The Making of Bangladesh

1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh by Srinath Raghavan (New Delhi: Permanent Black), 2013; pp 358, Rs 795

Kanti Bajpai (sppkpb@nus.edu.sg) teaches at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore.

Srinath Raghavan has followed up his meticulously researched and finely written account of war and peace in the Nehru era with a state-of-the-art account of the Bangladesh war of 1971. As in War and Peace in Modern India, Raghavan relies on deep research, including considerable archival and some oral history material, to challenge the myths, legends, fables, and received wisdoms on Indian
strategic and military history. My review (2010) of his earlier book emphasised the importance of Raghavan’s work for the development of the Indian study of International Relations (IR) and more specifically for scholarship on its external policy (diplomacy and security policy). 1971: A Global History confirms that view.
The “historical turn” to Indian scholarship in IR and to the study of external policy is a relatively recent one. It is true of course that archival-based work amongst Indian IR scholars and in the oeuvre of Indian foreign policy studies was not unknown before Raghavan’s work. M S Venkatramani of the old Indian School of International Studies (ISIS), later the School of International Studies (SIS) at Jawaharlal Nehru University, was probably the pioneer, with his writings on United States’ (US) foreign policy towards south Asia. Venkatramani depended largely on US archives that became available in the 1970s. Sisir Gupta’s study of the Kashmir dispute is another key early text, which relied on more contemporary archives, that is, open-source documents and statements.
Over the past 60 years, Indian IR and studies of Indian external policy were typified by “relational studies” – India’s relations with various powers, analysed through a fairly standard “Realist lens” which refracted New Delhi’s choices, challenges, and responses in terms of the “national interest conceived of as the pursuit of power”, the Hans Morgenthau/common sense view of external policy. Relational studies were based largely on contemporary open-source materials available in the press, published official documents, secondary sources (books and academic journals), and some fieldwork that relied on interviews with Indian or foreign officials. It was not therefore archive-based research. It was more or less “breaking news”, rather than historical, and it was frequently prescriptive, advice aimed at The Prince, intended to help make better policy.
New Scholarship
The new historical turn by contrast is far more inductive and is willing to “unpack” what India’s interests were in a particular case. The newer scholarship digs into the archives, in India and abroad, resorts to oral history and interviews, and uses open-source material as well as secondary sources to parse Indian objectives and goals and the sources of its interests, both external and internal. It seeks to lay bare pivotal historical periods or episodes that continue to affect choices and policies in the present. It is not explicitly prescriptive but rather descriptive, interpretive, analytical, and critical. Its aim is to demystify, set the record straight, and better inform, so that citizens and policymakers may reflect on past errors and successes and take away lessons for the present and future. The new IR is inspired by international history and military history and is generally light on theory. As a result, it is highly readable and accessible to a non-academic audience as well.
A whole new generation of historically-minded young scholars who write about India’s external policy is coming to the fore, and Raghavan is surely the leader of the pack at this point with this, his second book. The “group” – most of those doing this work know each other personally and of course know of each other’s work – includes Manu Bhagavan, Rudra Chaudhuri, Tanvi Madan, Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Pallavi Raghavan and Kate Sullivan, amongst others.
Emerging Work on Bangladesh
Raghavan’s 1971 must also be set in the context of emerging work on the Bangladesh crisis. The year 2011 was the 30th anniversary of the Bangladesh war, and it was marked by the publication of Sarmila Bose’s rather controversial book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Two years later saw the publication of Gary Bass’s The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf 2013), a monumental account of the Nixon-Kissinger White House and its role in US policy, and Raghavan’s 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. The three books allow us three different views of the Bangladesh crisis: Bose’s account is influenced heavily by East and West Pakistani views of the crisis; Blood primarily excavates the Nixon-Kissinger team’s and US’ perceptions; and Raghavan privileges India’s calculations and actions even as it deals illuminatingly with the policies of all the major players – the Pakistani government, Mujibur Rahman and the Bangladeshi resistance, the US, Soviet Union, China, Germany, France and Britain.
