by Dilip Hiro
PM [Zhou]: They [Pakistanis] were not clear about the situation because Mr. Bhutto himself was not a military man and Yahya Khan had boasted about the military situation. So I believe Mr. Bhutto on the 11th [December] thought that the military situation in Pakistan at that time was indeed very well.
HK [Kissinger]: Bhutto arrived in New York on Friday the 10th our time, 11th your time. . . . You called us in the morning of the 12th and we were going to the meeting with [French President] Pompidou [in Azores] so we sent General [Alexander] Haig. But between the time we got the phone call and picked up the message we didn’t know what it was. And since Huang Ha had taken a very tough line, not knowing the situation I thought your message to us was that you were taking military measures. And since we were going to the Azores before [the meeting with Huang], we had to give instructions [to Haig]. If your message was, you were taking military measures our instructions were that if the Soviet Union moved against you we would move against the Soviet Union.
PM: Why did the newspapers publish what had been discussed step by step in the Washington Special Actions Group with respect to the East Pakistan situation?
HK: Well first, the PM has to understand that the Washington Special [Action] Group implements decisions, it does not make decisions. The reason I had to take such a strong stand in this group was because the vast majority of our bureaucracy was pro-India and pro-Soviet.
PM: Pro-Soviet?
HK: More Pro-Soviet than Pro-Chinese. I came under the most violent attack. . . . What happened is that a disloyal member of our bureaucracy gave these documents to newspapers and they printed them in order to destroy us and they came very close.
PM: But after reading the records that were published, it seemed to me that the members of that group came from quite a lot of quarters.
HK: Yes, they were almost unanimously against our policy.
PM: Especially toward India?
HK: They didn’t understand our overall strategy. If they had understood we were getting ready to take on the Soviet Union then what happened was mild compared to what would have happened. The reason we moved our Fleet into the Indian Ocean was not because of India primarily—it was as pressure on the Soviet Union if the Soviets did what I mentioned before.
PM: And they also closely followed you down into the Indian Ocean.
HK: Yes but what they had we could have taken care of very easily.
PM: What they were trying to do was to create more noise in East Bengal. They openly passed through the Tsushima straits and then through the Malacca Straits.
HK: Yes but not with a force that could fight ours.
PM: Yes, but you know they could surface in such a way their support to East Bengal.
HK: Oh yes, it was used for that purpose. Actually, the Pakistan Army in the East surrendered five days later [on December 16], so it would have been too late for you to do anything.
PM: Also Yahya Khan had sent his order in preparation for such a measure on the 11th or the 12th.33
China’s message to the United States on December 12 apparently expressed support for an immediate cease-fire. That day, Washington requested the reconvening of the Security Council. While the Council deliberated, the military situation for Pakistan deteriorated rapidly.
Within a week of the hostilities, Indian warplanes had grounded the entire air force of East Pakistan by raiding four major air bases and had gained almost total control of its air space. By attacking the three main ports of East Pakistan, India’s warships severed the escape routes for the stranded Pakistani troops.
The lightning progress of Delhi’s forces owed much to the success Indian code breakers had in breaking Pakistan’s military cipher. They furnished India’s military intelligence with real-time information on the enemy’s strategic decision making, according to the selective leaks from India’s classified official history of the 1971 war.34 Among other things, the Indians’ interception of Pakistan’s military communications aborted its high command’s decision to evacuate its troops in five vessels disguised as merchant ships.
On land, the Indian troops advancing along Dacca-Chittagong Highway were forced to halt twenty miles southeast of Dacca when they encountered a broken bridge across the Meghna River. “The Pakistani forces thought they had cut us off after they blew up a bridge over the Meghna River,” recalled Lieutenant General Aurora later. “But we took them by surprise and crossed it at night with the help of the local people. That was the turning point [in the war].”35 With that, on December 13 Dacca became vulnerable to the invaders’ artillery fire.
Niazi’s Unconditional Surrender
“You have fought a heroic battle against overwhelming odds,” read the dispatch to Niazi from general headquarters in Rawalpindi. However, the message continued, “you have now reached a stage where further resistance is no longer humanly possible nor will it serve any useful purpose. . . . You should now take all necessary measures to stop the fighting and preserve the lives of armed forces personnel, all those from West Pakistan and all loyal elements.”36
Later, when controversy broke out in Pakistan about the actual events on those crucial days, some critics accused Niazi of acting unilaterally. “I swear on oath that I was given clear-cut orders from Yahya to surrender, but still I was determined to fight till the end,” Niazi asserted. “I even sent a message that my decision to fight till the end stands. However, General Abdul Hamid Khan and Air Chief Marshal Rahim [Khan] rang me up, ordering me to act on the [headquarters’] signal of December 14, 1971 because West Pakistan was in danger. It was at this stage that I was asked to agree on a cease-fire so that the safety of the troops could be ensured.”37
On December 15 Niazi approached the American consul-general in Dacca, who contacted the appropriate authority in Delhi. The next day Lieutenant-General Aurora, the joint commander of India’s Eastern Command and the Bangladesh Forces of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, flew into Dacca to accept the instrument of surrender signed by Niazi.
