Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, had been preparing for war for months, and a bit longer too. The son of a prominent Sephardic Jewish family from West Bengal, he had learned how to box and shoot as a schoolboy in Calcutta. He liked it.
Jake Jacob was a stocky, robust bull of a man with heavy-lidded eyes. When Nazi Germany stepped up its persecution of European Jews, with Jacob’s family sheltering refugees who had fled as far as Calcutta, he decided there was an enemy that had to be defeated. So in 1941 he enrolled in the British army, he says, “to fight the Nazis.” His regiment got cut to pieces fighting off German troops in Libya, and Jacob was wounded in hellish swamp conditions in Burma, but he survived to enlist in an independent India’s army. After serving in the 1965 war against Pakistan, he rocketed up through the senior ranks. Jacob is the rare person who speaks fondly of Indira Gandhi, who charmed him with kindly questions about India’s Jews (her favorite musical, he says, was Fiddler on the Roof) and stories about her children. “I liked her very much,” he says. “I don’t care what other people say.”1
Jacob savors the fact that three of the Indian generals fighting against Pakistan were a Parsi, a Sikh, and a Jew. General Sam Manekshaw, India’s topmost army commander—a dashing and jovial Parsi veteran of World War II who sported an outsized bristling mustache—was, like Jacob, confident of victory.2
The Indian generals knew they had an overwhelming military advantage in East Pakistan. The CIA estimated that India’s army had 1.1 million soldiers overall, dwarfing Pakistan’s three hundred thousand. India had built up and modernized its war machine, and had planned coordinated efforts from its army, air force, and navy. In East Pakistan, the Indians had the enthusiastic support of much of the Bengali populace, as well as a local fighting partner in the Mukti Bahini, which pinned down the Pakistan army and offered deep knowledge of the terrain. Pakistan’s eastern troops were outnumbered, demoralized, and exhausted from trying to quash the Bengali citizenry and rebels. Archer Blood had always known East Pakistan was a military liability: “They could never defend it against India because it is surrounded virtually by India and separated by over a thousand miles.”3
India’s war plans bore this out. In the east, the Indians seem to have chosen a daring strategy, which Jacob says he proposed: “You go straight for Dacca. Ignore the subsidiary towns.” Several other generals hashed out the plan of attack, but they agreed on the core concept. As Jacob explains, “Dacca is the center of gravity, the geopolitical heart of East Pakistan. Unless you take Dacca, the war cannot be completed.”
It is a measure of how well the war went that India’s generals have squabbled about credit ever since. According to Jacob, when they discussed the plan back in August, Manekshaw and other generals had wanted to take the other two main cities, Chittagong and Khulna, which would make Dacca fall. Jacob says, “I said, ‘No way. Chittagong is peripheral. It has no bearing on the war.’ He said, ‘Sweetie, don’t’ ”—the endearment being Manekshaw’s way of prefacing a rebuke.4
December 3, 1971, was a quiet political day in Delhi. Indira Gandhi was off in Calcutta, and her senior cabinet was scattered. A little before 6 p.m., air-raid sirens howled in the capital.5
“We were going to attack on December 4,” says Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, India’s director of naval intelligence. “They guessed it, I suppose.” Gandhi had reportedly approved General Manekshaw’s plans to attack on December 4, taking advantage of a full moon. According to K. F. Rustamji of the Border Security Force, he had instructions from the army for when war came. Their task was to force the Pakistani troops out of their bases and scatter them, and to fight skirmishes at the border. The rest would be handled by the army.6
But Pakistan struck first. At 5:30 p.m. on December 3, Pakistan’s air force launched coordinated surprise attacks on India’s major airfields in the north, in cities in Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Soon after, the Pakistan army began heavily shelling Indian army positions all along the western border, opening up a wide front in Punjab and Kashmir. In Kashmir, United Nations military observers reported an attack by Pakistani troops at Poonch. According to a Pakistani postwar judicial commission, Yahya had on November 29 decided on the assault, without knowing about India’s own plans to strike.7
In Calcutta, Gandhi—who had been addressing an immense rally of as many as a million people—privately said, “Thank God, they’ve attacked us.” She had wanted Pakistan to get the blame. Now it would. The prime minister showed no visible emotion when she got the news, but later that night as she winged back to Delhi, she was nervous that Pakistan’s air force might try to blow her airplane out of the sky. She met with her chiefs of staff, raced to the map room to take stock of the military situation, and then consulted with parliamentary leaders. She was in a gloweringly bad mood. One of her top aides remembered her “almighty rage” at an underwhelming speech her staff had hastily written for her. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the hawkish Jana Sangh politician, remembered her as “a picture of worry and concern.”8
The prime minister directed India’s armed forces to fight back. General Manekshaw later said that, with the prime minister and defense minister away, he had to decide to retaliate, and to have that decision approved later by the cabinet. After midnight on the night of December 3–4, Gandhi told Indians by radio, in a slow and grave voice, “Today the war in Bangla Desh has become a war on India.” On December 4, Yahya—having made his last big mistake—declared that Pakistan was at war with India.9
Yahya’s attack gave India the high moral ground. “We meet as a fighting Parliament,” Gandhi stormed before the Lok Sabha. “A war has been forced upon us, a war we did not seek and did our utmost to prevent.” She justified the war not merely as self-defense, but invoked liberty and human rights in Bangladesh. Writing to Richard Nixon, she condemned Pakistan’s aggression as well as its “repressive, brutal and colonial policy,” which “culminated in genocide.”10
