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  The Lok Sabha was dissolved, and Indian politicians hit the hustings, from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat to Kerala. It was the biggest election in the world. In the end, more than 151 million voters cast their ballots. She gambled her entire political future on the outcome.26

  Gandhi campaigned hard on a populist platform, dedicated to ending India’s grinding poverty. When her rivals put up the Hindi slogan of “Indira Hatao!” (Remove Indira!), she parried with what became her famous catchphrase: “Garibi Hatao!” (Remove Poverty!) She spoke to some 375 meetings, barely sleeping or eating as she campaigned all across the vast country. Astonishingly, in forty-three days of electioneering, she claimed to have given speeches in front of as many as thirteen million people. She later liked to boast that she never spoke at a rally with fewer than a hundred thousand people. She hammered home her core themes: getting rid of unemployment, helping peasants and shopkeepers, whipping the much-despised civil service into line.27

  It worked. Gandhi and her team won a massive landslide. Her party—known since the split in the Congress party as Congress (R)—seized a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha. Her own campaigning was crucial to this terrific sweep and she was now in an extraordinarily strong position. Her foreign minister, Sardar Swaran Singh, would later brag about “the Indira typhoon.” Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent in Delhi, was impressed. Settling into the newspaper’s bureau on Janpath, in the heart of Delhi, he had grown fond of India. “It has terrible problems, but it is a democracy,” he says. “The people do like to throw the bums out when they vote.”28

  Having won the election on her antipoverty campaign, Gandhi faced high expectations at home. But the crisis in Pakistan quickly overwhelmed her government’s focus on relieving India’s poor. As Gandhi said, “our country was poised for rapid economic advance and a more determined attack on the age-old poverty of our people. Even as we were settling down to these new tasks, we have been engulfed by a new and gigantic problem, not of our making.”29

  While Gandhi’s government might have been tempted to gloat at Pakistan’s troubles in governing East Bengal, the Indian government was painfully aware of its own difficulties in keeping a grip on its own state of West Bengal.

  The Indian state was a hotbed of Marxist and Maoist agitation, notorious as the home of the fiery Maoist revolutionaries known as the Naxalites—named after the West Bengali village of Naxalbari, where the movement originated. Haksar despised the “cult of violence” of the Naxalites and radicals in West Bengal. Gandhi’s government, horrified by the violent and pro-Chinese Naxalites, feared an armed communist takeover of parts of the country. Gandhi and her allies struggled to get the better of both the Naxalites and the powerhouse Communist Party (Marxist). “Calcutta was flooded with Maoist literature,” remembered one journalist. “Mao Tse Tung, Liu Shao Chi, Marx, Lenin. The city was Red.”30

  “From October 1969 to the middle of 1971, we broke the back of the Naxalite revolt in West Bengal,” remembers Lieutenant General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, then a major general and the chief of staff of the army’s Eastern Command. “Mrs. Gandhi told me to do it.” People were thrown in jail on specific charges or under a notorious Preventive Detention Act. Haksar knew that there were some ten thousand young people in jail in West Bengal, and that more than a hundred thousand political workers were facing criminal charges. The West Bengal state government requested the deployment of Indian army troops to maintain order. Gandhi’s central government offered large coercive forces to the West Bengal local government, including battalions of police, the Border Security Force, and almost two divisions of the Indian army.31

  Moderate politicians feared what the communists—who had done well in the elections—might do if they were allowed to run the state, and violent mass unrest if they were not. The governor of West Bengal bleakly told Gandhi that “restoring law and order … may be an unpleasant duty.” The Indian ambassador in Washington admitted, “Considering that we ourselves have plenty of problems in east India, we would not wish for East Bengal to be in a disturbed state.”32

  PAKISTAN VOTES

  India was thrilled by Pakistan’s novel experiment in democracy. The Pakistani elections in December 1970 touched a chord in India, where democratic precepts ran deep—and where Gandhi had just had her big electoral win.

