Nobody in the White House could claim not to know the horrors that had been visited upon East Pakistan. In a major report in September, the CIA guessed that “some 200,000 or more residents of the area have been killed,” and noted that East Pakistan had experienced “one of the largest and most rapid population transfers in modern times.”
The CIA had a blunt explanation for this “incredible” migration: “many if not most of the Hindus fled for fear of their lives.” Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, Yahya’s military governor, evidently thought he could quickly frighten the Bengalis into submission. The Pakistan army, the CIA noted, seemed to have singled out Hindus as targets.
Although the CIA refrained from crying genocide, it did insist this was an ethnic campaign, with 80 percent—or possibly even 90 percent— of the refugees being Hindus. So far, out of eight million refugees, over six million were Hindus, and many more might follow—ending perhaps only when East Pakistan had no more Hindus left. Yahya’s recent efforts to curtail such attacks had been of little use in a “virulent atmosphere” where loyalists got used to persecuting the Hindu minority.1
Even with Archer Blood gone, the Dacca consulate warned of persecution of Hindus in the Mymensingh area, and fresh waves of Hindus fleeing to India. The locals said there was widespread rape. This was confirmed by Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who, interviewing refugees in India, found that almost all of them were Hindus, who said that they were still specifically hounded by the Pakistan army. Schanberg remembers, “There were stories about rape by the Pakistani army, and those were true. Story after story. It was quite clear this had really happened.”2
As a respected U.S. development official reported, the Pakistan army, driven by anti-Hindu ideology, was clearing East Pakistan of Hindus. Even Major General Rao Farman Ali Khan, the senior military man ruling East Pakistan, agreed with this U.S. official’s assessment that some 80 percent of the Hindus had left East Pakistan. Off the record, the Pakistani general admitted there were roughly six million refugees, and that another million and a half would eventually flee into India—roughly the number of Hindus still remaining in East Pakistan.3
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger stood firm behind Pakistan, with China on their minds. “I think we ought to toughen a little bit on Peking,” Kissinger said. “If we screw Pakistan too outrageously, that really—and if a war starts there, that really could blow up everything.” Nixon feared what a war might do for his upcoming visit to China.4
Kissinger warned the president that if China decided that the United States was trying to “split off part of Pakistan in the name of self-determination,” that would be an unacceptable precedent “for Taiwan and Tibet in Peking’s eyes.” Nixon now wanted “a big, big, big package” of humanitarian aid to Pakistan, which, Kissinger thought, would impress China. Despite the mounting pressure from Congress, Nixon wanted China to know that he was still “standing firm for Pakistan.”5
Thus on August 16, Kissinger went to the Chinese embassy in Paris to hammer out details for Nixon’s upcoming trip to Beijing. Wanting to showcase how resolute the United States was as an ally of Pakistan, he instead found himself forced to explain the unwelcome restraints imposed on him by the U.S. democratic system, especially the press and Congress. “Indian propaganda is extremely skillful and the opposition party in the United States, which controls Congress, is completely on the side of Indian propaganda,” Kissinger said. “They make it next to impossible to continue military supplies to Pakistan.” He asked China, which was unconstrained by the hassles of a democratic legislature, to pick up the slack. Still, he said, the United States would not let India “humiliate Pakistan.” While asking China to encourage Pakistan to defuse India’s pretext for war by getting refugees home, Kissinger pledged to make no public statements that could embarrass Pakistan’s government.6
Using a line from Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger once wrote to Nixon, “Above all we must avoid being forced to choose between our policy toward the government of 700 million Chinese and over 600 million Indians and Bengalis.” But the White House had clearly chosen. Later, when facing criticism that they were sacrificing India for China, Nixon was incredulous. “Sacrificing India? For Christ sakes.” Kissinger said, “Mr. President, there’s nothing to sacrifice in India to begin with.” “Of course!” agreed Nixon.7
Nixon and Kissinger asked not just what they could do for China, but what China could do for them. Their new relationship with the People’s Republic brought radical possibilities. They could, they realized, use China to scare India out of attacking Pakistan—or, if war came, they could ask China to move its troops to the Indian border, threatening to embroil India in a war against two enemies at once.