Before the recent spate of books on 1971, there was in fact a rather substantial gap in scholarship for nearly three decades. Two Indian books were useful initial statements on the causes and course of the crisis/war, namely, Mohammed Ayoob and K Subrahmanyam’s The Liberation War (1972) and Pran Chopra’s India’s Second Liberation (1974). Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (1978) was the most authoritative Pakistani account to be published in the wake of the war. There were of course several other works, including Bangladeshi accounts and other Pakistani accounts, which appeared in the three succeeding decades. What is striking though is the paucity of high-quality writings from the subcontinent on this – the most significant subcontinental war.
This is somewhat curious, but perhaps understandable. For Pakistanis, the crisis and war are painful reminders of their tortured politics and the defeat at India’s hands. For Bangladeshis, 1971 represents liberation, but the ups and down since then have been traumatic. In addition, the crisis, war, and subsequent events in the country are controversial subjects, and it would take some courage to attempt a detailed and detached history of the past 40 years. For Indians, 1971 is a fairly glorious moment. However, relations with independent Bangladesh have been difficult, to say the least, and there is a substantial view that its creation may have been a strategic mistake – or at least that New Delhi messed up the diplomatic and political opportunities created by the break-up of Pakistan. To revisit the episode is therefore to feel a sense of frustration at what followed in its wake.
If south Asian scholarship on the war has not been terribly impressive, international scholarship too has been rather disappointing. The rest of the world, like the subcontinent, largely wished the episode away. There were only two exceptions: Robert Jackson’s South Asian Crisis: India-Pakistan-Bangladesh (1975), perhaps the best academic analysis to appear after the crisis, a volume that has largely stood the test of time; and Richard Sisson and Leo Rose’s War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (1990), more than a decade after Jackson’s volume, which set the academic standard on the issue. Srinath Raghavan’s and the Bose and Bass volumes must be seen in this context. There is little doubt that they are today the three most notable books on the events of 1971. And to my mind it is Raghavan’s that is the most encyclopedic in its coverage – while he adverts to India’s views, calculations, and actions throughout the book, he also deftly and with nuance depicts the policies of all the other major players.
Strengths of the Book
What, then, does Raghavan tell us about 1971 that we did not already know and that controverts both the scholarly and popular view of the events from 15 March 1971 onwards? What are the strengths of the book beyond its use of archives and its attempt to bring together in one volume the policy approaches of all the major actors? There is an enormous amount of scholarship here and many small and bigger surprises, but let me highlight six key themes.
First of all, Raghavan attacks the “inevitability thesis” – that the sundering of Pakistan was more or less inevitable given the geographical, ideological, political and economic differences between the two wings of the country; and that war too, as events unfolded in East Pakistan, was a runaway freight train. Instead, chance, contingency, and conjuncture, and key moments of agency combined to destroy Pakistan and to give Bangladesh freedom through war.
Until quite late, perhaps as late as November 1971, Islamabad might have kept Pakistan united. Raghavan shows that for several months after Operation Searchlight began – the Pakistani army’s crackdown on the protest movement in East Pakistan – all the major actors including India were in varying degrees of opposition to an independent Bangladesh. The Bangladesh problem, he argues, could have been solved within a united Pakistan, and even New Delhi hoped that East Pakistani interests might be accommodated. Indira Gandhi and her principal advisors feared the consequences of secessionism, not the least because India had its own chronic secessionist movements to deal with. Raghavan puts to rest the myth that Indira Gandhi almost immediately in March 1971 ordered General Manekshaw and the Indian Army to prepare for intervention. Manekshaw’s recollection that he had to remonstrate with an interventionist-minded Indira Gandhi and hold back the dogs of war (because the Indian military was not ready), Raghavan shows, is simply wrong: Indira Gandhi was in no mood to act precipitously.
