Why India decided to get involved in the Bangladesh Liberation War

The excerpt below, set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War—which lasted nine months and concluded with the birth of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971—explores the contradictions that shaped India’s approach to warfare and its relationship with the newly formed Mujib government in Bangladesh.  Among the many considerations that India had while getting involved in the matter was the rise of the Naxals in the country, China’s interventions in Bangladesh’s politics and the need for Soviet support. 

Joy Bangla

The people of East Pakistan fought back. On 26 March 1971, Mujib declared independence. One day later, the declaration was broadcast from the secret Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (Free Bengal Radio Centre) by an obscure Maj. Ziaur-Rahman who omitted any reference to Mujib. Mujib’s victory meant that the six-point programme had electoral support. Bhutto and Yahya’s failure to accept this mandate meant the demand for autonomy translated into a crackdown. The consequent Bengali pushback ended with Bangladesh’s liberation on 16 December 1971, the day Pakistani forces signed the instrument of surrender with attacking Indian forces.

A history of the war is beyond this book’s scope. Instead, this section focuses on the contradictions that shaped India’s approach towards warfighting and the Mujibnagar government. Aware of the fractious nature of East Pakistani politics coupled with Mujib’s cult, working with diverse sections of Bengalis united in their desire for liberation—but ideologically divided—was challenging. Who would credit for liberation became a fractious issue. The need to manage fissures in Bangladesh’s body politic was as important as ensuring India’s military preparedness with Soviet support and diplomatic mobilisation against Pakistan’s genocide.

The job fell on the shoulders of Durga Prasad Dhar—popularly known as ‘DP’. India’s envoy to the Soviet Union, Dhar played a critical role in the signing of the 1971 Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty.Haksar appointed the quick-witted and charming DP as chairman of the MEA’s policy planning committee to coordinate and lead the war effort as he himself was ‘physically, and mentally, stretched beyond the breaking point’. On 19 August 1971, DP was formally appointed to lead the ‘one-man committee’ to coordinate wartime political communications and intelligence liaison. Gandhi was ‘anxious’ that liaison with leaders of the Bangladesh movement should be centralised and maintained ‘by the clandestine agency and the secret channels of R&AW’. 

If Kao commanded R&AW’s special kinetic operations, DP was to command its special political operations. This meant working with all factions in the Bangladesh government, and channelling their capabilities towards liberation. For this, if needed, DP was to coax radical elements to toe the Bangladeshi government’s line,

and fight under the Mukti Fauj. To make sense of his appointment and approach, it’s essential to unpack the ideas DP had on how to manage these issues while he was still in Moscow.

On 7 April, a few days after the launch of Operation Searchlight, he received a letter from Haksar. Gandhi’s principal secretary wanted to know if ‘India and Soviet Union and perhaps others do anything to bring the conflict to an early end, or to sustain the truly nationalist forces in East Pakistan so that, politically speaking, they continue to command the respect and loyalty of the vast majority of

the people’. Gandhi was concerned that she couldn’t withstand domestic pressures, especially from the Jana Sangh, to recognise Bangladesh as a separate country after a point, and that there were thousands of people from West Bengal who were volunteering to fight in East Pakistan.

The 1967 Naxalite uprising, known connections between Indian and Bangladeshi Naxals, China’s ideological and material support to these groups, and the recent outbreak of a communist uprising in Ceylon worried New Delhi that the resistance in East Pakistan could ‘slip out of the hands of these [nationalistic] elements into the hands of pro-Chinese factions’. This ‘was bound to affect the whole of India and endanger its stability’, she believed. Haksar warned DP that R&AW was receiving reports of ‘beginning of rumblings’ that ‘the leadership of Mujibur Rahman and his colleagues has failed the people’ and the East Pakistani counterpart of ‘our Naxalites alone can deliver the goods’. In India’s reading, China was playing a classic ‘double-faced game’ by publicly supporting West Pakistan, but ‘working clandestinely to increase its influence in East Pakistan’.