This was a daring realpolitik gambit that Metternich himself might have admired. There was an undeniable strategic logic to it—despite the sheer audacity of one democracy trying to pit the People’s Liberation Army against another democracy. This would be a complete turnaround from the U.S. position the last time that China went to war against India, back in 1962, when the United States had helped India defend itself.8
It would also be a total reversal of Kissinger’s own solemn promises to India, made during his Delhi trip in July. Indian officials—whose direst fear was a Chinese attack—had been hugely relieved to get Kissinger’s pledges that the United States would back India against any Chinese saber rattling. In Delhi, Kissinger had personally made such assurances to Indira Gandhi herself, as well as to P. N. Haksar, the foreign minister, and the defense minister.9
Kissinger gradually warmed up to the idea of unleashing China against India. Impressed by his firsthand experience of Zhou Enlai’s hatred for India, he believed that the only way that India could lose a war with Pakistan would be if China joined in. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later suggested that India might have to divert five or six divisions to the Chinese border, offsetting India’s massive advantage over Pakistan in ground troops. At the White House, Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, planted the seed in Nixon’s mind: “Despite all their brave talk about being able to defend against the Chinese and fighting on two fronts against Pakistan, the Indians are still haunted by the 1962 humiliation.”10
In August, Kissinger warily told Nixon, “At this stage in our China exercise we would be presented with excruciating choices if the Chinese were to attack India following an outbreak of Indo-Pakistani hostilities.” Kissinger’s aides, without his unfettered ingenuity, were worrying about preventing China from attacking India, rather than encouraging it. The State Department, which wanted to offer military help to India if China invaded, was even more in the dark. So was the American public, almost half of whom would have wanted to send supplies or U.S. troops to help India if it was attacked by communists.11
India’s officials had more paranoid imaginations. They wondered what mysterious understandings Kissinger might have secured behind closed doors in Beijing. Back in January, the R&AW had secretly concluded that China was unlikely to fight for Pakistan, but expected that if India and Pakistan went to war, China would “adopt a threatening posture on the Sino-Indian border and even stage some border incidents and clashes.” This, the R&AW warned, could pin down Indian troops, keeping them away from fighting against Pakistan. In June, Swaran Singh, the foreign minister, had feared that China might fight India directly or “keep us busy on the borders and tie up our troops.”12
So as war loomed, and China spat rhetorical venom at India, India’s ambassador raced to Kissinger to find out where he really stood. Kissinger, retreating somewhat from his Delhi promises, now said that if it was not clear who started a war, with Indian irregulars in East Pakistan and Pakistani troops in Kashmir, the United States would not help India against China. But Kissinger declared that, as the ambassador wrote, “in a 1962 type of situation”—meaning a Chinese invasion of India—the United States would give “all-out help to India against China.” If Pakistan attacked India, with China supporting Pakistan, then the United States “would not hesitate to help us with arms, although not with men.”13
Even after this latest, more conditional pledge, the prospect churned in Kissinger’s prodigious mind. By September, he decided that China’s enduring animosity toward India would make a useful tool of U.S. diplomacy. Despite his own promises to India, he concluded that the United States should avoid making any pledges to defend India against a Chinese attack, since it might encourage India. A few days later, he told the Indian ambassador that if India attacked Pakistan, and that sparked a Chinese invasion of India, it would be hard for the United States to help out.14
Kissinger had much more in mind than that. If China provoked border incidents, he directed the White House and State Department staffs to leave India to its fate. In the Oval Office, Kissinger told Nixon that “if we could shock the Indians we would—because our judgment is that Chinese almost certainly come in at the Indians.” The president immediately took to the idea. Nixon told Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia that China could not stand by if Pakistan was attacked.15
India put its trust in two frozen friends: the Soviet Union and the coming winter. First, China might be scared off by India’s treaty with the Soviet Union. Even with war on the horizon, the Indian embassy in Beijing reported a surprising lack of public Chinese support for Pakistan. Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, remembers India’s friendship treaty with the Soviet Union as crucial, allowing his troops to operate.16
Second, ever since Indira Gandhi had first asked her generals for war plans, they had told her to wait for winter, when the Chinese army would be blocked off from an attack by the coming of the winter snows in the Himalayas. General Jacob says that his superior, General Sam Manekshaw, the chief of the army staff, was obsessed with Chinese intervention. Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, the director of India’s naval intelligence, remembers, “That’s why Manekshaw said, let’s choose the season—where there’s no rain, and there’s snow on the Himalayas.”17
In late October, Kissinger made a second China trip, hammering out the details for Nixon’s own upcoming visit to Beijing. The city was in the grip of one of the worst leadership crises in the People’s Republic’s history. China was under martial law, with armed troops on the streets and banners at the airport denouncing “running dog” capitalists. But meeting with Zhou Enlai in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, communists and capitalists at least found common ground in excoriating India.18
“We from the East and you from the West have the most to do with East Pakistan,” said Zhou. Kissinger reminded the Chinese premier that the United States, despite pro-Indian sentiment in Congress, was the only major Western country that had not condemned Pakistan.
Kissinger said that he had read a book that Zhou had recommended, which blamed the 1962 China-India war on Indian provocations and aggression, and said that the White House believed that now “the Indians are applying essentially the same tactics.” “That is their tradition,” said Zhou. India, said Kissinger, saw the crisis as a chance to smash Pakistan once and for all. Zhou agreed: India “doesn’t believe in the existence of Pakistan.” Kissinger said, “We believe she will try to destroy East Pakistan.” He expected India either to attack in the next month or so, or to provoke Pakistan into attacking. Kissinger reassured Zhou that the United States was completely opposed to Indian military strikes against Pakistan.19