Arundhati Ghose, the Indian diplomat posted in Calcutta, remembers, “We thought, now they’re going to hit Calcutta. It’s jammed with people. Even a firecracker would kill people.” In Delhi, people jumped at air-raid alarms in the dead of night and the sounds of jet aircraft overhead. But the country rallied behind the war. For all the theatrics—the government imposed a nightly blackout and encouraged civilians to dig trenches—the fighting was far away from the population centers, leaving most civilians feeling safe enough to enjoy the government’s reports of uninterrupted martial triumph. Despite his past criticisms, even Jayaprakash Narayan proclaimed his full support for Gandhi, arguing that there was no time for factionalism in this national emergency. One Indian activist wrote, “I wish to thank God, in whom I do not believe, that a strong, determined and fearless person like Indira Gandhi is our Prime Minister at this time of crisis.” P. N. Haksar worked hard at using the government’s pronouncements to drive home “the why and wherefore” of the war to India’s citizenry.11
Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times recalls, “Jacob was delighted that night. Now we’ll show you what an army is.” Jacob’s superior was just as confident. “Don’t look so scared, sweetie,” General Manekshaw told the anxious officer who informed him of Pakistan’s attack. “Do I look worried?”12
In Washington, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, without the facts, were immediately convinced that India had started the war. The outbreak of war distilled all of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s resentments of India down to their essence. They would brook no dissent. They snapped into a state of self-righteousness, suddenly convinced that they and Pakistan had made herculean efforts, while India had done everything wrong.13
Kissinger, nobody’s fool, realized correctly that India had been waiting for the opportune moment for war: “they moved as early as they were able to. The rains were over; the passes from China were closed with snow; the Bangla Desh had now been trained and the Indians had moved their own forces.” But even if the Pakistanis had actually struck first, Kissinger forgivingly said, the U.S. line should be that they had been provoked into aggression: “it’s like Finland attacking Russia.”14
Nixon told Kissinger, “by God, I can’t emphasize too strongly how I feel.” The president was lost in bitter rage. “[W]e are not going to roll over after they have done this horrible thing,” he ordered Kissinger. “[W]e will cut the gizzard out.” Kissinger passed this presidential fire on down through the ranks. Nixon, he pointedly informed underlings, was “raging” or “raving.” He told a Situation Room meeting, “I’ve been catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the President who says we’re not tough enough.”15
Nixon immediately ordered a stop to military and economic aid to India. He ordered Kissinger to scour every option to punish that country. As Kissinger told Alexander Haig, his deputy, “He wants to cut off all aid; he thinks I’m too soft”—a thought that made Kissinger burst out laughing. Nixon aimed to do lasting economic damage by cutting off aid to India for a long time.16
Both Nixon and Kissinger only regretted not tilting more toward Pakistan. On arms shipments to Pakistan, Nixon—unconcerned that Pakistan had used U.S. weapons for domestic repression rather than foreign defense—wished that he had given more. He thought that cutting off U.S. military assistance to Pakistan might have encouraged India to attack its weakened enemy. Kissinger wished that the administration had boldly cut off military and economic aid to India earlier, which might have held India back.17
For Kissinger, this was no mere local clash, but a Cold War contest of wills against the Soviet Union: “here we have Indian-Soviet collusion, raping a friend of ours.” He told the president, “if we collapse now, the Soviets won’t respect us for it; the Chinese will despise us”—which, he said, would wreck their opening to China. He argued that all their foreign achievements were coming undone: “The Russians are playing for big stakes here.” If the White House backed down, “this will then be the Suez ’56 episode of our Administration.”18
Kissinger expected that the war would lead to Yahya’s overthrow. Nixon was cut to the quick at the thought. “It’s such a shame,” he said mournfully. “So sad. So sad.”19
Nixon and Kissinger reviled Indira Gandhi. Nixon intoned, “she says she is not going to be threatened by a country of whites 3 or 4 thousand miles away. Well, she didn’t object to the color of our money.” The president worried “whether or not I was too easy on the goddamn woman when she was here.” Kissinger thought he probably should have “recommended to you to brutalize her privately.” Nixon vowed that “she’s going to pay. She’s going to pay.”20
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s wrath also encompassed the Indian people. When Nixon noted that some people might not want to alienate millions of Indians, Kissinger cut him off: “Well, but we haven’t got them anyway, Mr. President.” Nixon agreed: “We’ve got their enmity anyway. That’s what she’s shown in this goddamn thing, hasn’t she?” Kissinger asked, “when have these bastards ever supported us?” “Never,” said Nixon. Early in the war, the president said, “The arguments from the New York Times and others will be ‘we will buy ourselves a century or decades of hatred and suspicion from the Indian people.’ Bullshit!” Decades of U.S. foreign aid had only bought “hatred and suspicion from the Indian people.” “Exactly,” said Kissinger. “Tell me one friend we’ve got in India, do you know any?” “Exactly,” said Kissinger.21
The Democrats, Nixon said, would “probably say we’re losing India forever. All right, who’s going to care about losing India forever?” Kissinger said, “We’ve got to keep the heat on them now. They have to know they paid a price. Hell, if we could reestablish relations with Communist China, we can always get the Indians back whenever we want to later—a year or two from now.” He did not seem to grasp how winning back hundreds of millions of angry Indian citizens might be different from winning over Zhou Enlai. “I don’t give a damn about the Indians,” Nixon later said. Soon after that, he scorned elites who worried that “we’ll lose six hundred million Indians.” With withering sarcasm, he said, “Great loss.”22
Henry Kissinger has burnished the image of himself as supremely coolheaded in a crisis—the real person you want to get that phone call at three o’clock in the morning. But to Nixon and his senior team, Kissinger, already worn out from the strain of handling the China opening and the Vietnam War, appeared to be coming frighteningly unglued. After months dedicating himself to preventing a major war, he had failed. His voice was shot, which Nixon thought was due to tension. He seemed exhausted and irrational.23