In Delhi, within hours of learning about Niazi’s decision to surrender, Manekshaw called on Indira Gandhi. He reportedly asked her if the military high command had the permission to “finish the job.” This meant overrunning West Pakistan. She replied that the cabinet would consider his suggestion.38
She summoned a cabinet meeting. By the time she had briefed her colleagues about the secret intermediary role the Kremlin had played between her and Nixon, and that the Kremlin had ruled out even attacking Azad Kashmir, any enthusiasm for Manekshaw’s gung-ho proposal harbored by some of her ministers vanished. The session ended with a unanimous decision to declare a unilateral cease-fire on December 17 on the western front as well. Such level-headed decision making had a parallel during the September 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, when the Cabinet Committee on Security, headed by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, voted against attempting to capture Lahore, which would have been defended fiercely.
In Dacca, Aurora met Niazi at the ornate administrative office of the Ramna Race Course, the former exclusive club of the British officers stationed in Dacca Cantonment, overlooking the race course and the surrounding park. It was here that in his historic speech on March 6, 1971, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman had declared: “This time the struggle is for our freedom.” Now, surrounded by a large group of uniformed officers and civilian bureaucrats, the bearded Aurora, wearing a starched, striped turban, countersigned the instrument of surrender signed by clean-shaven Niazi, sporting a beret.
As the Indian and Pakistan officers emerged from the site of the signing ceremony, they were greeted by a cheering crowd. Jubilant young men and boys and girls in colorful clothes held aloft Bangladeshi and Indian flags as vehicles played loud music. They threaded their way slowly through the jostling assemblage. Shouts of “Joi Bangla” (Bengali: “Victory to Bengal”) interspersed with anti-Pakistan and pro-India slogans stirred the wintry air. Before their eyes the officers witnessed
the celebrating multitude grow exponentially.
The victorious and the vanquished senior army officers struggled to reach their jeeps to repair to the officers’ mess in the cantonment. Once there, while drinking whiskey and soda, they exchanged anecdotes about their time at the Indian military academy, where they had trained together before the partition.
Counting the Cost
For the moment, they set aside the fate of the 90,370 Pakistani POWs acquired by the nascent Bangladeshi government but held by the Indian military. Of these, 56,370 were military personnel, 22,000 paramilitaries and policemen, and the rest civil servants and their families. The war on both fronts cost India the lives of 3,850 servicemen and Pakistan 9,000. Predictably, Pakistan’s claim of destroying 130 Indian warplanes was rebutted by Delhi, which put the figure at 45. Equally, India’s claimed score of 94 enemy warplanes was scaled down to 42 by Pakistan. India’s tank loss of 82 was a fraction of Pakistan’s 226.39
The estimate of the deaths by violence in East Pakistan from March 26 to December 16, 1971, has varied wildly—from twenty-six thousand to three million. Going by the records of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, seen by the Hamoodur Rehman Inquiry Commission, the military killed twenty-six thousand people in action, with the commission noting that the officers always gave a low count.40 The figure of three million—five times the estimate for the unparalleled communal butchery in Punjab during 1947—first mentioned by Shaikh Rahman in his interview with British TV personality David Frost in January 1972 after his return to Dacca as a free man is now universally regarded as excessively inflated.41 The statistic given by Indian officials to Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, authors of War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh, was one hundred thousand.42
In her study of the subject, published as Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, Sarmila Bose, a Bengali-speaking research scholar at Oxford University, undertook extensive field research. After selecting the worst of the alleged atrocities, she reconstructed and quantified these by interviewing the participants in Pakistan and Bangladesh—mainly retired Pakistani officers, the survivors of the brutalities, and their relatives in Bangladesh, as well as members of the non-Bengali and non-Muslim minorities. Her case-by-case estimation gave her a total of 50,000 to 100,000 dead.43 In their analysis of the data from the world health survey program, covering fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia, Ziad Obermeyer and fellow researchers mentioned a figure of 269,000.44
In the excitement over the lightning triumph of the Indian and Bangladeshi forces, however, the statistics of those who perished in East Pakistan did not engage popular attention. The appearance of jubilant crowds in the cities of Bangladesh and West Bengal was a striking contrast to the angry demonstrations that rippled through the streets of West Pakistani cities. Such was the thoroughness with which the military junta controlled the media that the public at large believed that their forces were winning the war in the East while clobbering the Indians along the border with West Pakistan.
When exposed to the sights and sounds of Niazi signing the instrument of surrender on TV and radio on December 16, West Pakistanis went into instant denial. They blamed the battlefield debacle on Yahya Khan’s heavy drinking and womanizing. That night in a broadcast, Yahya Khan, his voice slurred with drink, declared bravely that though a battle had been lost, the war would go on. The next day he accepted Delhi’s unilateral offer of a cease-fire in West Pakistan.
