Winning 1971 again

Pakistani troops surrendering to Indian Army on 16 December 1971 in Dhaka. For the Bangladesh Liberation War, India had an inbuilt exit strategy or fallback option | @Sajeda_Akhtar/Twitter

When you look back on a sharp, short and decisive war with the benefit of four decades of hindsight, you have the luxury of breaking it up into four vital frames: military, strategic, ideological and political. The first, military, is settled at once, and without any argument. The real, formal war was over in a mere 13 days, the second shortest war in post-World War II history, and as cleanly decisive as the shortest one, the Middle East’s Six-Day War in 1967. There are still many arguments over what could have gone wrong, and where we got lucky or who did what at the last moment to save the day. But the brutal fact about a decisive war is the winner-takes-all privilege it confers on the victor. So that is not so much to argue about right now.

But there will be some arguments over the strategic outcome. Inder Malhotra, doyen of Indian journalism (and probably the only journalist active now from amongst those who covered 1971 and the two wars before that, 1965 and 1962, in India’s most perilous decade), argued in his op-ed page article on Friday (‘Fourteen days to freedom’, www.indianexpress. com/news/fourteen-days-to-freedom/888306/) that we seemed to have frittered away much of the strategic advantage the war conferred on us. Similarly, this paper’s contributing editor,

C. Raja Mohan, argued that even the military-strategic gains from the victory were limited as the Pakistani military now no longer had a faraway east to defend and could concentrate its military might in its heartland and threatened us even more from the west. It is tough to disagree with either. Indira Gandhi, and her formidable think-tank of strategic advisers then, the so-called Dhar-Kaul-Kao Kashmiri Mafia” did not seem to have a plan to build on that victory. And once celebrations were over, it is now evident, they got obsessed with milking that victory either for narrow gains in domestic politics, or to further an ideology that was very much their own, that of the Vasant Vihar Bolsheviks, rather than having been debated either in the public sphere or even in Parliament. It was this politico-ideological hijack that ultimately robbed India of what could have been the lasting strategic gains of that brilliant military campaign.

So this is our hypothesis: India lost the strategic gains of 1971 because Indira Gandhi’s politics came to be dominated entirely by the Left elite encircling her. In fairness, we have to record the fact that she had taken a hard Left-turn already to counter the party’s fuddy duddy old Right. But she erred in mixing the issue of high strategy and diplomacy with domestic politics and economics. In the run-up to the war, beginning with Yahya Khan’s brutal crackdown on East Pakistan beginning March 25, India was confronted with not just a pro-Pakistani tilt from Washington but also an emerging US-Pak-China axis. Mrs Gandhi countered this by signing a strategic treaty with the Soviet Union. This was a clear departure from the non-alignment she herself so strongly believed in. But she blundered in not only continuing that aligned posture but also in believing that it dovetailed nicely with her own post-1969 socialist posture. This is just what the intellectual and bureaucratic Left elite around her wanted. The result was a series of missteps leading up to phenomenal inflation (28 per cent at one point), widespread popular unrest, and then the Emergency. In fact it was during the Emergency that some of our most awful pseudo-socialist laws were passed, many of them by an illegitimate Parliament in its sixth year. In fact, it was this Parliament that added the word socialist” to the preamble to our Constitution.

Instead of making a quick correction after winning the war, Mrs Gandhi perpetuated the same client-state worldview, making India take stands on issues like Cambodia and Afghanistan that painted us for ever in disgrace, as backers of the Heng Samrin regime in Phnom Penh and Soviet stooges in Kabul.

Overall, therefore, a decade when India should have been basking in the glory of a great military victory that offered us great strategic gains and an exalted global stature, became India’s lost decade. Instead of building on this strategic capital, Mrs Gandhi tried to exploit it to push her faulty economics and politics. So our economy declined, our democracy was blighted by the Emergency and our global stature was diminished, as we became half a client state of the Soviets.

We did fritter away the strategic gains of a military victory. But what about the ideological argument?

It is a slightly more complex issue. The East Pakistani revolt has to be seen not just as a Bengali challenge to the politically and militarily dominant Punjabi West, but also as a questioning of the two-nation theory. A majority of Pakistanis lived in the East and if they repudiated the two-nation theory, they had questioned the very ideology of Pakistan. At the other end of the ideological spectrum was secular India, proudly embracing its Muslims. The rise of a liberal Bangladesh thus underlined the strength of one ideology of nation-building (liberal, secular, diverse) against another (insular, insecure and sectarian).

Over the same disastrous decade of the seventies we had lost that gain and Bangladesh was taken hold of by the generals. It has taken a good two decades now for the Bangladeshi people to recover from that. They have voted in a liberal, modern government. It has declared Bangladesh a secular republic and even the army has backed this. While the world celebrates the rise of Indonesia as a large, model, liberal-democratic Islamic state, there is an unfairly inadequate appreciation of what Bangladesh’s largely Muslim voters have achieved. That, the victory of democratic, liberal pluralism is, ultimately, the one real gain of 1971 that the people of Bangladesh have won back for the entire subcontinent. That is why India now needs to have a most big-hearted policy towards Dhaka. Any cussedness, in Delhi or Kolkata, and we could easily lose it once again, this time, probably, for ever.

Postscript: Here is a page from my Lahore scrapbook, dateline May 1, 1990. India and Pakistan seemed on the verge of war with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto resurrecting her father’s old threat of a thousand-year war over Kashmir and her Indian counterpart V.P. Singh mockingly asking if Pakistan could last for a thousand hours. It was in that charged mood that I was dragged to the intellectual (kalam mazdoor) May Day rally at Pak Tea House. Since this was mostly a left-liberal gathering, there were many conciliatory speeches made. But the show stealer was Habib Jalib, for decades Pakistan’s poet of dissent. I remember the most stunning lines of a composition that he said he had especially written for that day: nasheeli aankhon, sunehri zulfon ke desh ko kho kar, main hairaan hoon, woh ziqr waadi-e-Kashmir karte hain.” The implications of what he said took about half-a-minute to sink in. Only a brave man could publicly mock the Pakistani establishment’s self-destructive nostalgia for Kashmir which had already lost them half of what used to be their country. Habib Jalib was not just a brave man but also a brilliant poet. Because, in a simple verse in Urdu, he had told us the real meaning of the outcome of 1971.