Alone in the Oval Office with H. R. Haldeman, the president suggested—in an empathetic, almost fatherly tone—that Kissinger’s problem was “maybe deep down recognizing his own failure. Now that’s what my guess is.” Haldeman agreed it was “a self-guilt thing.” Nixon said, “I think he’s gotten emotional. He sounded awfully fatigued to me.” Haldeman agreed that the “overexcited” Kissinger got “over-depressed about his failures.”24
Nixon, fatalistically convinced that nothing could have been done to prevent the war, said Kissinger “feels very badly about this thing, because he always has a feeling that something we have done could have avoided it.” After yet another tiff with the State Department, Kissinger stormed into Haldeman’s office to say he would have to resign. “He’s mixed up,” said an exasperated Nixon. “He’s tormented internally,” agreed Haldeman. A few weeks later, after press criticism about anti-Indian policies set Kissinger off again, the president’s aide John Ehrlichman noted, “Nixon wondered aloud if Henry needed psychiatric care.”25
Enervated and humiliated, out of favor with the president, Kissinger became erratic in his behavior. In his fury, he turned apocalyptic, invoking the 1930s in ways that spooked even the most rock-ribbed White House officials. Haldeman warned Nixon that a “raging” Kissinger “talks about Chamberlain, and how this is our Rhineland.” Even Haldeman, no squish, recoiled at Kissinger’s “doomsday” talk of World War II. He dismissed the analogy of “Germany taking the Rhineland or something like that, but I mean there’s a little difference there. India doesn’t have a plan for world conquest.”26
Nixon pointed out that Kissinger, scapegoating the bureaucracy, “really has the inability to see that … he himself is ever wrong.” George H. W. Bush found Kissinger paranoid and out of control. “Henry is very excitable, very emotional almost,” he wrote privately. While admiring Kissinger’s intelligence and wit, he noted that he “is absolutely brutal on these [State Department] guys, insisting that they don’t know anything and asking why they are screwing up policy etc. I went through that, and … had a little bit of a battle myself.”27
So the war arrived with Kissinger seeking vindication, needing a win to bolster his standing with the president. For all his commitment to dispassionate realpolitik, he seemed propelled almost as much by emotion as by calculation. He would not admit that the United States had missed opportunities to avoid war by pressuring Pakistan. Despite having spent months denying that the United States bore responsibility for Pakistan’s actions, he now wholeheartedly blamed the Soviet Union for India’s. Nixon, despite his visceral hatred of India, saw the bigger picture: this was just one crisis in just one part of the world, where the United States was playing a losing hand. But Kissinger, in his despondency and rage, kept trying to escalate. He wanted to force the Soviet Union to back down.28
India waged starkly different campaigns in the east and west, with goals as dissimilar as the terrain. In the east, Indian troops fought a blazingly rapid war for the independence of Bangladesh, racing across swampland toward a decisive victory in Dacca, needing to get there before the United Nations Security Council stopped them in their tracks. Before the war, D. P. Dhar wrote to Haksar that they needed to finish up completely within eight days before foreign intervention halted them.29
Thus, as Indian generals argued, charging to Dacca itself was a fast way to secure Bangladesh. While blocking the territory’s ports and airfields from any help from the West Pakistanis, the Indian army launched a devastating assault of several different forces of infantry and armor.30
No such feats were possible on the western front. There Pakistan meant to punish India and gain land in Kashmir to compensate for eastern losses; as Pakistan’s generals used to say, the defense of East Pakistan was in the west. West Pakistan itself was a tough redoubt, with invaders facing highly motivated Pakistani troops in bunkers and pillboxes, defenses such as antitank ditches, and, as Jacob noted respectfully, a “well equipped force strong in armour.” Indian forces were only somewhat stronger than Pakistan’s there, without the kind of decisive superiority required for a successful offensive. So India and Pakistan became locked in a bloody but inconclusive stalemate, with tanks dustily clashing in the desert or in the mountains of Kashmir. General Manekshaw later said that his troops kept a “mainly defensive posture” against West Pakistan, only launching “limited offensives” meant to defend communications and bases and to improve their positions in Kashmir.31
Pakistan, encouraged by long months of White House support, hoped for foreign succor and perhaps intervention. As the CIA noted before the war, Pakistan’s “prideful, honor-conscious generals” might suddenly assault India, knowing defeat was likely, but hoping for good luck or a timely intervention by the great powers. Manekshaw would later speculate that Pakistan had attacked in the hope of grabbing large parts of Kashmir to compensate for the amputation of Bangladesh, and “to internationalise the whole issue and rouse World opinion, especially the USA in the hope of preventing INDIA from striking back. They were also perhaps expecting much more help from CHINA.”32
When Yahya attacked on December 3, he obviously had in mind something like the Israeli air force’s preemptive strike on Egyptian airfields in the Six-Day War in 1967, to be followed by devastating advances on the western front. He failed. India had dispersed and protected its air force in anticipation, and the Pakistani attack proved surprisingly ineffectual.33
Indian MiG-21 fighter-bombers pounded Dacca’s airport. Thousands of people watched thunderstruck from the crowded city’s streets and rooftops as Pakistani F-86 Sabre jet fighters fought them in quicksilver dogfights. The air was thick with flak, appearing as red tracers at night and puffy white smoke in daylight. In the U.S. consulate in Dacca, some of Archer Blood’s remaining dissenters cheered the Indians on. “It’s hard to describe this without seeming callous,” says Desaix Myers, the rebellious junior development officer, “but we were taking sides at this point. We didn’t think that Pakistan was going to be able to put it back together, we thought that what Pakistan was doing was wrong, we thought they needed to be controlled, we thought that Indira had to take action, we wanted the army to reach Dacca as soon as possible and to end the war.” Holed up at the Intercontinental Hotel, with blackout curtains on the windows, they could watch Indian warplanes flying in to bomb the airport, coming out of the sun to make themselves a harder target.34
