The Blood Telegram Page 31

  Kissinger later reckoned that Gandhi decided to visit because of a faintly guilty conscience. “We don’t want India in the Soviet camp,” he said, “even though the Indians may be driving themselves there deliberately through the creation of a phony crisis.” Gandhi would later send a message to Kissinger, through his guru Nelson Rockefeller, that the treaty was merely an act of expedience. When Rockefeller slammed her for the pact, asking her why she had put all her eggs in one basket, she replied that “we won’t if there’s another basket.”22

  India’s outreach was clumsy in other ways. In another bit of questionable etiquette, the Indian ambassador, delivering Gandhi’s letter to Kissinger, invited himself over to the White House on the very day of the treaty signing. Kissinger grouchily noted the awkwardness. Warning India not to be tempted into a war because of Soviet support, he sniffed at the prospect of India as a “diplomatic appendage to the Soviet Union.” The Indian ambassador hastened to blame the treaty on the leftist Haksar, and assured Kissinger that Gandhi’s letter was conciliatory.23

  Kissinger found her tone moderate and a little defensive, evidently not yet ready to write off the United States. But her letter, drawn up by Haksar, was unyielding. She saw no signs of political accommodation from Yahya. India, she wrote, was “greatly embarrassed” by the recent news of fresh U.S. arms shipments to Pakistan. Since the days of Eisenhower, she protested, U.S. weapons had been used against India, and were now being unleashed against East Pakistanis whose only sin was believing in the democracy that Yahya had promised them. And in rejecting a proposal to post United Nations observers on both sides of the India-Pakistan border—which she and Haksar knew might interfere with India’s covert sponsorship of the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla war—she reached shocking rhetorical heights: “Would the League of Nations Observers have succeeded in persuading the refugees who fled from Hitler’s tyranny to return even whilst the pogroms against the Jews and political opponents of Nazism continued unabated?”24

  This was hardly the first Indian use of Nazi imagery. Countless Indian officials had accused Pakistan of genocide; Jayaprakash Narayan spoke of a “Hitlerian junta” in Islamabad; and Haksar had privately written that Pakistan’s propaganda was “based, as always, on the pattern set by Gobbels.” But here was the prime minister of India, in a formal letter to the president of the United States, comparing a U.S. ally to Nazi Germany.25

  Indira Gandhi was now planning to order an attack on Pakistan, according to the diaries of K. F. Rustamji, the Border Security Force head who had done so much to support the Mukti Bahini. General Sam Manekshaw and the other service chiefs knew they had to be ready for war, but did not know what Gandhi had in mind.

  On this account, in late August—not long after the signing of the Soviet treaty—she went to a military headquarters in West Bengal to meet with her service chiefs and to tour some more of the refugee camps. She asked to see a nearby Mukti Bahini training camp in West Bengal. In the drenching rain, the prime minister scrambled into a jeep with two anxious senior Border Security Force men; she proved surprisingly nimble in leaping over a ditch along their way.

  She met with the rebels being trained there, and offered them some reassurances. When she returned from her extraordinary tour, she took aside a senior Border Security Force official and asked bluntly, “At this rate when do you expect to be in Dacca?” He said never, not without the Indian army. The Border Security Force could not withstand Pakistan’s armor and artillery, nor its air force. They would need the Indian army and air force to counter that. Gandhi agreed. She said that she was concerned about how to withstand a Pakistan army thrust from the west. He said that that would require ground that was dry enough for tanks to operate and some cover. She agreed.

  He asked when they should expect the green signal from her. The prime minister said, “Say in the third week of November.”26

  Chapter 15

  Kennedy

  In town after town in East Pakistan, Bengalis could list with gratitude the U.S. senators calling for cutting off aid to Pakistan. There was one name in particular that won their admiration: Ted Kennedy.1

  Kennedy earned his hero status with fervent speeches ripping into Pakistan’s repression. Jabbing at the Nixon administration’s underbelly, he said that Yahya’s terror had generated more refugees in less than two hundred days than the total from the entire Vietnam War. To the administration’s chagrin, Kennedy managed to get two more secret cables from the Dacca consulate leaked to him, which the senator’s staff obligingly photocopied and handed out to the press.2

