Forty years ago this week, one of the shortest wars in world history began. On December 3rd, India and Pakistan declared war and, only thirteen days later, it ended. While factually correct to dub it a “short” war, this label ignores tensions between the two countries that had been building for months as a result of the civil war in Bangladesh. India had been taking in refugees at more than 80 camps in West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura – the international community estimates there were 10 million refugees – and the Indians eventually began providing military support and training to the Mukti Bahini rebel forces in East Pakistan. It was not just the war atrocities and the increasing difficulty of managing the refugee camps that drove India to enter the conflict. Geopolitics, and specifically the Cold War, meant that the USA, Russia, China and much of Western Europe had a great deal of interest in how the conflict developed.
To get a sense of the geopolitical rhetoric of the day, check out some of the more recently declassified documents from the US State Department. In 2005, it released records which concern relations between the USA and South Asia in this time period. In one of them, US President Richard Nixon calls Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi “an old witch” and the people of India “slippery and treacherous…the most aggressive goddamn people around.” There are 335 documents related to the South Asia Crisis, 1971, available at the website of the State Department’s Office of the Historian. You can also find among these the infamous cable message from US Consul General Archer Blood in which he and 28 other Americans strongly protest the atrocities being committed in the war in East Pakistan and the lack of US action. Once President Nixon found out about the telegram, Blood was immediately transferred from Dhaka.
Taking into account international interest in the conflict, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appealed to the international community for assistance. On 31 October 1971, she spoke to the India League in London.
“I feel that I am sitting on the top of a volcano and I honestly do not know when it is going to erupt. So the question is not of how restrained we are today, but of what will happen across the border. We think this is the responsibility of the international community to see that a way out is found. Obviously, the best way, the most humane way, is to have a political settlement and that political settlement can only be with the elected leader of the people of Bangla Desh, and with the elected and accepted representatives of that country.”
But there was no political settlement. On the evening of December 3rd, Pakistan launched a preemptive air attack centred on military installations in western India. (Among the places targeted was Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Anticipating the attacks, the monument, whose white marble is a beacon from an aerial perspective, had been camouflaged with twigs, leaves and burlap. As a result, it was not damaged in the air strike.) By midnight, Prime Minister Gandhi addressed the people of India on public radio and the Indian Air Force retaliated.
For thirteen days, on the ground, in the air and at sea, the two countries battled. On the eastern front, in what was to become Bangladesh, the Indian forces joined with the Mukti Bahini, to capture the capital city, Dhaka. Once that happened, surrender followed. The Commander of the East Pakistani Forces in East Pakistan, Lt. Gen. A.A.K. Niazi, signed the Instrument of Surrender, along with the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Command of the Indian Army, Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora.
Officially, the wars were over – both the Indo-Pakistani War and Bangladesh’s Liberation War – and Bangladesh achieved independence. However, forty years later, the region continues to deal with the legacy of those conflicts. Compare this account of the news that the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni had asked very recently for a formal apology from the Pakistan government for the atrocities committed during the war to this account under the subheading “genocide.”
