The Longest August (29 page)

“They [The prime minister of India and the president of Pakistan] reaffirm their obligation under the UN Charter not to have recourse to force and to settle their disputes through peaceful means,” read Article 1 of the Tashkent Declaration, signed on January 10, 1966. “They considered that the interests of peace in their region . . . were not served by the continuance of tension. . . . It was against this background that Jammu and Kashmir was discussed, and each of the sides set forth its respective position.” Two other articles specified a February 25 deadline for the armed personnel of the two countries to be withdrawn to the positions they had held prior to August 5, and “both sides shall observe the cease-fire terms on the cease-fire line.” The last article stated that “both sides will continue meetings at the highest and at other levels on matters of direct concern to both countries. Both sides have recognized the need to set up joint Indian-Pakistan bodies, which will report to their Governments in order to decide what further steps should be taken.”
32
A day earlier, answering a question by Bhutto, Kosygin replied, “Jammu and Kashmir is disputed and naturally you have a right to bring this up under Article 9.”
33

The absence of a reference to a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir seemed to satisfy the Indian delegates. “The Indians were jubilant and smiling,” wrote Air Martial Asghar Khan, a member of the Pakistani delegation. “Tashkent Declaration was for Pakistan a statement of surrender. The Indians were all over the room shaking any hand that they could grasp. It was as if India had defeated Pakistan in hockey at the Olympics.”
34

Khan was unaware that the head of the Indian delegation, Shastri, was hardly in a buoyant mood. His consultations first with Kosygin on the text of the declaration and then with his foreign and defense ministers to judge how the joint communiqué would be received in India had dragged on until three
am
on January 10. His sleep was brief—too brief for his ailing heart.

Death in the Line of Duty

During the morning of January 10 Shastri held a series of meetings with his ministers and senior bureaucrats as well as Soviet officials to fine-tune
the declaration, and also work on his speech. He signed the historic document in the afternoon. Then, turning immediately to the accompanying Indian press corps, he said: “I am in your hands; if you write favorably, the country will accept it.”
35
In the evening he attended the farewell party given by the Soviet hosts.

The journalists accompanying Shastri retired to their rooms in a hotel located some distance from the dacha where Shastri and his party were lodged. “‘Your Prime Minister is dying'”: that was what Kuldip Nayar, part of the Indian press team in Tashkent, heard the Russian female concierge saying as she tried waking up the journalists on her floor. Nayar and the Indian press attaché rushed to Shastri's dacha by taxi. “At the dacha, we met Kosygin, a picture of grief,” wrote Nayar. “He could not speak and only lifted his hands to indicate that Shastri was no more.”
36

After the farewell reception, Shastri had reached his dacha at about ten
pm
. “Shastri told [his personal servant] Ram Nath to bring him his food which came from Ambassador [T. N.] Kaul's house, prepared by his cook, Jan Mohammed,” continued Nayar. “He ate very little: a dish of spinach and potatoes and a curry.” Venkat Raman, one of Shastri's personal assistants in Delhi, called him to say that the general reaction to the Tashkent Declaration in the capital had been favorable, except by opposition leaders, who objected to the withdrawal of Indian troops from the Haji Pir Pass. Keen to know the reaction of his close family members, Shastri phoned to know the opinion of his eldest daughter, Kusam. She replied in Hindi, “We have not liked it.” Shastri asked, “What about [your] Amma [Hindi: mother]?” She too had not liked it, came the reply. This upset Shastri. “If my own family has not liked it, what would outsiders say?” he remarked.

Agitated, he started pacing the room, something he often did while giving interviews to the press. He drank some milk as a preliminary to retiring to bed. But he could not sleep, and resumed pacing the room. He asked for water, which Ram Nath served him from the thermos flask on the dressing table. Soon after midnight he asked Ram Nath to retire to his room and rise early for a flight to Kabul.