  When Kennedy decided he needed to go see the situation in India and Pakistan for himself, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington sounded the alarm to Henry Kissinger. “Let him go,” said Kissinger. Instead, learning that two of Kennedy’s aides were planning to sneak into East Pakistan, the ambassador told Kennedy that they had not applied for visas. When they did, Pakistan turned them down flat, claiming feebly that hotels and transport were unavailable. The ambassador menacingly noted that anyone slipping into Pakistan risked being shot by the army as an enemy infiltrator.3

  For India, Kennedy’s visit was a bonanza. Indian diplomats in Washington believed that he might be Richard Nixon’s strongest Democratic challenger for the presidency in 1972, and immediately sought to woo a possible future president. Thus the government smoothed Kennedy’s way, drawing up a list of local memorials to John Kennedy from Punjab to Kerala, lavishing attention on the two Kennedy staffers whom Pakistan had threatened to shoot, and making sure there were crowds to greet the senator. His visit, wrote a senior Indian official, would be “mercilessly but usefully full and busy.”4

  Rather than pump Kennedy with rhetoric, the Indian government chose to simply bring him to the border states and show him around. A senior Indian diplomat instructed that the senator “should be given fullest possible view of refugee problem, enabled to see as many camps as he wishes and to meet and talk with a wide cross-section of refugees so that they may form a proper first-hand idea of the tragedy and terror perpetuated in East Bengal.” The foreign ministry ordered the authorities to do everything to help, noting that Kennedy wanted to witness refugees crossing the border.5

  The White House was scandalized. Kissinger warned that the trip would be trouble, while Nixon raged, “Now I want the State Department to know that any son of a bitch that does more than give him just the minimum is going to be fired. Is that clear?” The president fumed, “Goddamn it, I took trips abroad and nobody ever helped me.” Worried about his pro-Indian ambassador in Delhi, he said, “I want Keating not to fuck around, is that clear?”6

  Kissinger—indignant that Kennedy had had the nerve to ask Pakistan to get him a visa to visit China—knew about the denial of Pakistani visas for Kennedy’s staffers, but made no objection. During Kennedy’s trip, at a Situation Room meeting downstairs at the White House, the CIA director said they should “get Ted Kennedy home.” Kissinger wryly replied, “I’m not sure they would agree about that upstairs.”7

  THE SPIRIT OF MASSACHUSETTS

  Kennedy landed in India on August 10. He was also planning to tour East Pakistan and to visit Yahya in Islamabad, but the Pakistani government suddenly canceled his visa.8

  His visit to India was poles apart from Kissinger’s, who, a month before, had seen little more than South Block offices and a swank hotel in Delhi’s leafy diplomatic enclave. Setting off from Calcutta, Kennedy spent four grueling days visiting miserable refugee camps, covering the entire Indian border from West Bengal to Tripura.

  His mission was to meet refugees, and he made a point of talking primarily to exiles and relief workers, not just to Indian officials. (Despite Nixon’s fears, his lowest priority was the U.S. embassy, not wanting the State Department to take control of his trip.) Although Kennedy was trailed everywhere by a crowd of Indian and American reporters, including ABC and CBS television news crews, he kept them at arm’s length, ducking questions and refusing to criticize the U.S. government while ab
road.9

  Kennedy brought along seasoned American experts on development and refugee relief. One of them was Nevin Scrimshaw, a nutrition professor at MIT who had done cutting-edge work fighting malnutrition in children in Guatemala and India. Scrimshaw had a clinical familiarity with what they saw. “Edema, profound apathy, hair loss, pallor of the hair, and so forth,” he recalls. “To me, what was so devastating was the scale.” It was worse than anything he had seen in his long years in the field, from Panama to Egypt. He was stunned at the size of the first camp they visited, near Calcutta, where some ten thousand refugees were sheltering. “Imagine looking out on a field, hundreds of people squatting, most of them with diarrhea,” he says, still appalled by the memory at the age of ninety-four. “Imagine the people politely inviting you into their tent, and while they’re talking, picking up a rag in a corner, and seeing a child that’s going to be dead in a few hours.”10