The Indian air force—which had a three-to-one advantage in aircraft—quickly established mastery of the eastern skies, pulverizing the Dacca airfield into uselessness, and wiping out most of Pakistan’s small collection of warplanes in the east. With this air superiority, India’s air force provided cover for its advancing troops below, and pummeled Pakistan’s remaining warplanes and airfields, radar units, fuel dumps, and armored columns.35
Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the general officer commanding-in-chief of the Indian army’s Eastern Command—a tough and brainy Sikh soldier, with sharp eyes and upturned mustache—would later call the fight for Bangladesh “the battle of obstacles.” He and Jacob, his chief of staff, raced their troops across terrain unforgivingly sliced by fast-flowing rivers and streams, improvising as they went, relying on engineers, bridging equipment, and rivercraft to get the troops across. Adding to the challenge, the Mukti Bahini guerrillas had already blown up many of the bridges.36
But the Mukti Bahini—who would later in the war be brought under General Aurora’s command—more than compensated by establishing bridgeheads and organizing local transport for the Indian troops. These Bengali rebels, relying on the support of local civilians, sped the Indians’ advance with riverboats, rickshaws, and bullock carts. Bengali villagers carried guns and ammunition across their familiar countryside for the Indian troops. At one point, twenty locals pushed a 5.5-inch medium gun through a boggy rice field, with other Bengalis carrying its ammunition.37
India’s air superiority left the Indian columns free to advance without fear of strafing from enemy warplanes, without having to disperse or take cover. India used helicopters to drop battalions of paratroopers deep inside East Pakistan, to link up with the Mukti Bahini and, eventually, the Indian army. To General Jacob’s satisfaction, they went ahead with a big paratrooper drop precisely on schedule with the war plan—confident enough of their air supremacy to land the paratroopers in daylight. The helicopters became, in an Indian general’s words, an “air bridge.”38
With Pakistani soldiers dug into bunkers and fortified positions, the Indians preferred to bypass them rather than attack them directly, leaving behind enough Indian troops—or in many cases a Mukti Bahini force—to keep the Pakistanis stuck there. “We went around the towns and went straight for Dacca,” recalls Admiral Roy. There was no time to capture cities. Bent on reaching Dacca, Indian troops wound up taking only two major towns, Jessore and Comilla. Rather than taking the highways, which were sure targets, the Indians tried to go on dirt roads or through fields, helped along by the Mukti Bahini’s peerless knowledge of the local riverine terrain. In a bombed-out school, an Indian officer told Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, “We are kicking the shit out of them.”39
In many places, like Jamalpur, the Indians faced pitched resistance from the Pakistan army. “Give my love to the Muktis,” wrote one Pakistani colonel in reply to an Indian demand for surrender, enclosing a Chinese-made bullet in his letter. At another village, Schanberg, who accompanied an Indian tank unit, remembers staring in horror at charred Pakistani soldiers in a trench that had been blown up by tank fire. In a field, he counted twenty-two dead Pakistani soldiers in their bunkers, some of them seemingly peaceful, but others mangled or torn apart by Indian artillery bursts. One bunker had collapsed completely, with two booted feet sticking up from what had become a grave.40
The Mukti Bahini fought alongside the Indians. As a Bangladeshi commander later bragged, “Once again we demonstrated to the world that the Bengalis are a fighting martial race.” After an Indian pilot got shot down, the rebels sheltered him. When the insurgents attacked Pakistani soldiers, terrified villagers fled, sometimes getting cut down in the crossfire. Wading knee deep through the muddy water, one rebel incongruously remembered small fish “friskily moving around … playing their own games in their own world.” This guerrilla recalled his jubilation while watching the “beautiful” sight of three Indian Gnat fighter planes swooping down out of a clear sky toward Pakistani gunboats on a river, followed by blasts and dense smoke.41
The euphoric Indian troops were greeted with cheers and hugs from the local Bengalis. As the Indian army advanced, Schanberg noticed that nervous Bengali civilians followed about a mile or two behind them, hoping to return to their homes. Some, the victims of final spiteful attacks by the retreating Pakistanis, would not make it. The New York Times reporter saw two dead Bengali civilians left in a field to be gnawed by dogs, and another with his left arm sliced off and his chest torn open. For their part, some of the Mukti Bahini and Bengalis took cruel revenge on Pakistani troops and collaborators. Despite Indian army orders against reprisal executions, an Indian army captain saw the mutilated corpses of Pakistani soldiers, their fingers and nipples slashed off and their throats cut.42
On both sides, as even partisans had to admit, soldiers fought with extraordinary courage. Still, with the Pakistan army crumbling in the east, India urged the enemy troops to surrender rather than die for no reason. Manekshaw broadcast repeated appeals emphasizing that prisoners of war would be treated honorably under the Geneva Conventions. There was another, nastier incentive for the Pakistanis to yield to the Indians: as senior Indian officials surmised, Pakistani troops would probably fare better if they surrendered to Indian soldiers rather than to the Mukti Bahini.43
India’s victories were not just the product of the bravery of its soldiers, but also the quality of their equipment and weapons—the fruit of India’s own defense industry and Soviet support. Manekshaw thanked the Soviet Union for its camouflaged PT-76 amphibious light tanks, which could handle mud and marsh in Bangladesh, and its Mi-4 transport helicopters, which got Indian troops across streams and rivers, and evacuated wounded soldiers. India’s sturdy Soviet-made T-55 medium tanks could take out Pakistan’s U.S.-made M-54 Chaffee light tanks. Soviet commanders, proud as Indian troops redeemed the iffy reputation of their armaments, praised India’s armed forces with their highest compliment: comparing them to Soviet fighters in World War II.44
