IN ENTERPRISE OF MARTIAL KIND
On December 12, after that agitated session in the Oval Office, a top Soviet diplomat in Washington assured Kissinger that they would soon get results from the Indians, and that there was no need for “a fist fight in the Security Council because we are in agreement now.” Kissinger soothingly said that the United States would be cooperative. Although a US aircraft carrier group was on its way, he downplayed that, saying that the Americans had to stand by their allies, but had now gone through that exercise.
There was a fistfight anyway. The same day, in New York, the United Nations Security Council reconvened. After the last debacle, Haksar had sent Swaran Singh, India’s foreign minister, to confront George Bush and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was now leading the Pakistani delegation. Haksar told Gandhi that “the art of diplomacy lies not merely in advocating one’s cause, but in reducing one’s opponents.” That Singh did skillfully. “Is Mr. Bhutto still harbouring dreams of conquering India and coming to Delhi as a visitor?” he caustically asked. When Bush, on Nixon’s and Kissinger’s instructions, inquired about India’s ultimate intentions in the war, Singh asked about US intentions in Vietnam. He denounced Pakistan: “It is not India which has set a record in political persecution, the genocide of a people and the suppression of human rights that inevitably led to the present conflagration.”
For the third and last time, the Soviet Union shielded India with its veto, knocking down another Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal. Kissinger, not checking with Nixon, threatened to scrap the upcoming Soviet summit.
All the while the diplomats traded insults, Nixon and Kissinger had the USS Enterprise carrier group sailing fast toward the Bay of Bengal. To use the wholly implausible pretext of evacuating Americans, Kissinger told the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Send it where there are Americans— say, Karachi.” Kissinger informed Bhutto that US warships would soon cross the chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca, heading for the Bay of Bengal, and be spotted by the Indians. Nixon insisted that it continue toward India unless there was a settlement.
The Enterprise, a nuclear aircraft carrier from the US Seventh Fleet, was accompanied by the rest of its formidable task force: the helicopter carrier USS Tripoli, seven destroyers, and an oiler. (They were under the Honolulu-based command of Admiral John McCain Jr., the father of John McCain III, the Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential candidate.) With alarming symbolism, the carrier group set sail not merely from the Vietnam war zone, but, as the Indian government unhappily claimed, from the Gulf of Tonkin.
Nixon and Kissinger had a schoolboy enthusiasm for moving military units without meaning too much by it. Still, compared with India’s ragtag fleet, this was an awfully intimidating force. An Indian official called it “a nuclear-studded armada including the most powerful ship in the world.” The Enterprise had helped blockade Cuba during the missile crisis there. It was a modern, mammoth warship, almost five times larger than India’s own rickety aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. Even one of the Enterprise’s escorts, the Tripoli, was bigger than the Vikrant. The Enterprise, powered by atomic reactors, could sail around the world without refueling; the Vikrant was lucky if its boiler worked. This US carrier group was, the vice admiral of India’s eastern fleet recalled, “a fantastic threat.”
Indian troops were simultaneously closing in on Dacca from the north, south, and east. While the news of the Seventh Fleet’s deployment broke in the Indian press, Gandhi rallied a gigantic crowd in Delhi, speaking in simple, blunt Hindi. Indian warplanes circled overhead. As one of her top advisers nervously noted, this huge gathering could have made a tempting bombing target.
The wartime prime minister complained that the United States’ alliance with Pakistan was supposed to be against communism, not democracy. Although not naming the United States or China, she warned that India would stand firm against “severe threats” of “some other attack.” And, in words so inflammatory that her press office cut them from the printed version of her speech, she irately declared that the world was against India because of the color of its people’s skin. She led the masses in roaring “Jai Hind!”— victory to India.
That victory was almost in hand. Triumphant in Bangladesh and under pressure from both superpowers to leave it at that, India lost whatever appetite it might have had for a wider war. India by now held some pockets of Pakistani territory in the west, and two Soviet diplomats tried to ascertain the country’s intentions from Haksar and then from Gandhi herself— hoping to restrain them from reckless steps that might drag the United States into the war. The CIA noted that the Soviet Union had advised India to be satisfied with liberating Bangladesh and not to seize any West Pakistani territory, including that contested area in Kashmir known as Azad Kashmir. As Haksar anxiously wrote to Gandhi, the Soviets believed that the United States was firmly committed to defend West Pakistan’s territorial integrity. Thus Indian provocations against West Pakistan could drive the Americans to “enlarge the conflict.”
Haksar urged the prime minister to impress upon General Manekshaw that his troops must use “extreme care” on the western front. The United States, Haksar nervously wrote, would react to any military moves that gave the impression that India was trying to grab land in West Pakistan, including Azad Kashmir, or that India was planning to transfer forces from the eastern theater to charge deep into West Pakistan.
