Part III: The Blood Telegram: India’s secret war in East Pakistan by Gary J. Bass

Presidential prejudice and an advisor’s chicanery

Richard Nixon had a visceral hatred of Indians and a deep disdain for the Hindu faith. His antipathy towards India originated from a mix of racism, and an inferiority complex. On his first visit to India, in 1953, as Vice President to Eisenhower, he found Nehru’s (India’s first Prime Minister) Queen’s English delivered with impeccable diction, and British accent, so distant from his own expletive-ridden Americanese, irritating. He felt that this brown washed man had no business to have a scholarly grasp of global history. He found Nehru’s non-alignment, coupled with fondness for the Soviet Union, a classic example of Hindu deceit. Nixon was not a man to forget easily his first impressions. In contrast, his visit to Pakistan, the cantonment at stately Rawalpindi, and his meeting with the smartly dressed, but distinctly less intelligent Generals was rewarding. Pakistan readily aligned itself with the United States joining eagerly the CENTO and SEATO treaties, providing bases for the US within Pakistani territory, wringing in return, military aid in the form of 640 tanks, artillery, a submarine, sundry ships, B-57 bombers, F-86 sabre jets, interceptors, helicopters, and C-130 transport planes. Pesky Nehru fumed at the mighty US, and irritated Nixon further (pages 3-4).

Kissinger was Nixon’s shadowy National Security Advisor, with a nebulous role, distinct from, and independent of, the Secretary of State, with direct and unlimited access to Presidential facetime, in brief- a buddy. Kissinger instinctively knew how make himself indispensable. Inflame the President’s prejudices, echo his views, and shield him from independent advice. Here are a few of Nixon’s views on India:

(1)   “I don’t like the Indians”- at the height of the Bengali crisis (page 5, 262).

(2)   “The Indians need- what they need really is a mass famine”, to which Kissinger responds, “They’re such bastards” (page 144). This is in the context of India having to deal with the refugee problem single handedly.

(3)   “Why don’t they [Indians] shoot them [refugees]?” This to the American Ambassador to India, Keating who had come to urge aid for India to care for the refugees (page 153).

(4)   “The Indians are a slippery treacherous people”. Kissinger the man of the hour adding, that the Indians are “insufferably arrogant”, and “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” This in the context of Kissinger’s visit to India, Pakistan, and his secret visit to China in the aftermath (page 177).  

(5)   The State Department which had always taken an independent stand on this matter had recommended that Nixon take a tough approach towards Yahya including asking him to make peace with Awami League and stop destroying Hindu villages (page 209). This ignited Nixon. His response: “Sick Bastards”, said Nixon of those in the State Department who had supported Archer Blood and his telegram (page 211).

(6)   “I want a public relations program developed to piss on the Indians” & “I want to piss on them for their responsibility”, “I want the Indians blamed for this ---- we can’t let these goddamn, sanctimonious Indians get away with this.” This rant is in the context of the 14 day war that India had begun to swiftly win (page 286-7).

(7)   Not to be outdone by his boss, Kissinger, in a theatre of the absurd, more than once compared Yahya to Abraham Lincoln. Apparently Yahya was waging a civil war like Abe to keep the country together! See page 209 for one such instance.

What was the end result of these confabulations between the President and his intrepid Advisor?

(1)   Nixon cut off all aid to India, including the miniscule USD 70 million granted for refugee relief. This included the cancellation of critical radar equipment promised to India in the wake of the 1962 war with China, to guard our northern border.

(2)   China was informed of the cancellation of the supply of the radar equipment to India, a surreptitious hint that they could attack India’s northern border once again if they so desired.

(3)   The President approved the illegal transfer of American airplanes to Pakistan from third parties such as Jordan, Iran, and Turkey to compensate for the American-supplied jets that Pakistan had lost to the Indian air attacks on both frontiers.

(4)   The President ordered the famous seventh fleet, led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal in a threatening gesture. This was flowed by HMS Eagle of the UK Navy.