  The camp reeked of human shit. There was no sanitation and little access to clean water. The Indian authorities had designated a field the size of a city block as the latrine, but colossal numbers of children and adults were stricken with diarrhea, and often could not make it. Thus the ditches of muddy water between the makeshift tents, swollen by the monsoons, were fouled with excrement. The feces mixed in with the mud and water, and slopped into the overcrowded tents where people lived and ate. Against the monsoons, the refugees had only torn, leaky tents for shelter. Hundreds of people massed around the visitors, many carrying desperately malnourished children. “This was something beyond anything Kennedy had seen or imagined,” says Scrimshaw. The senator was visibly overwhelmed.11

  Like everyone, Kennedy was drenched by the downpour (although he could guiltily change into dry clothes later). In pummeling rain, he got out ahead of the Indian soldiers assigned to protect him, plunging into the crowds with scant concern for his own safety. Scrimshaw, worried that there was nobody to shield the senator, got in front of him and used his shoulders to clear a path among hundreds of people, thinking incongruously of running interference in football. They found themselves wading in two feet of water, over unfamiliar terrain, with no idea if they were about to plummet down into a submerged hole.

  Eager to talk to refugees, Kennedy wandered into any part of the camps or hospitals, often leaving his Indian and American retinue behind. After a full day of touring camps in Tripura, when everyone thought he was done for the day, at 10:30 p.m. he announced that he wanted to see another camp. After that, he visited a children’s hospital, returning after midnight. He forayed as close as possible to the East Pakistan border. Kennedy watched several small flatboats crammed with refugees crossing the river into Indian territory. In camps at Barast and Kalyani, he talked to hundreds of refugees. Over and over, Kennedy heard harrowing tales of terror and flight, of days or weeks spent trudging on foot to relative safety. Scrimshaw remembers that “their houses had been shelled and they were forced to go, by the Pakistani military.” Many of them were Bengali professionals, with good English, crushed by their sudden change of fortunes. “I do not know why they shot me,” a fifty-five-year-old Muslim railway employee told Kennedy. “I don’t belong to any political party. I was just a railway clerk.”12

  In a Tripura hospital, Kennedy saw children who had been shot through the side. As night fell, he spoke to a hospitalized woman who had been shot in the gut. In total, he and his team saw hundreds of civilians, from India and East Pakistan, who had been wounded by bullets, shrapnel, or artillery fire. Although Kennedy tended not to mention it afterward, he also got to see Mukti Bahini guerrillas who were being treated for combat gunshot wounds, Scrimshaw says. Hiking along a road north of Calcutta, Kennedy heard stories of massacre from dozens of Bengali peasant farmers—a small sample of the seven thousand refugees along the banks of the river crossing to East Pakistan. There were children dying along the road as their parents pleaded for help. Many were obviously in shock, sitting in despair by the side of the road or wandering blindly. Most of them, he realized, were Hindus.

  Kennedy got a heartbreaking crash course in emergency relief. He learned fast about the difficulties of burying dead children. Scrimshaw and the local doctors—many of them Bengali refugees themselves—explained that the main threats were diarrhea and respiratory diseases, which were racing through the camps. “I was so busy interpreting what he was seeing in human terms,” says Scrimshaw. Kennedy “saw those conditions and he cared.” Soon the senator could take one look at moribund children nestled in their mothers’ arms and expertly point out cases of kwashiorkor and marasmus, dire conditions of malnutrition. “There’s one,” he said. “There’s another.”

  Despite the efforts of the Indians, the camps were racked with despair and gloom. “The conditions in the tents, camps, makeshift shelters, were horrible,” says Scrimshaw. The whole state of West Bengal seemed like a huge refugee camp, with its muddy roads jammed with endless lines for inoculations or registration cards. The youngest children and the elderly had been the first to die. Again and again, Kennedy saw little ones, under the age of five, who would obviously be dead within days or hours. He saw dead children. When Kennedy asked the director of one of the refugee camps what he most urgently needed, he replied, “a crematorium.”13

  In an infinity of suffering, the horror finally overwhelmed Kennedy when it came on the smallest scale. Scrimshaw pointed out one little boy whose eye had clouded over. He would be permanently blind. He was just one of countless children so stricken. If the boy had been given a simple injection of vitamin A just a day earlier, the blindness would have been easily preventable. Scrimshaw invited the senator to peer closely into the boy’s ruined eye. Kennedy could not. He turned away.