As Indian troops and Bengali guerrillas closed in on Dacca, the non-Bengali minority in Bangladesh—the Urdu-speaking Biharis, many of whom had supported Pakistan—were at terrible risk of vengeful atrocities by the Mukti Bahini. Yahya told Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador, that India would kill “not thousands but millions.” Farland, echoing that, alerted the State Department to the “potential … for one of the greatest blood lettings” of the century, with Bengalis mercilessly taking revenge upon Biharis who had helped the West Pakistanis. Bihari men, women, and children would be butchered, he wrote, unless the Indian army prevented it. A senior United Nations official in Dacca warned that Biharis had gathered there, “armed to the teeth,” gripped by “animal fear” exacerbated by “threats of reprisals” on All India Radio.45
Kissinger responded well. He swiftly wanted to call on all parties to prevent massacres. So the United States urged India to prevent retaliation against Biharis and—as India had already pledged to do—treat Pakistani troops humanely under the Geneva Conventions. Of course, Kissinger had shown no such alacrity when the Bengalis were slaughtered; since the Biharis were, in his eyes, Pakistani citizens facing peril from other Pakistani citizens, their protection should not have been an international concern; and the White House was plainly seeking to puncture India’s pretense of moral superiority. He told Nixon that “in six months the liberals are going to look like jerks because the Indian occupation of East Pakistan is going to make the Pakistani one look like child’s play.” Nixon was eager for signs of Indian atrocities: “Here they are raping and murdering, and they talk about West Pakistan, these Indians are pretty vicious in there, aren’t they? Aren’t they killing a lot of people?” Even when his own officials denied him such evidence, he persisted, at one point furiously saying, “Henry, I just want the Indians to look bad. I want them to look bad for bombing that orphanage”—an incident that the U.S. consulate and the UN representative in Dacca believed had actually been done by a Pakistani airplane, in order to discredit India’s air force. But such hypocrisies are beside the point. The United States was asking for decent behavior, which could save innocent lives. It was right to do so.46
India, keenly aware of world public opinion, pledged that it was not out for vengeance. It promised to protect Biharis and surrendered Pakistani soldiers from retribution, following the Geneva Conventions. Haksar ordered Indian diplomats to pound home to Bangladeshi leaders the need for mercy: “they should say that they have been victims of such bloodshed and would not wish to spill any blood and deal with their opponents with humanity as a civilised State. Bangla Desh is emerging as a State in the family of nations. Their representatives have everything to gain by appearing dignified, calm, and self-possessed.” After reading the warning from that UN official in Dacca, Haksar instructed General Manekshaw, the defense ministry, and other outlets to declare “that Indian Armed Forces will not resort to the barbarism of Pakistan Armed Forces, that everybody who peacefully surrenders will be treated with respect and his life safeguarded.”47
There were still many horrible revenge killings. The most that can be said is that Indian influence meant there were fewer than there otherwise might have been. This is cold comfort. Under Indian pressure, the Bangladesh government pledged to respect the Geneva Conventions, promising humane treatment for prisoners of war and civilians—a declaration that Haksar had broadcast on All India Radio and read out at a government press conference. On December 9, the CIA reported, “The Indians appear to be making good on their promise to try to protect these people from vengeance-seeking Bengalis.”48
Throughout the conflict, the Indian navy was eager to show its mettle. By severing maritime outlets to West Pakistan, it cut off the Pakistani troops in the east from reinforcement or resupply. And by choking the ports of Chittagong and Khulna, the navy relieved the army of the need to capture them on land.49
To blockade the key eastern port of Chittagong, India deployed its sole aircraft carrier, the British-built INS Vikrant, backed up with supporting ships and submarines. From the carrier, India could launch Sea Hawk fighter-bombers into battle. But only if it worked. Even in India’s motley navy, the creaky Vikrant—in constant need of repair—was the butt of countless jokes. Three months before the war, the navy deemed it inoperable, with a crack in its boiler. “What’s the bloody point of having an aircraft carrier if it cannot be used during a war?” spat Admiral S. M. Nanda, India’s top navy man. The Indians patched it up as best they could and deployed it, dreading attacks by Pakistan’s biggest and mightiest submarine, PNS Ghazi, which had been provided to the Pakistan navy by the United States.50
Yahya himself hoped his navy would sink the Vikrant. But the unlucky Ghazi suffered an underwater explosion so loud that it broke windows on dry land: the result of plowing into Indian depth charges, according to Indian naval officers, or of hitting one of its own mines, according to the Pakistan navy. The great submarine sank to the bottom. The Vikrant, freed from its fear of the Ghazi, led attacks on Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar, paralyzing these vital harbors, and setting Chittagong’s main oil refinery alight. India’s eastern naval commander signaled his sailors, “MOTTO FOR EASTERN FLEET IS—‘ATTACK—ATTACK—ATTACK.’ ” East Pakistan was blocked off from any sea outlet to West Pakistan.51
At the same time, in West Pakistan, where Pakistani warplanes still challenged them for the skies, the Indian air force launched frightening strikes on airports and military installations in Rawalpindi and—again and again—Karachi. In Lahore, the Indian warplanes mostly hit military targets, although they did buzz the U.S. consul’s residence. When Nixon heard that the Indians had blown up a U.S. plane at the Islamabad airport—which actually belonged to the famous test pilot Chuck Yeager—he flew into a wild, screaming rage, berating his staff: “Now goddamn it, what the hell is the shit-ass State Department doing about objecting with those planes?”52
The Indian air force and navy had planned a daring surprise assault on the heavily defended port of Karachi, to destroy Pakistan’s crucial oil storage facilities, which held four-fifths of Pakistan’s supply, vital to keeping Pakistan’s armor moving. Late at night on December 4, Indian warplanes struck, while India’s navy surreptitiously crept up the coast and unleashed missiles on the city’s oil depots. The massive blaze turned the sky a bizarre, unearthly pink.53