Second, India’s victory in Bangladesh was not assured in the least. Nor was it in fact the war-goal of either the political leadership under Indira Gandhi or the top Indian military leadership. The political-military goal was to have Indian troops carve out an enclave, install the government-in-exile in power in the enclave, provide the Mukti Bahini with greater aid and succour, and force Pakistan to reconsider its stance. It was only Generals Jacob and Sagat Singh and some other senior officers who dissented from the military plan at this stage and who ignored orders to stick to the plan when they found they were in a position to end Pakistani military resistance altogether. For the most part, few in the Indian decision-making chain imagined that an independent Bangladesh was around the corner.
Beginning of the War
Third, Raghavan shows that it was India that really began the war and was by late November 1971 itching for Pakistan to initiate hostilities. It has been fairly well known, at least since the early 1980s, that Indian forces were deep within East Pakistan by the third week of November 1971 and fought pitched battles in Boyra in support of the Bangladeshi resistance. Raghavan confirms this. He shows that by late November, as the diplomatic pressures on India steadily increased, as erstwhile supporters of India’s stand such as France and Britain started to equivocate, as the US leaned on the Soviets to curb India and on China to intervene against India, and as the UN refused to act against Pakistan, Indira Gandhi and her advisors realised that India might be stuck in a stalemate: the refugees would remain on Indian soil; the Pakistanis would refuse to negotiate with Mujib; and a festering, factionalised resistance would drag on. India therefore had to play a much more active military role. When the Pakistanis finally pulled the trigger and bombed Indian airfields in the western sector on 3 December, D P Dhar, travelling with Indira Gandhi on a plane from Calcutta, remarked: “The fool [Yahya] has done exactly what one had expected” (p 234).
Fourth, on the diplomatic front, Raghavan illuminatingly documents the attitudes of the US, Chinese, Soviets, Japanese, Germans, French, British, and Australians. The depth of the Nixon-Kissinger dislike of Indira Gandhi and India still surprises: the expletives, the vindictiveness, and the anger. Part of it was personal and almost ethnic, in the case of Nixon, who never hid his distaste for India or its leader, and part of it was a geopolitics that was obsessed with the opening to China and a perception that the Pakistani crisis and India’s role in it would jeopardise the US’ standing with Beijing. The Raghavan account suggests that the Nixon-Kissinger panic in the crisis also grew out of the desire to save face with their Chinese interlocutors, who they admired in a personal – as against a merely geopolitical – way. Raghavan reveals, scarily, that at one point, when Nixon seemed to sag, Kissinger goaded and egged him on. With an eye on China, Kissinger urged that Nixon be prepared for a military confrontation, up to and including a nuclear confrontation, with the Soviet Union if Moscow threatened Beijing.
What Raghavan tellingly shows, perhaps better than anyone so far, is that the Nixon-Kissinger reading of China was comically wrong if not inept. Despite their prodding Beijing, the Chinese remained circumspect and cautious throughout the crisis and showed no desire to intervene militarily. Kissinger tried valiantly to instigate the Chinese into causing trouble along the border with India in the opening days of the war. On 10 December, his meeting with the Chinese Representative to the UN, Huang Hua, was a complete failure and almost comedic. Kissinger argued grandiosely and increasingly huffily that Pakistan would become a virtual protectorate of India if it was broken up and that China should act; Hua replied stolidly that the US’ stand was “a weak one” and that in effect China thought it was better to take on India and the Soviets at another time and place. Kissinger left the meeting in some disarray.
