The Blood Telegram Page 19

  In 1947, in Partition, the British Empire had finally severed what had once been a united Bengal. After massive dislocations of populations and terrible violence, the mostly Hindu people in the west found themselves in India’s state of West Bengal, and the mostly Muslim people in the east in what was known alternately as East Bengal or East Pakistan. So India’s own Bengali citizens, in West Bengal and other parts of the country, were particularly horrified by what was happening to people who spoke their language and shared their customs across the border in East Pakistan.35

  One of these Bengali Indians was Arundhati Ghose, a protégée of Haksar, who, while raised in Bombay in a prominent Bengali family, had ancestors from East Bengal. Ghose talks fast, cracks wise, chain-smokes. She would eventually rise to be ambassador to South Korea and Egypt, and would fiercely lead India’s diplomatic campaign against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But in 1971 she was only an undersecretary in the Indian diplomatic service, on what she cheerfully calls the bottom rung.36

  She remembers how proud Bengali Indians were at the Awami League’s electoral triumph. They glorified Mujib, she says, overjoyed to see their fellow Bengalis standing up for their language and their rights. Then, when the shooting started, there was an intense revulsion. Bengali Indians rallied for the cause. “I’m Bengali,” she says. “It was an emotional thing. We were raising funds. Delhi was full of that.” Since she was a government staffer, she quickly adds, “Nothing officially. Officially I had nothing to do with it.” She recalls, “Initially it was just Bengalis, and I think that’s why I got swept in. But then it was just people who were against the crackdown, because they were killing civilians. You’re powerless. There’s nothing you can do. Raising money is all right when you’re talking about Bengalis singing Bengali songs, but it’s not so hot when people are being shot and burned.”

  Ghose remembers the strain on the government caused by seething Bengali Indians. Haksar worried that in “our own part of Bengal,” there was “an impetuous demand that hundreds of thousands of volunteers be allowed to go and fight alongside the East Bengalis”—and that such pressures would only increase. “As Bengalis,” wrote an eminent former Indian minister, on behalf of India’s Bengal Association, “we feel all the more indignant” at “the wanton bestiality of genocide” against “our brothers and sisters of Bangla Desh.” When the killing started, he urged, “The freedom fighters of Bangla Desh must be allowed the free use of our border territory for the purpose of sanctuary or for organising their liberation struggle.”37

  Some might have found this touching. Not Haksar. He loathed this kind of identity politics among Indians. Like other Congress mandarins, he insisted on putting India itself above any ethnic, regional, or national loyalties. (He overlooked that many Bengali Hindus were standing up for Bengali Muslims.) “I am reduced to a state of despair and dark forebodings about our country,” wrote Haksar, who enjoyed a little melodrama. Asking the prime minister to dress down this unfortunate ex-minister personally, he loftily insisted that this Bengali Indian should “have the sensitiveness to see that what is happening in East Pakistan is a matter of national concern and that Bengalis, as Bengalis, especially those who claim to be Indians, have no special responsibility, any more than Tamilians should have a say in fashioning our relations with Ceylon or with Malaysia, or Gujaratis should have a say in how we conduct our relations with East Africa.”38

  But the pressure from West Bengali public opinion proved too intense, and in early April, Haksar proposed appointing a special officer in the foreign ministry to handle India’s outraged Bengali citizens, hearing out their ideas and proposals. For the rest of the crisis, he had to accustom himself to handpicking Bengali Indians for key jobs, lauding one official as “a balanced Bengali.”39

  Ghose was one of them. Posted in Nepal when Yahya’s crackdown began, she had never been to East Pakistan and knew precious little about the place. “They went through the foreign service to find everyone who spoke Bengali,” she remembers. “Unfortunately they had to take the girl.” They asked several men, who demurred, not wanting to risk their careers. “But I was too junior, and I thought it’d be good fun.” In April or May, she was summoned and “told, not asked, that I had to go to Calcutta.” Her job was to help set up a secretariat to work with the Bangladesh exile government. She arrived amid chaos and fresh hopes. “The refugees, we didn’t feel that in Delhi,” she says. “In Calcutta it started very much as, these are great things for Bengali culture, Bengali language, and they’re willing to fight for it.”