Senior military officers outside Yahya Khan’s immediate clique thought that he would accept responsibility for the nation’s humiliating defeat and that he and the top generals would step down. Instead, on December 18 he announced he was going to promulgate a new constitution, while furious demonstrations demanding the regime’s resignation had erupted all over the country. There was a real danger he might call on the army to restore order, which would have resulted in civilian bloodshed in West Pakistan.
To avert such a scenario, several commanders at divisional headquarters outside Rawalpindi jointly issued an ultimatum to Yahya Khan to step down by eight pm on December 19. That morning their representatives, Colonels Aleem Afridi and Javed Iqbal, flew to Rawalpindi and repeated the message to General Gul Hassan, chief of the general staff, in the afternoon. After high-level consultations, Hassan told them that Yahya Khan would see them at seven pm. Meanwhile his immediate boss, General Hamid Khan, tried to shore up support for the president by phoning several generals. He drew a blank. Shortly before the deadline of eight pm, a news broadcast said that President Yahya Khan had decided to hand over power to the elected representatives of the people.45
General Hassan, Air Marshal Rahim Khan, and Pakistan People’s Party leader G. M. Khar collectively phoned Bhutto—then sitting out the crisis in Rome, unsure of his fate on his return home—advising him to fly back to Rawalpindi. On arrival there on December 20, he headed for the presidential residence. His talk with Yahya Khan lasted a few hours. At the end of it, the forty-three-year-old wily politician found himself president, commander in chief, and chief martial law administrator of Pakistan.
In his rambling address to the nation, Bhutto promised “a new Pakistan” and added that “our brothers in East Pakistan” would have the support of the rest of Pakistan in “liberating” themselves from “foreign domination.” He announced the retirement of all the generals in Yahya Khan’s inner clique, saying that he was doing this “in accord with the sentiments of the Armed Forces and the younger officers.”46
Euphoria in India
Whereas the people, politicians, and soldiers in West Pakistan sank into deep depression after their initial shock and disbelief, their counterparts in India exploded instantly into unbounded joy. After the drubbing their motherland had received from the Chinese nine years earlier, Indians savored their victory over Pakistan with relish and special prayers.
The celebratory feeling was palpable in urban streets and markets all over India. Notwithstanding their secular constitution, and the rededication of their politicians to secularist values, the predominantly Hindu Indians tapped into their religious mythology to crown their triumph. They conferred the sobriquet of Goddess Durga (Sanskrit: “Inaccessible”) on Indira Gandhi. This went down particularly well with Bengali Hindus, whose colorful worship of Goddess Durga is legendary. According to Hindu lore, Durga—portrayed as a beautiful woman clad in a colorful sari, with eight arms carrying different weapons, riding a lion or tiger—is an outstanding warrior goddess whose energy becomes lethal when she targets forces of evil. In that role she slays the buffalo-demon Mahisasura. In the present context, as a clone of Durga, Indira Gandhi decapitated the evil of the two-nation theory on which Muhammad Ali Jinnah had built Pakistan with its two far-flung wings.
Now Jinnah’s Pakistan had lost more than half of its population, as well as its main source of foreign exchange earned by the export of jute from its eastern wing. Far more importantly, the breakaway of East Pakistan undercut the founding doctrine of two nations inhabiting the Indian subcontinent and upheld the view of Congress Party leaders that the partition was a pragmatic resolution of its conflict with the Muslim League rather than an ideological defeat. The secession of East Pakistan proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different languages, cuisines, cultures, and historical backgrounds. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism was a bitter pill to swallow not only for West Pakistani people and politicians but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan.
West Pakistanis also lamented the fact that for the first time in eight centuries Hindus had defeated Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. In mid-December 1971 their independent existence hung in the balance. It was ultimately saved by Nixon’s strong intervention, the restraining hand of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and the cool-headed deliberation of the Indian cabinet.
The third Indo-Pakistan war, fought almost a quarter cent
ury after the traumatic partition of the subcontinent, closed a tumultuous period in the postindependence history of South Asia. Among other things, it gave enough confidence to a few moviemakers in India to dwell on the acute dilemma the Muslims in India had faced on the eve of the partition.
Captured on Celluloid
One controversial result was the making of a low-budget movie Garm Hava (Hindi: Hot Wind) in Hindustani in 1972 under the direction of Mysore Shrivinas Sathyu. The screenplay, based on an unpublished short story by Bombay-based Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a leftist Muslim writer, focused on the postpartition trials and tribulations of Salim Mirza, owner of a shoe factory in Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, a glittering example of Islamic architecture.
The bank refuses him an overdraft, and the orders for shoes decline sharply. When the prospective husband of his daughter, who migrated to Pakistan after his engagement, returns to marry her, he is arrested as a suspected spy. That drives Mirza’s daughter to suicide. In despair he, his wife, and his college-age son leave for the railway station to move to Pakistan. But their horse-driven carriage is blocked by a flag-waving procession whose marchers are shouting slogans for communal harmony. Impetuously, the son jumps off the carriage and joins the demonstrators. Salim Mirza follows the son, as does his wife.