Imperial Benevolence of USA Towards India: Chapter 9
Even before the birth of Bangladesh, the Bengalis were collateral damage for realigning the global balance of power. That is not an interpretation. It is what Kissinger told his staff. We cannot turn on Pakistan after they gave us an airport, we massacre them. In this usage massacre meant applying diplomatic pressure. The actual massacre happening in East Bengal with American weapons was simply collateral ‘damage’. The migration of ten million Bengalis to India did not even register his intellectual talk.
The Price of the China Channel
USA, in 1971, was reeling under severe economic crises. Inflation was out of hand. Labour Unions were loggerheads with Nixon. He found a solution. He decided to take jobs elsewhere. A place which was dirt cheap and had no laws like USA.They found China. This was a policy Nixon did not discuss in public. He decided the way Yahya Khan had decided about Operation Searchlight.
In China Mao Zedong was facing political challenges. He had just foiled an assassination attempt by coup in plot known as Project 571. He needed something for his popularity. American recognition of his leadership could do what nothing else could do before.
Nixon and Kissinger needed a secret back channel to Beijing. They found one through Yahya Khan, the dictator of Pakistan. He carried their messages back and forth between Washington and the Chinese leadership. The arrangement required Yahya Khan to remain in power, to remain useful, and to remain grateful.
Kissinger secretly met Chinese diplomats at a CIA safe house in New York, shared American intelligence with them, suggested that India had left its northern border exposed, and encouraged China to mobilize troops to threaten India from the north. He was asking a communist dictatorship to threaten a democracy on behalf of a military junta committing genocide, in order to protect a diplomatic back channel to another communist dictatorship.
When the December war began and Pakistan’s air force struck Indian airfields in a final act of military folly, Nixon sent the USS Enterprise carrier battle group into the Bay of Bengal. Its purpose was to intimidate India into stopping its campaign before Pakistan’s eastern command collapsed. India’s navy had been expecting it. Vice Admiral Krishnan commanding the eastern fleet considered having a submarine torpedo the American fleet to slow it down. He decided against it. The Soviet Union sent its own vessels in response. The Americans blinked.
Nixon privately called Indira Gandhi names that are on the White House tapes. Kissinger called Indians as ‘sons of bitches’ in press background briefings while keeping a straight face with reporters. When the war ended and Bangladesh was born, Kissinger told Nixon: why would we give a damn about Bangladesh. Nixon agreed. We don’t.
Kissinger suppressed intelligence reports about Pakistani genocide reaching his desk because they complicated the narrative. It earned Nixon a dubious distinction. His biography as also the biography of Hitler is not found in any public or college library in India. Nixon thought he never forgave India. Kissinger wrote about it bitterly for the rest of his life. Both were intellectually buried in India. A population of 1.4 billion grew up without knowing who they were.
They were not embarrassed. They were proud. Kissinger told Nixon they had saved the China option. The dead Bengali were the price of that option. In Kissinger’s own later accounting, the suffering of the Bengalis fell clearly under Pakistan’s domestic jurisdiction.
Later, in February 1972 President of the United States Richard Nixon visited Beijing and shook hands with Mao Zedong, That was the only thing that mattered.
The American Weapons
Senator Ted Kennedy toured the refugee camps in August 1971. He saw children shot through the side. He saw a woman shot in the stomach. He saw children dying along roads while parents pleaded for help. He testified that this was the most appalling tide of human misery in modern times, fueled by American-supplied military hardware.
He was correct about the hardware. Pakistani F-86 Sabre jets and M-24 Chaffee tanks had been confirmed by Blood’s own team. American weapons supplied for the defence of the free world against communist aggression were being used to hunt Hindu families house to house in East Bengal.
When the December war began and it became clear that India might win decisively, Nixon and Kissinger arranged to transfer F-104 fighter jets to Pakistan from Jordan and Iran. When Pentagon officials reminded Kissinger that this was illegal under American law, Kissinger told Nixon and the Attorney General to just close our eyes and get the planes in there.
They attempted to break the law of their own country to keep American weapons flowing to a government committing genocide. The planes did not arrive in time to matter. Bangladesh was born anyway. But the intent was documented and unambiguous.
The Hamoodur Rahman Commission
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who succeeded Yahya Khan, established a judicial commission led by Pakistan’s chief justice to investigate the military defeat in East Bengal. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission produced a scathing record of corruption, incompetence, and atrocity. It confirmed that a very large number of unprovoked and vindictive atrocities did in fact take place. It recorded senior officers asking how many Hindus have been killed. It recorded written orders to kill Hindus. It called for courts martial of Yahya Khan, Niazi, and other senior commanders.