  “ALL-PERVASIVE FEAR”

  In June, a reporter for Life, among the teeming crowds in West Bengal, was struck by the thriving of the vultures: “The flesh-eaters were glossy, repulsively replete.” The correspondent moved past “the corpse of a baby, the clean-picked skeleton of a young child, and then dead refugees wrapped in mats and saris and looking like parcels fallen from a speeding truck.” The living were packed together, exhausted, baked by the sun. People vomited. Those who were not too far gone begged for spaces on a truck. An overworked Indian administrator felt physically ill from watching children dying. He asked, “Can we cope? The civil administration ceased to be able to cope long ago.” As cholera and other diseases spread, the lucky ones made it to a hospital, carried by rickshaw or oxcart: “Hollow-eyed and only semi-conscious in the listless torpor of total exhaustion, they lay and retched. Relatives fanned the black fog of flies from their faces.”40

  It was all too easy for Schanberg to fill the pages of the New York Times with horror. At a railway station, he was overcome by the sight of some five thousand refugees pressed together on the concrete floor: “someone vomits, someone moans. A baby wails. An old man lies writhing on his back on the floor, delirious, dying. Emaciated, fly-covered infants thrash and roll.” Filing from a border town in West Bengal, Schanberg reported the unclean sounds of the cholera epidemic: “coughing, vomiting, groaning and weeping.” An emaciated seventy-year-old man had just died. His son and granddaughter sat sobbing beside the body, as flies gathered. When a young mother died of cholera, her baby continued to nurse until a doctor pulled the infant away. The husband of that dead woman, a rice farmer, cried to Schanberg that the family had fled Pakistani soldiers who burned down their house. “My wife is dead,” he wailed. “Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?”41

  To reach the relative safety of India, Bengalis endured a terrifying and grueling trek, hiking through thick jungles in the deluges of the monsoons. One reputable Indian government official, himself a Bengali, relied on his local sources to remind Haksar what the refugees were fleeing: with encouragement from the Pakistan army, volunteers deliberately killed the Hindu men. He darkly wrote that it was not hard to imagine what had happened to the women. There were some Hindu families hidden in the granaries of “kind hearted Muslims who are against these deliberate atrocities but who find themselves entirely helpless.”42

  These kinds of stories were echoed six million times—the number of refugees that India officially estimated it was now sheltering. That number was, the Indian foreign ministry claimed, unparalleled in the world’s history. Gandhi’s government hoped to confine them to the refugee camps, but millions slipped off into the cities and villages, finding their way into informal labor markets and sweatshops, or simply ending up as beggars.43

  India’s sympathy for the refugees had limits. Some Indian officials worried that Pakistan was planting agents among the crowds. And the Indian government was ambivalent about having to shelter Biharis. One of Gandhi’s top officials accused these Urdu-speaking Muslims of being stalwart supporters of the Pakistan army and of organizing groups of fanatics to help crush the Bengalis’ autonomy movement. They were now fleeing reprisals from the Bengalis, and this official did not hide his resentment at having to look after them.44

  As the numbers of refugees mounted, Yahya himself seemed to be in denial. He assured foreign governments that normalcy had been restored and declared that ther
e was “no slaughter going on.” When a visiting U.S. diplomat told him that he had seen with his own eyes refugees streaming out of East Pakistan into India, and had heard their tales of terror and dispossession, Yahya flatly refused to believe it. Since Bengalis “look alike,” outsiders might be fooled by people “claiming to be refugees.”45

  But when Yahya’s government allowed a World Bank team of seasoned development specialists to tour East Pakistan, their secret report found an “all-pervasive fear.” The infrastructure was devastated, largely because of army campaigns in the big cities and towns. “In all cities visited there are areas that have been razed; and in all districts visited there are villages which have simply ceased to exist.” There were ongoing military strikes, which, even when targeting “Awami Leaguers, students or Hindus,” frightened the whole population. There was a “trail of devastation running from Khulna to Jessore to Kushtia to Pabna, Bogra, Rangpur and Dinajpur.”46

