CHAPTER XIV

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India’s Ascendancy
over Pakistan

THE CRITICAL factor in the international politics of South Asia has been the power balance and general relationship between India and Pakistan. With its two widely separated halves held precariously together by a common Islamic heritage and a shared fear and hatred of India, and with the support of military aid from and an alliance (even though not valid against Indian attack) with the United States, Pakistan was able for a time to hold up its end of the adversary relationship with its larger neighbor. But this was possible only as long as the Pakistani political system offered enough to the people of East Pakistan to keep them within the same fold as the culturally very different West, where the political and military power lay. When that ceased to be true, in 1970-71, Pakistan broke in half, and the power balance in the subcontinent tilted sharply in favor of India, which enjoyed comparative political stability and superior national power.

The Rise of Indira Gandhi

It was a striking testimonial to the vigor of the parliamentary system in India and to that of the Congress that the death of Nehru in May 1964 was not followed by chaos or a military takeover. A majority of the senior Congress leaders combined to exclude the conservative and authoritarian Morarji Desai from the succession and to pick instead as the next Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, a capable and conciliatory man lacking Nehru’s intellectual qualities and cosmopolitan background.

Under post-Nehru conditions, and given Shastri’s personality, it was almost inevitable that the force of tradition and regional feeling (“fissiparous tendencies,” as they are often called by Indians) should assert themselves. But the concessions made to them by the Shastri government were essentially statesmanlike compromises that had the purpose, and the effect, of easing tensions and preventing “fissiparous tendencies” from getting out of hand. There were three serious crises in 1965: a food shortage, tension resulting from the provision in the 1950 constitution requiring that Hindi (spoken only in the north) become the national language that year, and a war with Pakistan. The food shortage was gotten over through large imports of American grain for the poorer states, while the more prosperous ones were allowed to keep most of what they produced. The language crisis was eased by permitting the continued use of English for official purposes in the non-Hindi-speaking provinces. The war with Pakistan grew out of a Pakistani effort to force India to agree to a plebiscite in Kashmir (the greater part of which was controlled de facto by India although most of the population is Moslem) and resulted in an Indian victory which, although not decisive, was sufficient to enhance Shastri’s prestige considerably. He died in January 1966, at the Soviet Central Asian city of Tashkent, after negotiating an end to the war under Soviet mediation.

The Congress leadership again maneuvered successfully to exclude Desai from the succession and chose instead as the next Prime Minister Nehru’s daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi,* mainly because her name and prestige would be helpful in what promised to be a difficult general election in 1967. Like her father, she belonged to the left wing of the Congress and stood far enough to the left to be reasonably acceptable to Moscow and to the pro-Soviet mainstream of the Indian Communist movement, from which a pro-Chinese group calling itself the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) had split off in 1964 as a consequence of the Sino-Soviet dispute.

Rather widespread public discontent, with the Congress among other things, ate into the Congress vote in 1967, although it won 56 percent of the seats in the lower house (the Lok Sabha) of the Parliament whereas no other party won more than one-sixth as many. The Congress’s postelection position in several of the states was considerably shakier. In West Bengal, a leftist coalition led by the CPI(M) came to power only to be faced with an armed revolt of some of its own extremist members, usually known as Naxalites (from Naxalbari, their initial area of operations), who took part in forming a new militant movement calling itself the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). The Naxalites took to random violence in the Calcutta area until they were largely crushed by severe police pressures in the early 1970s.

The 1967 election produced considerable demoralization in the Congress leadership, some of whose senior members were defeated in their home constituencies. One result was a temporary mood of party unity; Desai was brought into the cabinet, as Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. More important was the fact that Mrs. Gandhi’s position was beginning to be strengthened by an influx of younger voters tending to prefer left-wing Congress candidates to their right-wing counterparts. More and more the Congress leadership polarized into its left and right wings, and a series of issues in 1968-69 produced a split between them. One of these was the question of cooperation between the Congress-controlled central government and the non-Congress governments in some of the states; Mrs. Gandhi favored cooperation, the right wing opposed it. Another was Mrs. Gandhi’s favorable tendencies toward the Soviet Union, India’s main arms supplier, and in particular her public support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The leadership of the Congress machine had tried with little success to dominate the Prime Minister during the tenure of Mrs. Gandhi’s father; it now hoped for better results in her case. As its alternative candidate for Prime Minister the machine, sometimes referred to as the Syndicate, selected the previously rejected Morarji Desai, probably because the weakness of his power base would tend to make him receptive to the Syndicate’s guidance.