While these actions did not delay the Indian victory, they gave the wrong impression to Yahya that the big powers, such as China and the US would directly intervene against India- an illusion that the Pakistan’s Eastern Command hemmed in by the Indian forces from all sides did not entertain. They asked for permission to surrender on December 10^th, 1971 which was denied.  Instead they surrendered on December 16^th after Yahya, authorized the Eastern Command to decide independently on the matter, i.e., after effectively throwing the Eastern Command to the wolves.   

Part II: The Blood Telegram: India’s secret war in East Pakistan by Gary J. Bass

‘A selective genocide’ of Hindus in East Pakistan

The Preamble. Subsequent to the election held on 7^th December, 1970, the inaugural session of the National Assembly of Pakistan was proposed to be held on 3^rd March 1971. Yahya, Bhutto, and the West Pakistani political elite baulked at the idea of handing over power to a party from East Pakistan, and postponed the inaugural session indefinitely. After unprecedented protests in East Pakistan, a new date was announced, 25^th March 1971. Yahya flew into Dacca on 15^th March for negotiations, with Bhutto joining them on 22^nd March. There was really nothing much to negotiate. Mujib had won the election and he was not going to throw away his victory. Seeing that the ‘negotiations’ were at a dead end, Yahya suddenly flew back to West Pakistan on 25^th March 1971, leaving behind certain crucial instructions to the army. The instructions were to be followed starting from the time his flight would be landing in Rawalpindi. The command of the Pakistani army in the East was in the hands of Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan.

What were these instructions and how were they carried out?

On the night of 25^th March, 1971,

“The Pakistani military had launched a devastating assault on the Bengalis. Truckloads of Pakistani troops drove through the city [Dacca] --- U.S.- supplied M-24 tanks led some of the troop columns. Throughout Dacca, people could hear the firing of rifles and machine guns. Windows rattled from the powerful explosions from mortars or heavy weapons. The night turned red from burning cars and buildings. It was only near daybreak that the gunfire slowed” (page 50).

In other words Yahya had ordered ‘a night of the long knives’ to purge East Pakistan of the Awami League and its supporters.

This much is unsurprising. Even the most sanitized histories of the period record these atrocities carried out by the Pakistani army against the unarmed citizens of East Pakistan. This was but the partial truth. The whole truth? It remained hidden for thirty years.

What was the whole truth?

It is a cliché that the world is a connected place. It indeed was, even before the era of the internet.

American embassies are expected to implement their Government’s policy in the host nation. American government response to the crisis brewing in Pakistan, was a bland restatement of the UN charter that does not permit any country to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. The US considered Pakistan’s war with the citizenry of East Pakistan as Pakistan’s internal matter. However, the American government had made a special provision for the embassies and consulates to communicate directly to the State Department in case the local situation in the host country required a realignment of US foreign policy. This was a provision that was seldom invoked by the professional diplomats, who were trained to be automatons of the US State Department.

Archer Kent Blood was the Consul General at the American consulate in Dacca. He was a dispassionate observer of the events taking place around him, and a fearless reporter. He communicated the developments in East Pakistan starting 25^th December 1971 to his superior in the American Embassy at Islamabad (Pakistan’s capital). This gentleman, Joseph S. Farland, was pro-West Pakistan, and aligned with Yahya. He did not forward any of these blood curdling communications to the US State Department.

Blood, then invoked the special provision to communicate news of what he called the ‘selective genocide’ of the Hindus by means of a telegram to the State Department- what has since become famous as The Blood Telegram, from which this book derives its title. These communications remained confidential, until they were declassified in 2001, after thirty years, in keeping with the American rules governing such matters. A vast amount of correspondence between the different arms of the US Government, the White House (President Richard Nixon), and the National Security Advisor (Henry Kissinger) saw the light of day.

The author Gary J. Bass has studied these documents in a detail that defies imagination (see the 150 pages of citations printed in closely spaced lines in a small font size). Collating the contents, with the Indian documents of the period obtained from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), chiefly the P.N. Haksar (Advisor to the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) papers and D. P. Dhar (India’s envoy to the Soviet Union) papers, the Author puts out a coherent and exhaustive history of the events. The true story, suppressed by all the players, Indian Government included, is revealed for the first time. The result is stunning.