With Indian troops racing against the UN’s clock, Haksar was grateful for every deferral and adjournment of the byzantine Security Council. While Haksar eagerly awaited the end of military operations in Bangladesh, he came up with a quibbling series of stalling tactics for the United Nations, meant to be “sufficiently elastic to generate discussion and give time.” But the Soviet Union, having endured more than its fill of embarrassments on India’s behalf, was, as Haksar told Gandhi, anxious for India to allow it to say something in the Security Council that was not completely negative.
The same CIA intelligence that had so alarmed Nixon and Kissinger now reported that India was almost ready to end its war. According to the CIA’s mole in Delhi, India would accept a cease-fire once an Awami League government was set up in Dacca. Although hawkish military leaders and Jagjivan Ram, the defense minister, reportedly wanted to fight on in southern Azad Kashmir and to smash Pakistan’s war machine, Gandhi had had enough. She wanted to avoid more trouble with the United States and China. Under Soviet pressure to accept a cease-fire as soon as Bangladesh was a fact, India, according to the CIA, was set to “assure the Soviet Union that India has no plans to annex any West Pakistani territory.” Once the war ended, according to this CIA mole, Gandhi was confident that Yahya’s military regime would fall and there would be new pressure for autonomy in Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and other restive areas in West Pakistan. India would dominate South Asia.
General Jacob remembers, “by thirteenth December we depleted strength on the outskirts on Dacca.” He and the other generals were closely watching the United Nations, as the Soviet Union kept on vetoing cease-fire resolutions. Then, he recalls, “The Russians say, no more veto. Panic— sorry, ‘concern’— in Delhi.” That night he prayed. He says that God evidently answered, as he received information that General Niazi, commander of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, would be going to a meeting at Government House in Dacca. He bombed the gathering. This terrified the remainder of the local Pakistani government. That evening, Jacob says, Niazi went to Herbert Spivack, the US consul general, with a cease-fire proposal.
General Manekshaw, the Indian chief of army staff, sent a third note asking Pakistan to surrender. Once again, he offered protection under the Geneva Conventions to all surrendering soldiers and para-militaries, and promised to protect ethnic minorities—meaning the Urdu-speaking Biharis, who were terrified of the Mukti Bahini’s vengeance. With the Bangladeshi forces under his command, he promised that Bangladesh’s government had also ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions. “For the sake of your own men I hope you will not compel me to reduce your garrison with the use of force.”
General Niazi urged the United States to help get a cease-fire to spare his troops and avoid street fighting in the city. Yahya accused India of inflicting bloodshed on his military and civilian forces of “holocaust” proportions.
In Delhi, Haksar warned India’s defense ministry that the dominant interest of the United States and China was preserving West Pakistan. He thus cautioned against any statements or military actions that indicated that India had serious intent to sever parts of West Pakistan or seize Azad Kashmir. To Haksar’s annoyance, India’s information ministry had been hard at work generating exactly that kind of impression, by preparing propaganda trying to whip up Sindhi irredentism in West Pakistan. He ordered a stop to that, and demanded the withdrawal of all propaganda “fanning Sindhi, Baluchi or Pathan irredentism.”
Even with the war lost, the CIA reported that pro-Pakistan forces killed “a large number of Bangla Desh intellectuals” soon before the fall of Dacca. According to the State Department, as many as two hundred people were killed. Later, after an Indian general visited the massacre site, he could not eat. Arundhati Ghose, the Indian diplomat, remembers telling him that he was a soldier, accustomed to seeing dead bodies. Yes, the general replied, but he had found the hand of a woman, with her nails painted. He said, “I can’t get that out of my head.”
Yahya begged Nixon to send the seventh fleet to Pakistan’s shores to defend Karachi. But Nixon, despite often sounding like he was on the verge of war with India, had no intentions of any naval combat. The USS Enterprise carrier group was an atomic-powered bluff, meant to spook the Indians and increase Soviet pressure on India for a cease-fire, but nothing more. Kissinger privately said that “we don’t want to get militarily involved and there isn’t a chance. Can you imagine the President even listening to that for three seconds.” Kissinger worried that the American public would not be able to stomach the mere sight of a US aircraft carrier threatening India— let alone actually opening fire. As for Nixon, he left no doubt: “we’re not going to intervene.”
Samuel Hoskinson, the White House staffer, who remains convinced that India meant to destroy Pakistan, applauds the deployment of the carrier group. “To my way of thinking, it was a brilliant strategic move,” he says. “I know Nixon and Kissinger have been faulted for that. I think more than anything else it stopped Madame Gandhi in her tracks.”