  Indians savored the drubbing the Pakistani military received at the hands of their electorate, and many educated Indians relished the voting as a repudiation of the founding ideal of Pakistan as a Muslim state, which was not enough to keep the two halves of the country from coming unglued. “Mujib’s thumping victory in East Bengal was a foregone conclusion,” wrote a senior Indian diplomat. “Culturally they’re quite different,” recalls Jagat Mehta, a former Indian foreign secretary. “It was in the seeds of time.”33

  The Indian government was heartened to hear Mujib call for friendship with India and for a peaceful resolution in Kashmir. Indians hoped that a democracy in Pakistan would prove peaceful toward them, particularly if the Awami League, warm to India, managed to form a government in Islamabad. India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW)—created as a kind of Indian answer to the CIA—concluded that a genuinely democratic Pakistan would increasingly desist from military confrontations against India.34

  Not everyone swooned. Haksar worried that the humiliated Pakistani military would lash out against India. “I have long been feeling a sense of uneasiness about the intentions of Pakistan,” he wrote to Gandhi. The Awami League’s resounding victory made Pakistan’s internal problems “infinitely more difficult. Consequently, the temptation to seek solution of these problems by external adventures has become very great.” He implored Gandhi to quietly convene her service chiefs of staff and defense minister to “share with them her anxieties,” and have the military make “a very realistic assessment both of Pakistan’s capability and our response. I have a feeling that there are many weak spots in our defence capabilities.”35

  India’s spies were similarly uneasy. The R&AW answered directly to Gandhi’s office, and was run by yet another Kashmiri Brahmin, R. N. Kao, who was eager to burnish his agency’s reputation. It delivered a top secret alert to Gandhi’s government on the impressive increase of Pakistan’s military power in recent years, and warned that Pakistan might foment “violent agitation” and sabotage in Kashmir. The R&AW warned that there was a “quite real” risk that Pakistan, bolstered by Chinese support, would attack India. Like Haksar, the R&AW worried that Yahya would be tempted into “a military venture against INDIA with a view to diverting the attention of the people from the internal political problems and justifying the continuance of Martial Law.”36

  But despite this, the R&AW was confident that Mujib and Bhutto—the dominant popular forces in their respective wings—would probably cut a deal, avoiding a crisis or military crackdown. Similarly, one of Gandhi’s inner circle remembered that the prime minister’s secretariat, reading its reports from Dacca, thought that sort of settlement between Yahya and Mujib was in the works. He recalled that even the appointment of the brutal Lieutenant General Tikka Khan as governor of East Pakistan was seen as just for show.37

  Haksar, however, quietly prepared for the worst. “Our requirements are extremely urgent,” he wrote, alarmed at Pakistan’s new offensive capabilities. With Nixon starting to sell weapons to Pakistan again, India made a huge request to the Soviet Union for bomber aircraft, tanks, armored personnel carriers, ammunition, surface-to-air missiles, and radar. Haksar nervously instructed the Indian ambassador in Moscow, “We have no repeat no other source of supply.”38

  India’s diplomats in Dacca made no attempt to disguise their sympathies. They eagerly reported the mass mobilization of the Bengalis. When Mujib spoke to a colossal rally of over a million people at the Race Course in Dacca, with the crowds singing Rabindranath Tagore’s nationalist song “My Golden Bengal,” the top Indian official in Dacca effused that “Bengali nationalism has gone deep into
the minds of the people.”39

  As Yahya flew to Dacca for constitutional negotiations with Mujib, the Indian government watched hopefully. India’s chief diplomat in Dacca worried that Mujib’s call for an autonomous East Pakistan seemed to undercut Pakistan’s unity. Mujib ominously warned that conspiracies in Pakistan’s ruling classes were trying to thwart the democratic will of the people: “But they are playing with fire. Our people are conscious and they would resist any conspiratorial move.”40

  In private, India’s diplomats heaped spiteful abuse on Bhutto, who was notoriously hostile to their country. India’s enthusiasm for democracy in Pakistan did not include Bhutto’s own electoral triumph; the Indian mission in Karachi sneered, “Mr. Bhutto … has really secured power through slogan-mongering and his not inconsiderable histrionic talents.” Indian officials blamed him for stonewalling the constitutional talks. A senior Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad would later accuse Bhutto of being “directly responsible for encouraging Military action against Awami League.” Bhutto, one of Gandhi’s senior aides later wrote, “approved of the merciless military offensive.”41

