The Longest August (32 page)

Haig stressed that the United States wanted the Kremlin to move promptly to halt the fighting and that delays could have the most serious
impact on US-Soviet relations.
29
“Nixon and Kissinger had to rely on Moscow's word that India would not attack West Pakistan,” noted Dobrynin in his memoirs,
In Confidence
, and added that “the Soviet Union's diplomatic intervention helped prevent the military conflict from spreading.”
30

When Henry Kissinger and Prime Minister Zhou met in the Great Hall in Beijing on June 20, 1972, they reviewed the events of the tumultuous days in December. Among the topics discussed was a series of articles about the “US tilt” toward Pakistan, published in January 1972 by columnist Jack Anderson, based on the classified minutes of the WSAG.
31
In hot pursuit of forging friendly ties with China, Nixon and Kissinger ignored the rising condemnation and anger of American commentators at the brutal atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan. Tellingly, the early protest of their stance of “See no evil” had come from the US consulate in Dacca. A telegram headlined “Dissent from US Policy on East Pakistan,” signed by twenty officials from the consulate and other American development agencies and sent from Dacca by the consul-general, Archer K. Blood, on April 7, 1971, referred to “selective genocide” in East Pakistan.
32

PM [Zhou]: They [Pakistanis] were not clear about the situation because Mr. Bhutto himself was not a military man and Yahya Khan had boasted about the military situation. So I believe Mr. Bhutto on the 11th [December] thought that the military situation in Pakistan at that time was indeed very well.

HK [Kissinger]: Bhutto arrived in New York on Friday the 10th our time, 11th your time. . . . You called us in the morning of the 12th and we were going to the meeting with [French President] Pompidou [in Azores] so we sent General [Alexander] Haig. But between the time we got the phone call and picked up the message we didn't know what it was. And since Huang Ha had taken a very tough line, not knowing the situation I thought your message to us was that you were taking military measures. And since we were going to the Azores before [the meeting with Huang], we had to give instructions [to Haig]. If your message was, you were taking military measures our instructions were that if the Soviet Union moved against you we would move against the Soviet Union.

PM: Why did the newspapers publish what had been discussed step by step in the Washington Special Actions Group with respect to the East Pakistan situation?

HK: Well first, the PM has to understand that the Washington Special [Action] Group implements decisions, it does not make decisions. The reason I had to take such a strong stand in this group was because the vast majority of our bureaucracy was pro-India and pro-Soviet.

PM: Pro-Soviet?

HK: More Pro-Soviet than Pro-Chinese. I came under the most violent attack. . . . What happened is that a disloyal member of our bureaucracy gave these documents to newspapers and they printed them in order to destroy us and they came very close.

PM: But after reading the records that were published, it seemed to me that the members of that group came from quite a lot of quarters.

HK: Yes, they were almost unanimously against our policy.

PM: Especially toward India?

HK: They didn't understand our overall strategy. If they had understood we were getting ready to take on the Soviet Union then what happened was mild compared to what would have happened. The reason we moved our Fleet into the Indian Ocean was not because of India primarily—it was as pressure on the Soviet Union if the Soviets did what I mentioned before.

PM: And they also closely followed you down into the Indian Ocean.

HK: Yes but what they had we could have taken care of very easily.

PM: What they were trying to do was to create more noise in East Bengal. They openly passed through the Tsushima straits and then through the Malacca Straits.

HK: Yes but not with a force that could fight ours.

PM: Yes, but you know they could surface in such a way their support to East Bengal.

HK: Oh yes, it was used for that purpose. Actually, the Pakistan Army in the East surrendered five days later [on December 16], so it would have been too late for you to do anything.

PM: Also Yahya Khan had sent his order in preparation for such a measure on the 11th or the 12th.
33

China's message to the United States on December 12 apparently expressed support for an immediate cease-fire. That day, Washington requested the reconvening of the Security Council. While the Council deliberated, the military situation for Pakistan deteriorated rapidly.

Within a week of the hostilities, Indian warplanes had grounded the entire air force of East Pakistan by raiding four major air bases and had gained almost total control of its air space. By attacking the three main
ports of East Pakistan, India's warships severed the escape routes for the stranded Pakistani troops.

The lightning progress of Delhi's forces owed much to the success Indian code breakers had in breaking Pakistan's military cipher. They furnished India's military intelligence with real-time information on the enemy's strategic decision making, according to the selective leaks from India's classified official history of the 1971 war.
34
Among other things, the Indians' interception of Pakistan's military communications aborted its high command's decision to evacuate its troops in five vessels disguised as merchant ships.

On land, the Indian troops advancing along Dacca-Chittagong Highway were forced to halt twenty miles southeast of Dacca when they encountered a broken bridge across the Meghna River. “The Pakistani forces thought they had cut us off after they blew up a bridge over the Meghna River,” recalled Lieutenant General Aurora later. “But we took them by surprise and crossed it at night with the help of the local people. That was the turning point [in the war].”
35
With that, on December 13 Dacca became vulnerable to the invaders' artillery fire.

Niazi's Unconditional Surrender

“You have fought a heroic battle against overwhelming odds,” read the dispatch to Niazi from general headquarters in Rawalpindi. However, the message continued, “you have now reached a stage where further resistance is no longer humanly possible nor will it serve any useful purpose. . . . You should now take all necessary measures to stop the fighting and preserve the lives of armed forces personnel, all those from West Pakistan and all loyal elements.”
36

Later, when controversy broke out in Pakistan about the actual events on those crucial days, some critics accused Niazi of acting unilaterally. “I swear on oath that I was given clear-cut orders from Yahya to surrender, but still I was determined to fight till the end,” Niazi asserted. “I even sent a message that my decision to fight till the end stands. However, General Abdul Hamid Khan and Air Chief Marshal Rahim [Khan] rang me up, ordering me to act on the [headquarters'] signal of December 14, 1971 because West Pakistan was in danger. It was at this stage that I was asked to agree on a cease-fire so that the safety of the troops could be ensured.”
37

On December 15 Niazi approached the American consul-general in Dacca, who contacted the appropriate authority in Delhi. The next day Lieutenant-General Aurora, the joint commander of India's Eastern Command and the Bangladesh Forces of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, flew into Dacca to accept the instrument of surrender signed by Niazi.