After returning to Washington, Kissinger privately confided that he preferred working with China to India. Fresh back from the violent convulsions of China in the Cultural Revolution, he still showed no fondness for Indian democracy. Nixon said, “Recently with the Chinese—goddamn it, they talk directly.” Kissinger heartily agreed: “Oh, the Chinese are a joy to deal with compared to the Indians.”20
In Washington, the first brisk nights of autumn brought more than a seasonal chill. Kissinger’s staff at the White House—using the exact same reasoning as the generals in India—warned that mid-October or November could bring an Indian attack: “The monsoon will be over, and weather in the Himalayas will begin to close in for the winter and make Chinese operations more difficult.”21
The Indian and Pakistani militaries were bracing for confrontation, with the Indian army in intensive training for war, while the Mukti Bahini intensified its guerrilla campaign. The rebels, more aggressive and popular than ever, fought with automatic weapons and mortars, and had grown skilled at blowing up bridges and mining ships. There was so much Pakistani artillery fire at the rebels that the Indian army was, as General Jacob later wrote, “officially authorized to occupy areas across the border to prevent Pakistani shelling.” The Bangladeshi exile government claimed it now had some seventy thousand trained guerrillas, and privately admitted that the Indian army was giving indispensable artillery cover for the rebels.22
Pakistan complained of frequent shellings from Indian troops along the border, in defense of the Bengali insurgents. The Indian mission in Islamabad reported anxiously that “a ‘Crush India’ campaign was whipped up all over West Pakistan to produce an artificial war hysteria.” Yahya, indignant at India’s “open hostility and her unabashed support and aid to the miscreants”—his word of choice still for rebellious Bengalis—asked Nixon to dissuade India.23
Although the United States warned both sides not to attack, Kissinger and his team gloomily wondered not whether war would break out, but how. The CIA director warned that Pakistan might launch a preemptive attack on India in a few weeks.24
If war came, the Nixon administration knew that Pakistan would be trounced. The U.S. military and the State Department’s intelligence bureau agreed that Pakistan’s defeat was all but inevitable. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the crucial factor in a war would be India’s four-to-one advantage in ground forces. He expected a short war, before both sides began running out of supplies in four to six weeks: “India will prevail because of superior numbers.”25
There was one remaining big diplomatic chance for the United States to try to prevent a war: Indira Gandhi’s upcoming trip to Washington. Kissinger’s aides told him that this summit, which had been put on Nixon’s schedule several months earlier, would be their last opportunity to restrain India.26
Nixon dreaded her visit. When Kissinger reminded him that it was on the calendar, he exhaled softly, “Jesus Christ.” The president suspiciously wanted to be sure that “she doesn’t come in here and, frankly, pull our legs.”27
Kissinger stoked Nixon’s wrath. Declaring that the Indians were plotting to undo Partition by destroying Pakistan, he pushed a stereotype of wily Indian brains: “In their convoluted minds they really believe they can give Pakistan a powerful blow from which it won’t recover and solve everything at once.” Nixon told the British foreign secretary, “All that I can say is that I think the British got out too soon.”28
In the Oval Office, Nixon angrily told Kissinger, “Well, you let the Indians know, they get their aid stopped when a war starts. They aren’t going to get any aid.” This was a tough threat. The United States gave substantial foreign aid to India—about $220 million annually, plus another $220 million worth of development loans and $65 million in food aid. The State Department recoiled at slashing off India’s aid, noting the “hyper-sensitivity” of Indians to a “neo-colonialist attitude,” and warning of a “new level of bitterness” that would long poison U.S.-Indian relations. Still, Kissinger told a Situation Room meeting, Nixon was deadly serious about cutting off aid if India went to war: “The Indians must understand that we mean it. The President has said so. In fact, he tells me every day.”29
India needed to firm up Soviet support for a likely war. So Indira Gandhi flew to Moscow, arriving in the coolness of late September. She was treated to all the baleful tributes that the Soviet state could muster: a military honor guard at the airport, crowds unspontaneously lining the wide avenues, forced accolades in the captive press, lodgings at the Kremlin. She met with Soviet political and military leaders, driving home to them the social pressures that the refugees were causing in India. Afterward, the Soviets unleashed at full blast an official press campaign against Pakistan, led by Pravda, demanding Mujib’s release and an end to the killings. Still, Gandhi could not quite extract a Soviet endorsement for a war. The Soviets emphasized the benefits of peace, arguing that war would only make India’s burdens worse. (While Gandhi was finishing up her rounds at the Kremlin, Nixon and Kissinger were in the Oval Office working over Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, who said that the Soviet Union had urged her not to pick a fight and that she had assured them should would not.) The best that Gandhi could get was a firm statement from Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, calling for a swift political settlement in Pakistan and for the safe return of the refugees.30
Next, on October 24, Gandhi and Haksar, her top adviser, left India for a three-week Western tour, including stops in Britain, France, and West Germany, with the most important encounter scheduled for Washington on November 4 and 5. As on her prior trips, Gandhi got rhetorical commiseration and some humanitarian aid, but not much more. “Mrs. Gandhi went around the world saying this is a genocide,” says Admiral Mihir Roy of the Indian navy. “Nobody listened to her.” Austria was promoting Kurt Waldheim, a diplomat hiding his Nazi past, to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations, and did not want to alienate the Muslim bloc. Britain still wanted to keep Pakistan united. Gandhi fared better in France, where President Georges Pompidou’s government urged the release of Mujib, the Awami League leader, and saw the independence of Bangladesh as inevitable. (André Malraux, the French novelist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, now offered to take up arms again with the Mukti Bahini—which might have been somewhat more intimidating to Yahya if he had not been seventy years old.) In West Germany, Chancellor Willy Brandt proved refreshingly sympathetic. But none of this would be enough to prevent war.31