  In the middle of these tense negotiations, India faced a spectacular act of terrorism. On January 30, in Srinagar, two young separatist Kashmiri Indians hijacked an Indian Airlines airplane to Lahore, in West Pakistan, and then blew it up in a fiery blaze. Although nobody was hurt, the furious Indian government immediately assumed the hijackers were Pakistani agents. As a tough reprisal, Gandhi’s government suspended flights of Pakistani military and civilian aircraft over Indian territory, making it hard for Pakistan to keep up links between its two far-flung wings. (Yahya would accuse India of arranging the hijacking to justify this decision to ban overflights.) In West Pakistan, politicians fired off denunciations of India, and Bhutto had a friendly meeting with the hijackers; but in East Pakistan, Mujib swiftly denounced the destruction of the airplane, while Bengalis, unconcerned with competing claims in Kashmir, condemned the terrorists. This episode afforded India a tantalizing glimpse of the transformed relationship that it might have enjoyed with Pakistan under a Bengali-led government.42

  The R&AW’s prediction of a deal among Pakistan’s leading politicians proved far too optimistic. Mujib insisted that his majority in the National Assembly entitled him to frame a new Pakistani constitution, ushering in autonomy for East Pakistan. But when Bhutto dug in his heels in early March, Indian officials noted sourly that “Mr. Bhutto took recourse to his familiar anti-Indian bogey.”43

  From Islamabad, Indian diplomats warned that hard-liners were putting increasing pressure on Yahya. An Indian official wrote that “the Armed Forces and the pre-dominately Punjabi Establishment in West Pakistan is back at its 23 year old game of not allowing East Pakistan to exercise its majority share in the country’s affairs.” As Bengalis protested, Indian diplomats in Dacca reported with alarm that hundreds of civilians were killed or injured, and scorned Yahya’s suggestion that the “the army is above democratically elected representatives ‘playing at’ Constitution-making.” This, Indian officials wrote, smacked of Latin American–style despotism.44

  India’s government remained wholeheartedly for Mujib. The top Indian diplomat in Dacca admiringly reported, “His constitutional method, solicitude for democratic process, discussion with west Pakistan leaders and the spirit of accommodation within the framework of his commitment are likely to create a favourable impression on President Yahya Khan and the people of west Pakistan.” One of Gandhi’s top advisers remembers that the prime minister’s staff thought that some kind of deal had been struck.45

  Other senior Indian officials in Delhi, however, were bracing for disaster. On March 2, over three weeks before Yahya launched his slaughter, Gandhi ordered her best and brightest—including Haksar and the R&AW spymaster Kao—to evaluate “giving help to Bangla Desh” and the possibility of recognizing “an independent Bangla Desh.” That, Gandhi feared, could easily prompt Pakistani retaliation in Kashmir, or a Chinese military response. The prime minister was already considering military aid to the Bengalis, who would need not just medicine and food, but a helicopter and a small airplane for “quick movement inside India around the borders of Bangla Desh,” as well as “Arms and ammunition (including L[ight] M[achine] G[un]s, M[edium] M[achine] G[un]s and Mortars.”46

  India urged the United States to hold Yahya back from a crackdown. In Washington, the Indian ambassador pleaded that “nothing would be more tragic than President Yahya Kahn trying to suppress East Bengali aspirations for autonomy by force.”47

  By March 15, the Pakistani foreign office complained that India had built up its military forces in West Bengal. But Yahya showed no signs of taking on India now. In the days after the hijacking, Pakistan had massed its troops on West Pakistan’s border with India, but now the R&AW and the chief of the army staff, General Sam Manekshaw, found that most of those troops had been withdrawn. Yahya had more than doubled his army strength in East Pakistan. Pakistan’s military rulers seemed to be marshaling their fire for their own populace.48

  Haksar urged Gandhi to stand firm: “we should not at this stage of developments in Pakistan say anything at all placatory, but be ‘tough’ within reason. This is not the time to make gestures for friendship for Pakistan. Every such gesture will bring comfort to Yahya Khan and make the position of Mujib correspondingly more difficult.” Haksar ominously warned the prime minister: “2½ Divisions of Pak Army is poised to decimate East Bengal.”49