In another room Shastri's personal secretary, Jagan Nath Sahai, and two stenographers finished packing their luggage at 1:20
am
. Suddenly they found the prime minister standing at their door. “Where is the doctor sahib?” he inquired with some effort. Astonishingly, there was no emergency bell or buzzer in Shastri's spacious room. Dr. R. N. Chugh was sleeping at the back of the room. Sahai woke up Chugh. While the doctor
dressed, Sahai and the stenographers helped Shastri to walk back to his room. (In retrospect this was a fatal move by someone who had suffered a severe heart attack, according to Nayar in his book
India: The Critical Years
. Shastri had previously survived two mild heart attacks.)

In his room, a racking cough convulsed him. He was given water to drink and put to bed. After touching his chest, he fell unconscious. Dr. Chugh arrived, felt his pulse, gave him an injection in the arm, and later put the syringe needle into his heart. There was no response. He then gave the dying Shastri mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it failed.

Chugh said to Sahai, “Get the local doctors.” The security guard at the dacha acted promptly. A Soviet doctor arrived within ten minutes, with others following. They declared Shastri dead. The exact time of his death on January 11 was 1:32
am
Tashkent time, or 2:02
am
IST.

Ayub Khan was informed instantly, and he arrived at Shastri's dacha at four
am
. He looked downcast. “Here is a man of peace who gave his life for amity between India and Pakistan,” he remarked. Later he would tell Pakistani reporters that Shastri was one Indian leader with whom he had hit it off. “Pakistan and India might have solved their differences had he lived,” he remarked.
37
When Aziz Ahmad, the foreign secretary of Pakistan, called Bhutto to inform him of Shastri's death, Bhutto was half asleep and grasped only the word “died.” “Which of the two bastards?” he asked;
38
the other “bastard,” according to him, being Ayub Khan.

Any opposition to the Tashkent Declaration in India died with Shastri. Parliament endorsed it. Indira Gandhi, the forty-nine-year-old minister of information and broadcasting, was installed as prime minister by Congress Party barons as a stop-gap measure. The sole, but largely neglected, child of Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru, Indira had grown up as an insecure and defensive woman. With her long, sharp nose and a broad forehead, she was a cross between the refined, sinewy features of her father and the bloated visage of her mother. She fell in love with an outgoing, articulate Zoroastrian intellectual and Congress Party activist named Feroze Gandhi. At the age of twenty-five, disregarding the opposition of her father and Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, she married Feroze Gandhi according to Hindu rituals. Since Zoroastrianism does not accept converts, there was no question of Indira adopting the religion of her husband. Following the breakdown of her marriage after Indian independence, she ran her father's household. Using his unchallenged power and personality, Nehru got her elected president of the Congress
Party in 1959. That was how she was parachuted into mainstream Indian politics. The ruling party's presidency gave her insight into the weaknesses of the main political players, an asset she would successfully use later to outmaneuver those who had earlier privately derided her as a “dumb doll” (Hindi:
goongi guddia
).

Ayub Khan Passes on the Ruler's Baton

The state-controlled press in Pakistan was inhibited from airing the public letdown about the Tashkent Declaration. Even then popular anger burst into street demonstrations. The protestors felt that their president had sold Kashmir to the Hindu babus (Urdu: petty clerks) and warlords and that he had given away his battlefield gains in the negotiations. Police gunfire killed two protesting students in Lahore. Angry demonstrators, marching along the main thoroughfare of Karachi, set ablaze the US Information Service Library.

Referring to the disturbance in his radio broadcast on January 14, Ayub Khan said, “There may be some amongst us, who will take advantage of your feelings and will try to mislead you.”
39
He was referring to his political adversaries, whose ranks and temper had been bolstered by Bhutto's undisguised opposition to the Tashkent Declaration. Indeed Bhutto resigned as foreign minister five months after the signing of this declaration, and started planning the birth of a political party of his own.

However, a more robust opposition was growing in East Pakistan with material as well as cultural causes. Under Ayub Khan's presidency, power became concentrated in the hands of the military, bureaucratic, and commercial-industrial elites, among whom Bengalis were only marginally represented. The war in Kashmir, in which they had minimal interest or attachment, was thrust on them without consultation. During the seventeen days of its duration, they remained helpless observers. In March 1966, they were shocked to hear Bhutto state, during a National Assembly debate in Dacca,
40
that during the Indo-Pakistan War the government had confidently assumed that, in the event of an attack on East Pakistan, China would come to its defense.
41
If, in the final analysis, Beijing was responsible for the defense of East Pakistan, then there was no advantage in the eastern wing remaining a part of Pakistan. As an independent nation,
most Bengalis concluded, they might be able to safeguard it more effectively. These factors swelled the ranks of the Awami League, led by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman. Its six-point platform, centered around a federal Pakistan, envisaged a weak central government, lacking taxation powers and control over external trade, with its jurisdiction reduced to foreign affairs and defense.

