The Blood Telegram Read online

  Worse, Haksar noted, the refugees would cause social tension and spark religious strife in volatile West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura. These border states, which had absorbed waves of refugees after Partition, were already poverty-stricken and notoriously unstable, and the Indian government dreaded the fiery leftist revolutionaries and Naxalites there. Since the people’s will was being stifled in East Bengal, Haksar secretly wrote that “extremist political elements will inevitably gain ground. With our own difficulties in West Bengal, the dangers of a link-up between the extremists in the two Bengals are real.”6

  The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus.7

  This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staffers had condemned as genocide. The population of East Pakistan was only 16 or 17 percent Hindu, but this minority comprised the overwhelming bulk of the refugees. India secretly recorded that by the 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.8

  The first wave of refugees was made up of a great many Bengali Muslims, but as early as mid-April, one of Gandhi’s top officials noted, India decided that Pakistan was systematically expelling the Hindus. The Indian government privately believed, as this aide noted, that Pakistan, by “driving out Hindus in their millions,” hoped to reduce the number of Bengalis so they were no longer the majority in Pakistan, and to destroy the Awami League as a political force by getting rid of “the ‘wily Hindu’ who was supposed to have misled simple Bengali Muslims into demanding autonomy.”9

  But the Indian government assiduously hid this stark fact from Indians. “In India we have tried to cover that up,” Swaran Singh candidly told a meeting of Indian diplomats in London, “but we have no hesitation in stating the figure to foreigners.” (Sydney Schanberg and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Kennedy administration’s ambassador to India, separately highlighted the fact in the New York Times.) Singh instructed his staff to distort for their country: “We should avoid making this into an Indo-Pakistan or Hindu[-]Muslim conflict. We should point out that there are Buddhists and Christians besides the Muslims among the refugees, who had felt the brunt of repression.” In a major speech, Gandhi misleadingly described refugees of “every religious persuasion—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian.”10

  The Indian government feared that the plain truth would splinter its own country between Hindus and Muslims. India had almost seventy million Muslim citizens, and as Singh told his diplomats, the government’s worst fear was vengeful sectarian confrontations. By not mentioning the Bengali Hindus, India also avoided hinting to Pakistan that it might be willing to accept them permanently. And Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jana Sangh party. From Moscow, D. P. Dhar, India’s ambassador there, decried the Pakistan army’s “preplanned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery,” but, fearing inflammatory politicking from “rightist reactionary Hindu chauvinist parties like Jana Sangh,” he wrote, “We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicised in India.”11

  Gandhi’s officials freely accused Pakistan of genocide—Indian diplomats in Islamabad secretly wrote of “the holocaust in East Bengal,” and Dhar blasted Pakistan’s campaign of “carnage and genocide”—but not in the same way that Blood did. Rather than basing this accusation primarily on the victimization of Hindus, India tended to focus on the decimation of the Bengalis as a group. The Indian foreign ministry argued that Pakistan’s generals, having lost an election because their country had too many Bengalis, were now slaughtering their way to “a wholesale reduction in the population of East Bengal” so that it would no longer comprise a majority in Pakistan.12

  NEHRUVIANS

  India, supporting this Bengali rebellion, faced an awkward ideological problem. Since Nehru’s day, a core doctrine of Indian foreign policy was refusing to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. This pervasive Nehruvian attitude was supremely protective of India’s own national sovereignty, wrested from the British Empire at such a terrible cost. So how could India possibly justify intervening inside part of sovereign Pakistan?13

  Soon after the crackdown started, Haksar—as steeped in Nehruvian thinking as anyone—wrote, “While our sympathy for the people of Bangla Desh is natural, India, as a State, has to walk warily. Pakistan is a State. It is a Member of the U.N. and, therefore, outside interference in events internal to Pakistan will not earn us either understanding or goodwill from the majority of nation-States.”14

  There was a less elevated motive: it was embarrassing for India to cheer on secession in East Pakistan while stifling it in Kashmir. India had long accused Pakistan of trying to stir up separatism among Muslims in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, as Haksar uncomfortably reminded Gandhi, it was “unlawful to preach secession.” Secessionist organizations were outlawed and would not be allowed to take part in elections. So Haksar privately argued, “We have also got to be careful that we do not publicly say or do anything which will cast any shadow on the stand we have consistently taken in respect of Kashmir that we cannot allow its secession and that whatever happens there is a matter of domestic concern to India and that we shall not tolerate any outside interference.” Dhar feared being “exposed to the counter charge of suppressing, by force, the people in Kashmir.”15

  With the bullets flying in East Pakistan, Indian officials found they could not hew to Nehruvian pieties. It would be impossible as a practical matter and disastrous in domestic politics. In its fury, the Indian public shrugged off the impropriety of criticizing what Pakistan did inside its own borders. The firebrand activist Jayaprakash Narayan quickly declared that “what is happening in Pakistan is surely not that country’s internal matter alone.” Just a few days into the slaughter, India’s ambassador at the United Nations intoned, “The scale of human sufferings is such that it ceases to be a matter of the domestic concern of Pakistan alone.” India brought a complaint against Pakistan’s violations of human rights to a United Nations body, which Pakistan promptly denounced as outside meddling.16