(1)   The West Pakistani political elite ‘scorned Bengalis- even the Muslim majority- as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them” (Page 81). “The West Pakistani army seems bent on eliminating them [Hindus]; their rationale, by eliminating Hindus, Pakistan purifies itself, rids itself of ---anti-Islam elements” (page 82).

(2)   By removing the Hindus “Pakistan will have ridded itself of ten million undesirables --- and East Pakistan’s total population will have been reduced enough to return it once again to minority position, thereby allowing continued domination by the West” (page 82).

(3)   India would be forced to accept the fleeing Hindus into its fold, and such a population drive would disrupt normal life in India to Pakistan’s advantage.

These objectives drove an unprecedented assault on the Hindu population in East Pakistan. In old Dacca, an area comprising two dozen blocks, mainly Hindu residences, were razed. The Pakistani soldiers entered the Dacca University and fired at students and teachers residing there. “Some of the worst killings of civilians, according to students, took place at Jagannath Hall, the Hindu dormitory” (page 54). The Hindu faculty were selected and shot dead. In short, what was being perpetrated was a ‘selective genocide’.

 “There was, Archer Blood thought, no logic to this campaign of killings and expulsions of the Hindus, who numbered about ten million- about 13 percent of East Pakistan’s population. Later he would call it ‘criminally insane’. There was no military need for it. The Hindus were not the nucleus of any armed resistance. They were unarmed and dispersed around East Pakistan. – and were outliers in a Pakistani nation defined in Muslim terms” (page 82).

The response of the US Government? Blood was removed from his post in Dacca at April end, and transferred to an insignificant desk job in the State Department. However reports of the persecution of Hindus were continuously dispatched from Dacca even after Blood’s removal. And the exodus of refugees to India fleeing persecution had reached ‘biblical’ proportions (page 119).

“The first wave of refugees was made up of a great many Bengali Muslims, but as early as mid-April ---by official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus. --- India secretly recorded that by middle of June, there were some 5,330,000 Hindus, as against 443,000 Muslims and 150,000 from other groups. Many Indian diplomats believed that the Hindus would be too afraid ever to go back” (page 121). The Indian Government kept these statistics secret, fearing that the truth would incense its citizenry and the parliament; the latter was already pressing the Government to go to war with Pakistan. 

Finally, “On May 22, after almost two months of targeted slaughter of the Hindus of East Pakistan, Farland [American ambassador in Islamabad, and a Yahya acolyte] finally gingerly raised these killings with Yahya, in a tense meeting at the President’s house in Karachi” (page 149). Farland had begun to feel qualms of his conscience. Yahya’s response? He replaced the fearsome Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan with Lt. Gen. A. A. K. Niazi.

By late June, an estimated 200,000, most of them Hindu Bengalis had been killed according to the information received by the US Government. Reference to the ‘selective genocide of the Hindus’ and “Hindus leaving because of specific persecution”, can be found in multiple citations throughout this book, from independent, and uninterested sources (see pages 152, 154, 202, 203, 208, 235, 236, 260).

The most incisive of these citations was from the CIA, which operated based on its own independent sources.

 “The CIA had a blunt explanation for this “incredible” migration: “many if not most of the Hindus fled for fear of their lives”. --- 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 possible 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” (page 236). 

By end June, everyone in the State Department, the Nixon administration including his Advisor Henry Kissinger were aware of this information (page 148).

But President Richard Nixon remained unmoved, although the genocide was being carried out American arms and American supplied ammunition, the supplies remained on-going even during the genocide.

The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan by Gary J Bass

 Part 1: The Birth of Bangladesh

A generational memory lasts about twenty years. Fifty three years after its birth, the current generation of adults, born twenty years after 1971, have at best a foggy memory of the events that led to the birth of Bangladesh. Let us first recapitulate those momentous events which led to the birth of a country.