In London, exhausted, Gandhi seemed close to breaking under the strain. She once again went clangingly heavy on the Nazi analogies, saying that she could no more meet with Yahya before the woes of the Bengali refugees were addressed than Winston Churchill could have met with Adolf Hitler before the end of World War II. When a British reporter challenged her for supporting the Mukti Bahini, for a moment she seemed almost overcome with anger and grief, blinking rapidly and swallowing hard, but not faltering. Did quieting the situation “mean we support the genocide?” she shot back with steely fury. “When Hitler was on the rampage, why didn’t you tell us keep quiet and let’s have peace in Germany and let the Jews die, or let Belgium die, let France die?”32
As Gandhi’s visit approached, Nixon and Kissinger tried to explain what they had done to forestall war. It was not a long list, but there were some achievements on it. In the late summer and fall, the Nixon administration had belatedly begun to urge Yahya to take some actions to undermine India’s reasons for war. Even the most bullish U.S. officials admitted that these steps only made a grim situation somewhat less grim, while Archer Blood later said they were “all too little and too late, as well as completely out of touch with reality in East Pakistan.” All of them were aimed at mitigating the consequences of worse decisions already made by Pakistani leaders.33
One success came when Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, urged Yahya to get rid of the reviled Lieutenant General Tikka Khan and appoint a civilian Bengali as governor of East Pakistan. At first Yahya refused, but later he installed a docile Bengali loyalist as governor and replaced the hated Tikka Khan with the somewhat less hated Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, the army commander in East Pakistan. For once, even the Indian government was briefly impressed, but Haksar soon realized that the new regime—still under the military’s thumb—was little different from before. The ostensible civilian administration was, a senior Pakistani official later admitted, “merely to hoodwink public opinion at home and abroad.… Real decisions in all important matters still lay with the army.” As the Pakistan army’s Major General Rao Farman Ali—who worked alongside General Niazi—testified later, “The army virtually continued to control civil administration.”34
Also, the Nixon administration privately rebuked Yahya when he launched a secret treason trial for Mujib, which seemed likely to end with his execution—and an explosion of Indian outrage, possibly even war. This trial iced any hopes of political reconciliation with the Bengali nationalists. Even Nixon was shocked. “Why did he do that?” he asked Kissinger in amazement. “He’s a big, honorable, stupid man,” said Kissinger. “For Christ sakes,” Nixon said. “He can’t do that.” The next day, Kissinger was more sanguine: “If he won’t shoot him, I think we can survive it.” Nixon asked, “Did you tell him not to shoot him?” Kissinger replied, “I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people”—at this point the tape is bleeped out on purported grounds of national security.35
So the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan told Yahya “as a friend” that while this was “completely an internal affair,” executing Mujib could “definitely and decisively affect virtually all assistance, humanitarian and economic.” Yahya, while still putting Mujib on trial and leaving the political process in tatters, replied that “you can stop worrying because I am not going to execute the man even though he is a traitor.”36
Perhaps the most important U.S. pressure came in response to reports that East Pakistan, ravaged by civil war, was facing a risk of famine. The Dacca consulate warned of a latter-day version of the notorious 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died, while the CIA director said, “This will make Biafra look like a cocktail party.” Kissinger worried that famine would produce a new wave of refugees, which could be the last straw for India. Thus he explained to Nixon that by preventing a famine they would deprive India of an excuse to attack Pakistan.37
This time, the United States acted. “I’m talking about Pakistan,” Kissinger told a Situation Room meeting. “We’re not so eager to do things for India. We want to make a demonstrable case to prevent famine in East Pakistan.” Nixon wrote to Yahya, asking him to make a big effort to avert famine, thereby undercutting India’s “pretext for interference.”38
But the White House staff, the State Department, and the U.S. embassy in Islamabad all warned that Pakistan’s government—indifferent, incompetent, and corrupt—was botching the relief efforts. The Nixon administration urged Yahya to get his act together, and donated almost $10 million in food and $3 million in vessels for inland transportation, helping United Nations relief workers. The United States single-handedly spent slightly more for Pakistan than the rest of the world. The distribution of food, Kissinger told Nixon, “has been handicapped again by the goddamned Indians because most of the roads run parallel to the frontier and very close to the frontier, and they’re blowing them up every night.” Nixon said, “Let’s stay out of this damn thing and just help refugees, stay out of the fight between the two.”39
The threat of famine receded. The food situation there was still dire, and would require more aid, but should hold until the spring. The United States and the United Nations could claim true lifesaving credit, although there was another, uglier factor in this success, as the White House staff noted: nine million people had already fled from East Pakistan into India. Still, Kissinger correctly told Nixon, this was a big U.S. contribution to regional peace, preventing “many millions more” Bengali refugees from rushing into India. “It is hard to prove, but the situation could have been a great deal worse by now.”40
But while alleviating some symptoms, belated U.S. pressure did little to end the fundamental crisis. These were all partial retreats from calamitous decisions by Yahya: while good not to have a famine, it would have been better still not to have created the conditions for one; while preferable to be rid of Tikka Khan, better not to have installed him to terrorize the Bengalis in the first place; and while it was a relief that Mujib was not executed, the winner of a democratic election might have been at a negotiating table rather than in a secret military jail. These were all faint hints of a better future that could have been—without civil war, fierce military rule, or the quashing of democratic leadership.41
