Ignorant cold warriors

Declassified transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secret talks with the Chinese leaders, Mao-Tse Tung, Zhou-En-Lai and Huang Hua, show how vi...

Declassified transcripts of Henry Kissinger8217;s secret talks with the Chinese leaders, Mao-Tse Tung, Zhou-En-Lai and Huang Hua, show how vicious the then US President, Richard Nixon, and his extraordinary troubleshooter were toward India. While the US tilt in favour of Pakistan during the 1971 war brought the Seventh Fleet, led by the nuclear-powered Enterprise, close to Indian shores is well known, it is a revelation that the Nixon regime did not mind causing the escalation of the Indo-Pakistan war into a major regional conflict, if not a world war.

What8217;s worse, the transcripts prove that Kissinger even hinted to the then Chinese envoy to UN, Huang Hua, that his country could go ahead and attack India on the US assurance that it would take on the Soviets in case they came to India8217;s rescue. All this was in the name of preventing the erstwhile 8220;East Pakistan from becoming a Bhutan and West Pakistan a Nepal8221;. The reason why the Nixon-Kissinger duo8217;s grandiose plan went awry was not only because it did notrepresent US public opinion.

The basic premise of the strategy was wrong. For instance, Kissinger8217;s portrayal of India as the aggressor flew in the face of incontrovertible evidence that lakhs of people from East Pakistan crossed the Indian borders for safety in the wake of the genocidal attack on the Bengali population by the Pakistani army.

For all his brilliance as a strategist, Kissinger did not read right the impact Indira Gandhi made during her visits to various world capitals to give a true picture of the gargantuan problem India faced in feeding the huge refugee population and the human tragedy it signified.

She knew what Nixon had up his sleeve, for she had tied up a security arrangement with the Soviet Union whereby any attack on India would have forced a Soviet retaliation. Another of Kissinger8217;s miscalculation was on the effect the sighting of US Enterprise in the Indian Ocean would have on the Indian leadership.In the end, the Indians were not overawed by the American presence in theIndian Ocean because they knew that if a shot was fired by the armada, the Americans would have been solely responsible for a third world war and all the resultant death and destruction. India did not have to be worried about the Seventh Fleet for another reason as well. Its motive was different from what Kissinger perceived it to be. The war was thrust on India and it had no intentions other than safeguarding its security as borne out by the unilateral ceasefire it announced when Gen Niazi8217;s forces surrendered to the Indian Army at Dhaka.

India knew, to quote Kissinger, that the Pakistani Army would run out of POL8217; petroleum, oil and lubricants and yet it availed of the first available opportunity to call off the war. If anything, it shows how wrong the US administration was in its estimation of India8217;s objective. Kissinger also did not expect the Chinese to be clever enough to see through his plan.

Thus it was not the Americans who saved Pakistan from dismemberment but the sagacious Indians who didnot let that happen. The irony is that despite proving themselves wrong the American tilt towards Pakistan continues to this day, though the viciousness that marked the Nixon-Kissinger years may have become a thing of the past.