  Kennedy seemed thoroughly traumatized, but the trip had its peculiar balms too. The senator, dogged by Chappaquiddick back home, was greeted everywhere by cheering crowds and enthusiastic press coverage. Along the roads, people stood waving “Welcome Kennedy” signs or placards hailing him as a friend of India. There was so much of this that it seemed stage-managed, although even the U.S. embassy did not doubt that the sentiment was genuine. Some young men chanted that the United States should stop sending arms to Pakistan. Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador, cabled, “Seldom in the memory of the embassy has any foreign visitor received a more effusive welcome.”14

  Kennedy—whose family’s name was revered in India—declared that his late brother John had believed that India was the real test for the future of democracy. If the democratic experiment failed in India, President Kennedy thought, then political philosophers would conclude that democracy was only for the rich. Now the refugee crisis was testing India’s democracy.15

  Kennedy got gala hospitality from the Indian government, including being flown around the east on an Indian Air Force airplane and helicopter. When he finally arrived in Delhi at the end of his trip, the foreign ministry hosted a reception with everyone from P. N. Haksar to Jayaprakash Narayan. A modest address to some legislators swiftly metamorphosed into an impromptu joint address to both packed houses of Parliament, complete with a standing ovation. Indira Gandhi invited him to accompany her to the grand Independence Day ceremony at the Red Fort, which Kennedy ducked after Keating reminded him to keep some distance from her government.16

  In Delhi and Calcutta, the Indian government set up secret meetings for Kennedy and his staff with the Bangladeshi exile government. He received a full dose of official Indian hawkishness while doing the rounds in Delhi, where the foreign secretary vitriolically compared Pakistan to Nazi Germany.17

  Nevin Scrimshaw remembers, “After we went back to Delhi, we knew for sure that the Indians were going to invade what is now Bangladesh. It was just so obvious.” This was starkly clear to everyone on the team, he says, including Kennedy. Scrimshaw recalls, “Their stores were running out. They weren’t getting the help from the U.S. and Europe that they had expected. They would have no alternative. They had no way of feeding these people.”18

  On his last day in In
dia, Kennedy met privately with Indira Gandhi, scion to scion. She warned that she could not hold on for long. Parliament was getting out of control; communists and Naxalites were gaining strength; there was public pressure to support the Mukti Bahini; and despite India’s best efforts, the refugees were still “living in appalling conditions.” When Kennedy suggested handing out a basic guide to malnutrition, with instructions on using milk, Gandhi had to explain that milk was rare stuff in those parts of India. It was, the prime minister said, hard to do anything special for the refugees and not for impoverished Indians in similar need.19

  Kennedy, trying to avoid bashing the Nixon administration from foreign soil, wanted to duck questions from reporters. But the Indian foreign ministry, not about to miss this opportunity, nimbly sent out engraved invitations to a Kennedy press conference to the whole Delhi press corps. Prolonged silence is not a natural condition for a United States senator, and when asked—as the first question—if Pakistan was committing genocide, he immediately said yes. Pledging to do everything he could to stop U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan, he said that Nixon’s policy “baffles me.” And he stuck up for democratic principles, saying that it was a “travesty” that Mujib, the Awami League leader, had been put on trial in a secret military court: “the only crime that Mujib is guilty of is winning an election.”20

  With that, Kennedy departed for Washington. Indian and U.S. officials alike were impressed with the seriousness of his inquiry. “The dynamic fact finding Senator has come and gone,” an Indian diplomat wistfully wrote.21

  Kennedy’s public acclaim was doubly impressive considering that he had landed in India the day after the signing of the Soviet treaty. Anyone who thought that the Indian public was fundamentally anti-American should have seen the ebullient throngs cheering him. Kennedy winningly suggested that India could sign another friendship treaty with the United States. As much as the White House cursed Kennedy’s trip, he stole some of the Soviet Union’s thunder.22