The inadequacy was perfectly plain from Washington. Both Nixon and Kissinger were informed that huge numbers of refugees were still fleeing, and almost none returning. As U.S. officials in Dacca explained, the Pakistani government’s efforts to win over the Bengalis had failed. Some middle-class Bengalis in the cities wanted peace no matter what, but younger Bengalis, especially in the countryside, were fixed in their bitterness against Pakistan’s government and army. This loathing was intensified by persistent reports of atrocities, convincing even many conservative Bengalis that the Pakistan army had to be forced out.42
A top U.S. development official, after visiting Pakistan, wrote, “Elections, political accommodation, welcoming the return of all refugees, amnesty—these are fine policy pronouncements, but their implementation is in the hands of the Army commanders who govern the Eastern Province, and these Army commanders do not as yet appear subject to foreign influences.” When Yahya made showy policy statements, it was an illusory “public relations diplomacy.”43
Nixon did write to Yahya that it would be “helpful” for him to enlist the elected Bengali politicians for national reconciliation, and later added that he was sure that Yahya wanted “maximum” participation of the Bengalis’ elected representatives. Yahya, having done his worst, had seemingly moved into the mopping-up phase of the crackdown, and professed a greater willingness to consider political accommodation. But Kissinger’s own aides called Yahya’s political efforts inadequate and “vacuous.” Yahya moved frustratingly slowly in planning for a new East Pakistan government, while refusing to lift the ban on the Awami League or to make serious efforts to deal with the victors of the election. The White House staff noted that “the army will try 45% of its elected representatives.” Kissinger still hoped to hold Pakistan together with autonomy for East Pakistan, but without a deal with legitimate Bengali leaders, there was little chance of any lasting peace there.44
Yahya said that he would welcome a secret meeting between Pakistani officials and Bengali politicians who accepted a unified Pakistan. The White House searched in vain for influential Awami League representatives who would settle for less than independence, but went no further than that, not wanting to mediate. The U.S. consul in Calcutta was authorized to tell the Bangladeshi exile government based there that Yahya was interested in talks. But the Bangladeshi leadership insisted that only Mujib could speak for them, and Kissinger complained that they wanted unconditional independence, which put an end to any possible negotiations. As for Yahya freeing Mujib and negotiating with him, Kissinger said, “I think that’s inconceivable! Unless Yahya’s personality has changed 100% since I saw him in July.”45
With no political deal in sight, U.S. diplomats in Pakistan painted a bleak picture. Few Bengalis believed in the declared amnesty, as arrests continued and few prominent people were released. The civilian governor seemed obviously a cat’s paw of the martial law authorities. Whatever good had been done by removing Tikka Khan, argued the second-ranked U.S. official in Islamabad, it was undercut by continuing army reprisals against the population. As the CIA noted, martial law continued: “Any civilian government established in East Pakistan under the army’s aegis is likely to be more shadow than substance.”46
Yahya’s steps were welcome, but from the viewpoint of skeptical U.S. officials in Washington and Delhi, the White House’s successes gave a small but tantalizing preview of what might have been possible if the United States had tried harder to use its leverage in a serious way from the start. From India’s perspective, Yahya was trimming his sails out of fear of an Indian attack. As much as Nixon and Kissinger would later brag about these achievements, at this late date they unfortunately mattered little.
Trapped in a desk job in the State Department bureaucracy, Archer Blood was doing his best to endure his ouster from the Dacca consulate with a stiff upper lip. While he was usually in no position to remind his bosses that he had told them so, the ex-consul’s prognostications in his cables were being confirmed by events. He once managed to get a half-hour meeting with the second-ranked official at the State Department, and declared confidently that the Bengalis, helped by Indian intervention, would eventually win their struggle. Their escalating guerrilla campaign, he said, was bleeding Pakistan white. The independent Bangladesh that he had predicted was well on the way to becoming a reality. “My husband had a different, long view,” remembers Meg Blood. “He could see it was not going to simmer down or go away.”47
As Indira Gandhi’s trip to Washington approached, Nixon’s policy seemed to the Indians to be almost completely one-sided. As an Indian diplomat scornfully noted, the Nixon administration’s real policy was to treat the issue as an internal matter for Pakistan, give as much diplomatic and economic aid to Pakistan as possible, try to keep up arms supplies to Pakistan, and not condemn Pakistan’s atrocities. This was leavened only by relief assistance to India for the refugees, which had been “played up out of all proportion to its quantum.”48
India, dismissing Yahya as “looking for quislings,” argued that Pakistan had to negotiate with Mujib himself. Haksar did not see how there could be any viable political deal without the overwhelming democratic choice of the Bengalis. When William Rogers, the secretary of state, said that the Americans could not force Yahya to talk to a man he saw as a traitor, Haksar retorted, “Churchill said worse things about Gandhi.” Haksar told Rogers, “The British talked to Gandhi and Nehru, … but Yahya Khan is not willing to talk with Mujibur Rahman.”49
Nor was India especially impressed with U.S. aid to the refugees—even before the Nixon administration started threatening to cut off foreign aid, a blow that would more than cancel out prior U.S. donations for the refugees. India saw the refugees as a symptom, not the disease, and anyway thought that the symptom was going almost entirely untreated.
It was true that, as the White House privately reckoned, the United States had provided a substantial $89 million, and other foreign governments had scraped together $95 million. While the Nixon administration had asked for more funding—$150 million more for India, as well as $100 million more for Pakistan—the foreign aid bill had stalled in Congress. Even if the White House’s motive was to deny Gandhi a pretext for war, this U.S. assistance unquestionably saved many lives, and Nixon and Kissinger deserve real credit for that.