China’s Caution
Why was China so cautious? Here too Raghavan offers a fresh interpretation. Part of the answer, he suggests, is that China and India were embarked on a diplomatic rapprochement of their own ever since Mao had talked to Brajesh Mishra in a diplomatic reception line in 1970. Part of the answer, and not unrelated to the incipient rapprochement, was that Beijing did not want to push New Delhi further into Moscow’s corner. Third, China’s internal politics were vital: Mao was busy recouping his own position within the People’s Liberation Army after the Lin Biao affair and did not want war. There was another more strategic calculation as well: the Chinese felt that East Pakistan could not be saved given how far things had gone internally. It is worth saying here that in recounting China’s attitude to the evolving crisis, Raghavan has in addition produced the best account I have seen of the rather protracted thaw between India and China in this period. As far as I know, the thaw in relations has never been analysed quite so thoroughly, and in any case, rarely finds much mention in accounts of Chinese behaviour during the Bangladesh crisis. Raghavan’s account suggests that Indira Gandhi used the opening rather astutely to disarm the Chinese diplomatically. She eventually wrote to Mao asking him almost plaintively how India should handle the difficult situation developing on its borders.
Soviet Union and India
Fifth, the Soviet Union, so often portrayed as firmly in India’s corner and more or less unquestioning of India’s stance, appears as almost fatally ambivalent on New Delhi’s increasingly hard stance. Going back to 1969, the Soviets had been keen to launch an Asian security initiative against China that would have drawn in both Pakistan and India. They were keen to sell arms to Pakistan as well and, in effect, to manage south Asia after the 1965 war. Right through the crisis and during the war, Moscow steadfastly counselled restraint on New Delhi, often confounding the Indian government – and this in spite of signing the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation (note: Raghavan does a masterly job of recounting the diplomacy leading up to its conclusion). In public statements, the Soviets were stubbornly even-handed. It was really only during Indira Gandhi’s September 1971 visit that the Soviets began to tilt openly towards India, and it took till late October for Indian Foreign Minister Swaran Singh to announce that India had Moscow’s “total support” (p 226). Thus, contrary to the view in India of unstinting Soviet support, and contrary also to the paranoid view in the US about the Soviet desire to humiliate the US and China, Moscow constantly worried about New Delhi’s handling of the situation and was anxious not to antagonise Washington.
Sixth, if Nixon-Kissinger failed to stir the Chinese, ironically they succeeded better with the Soviets. Raghavan shows that in the end the US pressures on the Soviets to lean on India did pay off – in the sense that Moscow exerted pressure on Indira Gandhi on the conduct of the war. Thus, crucially, during the war, the Soviet leadership urged India to speed things up in the east and to rein in its western campaign. When Indira Gandhi sent D P Dhar to reassure Moscow, he found Kosygin “shaking like a leaf” and insisting that India finish the war off quickly lest the US naval task force heading to the Bay of Bengal were to instigate an escalation of the conflict and draw the Soviets in. Raghavan’s account suggests that the image of the Soviets during this episode as being resolute and solid in the face of the US is not true. Moscow was surprisingly frail.
A Close Thing
Raghavan also shows nicely that American and Soviet pressures had a mixed result. If it was Washington’s intention to slow India down in East Pakistan, its pressures only increased India’s desire to go harder. On the other hand, on the western front, New Delhi ordered its military to be circumspect and to ensure that it did not alarm Pakistan or the international community. When Poland tabled a draft ceasefire resolution in the Security Council on 14 December 1971, it was clear that even the Soviets would not get in the way of a ceasefire resolution that would have put India in an awkward position. Fortunately for India, Bhutto, representing Pakistan at the UN, dramatically tore up the resolution in front of the Security Council and stormed out. “The Polish resolution”, Raghavan somewhat laconically concludes, “was buried”. What would the international community and India have done if India had not wrapped up the war in the ensuing 48 hours? Would New Delhi have defied the international community? Would the US aircraft carrier have been used if India had defied the UN? From Raghavan’s account, we can see that the war was much closely run than the triumphalist memory we have of 1971.
This is a rich book, and there is much else that is fresh and insightful in the account. For instance, it comes as something of a surprise that despite the US stand, the French and British were supportive of India almost to the end. Japan was sensitive to the refugee problem and defied the US in cutting off aid to the Aid Pakistan Consortium. On the other hand, it did little else. The Australians were forthrightly on India’s side on the humanitarian aspects of the crisis and quite early reconciled themselves to the necessity of intervention. The Canadians, internationalist in their diplomacy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, were buffeted about but were fairly conservative, in part because of their own separatist problems in Quebec. Germany was sympathetic and largely neutral. The third world was almost without exception opposed to India’s intervention and not terribly concerned about India’s refugee burden. Few accounts of the crisis bother with these secondary countries, and it is to Raghavan’s credit that he does so.
