxalite revolutionary violence, to avert communal tension between Hindus and Muslims, and, above all, to shuck off the crushing permanent burden of ten million refugees. But at the same time, India’s democratic society—including its ruling elites—was moved by a remarkably unanimous humanitarianism, with real solidarity with the Bengalis.31
The end of the war marked the low point for India’s relationship with the United States. Beginning a protracted sulk, Nixon wrote to Gandhi, in a baldly undiplomatic tone, “If there is a strain in our relations, and there is, it is because your government spurned these proposals and without any warning whatever chose war instead.”32
The Indian embassy in Washington despairingly reported that Nixon’s policies had sent “Indo-US relations plunging to their lowest ebb.” Before the crisis, fully two-thirds of Indians had held a good opinion of the United States, with only 9 percent with a bad or very bad opinion of the country. After the war, over half of Indians had a bad or very bad opinion of the United States, with just over a quarter having a good or very good opinion. The sourness lasted for decades. Jaswant Singh says that Indian bitterness at the deployment of the USS Enterprise carrier group did not begin to dissipate until Bill Clinton’s presidency.33
More pointedly, one of Gandhi’s top advisers has argued that the bullying of the Enterprise prodded India to accelerate its nuclear program—leading to the detonation of a nuclear device at Pokhran, in the vast Rajasthan desert, in May 1974. To this day, Indian nationalists often argue that the Enterprise proves why India needs nuclear weapons. “India had that experience in 1971, when the USS Enterprise entered the Bay of Bengal,” Arundhati Ghose once told a reporter. “I have always felt that this was what prompted Indira Gandhi to explode the nuclear device in 1974.”34
This is more a reflection of Indian resentment than of historical fact. After all, even Nixon—more hostile to India than any U.S. president—was obviously deterred from anything more than a symbolic gesture by India’s conventional military strength. So, evidently, was a bellicose China, which had menacingly tested its own bomb back in 1964. True, it seems that Gandhi authorized the building of a nuclear device in 1972, after the war, having publicly rejected an Indian bomb as recently as June 1971. But it is not clear when she decided to authorize building the device, with some accounts placing that before the Enterprise’s visit to the Bay of Bengal. India was certainly debating its nuclear options before the Bangladesh crisis, and the idea of a peaceful nuclear explosion was gaining ground in the summer of 1971, before Nixon’s gunboat diplomacy.35
Rather than being driven by fear of the United States, India in its decision to detonate a nuclear bomb seems to have been motivated in large part by Gandhi’s desire for domestic popularity. Many Indians cheered the blast. And the Enterprise definitely wounded the pride of India’s leaders, as well as reminding them of their relative weakness. They were shocked by this expression of American contempt. As the scholar George Perkovich argued, India was mostly driven to develop nuclear capacity not by any urgent new threat, but by the wish for major-power status.36
With this great victory, Indira Gandhi stood at the apex of her power. Her former critics sang her praises, as her favorability rating in the polls soared to an astonishing 93 percent. In March 1972, state elections were called for thirteen states, and her Congress party easily rode her coattails to win all of them. Even in West Bengal, the Congress came out well, although it had to ally itself with the Communist Party of India, and use shocking measures of terror and voter fraud. She had stood up to the cruel Pakistanis, the fanatical Chinese, and the arrogant Americans. People hailed her as Durga, the invincible Hindu warrior goddess.37
Gandhi was intoxicated by her battlefield success. “I am no longer the same person,” she euphorically told her closest friend. That friend was worried: adrift in all the adulation, the prime minister seemed to be losing the ability to doubt herself. The war had fostered something close to a cult of personality around Gandhi. The Congress—which tellingly eventually came to be known as the Congress (I), for “Indira”—was more than ever her instrument. She weakened the restraints of India’s democratic institutions, installing loyalists to run key states, packing the civil service, and even trying to hold sway over the judiciary.38
But Durga still had a poor country to run. India’s coffers were drained by waging war, sheltering refugees, and sponsoring an insurgency. India had also lost U.S. economic aid. As the monsoons failed, the economy was in a shambles, battered by high oil prices and inflation. The country fell into labor strikes, with factories shuttered and people in misery. She turned away from Haksar, relying increasingly on her corrupt and callow second son, Sanjay Gandhi, who pressed her toward autocracy. “The Prime Minister had become very arrogant,” recalled one of her aides. “She loved being called Durga. The Bangladesh victory was the turning point.”39