But this U.S. aid was overshadowed by something approaching ten million refugees. India was buckling under that burden, which cost far more than anything on offer from the United States, or any outside power. By a White House account, the expense of the refugees was by now roughly between $700 million and $1 billion annually—at least a sixth of India’s normal spending on development for its own people. To date, the United States had met perhaps a tenth of the cost of looking after the refugees for this year only, and the rest of the world had covered another tenth—leaving roughly 80 percent of the expense on poverty-stricken India. And this was at the peak of international concern for the refugees, before the world’s attention inevitably moved on to other matters, leaving India to cope alone.50
Before Gandhi’s arrival, the Nixon administration made one last push to get concessions out of Yahya—something that could put Gandhi on the spot when she showed up in Washington. Nixon wrote to Kissinger that there should be no pressure on Pakistan, only on India: “The main justification for some action on the part of Yahya, and I believe there is some, is that then we will be able to hit Madame Gandhi very hard when she comes here for her visit.”51
In mid-October, India’s complaints had reached a new crescendo after Pakistan started “a massive build-up” of troops, armor, and artillery on the western front, including Kashmir. India responded with its own deployment, leaving the two armies facing off. So the United States proposed a mutual withdrawal of Indian and Pakistani troops from the borders. Yahya gamely said he was willing to pull his troops and armor back. (The State Department noted with some jaundice that it was he who had first moved his troops to confront India.) As the summit approached, Yahya said that he would move first in withdrawing some of his troops, although wanting a promise from Gandhi to Nixon that she would soon follow suit.52
Gandhi shrugged this off. Indian officials protested that Yahya was trying to seem reasonable by undoing his own deployment, while Gandhi dismissed Yahya’s gesture as meaningless, complaining that he would withdraw on the West Pakistan front but not in East Pakistan, where the real danger was. More to the point, India knew just as well as the Americans how the military balance stood, and was not about to let Yahya off the hook. So India took a hard line, backing the Mukti Bahini and keeping the pressure building on Pakistan.53
Before Washington, Indira Gandhi stopped in New York, where she dazzled Hannah Arendt, herself a longtime critic of British rule in India. The political theorist breathlessly described Gandhi as “very good-looking, almost beautiful, very charming, flirting with every man in the room, without chichi, and entirely calm—she must have known already that she was going to make war and probably enjoyed it even in a perverse way. The toughness of these women once they have got what they wanted is really something!”54
The Indian government was expecting a frosty summit. Kissinger warned Nixon that Gandhi was trying to set the president up, to claim that the Americans had driven her to war. The United States would help the refugees, Kissinger said, but would not help India wreck Pakistan’s political structure.55
“You know they are the aggressors,” Kissinger told the president, about the Indians. Briefing Nixon for Gandhi’s arrival, he assured him that Pakistan’s record was impressive. “I have a list for you of what the Pakistanis have done,” he said, “and really short of surrendering they’ve done everything.” (When he said that the United States had “stopped the military pipeline” to Pakistan, it came as a surprise to Nixon: “We have?”) Kissinger said that Yahya was willing to grant autonomy for East Pakistan, but blasted India for insisting that Yahya negotiate that with Mujib: “no West Pakistan leader can do that without overthrowing themselves.” By demanding Mujib’s participation, Kissinger said, the Indians were “in effect asking for a total surrender of the Pakistanis and that would mean to me that they want the war.”56
On November 4, Indira Gandhi arrived at the White House. From the welcoming ceremony onward, it was a disaster. Despite Kissinger’s reminders to Nixon to be on his best behavior in public, the two leaders, standing at attention on the South Lawn on a bright, crisp morning, were a portrait in sullen antipathy. They were visibly uncomfortable to be physically so close together. Gandhi, wrapped in a light orange overcoat against the autumn chill, glowered fixedly out from underneath her towering white-streaked coif. Nixon, his belly straining against his dark suit jacket, sported a particularly heartfelt version of his trademark scowl.57
Kissinger later wrote that Gandhi’s “dislike of Nixon” showed in her “icy formality.” Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, was struck by the tension and mutual loathing. “This was now between the heads of state who are deeply suspicious of each other,” he remembers. “He was the antithesis for her.” He says, “Shit, she thought this was the moment she was going to make history, destroy Pakistan entirely.”58
The state dinner went off miserably. There was an attempt at good cheer: a performance by the New York City Ballet; Pat Nixon draped in a floor-length gown of blinding 1970s cotton-candy pink; Gandhi only slightly less loud in a crimson sari with gold trim; and Nixon rather dashing in a tuxedo. But the president never enjoyed these functions at the best of times. He privately complained about the lack of patriotic spirit in the U.S. officials, with “only the shit-asses in the government” left unmoved by things like the Marine Corps Band. “The Congress, they sit there like a bunch of blasé bastards. They really do. The State Department people are horrible.” His main consolation was giving a genuinely delightful toast to Gandhi—composed, he said, without using anything prepared by the State Department, and delivered without notes, to dazzle the press corps with his grasp of foreign policy. He boasted, “I can do toasts and arrival statements better than anybody in the world. I have traveled all over the world.”59
But Gandhi and Haksar were left cold. The Indians were amazed that the president avoided mentioning the Bengali crisis in his toast. In hers, Gandhi made no attempt to charm. “Can you imagine the entire population of Michigan State suddenly converging onto New York State?” she asked. “Has not your own society been built of people who have fled from social and economic injustices? Have not your doors always been open?”60
Kissinger had more fun at the dinner. (“I liked the ballerina,” he told the president afterward.) But, chewing it over in the Oval Office the next morning, Nixon and Kissinger were both appalled by Gandhi’s toast. She “had gone on forever last night,” grumbled H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff. Kissinger said, “The president made really one of the best toasts I’ve heard him make since we came here. Very subtle, very thoughtful, and very warm-hearted. Very, very personal. And she got up and—almost no reference to the president, somewhat friendly reference to Mrs. Nixon, launched into a diatribe against Pakistan, which, you know, it’s never done at a state dinner, that you attack another government.” (She had managed to avoid mentioning Pakistan by name, but had decried “medieval tyranny.”) Kissinger was put off by Gandhi’s mention of her democratic mandate: “Then she started praising herself, she said in effect that yes, this praise was well deserved, that I ran an election campaign.… And she said it was wrong to treat them the same way as the Pakistanis. Oh, it was really revolting, God.”61
On November 5, just before the Indian prime minister arrived at the Oval Office, Kissinger stopped by to give the president a final pep talk. He found Nixon already furious. The president said that the United States had given more relief aid to India than the rest of the world combined, and immediately exploded with rage, hollering, “Goddamn, why don’t they give us any credit for that?” Kissinger kept him boiling. “I wouldn’t be too defensive, Mr. President,” he replied. “Because these bastards have played an absolutely brutal, ruthless game with us.”
