By Swapan Dasgupta
The extent to which India as a nation lacks a sense
of history was driven home to me recently by an account of the Bangladesh
Government’s commemoration of the liberation war of 1971.
Anxious to honour those Indians who had contributed
the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation four decades ago,
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina organised a series of events in Dhaka
over the past two years. Since most of those who contributed, either publicly
or under a cover of anonymity, to the liberation struggle had died, Bangladesh
graciously invited their family members to accept the awards on their behalf.
Predictably, since most of the non-Bangladeshis who played a role in ensuring
the defeat of the brutal Pakistani regime between March and December of 1971
were Indians, the authorities in Dhaka were compelled to seek the assistance of
the Government of India to locate the individuals or their families.
According to the officials in Bangladesh handling
the commemoration, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Delhi over Sheikh
Hasina’s gracious gesture. In particular, Bangladeshi officials were stumped
over the complete blank that greeted their inquiries of two individuals. One
was an Indian Foreign Service officer managing the Pakistan desk in South
Block, the only non-military Indian official present at the surrender of the
Pakistan army in Dacca; and the other was a more shadowy figure, the right-hand
man of R&AW chief R.N. Kao, operating from Calcutta. Inquiries about the
first gentleman produced no results from the Ministry of External Affairs and
the intelligence community in Delhi were unaware of the existence of one of the
early stalwarts of R&AW.
At one level, the entire episode reeked of official
indifference to anything that was not in the normal line of duty. Far more
important, it seems to me, was the confirmation of a huge lacuna in ‘official’
India: the complete absence of institutional memory. The collapse of East
Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh was one of the most important chapters
of India’s post-Independence history. It continues to define Pakistan’s
attitude towards India and, as such, has a direct contemporary bearing. Yet, it
is astonishing that absolutely no organised attempt is made to disseminate the
history of that crisis to a new generation of diplomats who will be managing
India’s relations with its neighbours in the future. This wilful disregard of
history can be contrasted to the exacting importance the Pakistan Foreign
Service and, for that matter, the Pakistani military establishment attaches to
learning the lessons of its greatest national humiliation.
The publication of Gary J. Bass’s eminently readable
The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in
East Pakistan is as good an occasion as any to revisit the events of 1971.
Based almost entirely on official US Government documents, the White House
tapes pertaining to the presidency of Richard Nixon and the papers of Indira
Gandhi’s Principal Secretary P.N. Haksar and the then Foreign Secretary T.N.
Kaul, the book provides a gripping insight into the calculations of policy
makers in Washington D.C, New Delhi and Islamabad. Although much of the
narrative now belongs to the realms of history, there are important strands
that have a direct bearing on the contemporary relations between India and
Pakistan.
Bass’s most crucial revelation is one that was well
known in official circles in India but was quite consciously hidden from public
view and, consequently, is insufficiently factored in contemporary Indian assessments
of Pakistan. The Pakistan army’s crackdown in erstwhile East Pakistan began as
an offensive against Bangladeshi nationalism and the Awami League. This
involved murderous action against students, political activists and the
paramilitary forces staffed by Bengali speakers. However, once the Pakistan
army entrenched itself in the towns it initiated a parallel campaign of ethnic
cleansing of the minority Hindu population. So much so that by the time the
Indian army began its military offensive against Pakistan in December 1971,
nearly 80 per cent of the 8.5 million refugees who were camped in India were
Hindus.
This attempt to ‘purify’ Pakistan of non-Muslims was
well known to both India and the West, particularly the US. On July 19, 1971,
Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s amoral Secretary of State, had
remarked that President Yahya Khan of Pakistan had loved the cloak and dagger
arrangements surrounding his ‘secret’ visit to China, adding: “Yahya hasn’t had
such fun since the last Hindu massacre.”
The remark may have been characteristically
tasteless—and the White House tapes resonate with Nixon and Kissinger outdoing
each other in showering profanities on Indians and Bengalis—but it indicates
that the viciously sectarian character of the Pakistan military regime was well
known. It is a different matter that India deliberately underplayed the
denominational details of the refugee problem to avoid any diversion from the
fact that the crisis had stemmed from a Bengali uprising against Pakistani
domination. However, in allowing the real story to remain buried for more than
40 years, India lost sight of a larger reality. It also glossed over the fact
that Pakistan was not normal. A state that couldn’t countenance any deviation
from its Islamic identity and, in fact, was fanatical enough to lose more than
half the country on this count, cannot be judged by the accepted standards of
international statecraft.
What emerges from the Nixon-Kissinger private exchanges
is that Pakistan’s foremost ally was clear in its mind that Yahya had embarked
on a path of self-destruction. Pakistan, they knew, couldn’t win a war against
India in the East. At various point they even tried telling this to the “big,
honourable, stupid man” that was the Pakistani President. However, as Kissinger
was to confess later, Yahya “was oblivious to his perils and unprepared to face
necessities. He and his colleagues did not feel India was planning war; if so,
they were convinced that they would win. When I asked tactfully as I could
about the Indian advantage in numbers and equipment, Yahya and his colleagues
answered with bravado about the historic superiority of Moslem fighters.”
Ayub Khan too had believes that one Pakistani
soldier was equal in worth to 20 Hindu fighters. This was the basis of his war
to occupy Kashmir and even reach Delhi in 1965. In both 1965 and 1971, Pakistan
failed to live up its exalted self-esteem. Yet the belief in its superior
national character has never waned. There is a big section of the Pakistan
establishment that believes that the country was “betrayed” in all its wars
against India. Consequently, the belief that unflinching Islamic nationalism is
the only way to realise Pakistan’s manifest destiny (in Kashmir or elsewhere) is
deep-rooted and widespread.
For India this implies permanent danger on the
frontiers. The threat is doubled by Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine that is
premised on the understanding that the adversary in India is somehow a
sub-human whose elimination is also a religious duty.
Beginning with Indira Gandhi and P.N. Haksar who
felt that Pakistan must be allowed to recover from Dacca debacle with an iota
of self-respect, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh whose perception of the
Pakistani national character is coloured by pre-Partition nostalgia, India has
tried its best to couch neighbourly relations with civility and the lure of
good economics. After each disappointment, India has tried to begin afresh,
believing that pragmatism will mark every new generation in Pakistan. Each time
history has hit back.
The Telegraph, October 25, 2013
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