  This refugee population in India was far beyond the capabilities of a government that strained to lift its own citizens out of poverty. In a June survey, Indian observers were staggered by the conditions in refugee camps in the border states of Assam and Tripura. The temporary housing was “pitiable”; without sanitation, the Indians were horrified by “the stinking foul-smell”; and due to an unchecked cholera epidemic, on average thirty to forty people were dying every day. In a brief visit of a few hours in one camp, they saw several dead bodies being hauled out for cremation.47

  India’s relief work was shot through with failures. Gandhi herself complained that efforts to prevent cholera were “dragging on for far too long.” There were not enough doctors; angry young men sat around idly; Hindu nationalists spread resentment of Muslims; women had to give birth without even the shelter of a tent. According to this Indian report, corrupt contractors reportedly pocketed fees for tarpaulin sheets, but never supplied them. Other contractors would not allow Bengali youths to help build up their own camps. When a cholera epidemic broke out in one camp, there was outright panic and a near-total breakdown of operations. The contractors, police, and some civilian officials abandoned their posts, leaving the refugees without rations for two weeks. “From one of these camps some 3–4 thousands evacuees returned to Bangla Desh in sheer disgust.”48

  The burden fell on some of the poorest people in India. K. C. Pant, the minister of state for home affairs whose portfolio included the eastern border, remembers, “Among the common people, there was an understanding that a lot of things are happening in East Pakistan which they found highly offensive. It was a natural kind of reaction, to people being driven out of their homes, carrying with them stories of what had happened.” There was, he recalls from a visit to the border areas, lots of sympathy. Still, it would be too much to expect a purely high-minded public response. Some local officials in Assam seemed outright hostile. According to this Indian report, the impoverished Indians in the border states did not welcome the refugees. The sheer numbers instantly turned the locals into minorities in their own home villages: in Bagmara, for instance, four thousand locals were vastly outnumbered by more than seventy-two thousand refugees. “In all the places we visited the local population did not appear very favourably inclined towards the evacuees. In Meghalaya the local people were not only passively hostile but had even started an active campaign against the helpless evacuees.” The Indian team heard accounts of “evacuees having been mercilessly beaten by the local people. There were case of even attempted rape.”49

  By September, India would record almost six thousand deaths from cholera alone. As the state governments reeled, they turned to Gandhi’s central government for help. In Assam, state officials were convinced that the refugees—particularly the Hindus—would not return without some drastic action by Gandhi’s government. The refugee crisis was driving India toward war.50

  Chapter 9

  India Alone

  In Beijing, amid the radical throes of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Red Guard cadres and zealous demonstrators would sometimes besiege the Indian embassy, burning a straw effigy of Indira Gandhi. Even as India hurtled toward war with Pakistan, it actually dreaded its Chinese enemy far more. Mao’s regime was a sworn foe of “bourgeois” and democratic India, and had thrashed India in a major war in 1962. Indian diplomats in Beijing anxiously argued that China was wary of India—with its massive population, and military and economic potential—emerging as a rival great power.1

  Indira Gandhi worried that “if Pakistan attacks us, China may join them.” China was a close partner of Pakistan, hosting Yahya on a showy visit, selling him a considerable amount of weaponry in years past, and maintaining tight military ties. If war came, the R&AW’s spies were sure that China would provide Pakistan with a steady stream of military supplies. Indian intelligence was constantly working on paramilitary plans for guerrilla warfare against a Chinese threat.2

  The Chinese government, with its own searing experience of Western and Japanese imperialism, had a bedrock ideological commitment to national sovereignty. It loathed secessionists in Taiwan and Tibet. India’s domestic outcry about atrocities inside East Pakistan thus offended China, and Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, vowed to support Pakistan against “Indian expansionists,” even lodging a formal protest against India’s “gross interference in internal affairs of Pakistan.”3