Off Karachi, Indian warships blasted in half and sank a massive Pakistani destroyer, PNS Khyber, and badly damaged a second, PNS Shahjehan. In a second big raid on December 8, the Indian navy fired another barrage on the Karachi area, blowing up fuel tanks and tankers. The next day, as the city weathered its thirteenth air raid, the fires spread, leaving half of the city’s oil storage up in flames. For seven terrifying days, Karachi burned.54
Although understandably nobody who lived through Karachi’s oily inferno could see it this way, India actually had to fight a relatively cautious land war against a thoroughly formidable West Pakistan. While India hoped to pummel Pakistan’s offensive war machine and to improve its position in Kashmir, there was no chance of the kind of decisive victories that it was scoring in the east.55
These military facts were well understood in Washington. The CIA, based on a source purportedly with access to Indian cabinet deliberations, explained that India planned a “defensive posture” in the west, preventing Pakistan from lunging deeper into Kashmir. Kissinger informed Nixon of this defensive Indian stance. The president thought India would face “real rough going up through those mountains” in West Pakistan. It would be, he said, “a good trade” if Pakistan grabbed Kashmir while India took East Pakistan.56
The combat in the west was sharp and devastating. Death came at every moment: in the dead of night, when a bright moon gave away Pakistani tanks moving in the desert; in daylight, when a twenty-two-year-old Indian lieutenant was killed instantly by a direct hit on his tank’s turret; or in a hurried breakfast, as a Border Security Force officer was eating chapatis when a Pakistani shell came out of nowhere to slice open his windpipe. Indian and Pakistani troops screamed back and forth with the filthiest Punjabi curses they knew.57
Pakistan launched massive thrusts in Kashmir and Rajasthan. In the Poonch sector in Kashmir, Indian troops struggled to hold fast against Pakistani artillery and machine guns. It was only after five days of hard fighting, with heavy casualties, that India thought Poonch was secure. Indian troops made a bold thrust into Sindh, as well as pressing hard into Pakistan’s Punjab. But the western front cast a shadow over the breakfast meetings where Indira Gandhi and General Manekshaw nervously updated each other. When the fighting bogged down on the sixth day of the war, she tried to buck him up: “But Sam, you can’t win every day.”58
In Kashmir, Pakistan attacked fiercely in the Chhamb sector. The combat there was the worst of the war. Pakistan had massed terrifying firepower: some two hundred heavy guns as well as medium ones, which rained down sixty thousand rounds on the Indians in under two days. Soon the hillsides were burned black. The Pakistanis would start deafening artillery barrages late in the afternoon and keep firing until long after midnight, eerily lighting up the night. The ground shook. The Indian soldiers had a sick sense of doom. The incoming shells cratered the battlefield, propelling solid rock and soil high into the air. They smashed sandbagged concrete bunkers. When they hit a trench, they blasted up a grotesque rain of mud and human limbs. A nearby shallow river reddened.59
The Pakistanis endured punishing attacks from Indian fighter-bombers, while the Indians faced a hellish combination of Pakistani airstrikes, artillery, and charges by infantry and tanks. On December 5, the battle reached a smoky, gory climax, with Pakistan’s notorious Lieutenant General Tikka Khan redoubling his troops’ attack. One Indian Sikh regiment used rocket launchers against the tanks, thrilling the troops at the sight of four of the metal behemoths immobilized by their own tank killers. The Indians’ machine guns jammed from overuse. After that, the Pakistanis took advantage of their superior numbers with an infantry charge, which the Indians tried to force back with gruesome hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets. “Let them know they are fighting a Sikh regiment,” bellowed the Indian major in command, who was himself a Hindu.60
The base camp hospitals were overrun with the shrieking wounded, ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets, bleeding out. Against their terror, the troops carried photographs of their wives and children, or a deity. One Indian soldier, firing in a frenzy at charging Pakistani columns, was blasted by a bomb, suffering horrible internal injuries. “Lord, save me for the sake of my one-month-old son and my wife,” he prayed. An officer, on the verge of death, kept shouting at the surgeons to let him return to the front to avenge his brother. Another soldier, who had kept on shooting because it was the only chance of surviving, was vomiting blood. Others had lost hands, feet, and legs.61
On December 6, ground down by combined barrages of airstrikes and artillery, the Indians had to fall back. They fought on afterward, but had been bested by the Pakistanis. The battlefield was left strewn with burned-out tanks, jeeps, and trucks, as well as abandoned guns. It reeked of human corpses rotting in the sun. With minefields in place, troops on both sides did not dare recover their dead.62
Indira Gandhi had a mystical, hallucinatory experience of wartime leadership. She had “an extended vision I had known at times in my youth,” she told a startled friend. “The color red suffused me throughout the war.”63
More prosaically, the outbreak of war finally allowed her to recognize Bangladesh, on December 6. This was, the Indians hoped, the birth of a new democracy that respected human rights. Baiting Nixon, Gandhi invoked America’s own independence struggle, justifying Bangladesh’s statehood by misusing words from Thomas Jefferson: “the Government of Bangla Desh is supported by the ‘will of the nation, substantially expressed.’ ”64
India’s recognition of Bangladesh was not just about preventing chaos or a power vacuum, or enshrining the Awami League in power. It meant to prove that this was not a war of conquest. “The act of recognition shows a voluntary restraint which we have imposed upon ourselves,” Haksar instructed Indian officials. “It signifies our desire not to annex or occupy any territory.” To underline Bangladesh’s independence, Indian officials scrambled to find photographs and film of Bengali guerrillas fighting for their own country, or of Bengalis welcoming the Indian army as liberators. Gandhi publicly declared, “We do not want anybody’s territory.”65