But first, the birth of Pakistan. Pakistan, India’s invalid twin, was born out of Jinnah’s call for lebensraum (literally ‘living space’, metaphorically, a homeland) for the subcontinent’s Muslims. Therein lay the disease- an uncompromising sectarian constitution. After much negotiation two non-contiguous Muslim majority areas separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, one towards the west (the current day Pakistan), and the other on the east (East Bengal, current day Bangladesh), were selected for the formation of Pakistan. On the eve of partition and independence, a mass, unorganized but incomplete exchange of populations took place, with Punjab and Bengal bearing the brunt. Hindus from East Bengal trudged westwards, and Muslims from West Bengal trudged eastwards. This mass migration took place in the midst of much violence fanned by the Muslim League. Despite this migration, at the time of independence, 24% of the population of East Pakistan (the erstwhile East Bengal) were Hindus. Among those who trudged eastwards were a significant number of Muslims from the Indian state of Bihar. In East Pakistan, they were referred to as Biharis, this term, in later years became a pejorative for the Urdu speaking non-Bengali population. 

What was wrong with Pakistan? While being united by their religion- this unity being expressed in their anti-Hindu sentiments, the two wings of Pakistan were divided in every other way possible. The West was dominated by the Urdu (and Punjabi)-speaking Punjabi Mussalmans, who felt that they were the original inheritors of Islamic sovereignty. Their strong sense of identity had its origin in the British theory of martial races, which considered Punjabi Muslims to be martial, and the Bengalis to be effeminate, and non-martial. There was something ironic about this theory, given that the most serious threats to British rule had arisen from the mutiny in the Bengal Army in 1857, and the twentieth century revolutionaries from Bengal! But this theory, reinforced the self-image of the West Pakistanis as the natural rulers of the new state of Pakistan. Consequently, from 1947-1971, Pakistani politics was dominated by individuals from the West, and there was almost continuous agitation in the East for equitable power sharing, distributive justice, and development. This state of unstable equilibrium could have in principle, continued indefinitely. However it was rudely interrupted when Gen. Yahya Khan, the then martial law ruler- who had seized power in 1969 after deposing Gen. Ayub Khan- who had himself seized power in 1958, and lost a disastrous war with India in 1965, decided to conduct elections on 7^th December 1970, with a view to hand over power to an elected civilian government. Yahya could have rigged the elections, and contrived a pre-determined result to keep power within the West Pakistani ruling elite. But he unwittingly permitted the very first free and fair election in Pakistan.

The result was a monumental disaster. As it happened, East Pakistan was more populous compared to West Pakistan, and consequently had a larger number of seats. In East Pakistan, the Awami League headed by the charismatic Sheikh Mujibur Rehman (father of the recently toppled Sheikh Hasina) swept the polls winning 167 out of the 169 seats. In the West, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) headed by Z. A. Bhutto won 86 out of the 144 seats. On the basis of the principle of parity, Mujibur Rehman-headed Awami League should have formed the government with the Bhutto-headed PPP in opposition. However Yahya and Bhutto refused to hand over power to a party, and a Prime Minister hailing from the East. The inauguration of the National Assembly (Pakistan’s Parliament) was indefinitely postponed, and confabulations began to deprive the Awami League of its election victory. When the Awami League did not relent, and negotiations hit a dead end, Yahya imprisoned Mujib, and unleashed a war of attrition against his own Bengali population in East Pakistan, leading to a massive influx of refugees into India. With the burden of this humanitarian relief becoming unbearable, India invaded East Pakistan to restore law and order there, and facilitate the return of the refugees to their own land. The Indian armed forces won a short (4^th-16^th December 1971), intense war and liberated Dacca (now Dhaka) in under twelve days, securing the surrender of over 97000 Pakistani soldiers, the largest surrender ever after the Second World War. The end of the war saw the birth of Bangladesh and the installation of the Awami League government under Sheikh Mujibur Rehman.

This is a brief sanitized version of the events that led to the birth of Bangladesh.

  

Savarkar and Hindutva- The Godse Connection by A. G. Noorani

 Partisan Polemics

The Hippocrates Oath obliges a doctor to tend to any patient who seeks care without discrimination. Lawyers operate under a similar ethic, which requires them to legally defend any person needing help without discrimination. By implication, a lawyer is trained to look at all sides of the law. The author of this brief book was an eminent lawyer, scholar, author and critic. He famously defended Sheikh Abdullah [grandfather of the incumbent Chief Minister of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir], the ‘Prime Minster’ of Jammu and Kashmir who was jailed by the Union Government for his support to insurgents.