Provocative Argument
Raghavan also quite provocatively argues that had India intervened earlier, a more stable, united Bangladesh would have resulted and that this was in India’s interests. The protracted nature of the crisis caused bitter differences to emerge amongst the Bangladeshi resistance – ordinary resistance fighters, the Bangladeshi military led by Ziaur Rahman, various factions of the Awami League, and smaller political parties – and the province’s infrastructure, on which its subsequent development necessarily depended, was badly damaged during the civil and then international war. This counterfactual argument is certainly a defensible one – though it is an open question whether or not India’s ponderous armed forces and national security apparatus was/is capable of such categorical, expeditious analysis and action.
1971 is not without flaws. For instance, Raghavan’s attempt to locate the revolt in East Pakistan in the context of the worldwide upsurge of the 1960s and an incipient globalisation only works up to a point. The book opens with this larger setting, but except for Chapter 6 which deals with global civil society responses to the crisis there is scarcely any further adversion to globalisation. In any case, the opening remarks on globalisation are rather breathless and do not really satisfy. So also the references here and there to the crisis as an exemplar of the challenges facing humanitarian intervention are not terribly edifying, though certainly the book reinforces the point that international society is deeply conservative about intervention.
This attempt to lift the book up and beyond a strategic-diplomatic-political reconstruction of the crisis only partially succeeds. Raghavan bravely makes the point that the crisis is not just some relic of south Asian regional politics and the cold war but has larger resonance; yet, in the end, the account – detailed, revealing, often provocative, and always responsible and intelligent – remains largely that, namely, a wonderful international history of a consequential moment in south Asia’s history during the second phase of the cold war. Having said that, the size of the book is already considerable (260 pages of small print) and may well have militated against a more expanded discussion of the larger import of the crisis.
Finally, it must be said that Raghavan’s insistence that chance, contingency, and conjuncture are vital in understanding the course of events is at some level unexceptionable. The book returns to this theme now and then, but fails to use the argument very compellingly. The US opening to China in the midst of the crisis was certainly a fateful conjuncture, but this is well appreciated and not an original insight. Where Raghavan is more creative is in linking the crisis to the student movements and global protests of the 1960s and in suggesting that the explosion of the media at this time was a fateful coincidence. One could say possibly that it was chance and contingency that Yahya was at the helm in Pakistan, that Nixon and Kissinger with their dislike of India led the US, and Indira Gandhi who was equally repulsed by the US administration was the Indian prime minister, and that this conjuncture of personalities structured the crisis. Perhaps what Raghavan is really saying in plain language is that Indian policy evolved and that there was no straight line, grand plan to dismember Pakistan – which is fair enough. My own sense is that the book’s intoning of chance, contingency, and conjuncture is portentous but that in the end the deployment of these words functions more like a trope than a heuristic or analytical device of any force.
Best Account of the 1971 Crisis
These caveats aside, Srinath Raghavan’s global history of the 1971 crisis and war is the best account we have and is not likely to be surpassed in a hurry. It is meticulously and stylishly written and sets the highest standards. Raghavan is prolific, and 1971 is a worthy successor to his groundbreaking book on the Nehru years. Indian IR desperately needed a smart kick in the pants, and the historical turn has provided it. One of the reasons that the study of IR has not bloomed in India is that a wider reading public has not been drawn to its products. Nor have decision-makers found much in its writings they did not already know, and know better. Raghavan and this band of young historically-minded scholars are drawing more general readers to India’s external policy and are telling today’s decision-makers stories that they are not familiar with and do not know in any great depth. Their work is exciting and stimulating, and could signal the coming of age of Indian IR and the study of India’s external policy.