  For months, the Indian government cast about in search of a serviceable ideological justification for resisting what it called genocide. Haksar tried and failed to get Gandhi to declare, “For countries situated far away, it is natural to argue that events in East Bengal are, legally and juridically, matters pertaining to the internal affairs of Pakistan. For us in India this mood of calm detachment cannot be sustained. There is a vast revulsion of feeling in India against the atrocities which are being daily perpetrated.” Narayan, going further, dismissed the whole concept of noninterference as a “fiction,” since the great powers were constantly intervening in weaker countries. Unlike the coldhearted superpowers, he argued, India would be “interfering … in the interest of humanity, freedom, democracy and justice.” “It depends on how you describe national sovereignty,” says K. C. Pant, who was then a minister of state for home affairs. “National sovereignty in a country where people reject the system is different from the people’s acceptance of a government and a political system.”17

  There was a possible precedent. The young Mahatma Gandhi had famously campaigned against white supremacy in South Africa; Nehru later championed that cause at the United Nations; and Indira Gandhi’s government crusaded against South African apartheid. India went even further against the racist regime in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe): promoting economic sanctions and asking Britain, the colonial power there, to take military action. “India and other nations have repeatedly urged Britain to use force against Rhodesian regime in defence of the rights of majority of Rhodesians,” the strategist K. Subrahmanyam bluntly wrote in his secret report. “The U.N. has been
calling for sanctions against South Africa to compel the white minority regime to give up the oppression against the majority.… There is no need for India to feel guilty of having interfered in the affairs of another nation.” India’s foreign ministry urged the United Nations to show “the same kind of concern about the actions of Yahya Khan in East Bengal as they have done about racialism and colonialism in South Africa, Portuguese colonies and Rhodesia.”18

  Whatever compunctions the Indian government had left about Pakistan’s sovereignty, they cracked as the refugees poured across the border. Haksar wrote, “Even if the international community concedes to the military rulers of Pakistan the right to decimate their own people, I cannot see how that right could be extended to the throwing of unconscionable burden on us by forcible eviction of millions of Pakistani citizens.” The refugee crisis afforded India a devastating riposte: what Pakistan did within its borders was having a massive impact outside its borders.19

  In public, Indian officials such as Swaran Singh would impeccably speak up for sovereignty. But behind closed doors, he coached his officials to take the opposite line: “repression internally has resulted in the uprooting of six million refugees. With what stretch of the imagination is this an internal matter?” Upending the argument, he accused the United States of meddling in Pakistan’s internal affairs by helping a military junta to slaughter the Bengali majority: supporting Yahya was “truly interference in the internal affairs.” He instructed his diplomats, “You can use your genius for the purpose of thinking of other such arguments.”20

  Indira Gandhi’s loyalists have emphasized the heroic and levelheaded leadership of her government in this crisis. Still, India’s leaders were prey to the usual range of human failings: self-doubt, stress, and exhaustion.21

  The prime minister’s secretariat roiled with confusion, inundated with harebrained schemes. Some people pragmatically argued that the refugees would never go back and that India should concentrate on winning international aid for looking after them; others demanded that India let only Hindus in, shutting out Muslims; some wanted to seal the borders outright; there were even suggestions of population exchanges.22

  Haksar, the impresario of much of the government’s policy, privately despaired. He confided to Dhar, a close friend, “As far as I am capable of knowing about myself, all that I can say at this stage is that I feel, physically and mentally, stretched beyond the breaking point. I feel that I just cannot carry on.” He needed “a little rest and time to think.” He knew that the crisis was escalating, possibly in terrifying ways, and could not bear the responsibility: “My present assessment is that for the new phase which has begun I am not the man.”23

  For two days, Gandhi went to West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura to see the refugees herself. She and her staff were shaken. After sitting in South Block dealing with abstract statistics of refugees and rupees, they came face-to-face with real people, hearing their stories of terror. What they witnessed, as one of the prime minister’s senior aides wrote later, “assaulted our moral sensibility.”24

  Gandhi was overwhelmed. She visited slapdash camps, where thousands of tents had been hastily pitched. Any functional local building had been requisitioned. People urgently needed clean water. Many of the refugees were wounded, beyond what local hospitals could handle, needing special teams of doctors and public health workers. She impatiently interrogated an Indian camp commander, who later snapped to one of her senior aides, “Sir, please tell the prime minister that even hurry takes time.” By the end of the tour, when she was supposed to deliver some remarks, she was so overcome that she could barely speak. When she and her team got back to Calcutta, a senior aide later recalled, she said that “we cannot let Pakistan continue this holocaust.”25

  After this, she was determined that India could not absorb the refugees. They would have to go home. This, in turn, would require the Pakistani government to make a generous political deal with the Bengalis to end the civil war. She was scheduled to make a major speech to the Lok Sabha, and Haksar, despite his exhaustion, junked a more cautiously diplomatic draft from the foreign ministry, persuading her instead to tell Indians and the whole world exactly how grave the situation was.26