In this slim book on Savarkar, Noorani had the opportunity to examine Savarkar from all angles of the law. To say the least, Savarkar is deified and reviled in equal measure by large sections of the population of different persuasions. A controversial figure, Savarkar is the ideal subject for a scholarly lawyer’s all-encompassing legal vision. Unfortunately, Noorani fails the lawyer’s ethic. He assumes the role of a Judge, and pronounces his judgment in the very first paragraph of the Preface!

“He [Savarkar] was engaged in a political enterprise, and used history in the service of his politics of hate.”

Having passed the judgment at the outset, he sets about presenting the supporting evidence. He fails the test of an intellectual, and thereby, sadly reduces himself to the level of a partisan polemicist. A preview to his approach is evident in the Dedication:

“TO THE VICTIMS OF THE POGROM IN GUJARAT 2002 AND TO THE MEDIA, PRINT AND ELECTRONIC, WHICH DID INDIA PROUD”

He is not unique in presenting this slanted, and one sided view of the second most gruesome carnage in India’s contemporary history. He joins other authors in this vilification of India. See, my reviews of Graham Turner’s Catching Up with Gandhi, and David Hardiman’s Gandhi in His Times and Ours. As pointed out elsewhere, these latter two gentlemen are foreigners, who have no love lost for India. But for an Indian author, who led a privileged, eminent public life, to vilify the country of his birth by resorting to half-truths is to be not very decent. This reflects not on the country but on the individual.

For one, the pogrom of Gujarat 2002, did not just begin on one pleasant morning out of nowhere. It followed the 27^th February 2002 incident, in which 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were locked inside the compartment of a train and burnt to death by Muslim miscreants in Godhra. If Noorani was even-handed, the dedication to the book should have included these 58 innocent souls as well. In failing to acknowledge the killing of these innocent victims, and in including the entire media, he is inadvertently imputing his partisan perception to the Indian Media as well. I do not know how many in the Media will look upon this Dedication as a badge of honour.

I have called this the second most gruesome pogrom. Which is then the first most gruesome pogrom? This is undoubtedly the Anti-Sikh riots in which over 3000 Sikhs were killed by Congress sponsored goons in 1984, after the murder of Indira Gandhi. A Citizens Commission headed by Justice S. M. Sikri, former Chief Justice of India went on the ground to hold public hearings, and indicted 198 local Congress (I) (these days called the Indian National Congress of Rahul Gandhi) activists, 15 Congress leaders, and 143 Police Officials. The then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi famously said on the occasion that the earth shakes when a mighty tree falls.

If one goes further back in history to the 1948 assassination of the Mahatma by Godse, the Gujarat 2002 pogrom will be the third pogrom in independent India. For a person of Noorani’s generation, the first pogrom ever to take place in independent India is the selective ethnocide of Chitpavan Brahmins (the caste to which Godse belonged) following the Mahatma’s assassination. This was again at the behest of Congress politicians, and other sundry disciples of Gandhian non-violence! Nehru kept a Rajiv Gandhi-like silence on this episode (for more on this see Koenraad Elst, Gandhi and Godse). While in this book, Noorani castigates Savarkar, the alleged Mentor of Godse, did he feel compelled to write about Congress sponsored pogroms and its ideologues?

If you still want to read this book, go ahead. However there are several more biographies of Savarkar: sympathetic ones by Vaibhav Purandare, and a two volume work by Vikram Sampath. There is another titled Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, by Janaki Bakhle of the University of California, Berkeley. Evidently Savarkar is of interest not only to journalists, and scholars in India, but overseas scholars as well.

Statutory Warning: These are bulky tomes on a humorless personality. In the interest of your mental health, you could read other books.

Savarkar, fearful hate preacher or not, his followers are well and truly entrenched in power, with no credible challengers in view. As a local smart Alec once said: Either the Congress Party rids itself of Gandhi (not the Mahatma) or the Nation will rid itself of the Congress!