In Delhi, within hours of learning about Niazi's decision to surrender, Manekshaw called on Indira Gandhi. He reportedly asked her if the military high command had the permission to “finish the job.” This meant overrunning West Pakistan. She replied that the cabinet would consider his suggestion.
38

She summoned a cabinet meeting. By the time she had briefed her colleagues about the secret intermediary role the Kremlin had played between her and Nixon, and that the Kremlin had ruled out even attacking Azad Kashmir, any enthusiasm for Manekshaw's gung-ho proposal harbored by some of her ministers vanished. The session ended with a unanimous decision to declare a unilateral cease-fire on December 17 on the western front as well. Such level-headed decision making had a parallel during the September 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, when the Cabinet Committee on Security, headed by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, voted against attempting to capture Lahore, which would have been defended fiercely.

In Dacca, Aurora met Niazi at the ornate administrative office of the Ramna Race Course, the former exclusive club of the British officers stationed in Dacca Cantonment, overlooking the race course and the surrounding park. It was here that in his historic speech on March 6, 1971, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman had declared: “This time the struggle is for our freedom.” Now, surrounded by a large group of uniformed officers and civilian bureaucrats, the bearded Aurora, wearing a starched, striped turban, countersigned the instrument of surrender signed by clean-shaven Niazi, sporting a beret.

As the Indian and Pakistan officers emerged from the site of the signing ceremony, they were greeted by a cheering crowd. Jubilant young men and boys and girls in colorful clothes held aloft Bangladeshi and Indian flags as vehicles played loud music. They threaded their way slowly through the jostling assemblage. Shouts of “
Joi Bangla
” (Bengali: “Victory to Bengal”) interspersed with anti-Pakistan and pro-India slogans stirred the wintry air. Before their eyes the officers witnessed the celebrating multitude grow exponentially.

The victorious and the vanquished senior army officers struggled to reach their jeeps to repair to the officers' mess in the cantonment. Once there, while drinking whiskey and soda, they exchanged anecdotes about their time at the Indian military academy, where they had trained together before the partition.

Counting the Cost

For the moment, they set aside the fate of the 90,370 Pakistani POWs acquired by the nascent Bangladeshi government but held by the Indian military. Of these, 56,370 were military personnel, 22,000 paramilitaries and policemen, and the rest civil servants and their families. The war on both fronts cost India the lives of 3,850 servicemen and Pakistan 9,000. Predictably, Pakistan's claim of destroying 130 Indian warplanes was rebutted by Delhi, which put the figure at 45. Equally, India's claimed score of 94 enemy warplanes was scaled down to 42 by Pakistan. India's tank loss of 82 was a fraction of Pakistan's 226.
39

The estimate of the deaths by violence in East Pakistan from March 26 to December 16, 1971, has varied wildly—from twenty-six thousand to three million. Going by the records of Pakistan's Eastern Command, seen by the Hamoodur Rehman Inquiry Commission, the military killed twenty-six thousand people in action, with the commission noting that the officers always gave a low count.
40
The figure of three million—five times the estimate for the unparalleled communal butchery in Punjab during 1947—first mentioned by Shaikh Rahman in his interview with British TV personality David Frost in January 1972 after his return to Dacca as a free man is now universally regarded as excessively inflated.
41
The statistic given by Indian officials to Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, authors of
War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh
, was one hundred thousand.
42

In her study of the subject, published as
Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
, Sarmila Bose, a Bengali-speaking research scholar at Oxford University, undertook extensive field research. After selecting the worst of the alleged atrocities, she reconstructed and quantified these by interviewing the participants in Pakistan and Bangladesh—mainly retired Pakistani officers, the survivors of the brutalities, and their relatives in Bangladesh, as well as members of the non-Bengali and non-Muslim minorities. Her case-by-case estimation gave her a total of 50,000
to 100,000 dead.
43
In their analysis of the data from the world health survey program, covering fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia, Ziad Obermeyer and fellow researchers mentioned a figure of 269,000.
44

In the excitement over the lightning triumph of the Indian and Bangladeshi forces, however, the statistics of those who perished in East Pakistan did not engage popular attention. The appearance of jubilant crowds in the cities of Bangladesh and West Bengal was a striking contrast to the angry demonstrations that rippled through the streets of West Pakistani cities. Such was the thoroughness with which the military junta controlled the media that the public at large believed that their forces were winning the war in the East while clobbering the Indians along the border with West Pakistan.

When exposed to the sights and sounds of Niazi signing the instrument of surrender on TV and radio on December 16, West Pakistanis went into instant denial. They blamed the battlefield debacle on Yahya Khan's heavy drinking and womanizing. That night in a broadcast, Yahya Khan, his voice slurred with drink, declared bravely that though a battle had been lost, the war would go on. The next day he accepted Delhi's unilateral offer of a cease-fire in West Pakistan.

Senior military officers outside Yahya Khan's immediate clique thought that he would accept responsibility for the nation's humiliating defeat and that he and the top generals would step down. Instead, on December 18 he announced he was going to promulgate a new constitution, while furious demonstrations demanding the regime's resignation had erupted all over the country. There was a real danger he might call on the army to restore order, which would have resulted in civilian bloodshed in West Pakistan.