History does not march so directly, but Gandhi certainly grew less tolerant after her war. Throughout the Bangladesh crisis, the activist Jayaprakash Narayan had pressed her to confront Pakistan. Rather than embracing him as part of the war effort, Gandhi spoke of him with vehement contempt. “Jayaprakash has never taken me seriously,” she told her friend. “One has to be really ruthless if the need arises.” To her fury, Narayan launched a new and radicalized protest movement, capitalizing on the country’s economic woes. Her popularity sank steadily, while he alarmingly called for “total revolution.” Escalating the confrontation, she unleashed the police on Narayan and his followers in Bihar. Gandhi became prey to conspiratorial claims that Narayan’s movement was secretly backed by the United States as payback for the Bangladesh humiliation. The prime minister, knowing how much Nixon loathed her, worried about “the foreign hand.”40
In June 1975, after a high court handed down a startling ruling that threw the prime minister out of Parliament and barred her from office for six years, Gandhi launched her Emergency. Indians were devastated at this nightmare betrayal of their freedom. Egged on by Sanjay, Indira Gandhi rounded up and jailed hundreds of opposition politicians, including Narayan. She imprisoned unionists, students, and politicians who had anything to do with rival parties like the Jana Sangh and the Congress (O). She imposed humorless censorship and cut electricity to newspapers. India’s famously rambunctious press—which had done so much to bring to light the atrocities against Bengalis back in 1971—was forced to kill stories about strikes and demonstrations, cut out the political jokes, and instead run official drivel from South Block.41
This kind of rupture was something that Haksar—now shoved aside—had long dreaded. With a bitter awareness of the fragility of democracy, he had once written, “If our Parliament goes berserk and becomes an instrument of oppression, our democracy would have failed and something else would take its place. If such turbulence were to take place in our country, waving of the Constitution against the flood waters of dark reaction or revolution will not stem the tide.” But it was his own prime minister who had now gone berserk.42
Throughout the darkest days of the Bangladesh crisis, Indians had taken pride in their own democratic system as a sign of moral superiority over Pakistan’s junta. Now—until Gandhi held new elections in March 1977—India had an autocrat of its own. Some Indians painfully heard echoes of Pakistani dictatorship in the Emergency. After all, Yahya had subordinated freedom to stability too; the Pakistani military had also taken power to rescue their country from itself. The Bengalis of East Pakistan had accused Pakistan’s generals of cementing West Pakistan’s domination over them; now southern Indians complained that Gandhi was enshrining northern preeminence through her Emergency powers.43
Less than two months after the Emergency began, Mujib was assassinated in Dacca. India, for all its wartime rhetoric about Bangladeshi democracy, kept up normal ties, readily accepting a new military president to replace the dead Mujib. The
Indian foreign secretary, in no position to lecture about the abnegation of democracy, told the Bangladeshi high commissioner, “It is for the Bangladesh nation to decide what is best for them.” Gandhi, horrified, was convinced that she would be next. The army officers in Bangladesh had shot dead Mujib’s nine-year-old son; her grandson, Rahul Gandhi, was about the same age. She spent the rest of her life in dread of assassination, until the day in October 1984 when she was gunned down at her home by two of her Sikh bodyguards.44
Indira Gandhi left behind a family dynasty that still looms over Indian politics. Her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi is a monumental political force, and her grandson Rahul Gandhi is trying his level best. He has even tried to kick-start his spluttering political career by capitalizing on his grandmother’s breakup of Pakistan. “I belong to the family which has never moved backwards, which has never gone back on its words,” he said at a rally in Uttar Pradesh in 2007. “You know that when any member of my family had decided to do anything, he does it. Be it the freedom struggle, the division of Pakistan or taking India to the 21st century.” This was met with derision by Indian politicos and fury by Pakistan, but the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty still dominates the country, jealously guarding Indira Gandhi’s legacy.45
THE UNITED STATES
On March 1, 1973, in the Oval Office, Nixon and Kissinger were talking about Soviet Jews. Kissinger, who had at least thirteen close relatives murdered in the Holocaust, showed his lack of interest in the starkest possible terms: “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Nixon agreed: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”46