India received a sympathetic but noncommittal response from Moscow through a ‘disappointed’ DP. On 18 April, a few days after noting his disappointment with the Soviets, DP authored an optimistic and considered note to Haksar. He argued that Moscow was more forthcoming and sympathetic in reality than its written notes reflect, and recommended that India consolidate its position both in the ‘East Pakistani people’s mind and in the assessment made of our motives and our attitude in the different countries of the world’. He noted that Moscow was willing to depart from its policy of discouraging secessionism in light of Pakistan’s crackdown against Bengali nationalism, which ‘is secessionist in essence’.

Moscow informed DP that it guided the Communist Party of India (CPI) to utilise its channels to help the ‘politically correct groups in East Pakistan’, namely the NAP-M and the Communist Party of Bangladesh. Moscow also advised the CPI to suspend its rivalry with CPI(M) for the conflict’s duration. The situation in West Bengal in 1970–71 was precarious. After meeting CPI’s Rajeshwar Rao and CPI’s Bhupesh Gupta in Moscow, DP was convinced that Soviet influence was working on Indian communists.

But most of all for DP, the month preceding the onset of Pakistan’s crackdown demonstrated ‘to the delighted surprise of all us that the East Bengalis have it in them’.There had been apprehensions among Indian officials about the stamina and commitment of the Bengali people to resist Pakistan. DP did not want New Delhi to seek an immediate defeat of the Pakistani army, but to ‘create the whole of East Bengal into a bottomless ditch which will suck the strength and the resources of West Pakistan’. India had to think in terms of one or two years, not a week or two, and wage a long-term covert campaign inside East Pakistan instead of using overt military force, he suggested. His advocacy had support in New Delhi. K Subrahmanyam, director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, argued that India should intervene to ‘save the majority population in a country from genocide by a military oligarchy’, and that such an act ‘will be in the spirit of the action India has been demanding’ from the UN and the West against oppressive ‘white minority regime[s]’ in South Africa and Rhodesia. 

In July, on his return to India, DP met with Bhashani and Tajuddin, and presented a seventeen-page assessment to Gandhi that explained how to manage the fractious politics of East Pakistan in keeping with India’s interests. His basic point was to caution Gandhi against total war despite the risk of an insurgency becoming a ‘festering wound’, and to ‘use the Bengali human material and the Bengali terrain to launch a comprehensive war of liberation’. Somewhat derogatorily, DP continued that India’s efforts to train and arm Bengali guerrillas were woefully small and the R&AW should ‘convert every potential beggar—because anyone who lives on doles for a long time loses initiative and becomes a beggar—into a committed liberation fighter.’ Once these ‘steeled fighters’ could operate with greater speed and gain territory, it was likely that the situation may escalate to war between India and Pakistan. 

He went on: ‘of such a possibility we need not be unduly afraid. If war comes in this manner, well, let it come and we should not avoid it. As a matter of fact, I discern a ring of inevitability about an Indo Pak war’. But how could internal differences be managed in the liberation movement? DP drew from past experiences, including the world wars, to build a case for a disciplined vanguard within the movement. He was clear that ‘it will be nothing short of a miracle that no bickering should arise amongst the constituents of Bangladesh … the list of differences and complaints against the Government of India and their functionaries is also likely to become fatter and fatter’.

To manage the AL-dominated Mujibnagar government’s internal issues and create a united front, DP recommended forging battlefield unity among fighters (instead of creating ‘manifesto-borne-unity’), like in the Spanish civil war.His biggest worry was the AL leadership turning ‘wishy washy … leading to endless argument and quarrels’, and creating grounds for the movement’s leadership passing into the

hands of ‘sober or the extreme communist’. India had to ‘identify the really liberal, democratic and brave elements amongst the cross section of the leadership of the East Bengalis. This would become the hard core around whom we could build an edifice which could at once be dependable and stable’. Though sensible to keep the liberation movement united, DP’s approach had its antinomies. The nationalist vanguard he had in mind was suited to India’s interests, but militated against participatory politics. The other contradiction lay in how India viewed and dealt with communists.