In Washington, Nixon and Kissinger were usually contemptuously dismissive of the United Nations. But once the war started, they suddenly discovered the usefulness of the world organization—as a cudgel against India. By getting the United Nations Security Council to demand pulling back all troops, they could deny India its battlefield victory. As Nixon said, “the Indians are susceptible to this world public opinion crap.”66
So India’s war effort became reliant on Soviet diplomats in New York, temporizing or vetoing, buying enough time for General Manekshaw’s troops to win in Bangladesh. (This was particularly awkward since the Soviet Union had long warned India against a war in the subcontinent.) Kissinger bluntly explained to Nixon, “At the Security Council, the Indians and Soviets are going to delay long enough so a resolution cannot be passed. If it was, the Soviets would veto. UN will be impotent. So the Security Council is just a paper exercise—it will get the Post and Times off our backs. And the Libs will be happy that we turned it over to the UN.… [T]his proves that countries can get away with brutality.”67
For three exasperating days, while Indian troops battled toward Dacca, the Security Council debated and delayed. Confirming India’s worst fears of the United Nations, the Nixon administration secretly worked with China to poleax India. On December 4, George H. W. Bush, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, offered a resolution for an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of troops—which would undo the Indian campaign for Bangladesh. Nixon laid out their party line to Bush: “if you want to put it, we’re not pro-Pakistan or pro-Indian, but we are pro-peace.”68
Bush, while assiduously dodging any direct reference to Pakistani atrocities, condemned India for attacking “in violation of the United Nations Charter.” Brushing aside any discussion of the origins of the conflict, he said, “This has been a full-scale invasion in East Pakistan and it must stop.” The Indian foreign ministry, stung at being labeled an aggressor by a superpower at war in Vietnam, privately groused that the United States had encouraged Pakistan’s “unprovoked and naked aggression” and “genocide in East Pakistan.” When Pakistan decried India’s interference in its internal affairs as a brazen transgression of the United Nations Charter, Indian diplomats countered far and wide that “genocide in Bangla Desh … is not an internal matter of Pakistan and is the concern of the international community, under the Genocide Convention and other international instruments.”69
The Indian foreign ministry secretly slammed Bush as “completely pro-Pakistan,” ignoring the Bangladeshis’ plight. For his part, Bush took showy offense at Indian advocacy. He boasted to Nixon that when one of India’s diplomats had dared to mention the president by name, Bush had “climbed on him.” He was having fun. He told Nixon, “it’s been fantastic.”70
Nixon and Kissinger relished the absurdity of the pinstriped show in New York. The U.S. resolution overpoweringly carried the day, winning eleven votes, with only the Soviet Union—which cast a veto—and its satellite Poland defending India. If there was an anti-Indian resolution, Kissinger explained, “the Russians will veto it,” and if “it’s anti-Pakistan, the Chinese will veto it.” Nixon burst out laughing. Standing firm, they had Bush introduce another similar resolution, daring the Soviet Union to veto again. As draft resolutions piled up, the Soviet Union made a second veto for India, despite another embarrassing vote of eleven to two. Kissinger told Nixon, about the Soviets, “They are having a good time.”71
Kissinger warned the Soviet Union that “we are at a watershed in our relationship,” while Nixon sent Leonid Brezhnev a letter harshly complaining that he was supporting Indian force against Pakistan’s independence and integrity. Kissinger urged Nixon to confront the Soviets: “Every time we’ve been tough with them they’ve backed off.”72
By the night of December 6, the hopelessly deadlocked Security Council gave up, punting the whole mess to the General Assembly. Bush neatly elided the difference between the atrocities against Bengali civilians and his own accusations of Indian aggression: “Stopping the slaughter, stopping the invasion somehow seems to our people to be desperately important.” He eagerly told Nixon that “there was a strong groundswell. The minute we made our resolution, in that first resolution, the U.S. resolution, that got beat eleven to two, many ambassadors, not on the Security Council, that had never voted with us, Zambia, Tanzania, Morocco, came up and said we ought to go to the General Assembly. This is an excellent position. We don’t sometimes vote with the U.S. but you’re absolutely right.”73
The next day, December 7, India faced a global verdict on the war. In a crushingly lopsided tally, fully 104 countries voted for a resolution calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal.74
This was a worldwide repudiation of India’s case for liberating Bangladesh. Indians fumed that these same governments had been desultory in preventing carnage or providing for the refugees. Despite plangent appeals from Indira Gandhi and her team, India only won backing from the Soviet Union, a few Soviet satrapies and satellites, and neighboring little Bhutan (Nixon snapped, “Bhutan isn’t a country, for Christ’s sake”)—just eleven votes, a tenth of what the United States and China together mustered. Bush told Nixon that “we got strong support through Africa and through the Arab countries.” India was abandoned by the Non-Aligned Movement, including Yugoslavia, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. This vote had no binding authority, but it was tremendously humiliating.75
Nixon and Kissinger were jubilant. “Hoh, Christ!” laughed Nixon. He told Kissinger, “The Indian lovers are a breed apart. But by God they don’t rule in the UN, do they?” The president gloated at the slap to India’s supporters in the United States, particularly Ted Kennedy. Kissinger concurred: “these damn liberals, what can they say? Security Council eleven to two? And the General Assembly 104 to eleven?”76
The most ebullient American was George Bush, who sounded like he had just won the war himself. When Nixon telephoned to congratulate him, he could hardly contain his joy. “We felt very, very good about it,” Bush told Nixon, who sounded like he could not get off the phone fast enough. Despite strong Soviet and Indian lobbying, Bush said, “all they got was their Iron Curtain.” He explained that “there was total agreement on the principle of ceasefire and withdrawal, which we had—you made fundamental to what was—and the fact also that India, in spite of its sanctimony, was really the aggressor.”