But India’s military commanders seem to have doubted the Americans would fight them. “I didn’t think the Americans were so foolhardy,” recalls General Jacob. “We had land-based aircraft.” Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, the director of naval intelligence, says he briefed Indira Gandhi about the composition of the task force, and explained it was possible that it could strike India. But with Vietnam going on, he told the prime minister, he did not believe the Americans would attack. He also noted that the Seventh Fleet could try to break India’s blockade of Pakistan by coming between India’s navy and the land; Vice Admiral N. Krishnan, leading India’s eastern fleet, feared that the Enterprise task force would do this at Chittagong. Krishnan even considered having an Indian submarine torpedo the US fleet to slow it down. But he told his underlings in the Maritime Operations Room that any direct US attack could cause “the end of the world,” or embroil the Americans in “a Vietnam to end all Vietnams.” In defiance of the Enterprise, India intensified its naval assault on Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar. India’s political leaders claim to have been equally skeptical that the Enterprise would actually fight them. Thanks to Soviet surveillance, they knew that Dacca was going to fall before the Seventh Fleet could do anything about it. They were well aware how impossible it would be for Nixon, mired in Vietnam, to send US troops into a new Asian war against India. Gandhi later said, “Naturally, if the Americans had fired a shot, if the Seventh Fleet had done something more than sit there in the Bay of Bengal . . . yes, the Third World War would have exploded. But, in all honesty, not even that fear occurred to me.”
Still, the Indian government asked the Soviet Union to warn against the dire consequences of this threatening movement of the US Navy. At the same time, Haksar ordered D. P. Dhar, the Indian envoy sent to Moscow, to personally reassure Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin that India had no territorial ambitions in either Bangladesh or West Pakistan, and that India’s western position was entirely defensive. The Soviet ambassador assured India that a Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean would not allow the United States to intervene.
On December 15, India’s R&AW spy agency warned that US warships were moving past Thailand, heading toward India. That day, the Enterprise carrier group entered the Bay of Bengal.
This caused some panic among Indian officials, according to General Manekshaw, although Gandhi and Haksar publicly affected nonchalance. Manekshaw claimed that in a cabinet meeting Swaran Singh and other ministers urged an immediate cease-fire to avoid facing US troops or even nuclear weapons. There were some overheated rumors of a shooting war between Americans and Indians. India was tipped off, seemingly by an American source, that the Seventh Fleet might move into action, maybe even landing troops. One senior Indian official in Washington claimed that the task force was ready to establish a beachhead, with three Marine battalions at the ready, and that bombers on the Enterprise had been authorized by Nixon to bomb Indian army communications if necessary. When India’s ambassador in Washington asked a senior State Department official about the prospect of US troops establishing a beachhead, he got a less than categorical denial, although the official said he had not heard of the possibility. The Indian ambassador fed the story to the press, lashing out against the Nixon administration on American television. 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.”
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.
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 US 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.
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?”
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.”
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.”
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 US 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 US 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.
Amid roiling rumors of possible US direct intervention to help Pakistan, Keating cabled that if people in Washington were seriously considering doing so, or directly providing US 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 US policy.
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 US 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.
Niazi’s cease-fire letter was delivered to Haksar by Galen Stone, a US 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 US 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.
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 US 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 US 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.”
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.”
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 ********.”
“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.”
SURRENDER
An exhausted group of Mukti Bahini fighters were ecstatic— and relieved— to hear that Pakistan was about to yield. They 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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pm on December 17.
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.
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.
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, HR Haldeman noted, was “practically ecstatic” at the imminent cease-fire. Nixon was not. “Dacca has surrendered,” the president told Kissinger glumly.
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.”
The president took some comfort in the fact, relayed by Kissinger, that Jordan had illegally sent warplanes to help Pakistan. But Nixon complained that “when the chips are down India has shown that it is a Russian satellite.” He fumed, “I know the bigger game is the Russian game, but the Indians also have played us for squares here. They have done this once and when this is over they will come to us ask us to forgive and forget. This we must not do.”
Soon after, Kissinger telephoned the president to report the cease-fire in the west. Kissinger saw this as an enduring achievement for himself. Jolly once again, he tried to cheer Nixon up: “Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved W[est] Pakistan.” Nixon brooded, not wanting Indira Gandhi to gloat in victory. “She shouldn’t get credit for starting the fire and then calling in the fire department,” he said. “It’s back to Hitler.”
Kissinger savored a victory lap. He separately told Haldeman and George Shultz, “We have turned disaster into defeat,” and thanked John Connally, the anti-Indian Treasury secretary, for giving him “the moral courage to do it.” He spent the rest of the day calling reporters to claim credit and working the phones to try to cobble together a feeble United Nations Security Council resolution. About the Indians, he told the British ambassador, “I don’t know how you tolerated them for those years.” Kissinger joked to Bush, “don’t screw it up the way you usually do.”
“I want a transfer when this is over,” replied George Bush. “I want a nice quiet place like Rwanda.”
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ ... ing-at-war
If they (government) want to end this war, they will have to announce a ceasefire,” Shahid said. The Taliban on Sunday announced preconditions for talks on ending the insurgency that has killed thousands of people, demanding that troops withdraw from tribal areas and that prisoners are freed.
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