Kissinger laid out their actions that might mollify Gandhi: “famine relief, international relief presence, civilian governor, amnesty, unilateral withdrawal.” He said that the arms supply had dried up, while Nixon added that the Pakistanis had agreed not to execute Mujib, the Awami League’s popular leader. (Nixon asked, “what’s his name? Mujib? How do you pronounce?”) Kissinger said, “And also Yahya has said that he would agree to meet with a Bangladesh leader,” although not Mujib. “No,” said Kissinger. “No, no, no.” Meeting Mujib “would be political suicide for Yahya.” Nixon, aiming for a high tone, suggested telling Gandhi that while the Americans had no treaty with India, they were “bound by a moral commitment” to promote peace—and then snarled at Gandhi, calling her “the old bitch.”62
Kissinger urged Nixon to be tough on her. “I think publicly you should be extremely nice,” said the national security advisor—and at this point the tape is bleeped out, to hide whatever words he used to urge being rougher in private. Kissinger recommended sternly telling her that her Soviet treaty had cast doubt on India’s ostensible nonalignment, and that “a war with Pakistan simply would not be understood.”
Kissinger’s briefing set Nixon at ease. The president was impressed with what they had gotten the Pakistanis to do. Stumbling on the name, he said, “They’ve agreed not to execute Muju—Muju—however it is you say his name—” “Mujib,” said Kissinger. Nixon fluently rattled off Kissinger’s list of Pakistani concessions, such as a civilian governor and the unilateral troop withdrawal. The only options, the president concluded, were “accommodation or war,” and war would benefit no one. He was ready.
“I’m going to be extremely tough,” said Nixon.63
At last, away from the trappings and distractions of a state visit, Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhi faced off in the Oval Office. In an angry and protracted meeting, they grappled one-on-one, with only Kissinger and Haksar attending their chiefs. It was explosive. He thought she was a warmonger; she thought he was helping along a genocide. Summits are often pretty placid affairs, but this was a cathartic brawl, propelled not just by totally opposite views of a brewing war, but by the hearty personal contempt that the president and prime minister had for each other.
Nixon first emphasized U.S. aid to the refugees, but then sharply warned that launching a war was unacceptable. He said that the United States needed to maintain some influence with Pakistan, which explained a “most limited” continuation of military supply. Hitting his talking points, he recited the ways that the United States had ameliorated Pakistan’s positions: preventing a famine in East Pakistan, naming a civilian governor of East Pakistan, welcoming back refugees, talking to acceptable Awami League leaders, not executing Mujib, and now withdrawing some troops from India’s border. The United States could go no further. Gandhi listened, Kissinger later wrote, with “aloof indifference.” Nixon, refusing to push for negotiations with Mujib, said that he “could not urge policies which would be tantamount to overthrowing President Yahya.”
India would win on the battlefield, Nixon said, but a war would be “incalculably dangerous.” With the superpowers involved on opposite sides, it would threaten world peace. Hinting broadly at a possible Chinese attack on India, he told the prime minister that a war might not be limited to only India and Pakistan.
Gandhi was blunter—if anything, less tactful than Nixon. Kissinger later wrote that her tone was that of “a professor praising a slightly backward student,” which Nixon received with the “glassy-eyed politeness” that he showed when trying to muscle down his resentment. She ripped into U.S. arms shipments to Pakistan, which had outraged the Indian people, despite her efforts to restrain her public.
She hammered away at Pakistan’s “persistent ‘hate India’ campaign,” which she blamed for the two previous India-Pakistan wars. Then she gave an expansive denunciation of Pakistan. Since its creation, it had jailed or exiled rival politicians. Many of its regions, like Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, sought autonomy. (India, she claimed, had always shown some forbearance toward its own separatists—something that might have come as news to the Nagas and Mizos.) She blasted Pakistan’s “treacherous and deceitful” mistreatment of the Bengali people, and told detailed atrocity stories. She said that it was unrealistic to expect East and West Pakistan to remain united; the pressures for autonomy were too strong.
The prime minister turned to the huge numbers of refugees still streaming into India. (There were, by India’s count, over nine and a half million on that autumn day.) Nixon, trying to undercut what he and Kissinger saw as India’s pretext for war, said he would keep pressing Congress for a large relief effort. He wanted the refugees to go home. But Gandhi said that the refugees were from a different background and religion from Indians in the border states, leaving her government hard pressed to prevent bloody communal riots.
Nixon denounced the Bengali insurgents for interfering with relief supplies on ships near Chittagong harbor. This kind of guerrilla warfare, the president said, had to rely on sophisticated training and equipment. Gandhi dodged the accusation, foggily saying that “India had been accused of supporting guerrilla activity but that the situation was not that clear.” Nobody sitting in the Oval Office believed that, least of all Gandhi and Haksar. She perplexingly compared the insurgency to Cuban exiles in Florida striking against Cuba.
The two leaders sparred fiercely. It was, Kissinger later wrote, “a classic dialogue of the deaf.” Gandhi complained bitterly of Yahya’s talk of “Holy War,” and said that the vital issue was Mujib, who was a symbol of the autonomy movement. She raised Nixon’s and Kissinger’s hackles by mentioning her Soviet friendship treaty. Nixon, claiming that the United States had put “great pressure on Pakistan,” brought up again Yahya’s offer to unilaterally pull back his troops. Haksar dodged that, for which Nixon slapped him down.
Nixon ended with a steely warning. He said that the U.S. government would continue to help with humanitarian relief, urge restraint on Yahya, and try to find a political solution. But he declared that the disintegration of Pakistan would do no good for anyone, and rumbled, “The initiation of hostilities by India would be almost impossible to understand.” He warned, “It would be impossible to calculate with precision the steps which other great powers might take if India were to initiate hostilities”—hinting not just at the reaction of the United States but also the possibility of Chinese intervention. This implicit threat hung in the Oval Office as the final ugly moment.64
Nixon and Kissinger were stunned by the showdown. They had been sorely taxed by the sustained need to be civil to Gandhi. The next morning, in the Oval Office, alone except for Haldeman, they vented their frustrations. “This is just the point when she is a bitch,” said the president. Kissinger replied, “Well, the Indians are bastards anyway. They are starting a war there.”