  She did so thunderously. “Has Pakistan the right to compel at bayonet-point not hundreds, not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of its citizens to flee their homes?” she asked the lawmakers. In front of some of the same legislators whom she had just briefed about India’s clandestine support for the rebels in East Pakistan, she falsely declared that “we have never tried to interfere with the internal affairs of Pakistan.” Then, using Haksar’s language, she inverted Pakistan’s insistence on its own national sovereignty: “What was claimed to be an internal problem of Pakistan, has also become an internal problem for India. We are, therefore, entitled to ask Pakistan to desist immediately from all actions which it is taking in the name of domestic jurisdiction, and which vitally affect the peace and well-being of millions of our own citizens. Pakistan cannot be allowed to seek a solution of its political or other problems at the expense of India and on Indian soil.” This became her government’s core argument for why India was entitled to ask Pakistan to stop killing its own citizens and instead make peace with them.27

  Gandhi demanded that the refugees be allowed to return in safety. She made a plea to the “conscience of the world,” even though it was “unconscionably” slow to react. She warned, “this suppression of human rights, the uprooting of people, and the continued homelessness of vast numbers of human beings will threaten peace.” Without foreign succor, she said, India would have to “take all measures as may be necessary”—an unsubtle threat of war.28

  These unequivocal Indian demands, which Pakistan would surely not meet, posed the manifest prospect of war. Indian officials simply did not believe that Yahya would do anything serious to bring the refugees home. Pakistan’s government, they said, was still systematically driving them out, while providing soothing speeches that the United States could use as propaganda. The foreign ministry dismissed the Pakistani government’s weak proposals for finding some new civilian authorities as dictatorial puppetry. India would only be satisfied with a government formed by Mujib.

  In private, Swaran Singh argued that Yahya’s dictatorship had to fall. He told a meeting of his diplomats that since the refugees would never return home while Pakistan’s military government was in power, “this regime must be replaced by a regime which is responsible to the people.” He said flatly, “Our ultimate objective is that this military regime should give way to a regime which is truly representative of the Awami League.”

  Singh instructed his officials to make their threats of war implicitly, telling foreigners that India did not want to be left alone to face the storm. But he frankly told his staff to be ready for an Indian attack: “when war comes even if it is our action, we should be able to make a case that it has been forced on us.” Gandhi, Haksar, and Singh stayed resolutely on their path, knowing it was inexorably leading them toward war.29

  Of all the Indians speaking out for the Bengalis, the most striking name to protest was Jayaprakash Narayan. He was an elder statesman of India’s independence struggle against the British Empire, who had been uneasily won over to a tactical kind of nonviolence by Mahatma Gandhi. Narayan—known as J.P.—was a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, but his name is eternally linked to Indira Gandhi’s for a more tragic reason. In 1975, Narayan would challenge her rule with a mass mobilization of his supporters, and she would in response declare her notorious Emergency, suspending India’s democracy.30

  When Yahya’s onslaught began, Indira Gandhi later recalled, Narayan argued that “we should have gone to war right at the beginning.” Haksar noted, “Even a pacifist like Jayaprakash and his co-workers demand recognition of Bangla Desh.” (This exaggerated Narayan’s commitment to nonviolence, which did reluctantly allow armed resistance in desperate cases.) According to Gandhi’s closest friend, he urged Gandhi to swift
ly invade East Pakistan. She listened intently but did not reply.31

  Narayan fierily supported the Bengali guerrillas, meeting with Bengali political leaders and Mukti Bahini officers, and taking a particular interest in supplying them with arms and artillery. He demanded the defense of the “political and human rights” of the Bengalis, and decried a “holocaust” carried out by a “Hitlerian junta in power in Islamabad.” In early June, Narayan raced around the globe, from Jakarta to Moscow to Cairo, denouncing genocide to everyone from Tito to the pope to the Council on Foreign Relations. (His Burmese contact of choice was Ne Win, the vicious military dictator.) In Washington, he met with Henry Kissinger and told a senior State Department official that he remembered from his own days struggling against British colonial rule in India what it meant “to be an irreconcilable.” He had accepted nothing less than independence, and neither would the leaders of Bangladesh.32

  Still, even in this dire moment, Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan could not get along. They squabbled with petty fury. According to her close friend, she did not want to let him become India’s main voice on Bangladesh. When he held a conference in Delhi to condemn the atrocities, she had her political party avoid it. “I was shocked,” he wrote to her. “Does she think she can ignore me?” he exploded, according to one account. “I have seen her as a child in frocks.” When she got wind of that outburst, she froze him out. The sourness in their relations would linger for years.33

  INDIA’S BENGALIS

  Inside India, Bengalis were anything but an alien, unfamiliar people. They composed a major part of society: Bengali was one of the most commonly spoken languages in India, and its culture was celebrated. “Bangladesh was part of India less than a quarter century back,” remembers Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. “It was all one country. It was part of India. It didn’t feel like a separate land. They were kith and kin.”34