Bhutto suppressed the report entirely. It leaked in fragments to an Indian magazine in 2000 and to Karachi’s Dawn newspaper in 2001. Bhutto’s own verdict on the genocide was philosophical. You can’t build without destroying. To build a country, Stalin was obliged to use force and kill. Mao Tse-tung was obliged to use force and kill. As for the women who were raped and killed, he said flatly: I don’t believe it.
Pakistan’s own judiciary produced the verdict. Pakistan’s own politicians buried it. America never bothered about human life out of Europe or America.
The Surrender
India had been preparing since April. General Manekshaw had told Indira Gandhi that he needed time, that the monsoons would bog down Indian tanks, that the Himalayan passes needed to close before China could intervene. Gandhi waited. By December the passes were closed, the monsoons were over, and the Mukti Bahini had been fighting for eight months.
On the morning of December 16, Major General JFR Jacob flew to Dacca in an unarmed aircraft and landed on an unsecured airfield. He drove through Pakistani-held territory to the Governor’s house. He found General Niazi and told him he had thirty minutes to agree to surrender or face the resumption of hostilities and the bombing of Dacca. As Jacob walked out he thought, my God, I have nothing in my hand.
Niazi had ninety three thousand troops and could have fought street by street through Dhaka. Jacob calculated correctly that Niazi’s nerve had broken and that a show of confidence would produce surrender faster than force. It did.
That afternoon on the Dacca Race Course, ninety three thousand Pakistani soldiers surrendered to General Aurora. Niazi handed his pistol across. Crowds surged into the streets shouting Joi Bangla, firing bullets into the sky. General Aurora was hoisted aloft on the shoulders of leaping, cheering Bengalis.
When Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times told Jacob that the surrender of a Pakistani general to a Jewish Indian general made one hell of a story, Jacob indignantly told him not to write it. Jacob was not a Jewish general. He was an Indian general. His ancestors had come from Baghdad to Bengal in the eighteenth century. His Promised Land was India.
The most American weapons ever deployed against India had produced the largest military surrender since the Second World War. Ninety three thousand soldiers. Thirteen days. One barely armed General on an unarmed aircraft on an unsecured airfield, secured the surrender.
America Found Its Tongue
The State Department finally expressed concern.
Nixon expressed anger at India. Kissinger expressed satisfaction at having saved the China option. Blood went to a desk job. Keating was muzzled. The Enterprise turned back. Yahya Khan was eventually replaced by Bhutto, who suppressed the commission report, denied the rapes, and put Tikka Khan the Butcher of Bengal in charge of the army.
Tikka Khan later became a leader of the Pakistan People’s Party. He died in 2002. He never faced a court.
The ten million refugees who had flooded into India, eighty to ninety percent of them Hindu, went home. The border states of Tripura, West Bengal, Meghalaya, and Assam, which had been crushed under the weight of the influx, slowly recovered. The Bangladeshi intellectuals, doctors, and professors kidnapped and executed by pro-Pakistani militias on the eve of surrender, specifically to cripple the leadership of the emerging nation, remained dead.
Bangladesh was born.
America had tried to prevent it, had sent a carrier battle group to stop it, had transferred illegal arms to reverse it, had suppressed its own diplomat who had documented it, and had covered for the government that had committed it.
Then America expressed concern.
The Long Shadow Today
Bangladesh is not a historical chapter. It is a living context.
Sheikh Hasina’s government fell in 2024 in a coup by workers of Zamat-e-Islami. Workers were carrying their flags high. USA chose to call them students.
Muhammad Yunus, installed as chief advisor of Bangladesh. He is a close associate of the Clintons. The American civil society networks that India’s FCRA amendments had been systematically choking for years were exactly the kind of networks that Bangladesh’s new government represents. When Rubio visited Kolkata and stopped at the Missionaries of Charity before anything else, he was signalling continued American interest in exactly those networks. India read the signal.
The land bridge to Southeast Asia runs through Bangladesh and through India’s northeastern states. Matthew VanDyke, arrested by India for espionage, was operating in precisely that corridor. The geography of 1971, East Bengal as the strategic hinge between India’s east and its northeast, is the same geography that matters today.
America built the Pakistani military that committed the genocide of 1971. America protected it diplomatically. America tried to save it militarily. America punished the diplomat who told the truth about it. America then spent the next fifty years continuing to arm and fund the same military establishment that had carried out the killing.
NSA, Doval, was posted in Pakistan as an undercover operative for years. He knows what the Pakistani military establishment is. He watched it from the inside.
Rubio came to talk about partnership. He was sitting across from a man who had read every file, crossed every border, and remembered every chapter that America has preferred to forget.
India received him politely, as is its tradition. The muted welcome Rubio received was the return gift to USA for decades of benevolence towards India.
References
Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013)
Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangla Desh (Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1971)
Archer Blood and the Dissent Cable
Nixon White House Tapes on India-Pakistan
Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report