  Chapter 4

  “Mute and Horrified Witnesses”

  Dacca is a tropical, impoverished, polluted, and verdant river city, in the middle of the great part-submerged marsh that is Bangladesh. The capital city is clamorously loud, from honking cars, radios, conversations, muezzins, and mechanical disasters. People toil in steamy heat, in acrid haze and dust, hefting stones at construction sites or holding together a small shop. The streets are crammed with rickshaws decked out in explosive color, and with rickety buses whose mangled flanks, painted only a little less gaudily beautiful than the rickshaws, bear the scars of abrupt lane changes gone bad. People drive with a headlong recklessness. They jaywalk worse. The palm trees offer shelter from an implacable sun. At night, it falls truly dark in the way of very poor cities; there is only a fraction of the garish neon and fluorescent light that illuminates the wealthier megacities of South Asia. In March, it is already sweltering.

  In 1971, March 25 marked the twenty-third long day of the Bengali nationalist protests in Dacca and beyond. Archer Blood warned Washington, “Storm before the calm?”1

  He nervously reported a worsening crisis, with the army clashing with civilians in several spots in East Pakistan. In the port city of Chittagong, thousands of Bengalis tried to prevent the unloading of a cargo ship laden with weaponry and ammunition for the Pakistani military. The army—which Blood called “restrained (but presumably increasingly irritated)”—sent in five hundred troops, and eventually opened fire on the crowds, killing at least fifteen people.2

  Finally, with ominous swiftness, Yahya flew out of Dacca for West Pakistan, abandoning the talks once and for all. Whatever hope there had been for a political deal, it was now extinguished.

  That night, trying to break the tension, Archer and Meg Blood hosted a dinner party at their residence. It was supposed to be a morale booster, for a mixed crowd of Americans, Bengalis, and foreign diplomats. Nobody was in the mood.

  The anxious group was watching an old, downbeat Spencer Tracy movie when the emergency telephone rang. Blood was told that students were barricading the streets against Pakistan army vehicles, and that Yahya was gone. The Bengali guests, two High Court justices with their wives, decided to chance running home, and vanished into the dark. But when two American guests ventured out into the streets, they saw a dead body, and raced back to the consul’s residence. A dozen of Blood’s guests—including the Yugoslav consul—nervously camped out there for the night, too afraid to risk going home.

  From the roof, they
had a view of fires and shadowy terrors all across the city. They spent much of that night, Blood later recalled, “watching with horror the constant flash of tracer bullets across the dark sky and listening to the more ominous clatter of machine gun fire and the heavy clump of tank guns.”3

  They could see explosions in the sky. “Dark, dark, dark skies, but with flak,” remembers Meg Blood. “It was not like fireworks. It was continual. It was exploding all over the sky.” The detonations were small, but bright and loud. Some of the Bengalis who worked for the Bloods said that they knew people in the neighborhoods that were being set aflame, including a poor bazaar area. There were army jeeps moving around. Some of the fires were in nearby places that were heavily populated with extremely poor people. “They were suffering terribly,” Meg Blood says.

  The Pakistani military had launched a devastating assault on the Bengalis. Truckloads of Pakistani troops drove through the city, only barely slowed by Bengali barricades. U.S.-supplied M-24 tanks led some of the troop columns. Throughout Dacca, people could hear the firing of rifles and machine guns. Windows rattled from powerful explosions from mortars or heavy weapons. The night turned red from burning cars and buildings. It was only near daybreak that the gunfire slowed.4

  Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times was stuck at the Intercontinental Hotel, beside himself with frustration. On that night, he was jolted by explosions. The army corralled the foreign press. “They kept pushing us into the hotel,” he remembers. They ended up watching from the tenth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. They could see flames from Dacca University, which was a mile and a half away, where, Schanberg says, the army seemed to be shooting artillery. The trapped reporters watched a Pakistani soldier on a jeep that had a mounted machine gun—equipment probably provided by the United States. He recalls, “They started shooting at students coming from the university, up the road about a mile. They were singing patriotic songs in Bengali. And then the army opened up. We couldn’t tell when they hit the ground if they were ducking or killed.”5