This set off Nixon, who fumed, “the Indians put on this sanctimonious peace Gandhi-like Christ-like attitude, and they’re the greatest, the world’s biggest democracy, and Pakistan is one of the most horrible dictatorships.” Bush followed Nixon’s lead, saying he had told the United Nations, “look, we’re talking about war and peace. We’re talking about invasion. We’re talking about 150,000 troops in the other guy’s country.” This was the early voice of the future president who would two decades later go to war to undo Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Still, showing a bit of bad conscience over the Pakistani atrocities that they were not mentioning, Bush said, “that’s the point where the United States is right. We’re trying to stop that. We’re not whitewashing Yahya.” Nixon pointed to the administration’s success in using its influence on Yahya over the refugees, United Nations observers, and talks with, as he put it, “Mujib deal and all that jazz.” Nixon admitted that much of the criticism of Yahya’s government was “justified,” but ringingly said that “it does not justify resort to invasion of another country. If we ever allow the internal problems of one country to be justification for the right of another country, bigger, more powerful, to invade it, then international order is finished in the world. That’s really the principle, isn’t it?” Bush agreed enthusiastically: “That’s the fundamental. And that’s why they lost the vote.”
Nixon warmed to the principle that a sovereign government could do whatever it wanted inside its own borders. He conceded that “as far as Yahya is concerned, there’s no clean hands there either. I mean, they handled this very clumsily, very badly.” But he and Bush reserved their anger for the Indians. The president growled, “They’re caught in a bloody bit of aggression.” He gave Bush his marching orders: “the main thing, as I say, all this yak, if you can constantly emphasize that world opinion, world opinion, it isn’t a question of being pro-democracy or against—anti-democracy, it’s not a question of being for six hundred million as against sixty million. Aggression is wrong. And the difference in size between countries does not justify it. The difference in systems of governments does not justify it. Aggression on the part of a democracy, if it is not justified, is just as wrong as aggression on the part of a dictatorship.” He concluded, “It is aggression that is wrong. That’s what the UN is built upon, after all. Those goddamn communist countries are all, if they engage in it, it’s wrong on their part, but if a democracy engages in aggression, it’s wrong.”
Bush had much more to say, but Nixon cut him off, said, “Knock ’em dead,” and hung up without saying goodbye.77
At home, Nixon and Kissinger unleashed the full power of the White House to brand the war to Americans as flagrant Indian aggression. Any way they could—from Kissinger’s background briefings, Vice President Spiro Agnew, White House flacks, cabinet secretaries, State Department officials, and surrogates in Congress such as Gerald Ford—they got the word out. “Let the Indians squeal,” said Nixon. “Let the liberals squeal.”78
“I want a public relations program developed to piss on the Indians,” Nixon told Kissinger. “I want to piss on them for their responsibility.” He fumed, “I want the Indians blamed for this, you know what I mean? We can’t let these goddamn, sanctimonious Indians get away with this. They’ve pissed on us on Vietnam for 5 years, Henry.”79
The White House skillfully took advantage of Americans’ distaste for the Vietnam War. “Let’s let our opponents side with India at this time, with this aggression,” said Nixon. “People don’t like war. They’ll turn against it.”80
Kissinger set out to make the case against the Indians to the White House press corps. He contemptuously said that “of course, they are bleeding about the refugees. But it’s beginning to tilt against India.” In a press background briefing, he kept a straight face while saying that he was unaware if Nixon preferred Pakistan’s leaders over India’s. While deploring to the reporters the American public’s “love affair with India,” he privately grew confident that American support for India was shallow. He told Nixon, “The sons-of-bitches in this country can piss on you as much as they want.” He explained that “our liberal establishment” is “morally corrupt, but it’s also intellectually so totally corrupt. What they’re telling you is, in effect, to preside over the rape of an ally.” He added, “I don’t know which American likes India.” “Nobody,” said Nixon. “Except those intellectuals who are against you,” Kissinger added.81
Once the war started, Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats could not compete with the president’s bully pulpit. Nixon and Kissinger lashed back at their Democratic critics, encouraging Republican allies in Congress to decry India. After the United Nations General Assembly’s vote, Nixon gloated to Kissinger, “God damn, I must say, these Churches, Henry, and these Kennedys, and the New York Times, and the rest, and Time, they’ll look at that vote.” Kissinger urged him to go on the attack against Kennedy.82
Nixon thought of himself as a man of ideals, and justified his policies as a necessary moral stand against aggression. He insisted that something “that State needs to get pounded into its goddamned head” was that U.S. policy was not determined by “whether a country is a democracy or whether it is not a democracy.” He told Kissinger, “By God, we just don’t do it that way.… [A]n evil deed is not made good by the form of government that executes the deed, Henry. I mean, as I’ve often said, the most horrible wars in history have been fought between the Christian nations of Western Europe.” Aggression, he argued, was worse when committed by a democracy, because democracies should have higher moral standards. With satisfaction, he added, “I really think that puts the issue to these sons-of-bitches.”83
Driven by the White House’s campaigning, the American mood swung against India. Despite unease about Nixon’s own handling of the subcontinent’s war, Americans came to sympathize somewhat more with Pakistan than India. Many more Americans simply tuned out, not caring about either side or not being sure what was going on. As the president told Kissinger, “People don’t give a shit whether we’re to blame—not to blame—because they don’t care if the whole goddamn thing goes down the cesspool.” Nixon, while regretting that public opinion did not allow him to do more to help Pakistan, was reassured. “[T]hey’re not going to touch us with this thing,” he said. “Because, by God, the country doesn’t give a shit.”84
Kissinger was relieved. As the Pakistan army faced defeat in the east, he said, with his voice dripping contempt, “That means no one can bleed anymore about the dying Bengalis.”85