For Americans of a certain age and taste in music, the South Asian crisis of 1971 is remembered primarily for one of the first big concerts for a cause: the Concert for Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, and featuring Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and other luminaries of 60s rock. Yet as Gary J. Bass reminds us in his new book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, the South Asian crisis left a legacy far more important than a best-selling concert album.
According to Bass, a professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University, the crisis reshaped cold-war geopolitics and reordered much of South Asia. It created Bangladesh out of East Pakistan, ratcheted up tensions between India and what was left of Pakistan, and presaged the threats to democracy that would emerge a few years later in Watergate and India’s declaration of a state emergency (1975-77).
Bass came to the topic after writing a book on humanitarian intervention. In Freedom’s Battle (Knopf, 2008), he showed that humanitarian intervention was not a post-cold-war upstart but had a venerable tradition, with European (mostly British) involvement, or debate about involvement, in crises in Greece, Syria, and Bulgaria in the 19th century. Blood Telegram is about the inverse: humanitarian nonintervention. Or, as Bass notes, something far more distressing.
It was not just that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, did little to relieve the suffering or resolve the conflict in East Pakistan. It was also that they stood firmly by Pakistani leaders like Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, who were responsible for the dire situation there.
Dire is too mild a word. As many as 100,000 Bengalis lost their lives in state-sanctioned violence. And something like 10 million refugees, one-sixth of East Pakistan’s population, fled to neighboring India; the vast majority were Hindus, stoking fears of communal violence in the multilingual, multireligious nation. That came on the heels of a major cyclone that received only lackadaisical attention from Yahya’s regime.
Unlike Sarmila Bose, who in Dead Reckoning (Columbia University Press, 2011) analyzes the experiences of those who suffered in 1971, Bass is concerned with those in power who allowed the suffering to take place. He focuses on the proximate causes of the crisis: the cruelty of the Pakistani national government on the one hand and the geopolitical scheming of Nixon and Kissinger, who were at that very moment relying on General Yahya as an intermediary for their top-secret American approach to the People’s Republic of China, on the other.
Bass makes the most of troves of English-language documents on American foreign policy, including remarkable recordings of Nixon and Kissinger’s telephone calls that only recently became available. He reveals Nixon and Kissinger, who draw most of his ire, as calculating, vindictive, and acting out a personal animus against Indira Gandhi and, indeed, all Indians. For example, Nixon intimated to his adviser that what Indians “really need is ... a mass famine”; Kissinger, perhaps playing to his president’s sensibilities, interjected that the Indians are “such bastards.”
America’s diplomats in chief, with their undiplomatic language, were pitted against American foreign-service officers across South Asia, who sounded the alarm about the unfolding humanitarian disaster. Foremost was Archer Blood, who termed the situation “selective genocide” and whose name provides Bass’s cover art and title. Bass’s sympathy for Americans who described the terrifying conditions in East Pakistan is given voice through interviews with Blood’s colleagues and his widow. These new sources add personal details and salty language but few surprises; Nixon and Kissinger’s antipathy toward Indians, Indira Gandhi, and their own diplomats (not necessarily in that order) are well known.
Bass moves onto new ground with his extensive use of Indian documents, which confirm his distaste for Nixon and Kissinger. India campaigned for international help to meet the extraordinary burdens of even the most primitive care for refugees, and pursued diplomatic initiatives that would end Yahya’s policies toward Bengalis. The campaign had some high points but netted only a small portion of refugee costs. The $250,000 raised by George Harrison and friends, for instance, barely covered India’s costs for the duration of the two performances of their concert.
Even that meager result was more successful than Indian diplomatic efforts. Feeling abandoned by the international community, Indian officials took matters into their own hands by supporting the Bengali insurgency in East Pakistan and, eventually, by launching a successful full-scale attack that paved the way for the creation of Bangladesh.
Bass’s account is essential reading—especially for Americans, who will gain insight into their nation’s vexed involvement in South Asia. The author’s outrage at Nixon and Kissinger is well supported, indeed sometimes even repetitively so, and his indictment of American policy compelling.
The connection to crises in Indian and American democracies in the 1970s is speculative. Bass provides evidence of illegality during the Bangladesh emergency, as Nixon and Kissinger sent fighter jets to Yahya through third countries—contravening American law and even bringing the departments of state and defense together in opposition. More important, Nixon’s secrecy and vindictiveness, so well-documented in The Blood Telegram, are familiar traits. Ditto the link between Indira Gandhi’s actions in 1971 and her Declaration of Emergency in 1975. She may well have become less tolerant and more assertive, as Bass claims—but those tendencies were well in evidence before 1971.
Another legacy of 1971 may have been new ways of debating American responses to humanitarian emergencies. As refugee crises and natural disasters drew attention in the 1970s and 1980s, so too did calls for American action. Nor was that just a matter of op-eds and benefit concerts; President Jimmy Carter announced that human rights would be a factor in American policy decisions. Yet Bass is silent about this important legacy.
Readers interested in an account of 1971 that reaches beyond the United States do not have long to wait. Later this fall, Harvard University Press will publish the American edition of Srinath Raghavan’s 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. Almost as critical of American leaders as Bass, Raghavan, who is based at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and whom I met while conducting research in Indian archives, tells the story of Bangladesh’s bloody origins in wider scope than Bass and with more economical prose. Starting with the rising tensions in South Asia, Raghavan uses archives from seven countries (plus the United Nations) to offer a panoramic view of the 1971 crisis as a turning point for longstanding India-Pakistani tensions, for the cold war that now had to reckon with the global aspirations of China, which would soon recognize Bangladesh, and for the globalizing tendencies that would eventually undermine the bipolar world order.
These two impressive new histories bring both the tragedies and legacies of the 1971 crisis to the fore—much as George Harrison aimed to do in his own way.
David C. Engerman is a professor of history at Brandeis University. He is writing a book on Soviet and American aid to India during the cold war, to be published by Harvard University Press.