Looking back, Ayub Khan regretted his decision to go to war with India. In April he told his cabinet: “I want it understood that never again will we risk 100 million Pakistanis for 5 million Kashmiris—never again.”
42
But the plunge in his popular standing proved irreversible.

Four months after resigning from the cabinet in June 1966, Bhutto announced the creed of his forthcoming Pakistan People's Party (PPP): “Islam is our Faith; Democracy is out Policy; Socialism is our economy. All power to the People.” While serving as a cabinet minister for eight years, he had impressed his colleagues with his extensive knowledge, wit, and brilliance, and had acquired a base of his own. He expanded it by coopting leftists in West Pakistan with a sprinkling of communists from East Pakistan to establish the PPP in Lahore in November 1967. Notably, its founding charter referred to “jihad against India” because of its continued refusal to hold the promised plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. A prematurely balding man with a sharp nose in a buttery face, he was charismatic and glib, with a penchant for catchy slogans. His slogan “Bread, Clothing, and Shelter” for all clicked with the public, as did his cries of “Down with
zamindars
[landlords]” and “Equal rights for peasants.” Through seductive demagoguery and awe-inspiring self-confidence, he rapidly built up popular support for the PPP.

Beginning in the autumn of 1968, opposition to the government, expressed through demonstrations and strikes, escalated. It became so acute that in March 1969 Ayub Khan abrogated the constitution he had unveiled in 1962, reimposed martial law, and resigned. He handed over power to the COAS, General Yahya Khan.

In August Yahya Khan welcomed US president Richard Nixon in Lahore. He paid a return state visit to Washington at the end October 1971, when the crisis in East Pakistan became acute, requiring consultations with Nixon. He followed this up with a meeting with Zhou Enlai in Beijing on November 14. At home one of his early decisions was to expand the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and assign it the task of gathering political intelligence in East Pakistan.

The Rise of the ISI and RAW

The ISI had come a long way from its modest inception in 1948, when Deputy COAS Major General Robert Cawthorne established it as part of military intelligence. Two years later he turned it into an independent agency under his direct command. In the 1950s COAS General Ayub Khan used the ISI to keep increasingly fractious politicians under surveillance. Its authority grew when he seized power in 1958, and in effect it became the military's political arm. Following its intelligence failures in the Indo-Pakistan War in September 1965, he reorganized it. He set up a Covert Action Division inside the ISI. Its early assignment was to assist ethnic minority insurgents operating under such names as the All Tripura Tiger Force and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland in northeast India that were demanding independence.

Delhi countered this when, in September 1967, Indira Gandhi established a foreign intelligence agency initially as a wing of the main Intelligence Bureau (IB) with the innocuous title of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) but reporting directly to the prime minister's office. It immediately acquired the assets of the Special Frontier Force, a secret army set up five years earlier and trained by the CIA to carry out subversive actions, originally aimed at Chinese troops in Tibet.
43

Before establishing the new agency, Indira Gandhi had secured the assistance of the CIA through President Lyndon Johnson. Since their White House meeting in March 1966, he had maintained cordial relations with her. He disapproved of the close relationship Pakistan was developing with China. This opened the way for senior RAW and IB officials to be trained by the CIA. RAW was made an independent agency in 1968 under Rameshwar Nath Kao, who had headed the IB's foreign intelligence division. Its activities were to be concealed not only from the public but also from Parliament. To counter the growing intelligence and military links between Pakistan and China, the prime minister instructed Kao to cultivate links with Israel's foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, which also functioned as a department of the prime minister's secretariat.
44
This was at a time when Delhi had no diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv and took a strongly pro-Palestinian stance in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.