The two men stripped the bark off the Indians. Kissinger, struck by Gandhi’s unyielding condemnation of Pakistan, suspected that she was out not just to free East Pakistan but to smash West Pakistan. He lavished praise on Nixon’s performance: “While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too.”
Nixon was revolted by the politesse shown to Gandhi. “We really slobbered over the old witch,” he said. Kissinger, doing a little slobbering of his own, reassured the president: “How you slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in the things that did matter, you didn’t give her an inch.” Kissinger flattered Nixon’s toughness and skill, while Nixon gloated, “You should have heard, Bob, the way we worked her around. I dropped stilettos all over her.”
Kissinger said, “Mr. President, even though she was a bitch, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that we got what we wanted, which was we kept her from going out of here saying that the United States kicked her in the teeth.” He added, “You didn’t give her a goddamn thing.” Although it would have been “emotionally more satisfying” to rip into her, Kissinger said “it would have hurt us.… I mean if you had been rough with her then she’d be crying, going back crying to India.” Thanks to the president, Kissinger said, Gandhi could not say that the United States had been cold to her and therefore she had to attack Pakistan.
Kissinger understandably winced at Gandhi’s protestations that she knew nothing about the guerrillas in East Pakistan. He was also incensed by India’s relationship with the Soviet Union: “They have the closest diplomatic ties now with Russia. They leak everything right back to them.” And Nixon cheered Kissinger, who had “stuck it to her on that book”—the one recommended to Kissinger by Zhou Enlai, which, in Kissinger’s words, “proves that India started the ’62 War” against China. Kissinger sarcastically said, “It was done with an enormous politeness and courtesy and warmth.” Nixon added that “she knew goddamn well that I knew what happened.”
Nixon and Kissinger were bitter at India for winning support in the U.S. media and Congress. “You stuck it to her about the press,” said Kissinger. “On that I hit it hard,” Nixon agreed. “I raised my voice a little.”
Kissinger had also met with Haksar, whom Nixon called “that clown.” Kissinger said that he had been just as rough on Haksar. He had complained to the senior Indian official that India gave visiting Democratic politicians “a royal reception, tremendous publicity, personal meetings. And then after you do all of this you come over here and ask us to solve all your problems.” Nixon said, “Good for you.” Kissinger continued, “I said look at the record the last 3 months. You’ve had a press campaign against us. You put out the word that our relations are the worst ever. You get Kennedy over.… You make a treaty with the Russians. And then you come here and say we have to solve your problems for you.”
Nixon decided to make that day’s meeting “cool.” Kissinger suggested giving Gandhi a rougher day, as the conversation turned to Vietnam and other international issues: “even though she is a bitch, I’d be a shade cooler today.”65
Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, had the joyless duty of meeting Gandhi and Haksar at the White House diplomatic entrance and escorting them up to see the president again. From the alcove in the diplomatic entrance, he remembers, he telephoned Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Woods told him to delay. After an interminable half hour, he says, Gandhi was “getting frosty as hell.” He called upstairs again. Woods told him not yet. “It’s clear to me what’s happening,” recalls Hoskinson. “They’re standing her up a little bit. You wait for the president of the United States, lady.”
After something like forty-five minutes, Hoskinson got the call to take her upstairs. “Then Rose Mary says, ‘Would you please take Madame Gandhi to the Roosevelt Room?’ I wait another ten or fifteen minutes. She is totally pissed. They’re whispering back and forth. It was the most excruciating scene you can imagine.” Finally, Hoskinson says, Nixon burst in, turning on the charm, and saying he did not know she had been kept waiting. “She was flabbergasted,” says Hoskinson. “It was a kind of one-upmanship. Nixon felt he had to show her he was in control.”66
With that, the exasperated president squared off against the offended prime minister in their final Oval Office session. “Mrs. Gandhi didn’t indicate much interest in anything in her conversations with the President,” Kissinger recalled a few days later. “When he asked her about military withdrawal, she said she would let him know the next day, and she didn’t even have the courtesy to mention it again.”67
To Nixon’s and Kissinger’s annoyance, Gandhi had asked that their second meeting cover issues beyond South Asia. With less at stake in this encounter, there was less to raise the temperature. This time, Nixon explained his opening to China, while Gandhi blandly said she supported it—not mentioning his implicit warning the day before that great powers might intervene against India. The prime minister asked about Vietnam, where India remained bitterly critical of the U.S. war effort. Haksar warily asked about China. The two leaders were able to wrap up on somewhat better form and be rid of each other. With not much to do, Haksar spent his Oval Office time mesmerized by the two Americans. He fought a strong urge to touch Nixon’s “mask-like” face, which seemed “unreal.” The president’s only sign of emotion, Haksar thought, was his sweat.68
No wonder Kissinger later declared that these were undoubtedly the worst meetings Nixon held with any foreign leader. Pakistan’s unilateral withdrawal plan was a dead letter. The Indians saw no shift in the White House’s attitude, with Yahya still seen as irreplaceable. With nothing in hand, with no plan to defuse the confrontation, Gandhi and her retinue departed Washington. “My visit to Nixon did anything but avert the war,” she later said.69
The main discernible outcome of the summit was that the two leaders of these massive democracies now hated each other rather more. The last big chance to prevent a war had slipped away.