  Worse, the Indian government secretly worried that China was sponsoring radical pro-Chinese factions among the East Bengalis that would, as the civil war dragged on, undermine Mujib’s mainstream nationalists. P. N. Haksar, Gandhi’s top adviser, wrote, “China, as usual, is playing a double-faced game by giving public support to West Pakistan and working clandestinely to increase its political influence in East Pakistan.” The Indian government nervously detected some rumblings among East Pakistanis that the Awami League moderates had failed and it was time to turn to the Maoist radicals in India’s West Bengal. Meanwhile, the Awami League warned that thousands of fighting Naxalites from West Bengal had crossed into East Pakistan to try to commandeer the struggle.4

  The Soviet Union shared India’s anxiety about China. The two communist behemoths, having just fought a border war in 1969, were mortal rivals. The Soviet defense minister told the Indians, “If I were you, I would not be worried by Pakistan. You should take into account the unpredictable enemy from the North.”5

  Gandhi once showily declared that there was no need for the United States to worry about India’s relationship with the Soviet Union, since India was a democracy like the United States. But in fact, with Mao venomously hostile and Richard Nixon truculent, it was not hard for pro-Soviet officials like Haksar to pull India further into the orbit of, in his words, “our Soviet friends.” Fearing war, he wrote to D. P. Dhar, the ambassador in Moscow, “we shall be assuming a very heavy burden and will expose ourselves to serious risks. We cannot do this alone.”6

  Dhar led the charge. He had a sensitive face and wispy hair, and wore his neckties ostentatiously. Florid and wordy, he was stoutly pro-Soviet, writing fondly of their commissars and extolling the grayest Soviet pronouncements with enthusiasm. He was the kind of useful idiot who isn’t an idiot. From Moscow, where anti-Chinese sentiment hung thick in the air, Dhar warned of “diabolical plans hatched in Peking or Rawalpindi.”7

  For months, Dhar had been toiling on what he obliquely called the “Document”—a formal friendship treaty between India and the Soviet Union. He urged the foreign ministry to sign it now, which he thought would thrill the Indian public. The Soviets—who argued that a treaty could deter both Pakistan and China from attacking India—had suggested this more than two years earlier, but India had put it on hold before Gandhi’s victory in the March elections. There had been no particular urgency. The government was not eager to get pounded by conservatives in Parliament for throwing the country into the Soviet camp, and it would be a disaster for India’s image as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. But now India had to shore up its Soviet relationship.8

  Dha
r was thrilled when, on April 3, the Soviet Union sent Yahya a stinging message, calling for an end to killing and repression and urging respect for the results of democratic elections and the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even as Dhar crowed, he understood that Leonid Brezhnev’s regime did not generally come out swinging for human rights. The Soviets, he wrote, had to “overcome their inhibitions about so-called principles of national integrity etc.” But the Soviets “have, as never before, a nice appreciation of the sheer weight of India in Asia today.”9

  Following up, Gandhi sent Dhar to press Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, for any and all kinds of help. India seems to have been hoping for Soviet approval for more aggressive action, possibly even a war. But the Soviet Union refused, pressing India to avoid war. Instead, the Soviets produced a minor masterpiece of apparatchik obfuscation, asking India to avoid escalation, leaving Haksar and Dhar crestfallen.10

  Preparing for confrontation, India badgered the Soviet Union for more military assistance, such as Soviet T-55 battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery rounds. Haksar bluntly told Gandhi of the urgency of their defense needs. In late April, she begged Kosygin for a long list of military supplies, including bombers that could, as Dhar noted, hit targets all across Pakistan and strike deep into China. Here again, there were limits to Soviet support: they only offered some supersonic but unreliable Tu-22s, which were so unacceptable to the Indian Air Force that India rejected them. Dhar, mortified at the snub, argued that these bombers could carry “nuclear war-heads” for “nuclear warfare in the future.” Nor did the Soviet Union come through in helping the refugees; while making some donations, it wound up being handily outspent by the United States.11