Mrs. Gandhi met the challenge head on, and successfully, in 1969, the centennial of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth and a year whose associations therefore tended to strengthen her hand as the living embodiment of the Gandhi-Nehru tradition. Both more autocratic and less powerful than her father, she forced a break with her adversaries, rather than managing them while keeping them within the Congress as her father had done. In July she picked a fight with Desai by compelling his resignation as Finance Minister over the issue of nationalizing the banks, which he opposed. She then secured the adoption of legislation nationalizing the fourteen largest banks; her position was the popular, although not necessarily valid, one that the banks would now make credit more readily available to ordinary people. At the same time she challenged Desai’s backers, the Syndicate, by maneuvering the election by the state legislatures of her candidate for the presidency of the Republic over the Syndicate’s candidate; this was an important victory inasmuch as it is the President’s prerogative to proclaim emergency (“President’s”) rule in states where normal parliamentary government is held to have broken down, and as we have seen there were differences between Mrs. Gandhi and the Syndicate on this question. In the latter part of 1969 the Syndicate and its supporters seceded and began to function as a separate party, usually known as the Old Congress, within the Parliament and in the country at large. Mrs. Gandhi’s following, usually referred to as the New Congress, was clearly the stronger of the two. Much of her popularity arose from her endorsement of an appealing, if probably unrealizable, program of social reforms designed to “stamp out poverty.”

The Fall of Ayub Khan

In 1962, President Ayub permitted political parties to function again in Pakistan. He intended to strengthen his authority by being elected to the presidency in 1965 by the 80,000 Basic Democrats, who in turn had been popularly elected in accordance with his nonparliamentary system of Basic Democracy. The latter was more democratic in name than in fact and rested essentially on the support of the armed forces and the bureaucracy.

Disturbed by the narrowness of his victory in the presidential election of early 1965, Ayub began to rely more than ever on the support of the essentially conservative bureaucracy and the armed forces. Angered by the Kennedy administration’s liking for India, he had already begun to depend on China rather than the United States as his main external support against India, a tendency which was also favored by his brilliant, leftist, hawkish Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Encouraged and possibly incited by Peking, Ayub decided in mid-1965 to use force in an effort to make progress on the deadlocked Kashmir question, and in particular to bring about a plebiscite in which most of the region’s Moslem majority could be expected to vote for union with Pakistan, in preference to accepting a continuation of the existing de facto partition of Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

In August 1965, Pakistani troops invaded the Indian-held part of Kashmir, and in September the fighting spread southward to the much more sensitive border region between the two countries properly speaking. The United States suspended aid to both sides in protest, and American influence in the subcontinent sank to one of its numerous low points. Being larger, although not necessarily better, the Indian armed forces began to gain the upper hand over their Pakistani adversaries, both in Kashmir and farther south, and it appeared that they might come into control of the tributaries of the Indus River, whose water is vital to the survival of West Pakistan. In mid-September, accordingly, Ayub first requested American and then accepted Soviet mediation. This step was opposed by Bhutto, who received some loud but ineffective propaganda support from Peking in the shape of (empty) threats designed to arouse in New Delhi fears of another Chinese border attack like the one of 1962. The main effect of this Chinese performance was to bring increased American and (above all) Soviet diplomatic pressure on both sides for a settlement, precisely in order to remove any basis for Chinese intervention. Meeting under Soviet auspices at Tashkent in January 1966, India and Pakistan agreed in effect to a return to the status quo ante. Pakistan had gained neither a plebiscite in Kashmir nor anything else; far from strengthening his political position, Ayub had impaired it.

China appeared more than ever as Pakistan’s main foreign friend. Peking was credited, plausibly but not necessarily correctly, with having deterred any Indian move against East Pakistan during the 1965 war. Chinese military aid flowed to Pakistan in substantial amounts. By contrast, Pakistan began in 1969 to squeeze the United States out of bases near the Northwest Frontier from which certain activities in Soviet and Chinese Central Asia, notably signal communications and missile tests, had been electronically monitored for the previous decade.

Ayub’s political decline continued, for reasons that included some basic social forces. Pakistan’s remarkable economic growth under his political leadership had been achieved within the framework of a capitalist economic system. This meant that a few firms and families had grown disproportionately rich, that they could and did corrupt civil servants and politicians, and that the poor benefited relatively little and grew increasingly discontented. A long illness that Ayub suffered in 1968 helped to increase the level of opposition political activity, the most important manifestation of which was the emergence of Bhutto (whom Ayub had sacked as Foreign Minister in 1966) at the head of a new (1967) party, the Pakistan People’s Party. In the autumn of 1968, Bhutto began to give effective political leadership to an anti-Ayub movement centering on student demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of disorder in the cities of West Pakistan, the main purpose being to prevent Ayub from being re-elected President in 1970.

Under mounting pressure of this kind, Ayub explored the possibility of proclaiming martial law, but the armed forces refused to implement it while he remained President. He then agreed (in February 1969) to a restoration of parliamentary government and announced that he would not be a candidate for the presidency in 1970, but the violence continued (mainly in West Pakistan), and political leaders in East Pakistan were loudly demanding autonomy. Ayub accordingly resigned on March 25, and the violence promptly subsided.

Ayub was succeeded by the senior figure among the military leadership, General Mohammed Yahya Khan. Even though the violence was virtually over, the new regime promptly proclaimed martial law. Although it was administered less rigorously than had been the case after the 1958 coup, it was regarded by many among the politicians and the public as unnecessary and excessive and accordingly got the new era off to a rather unpromising start on what was to turn out to be a disastrous career.

The Emergence of Bangla Desh

Perhaps even more than the quarrel with India, the tension between East and West was Pakistan’s most serious single political problem. There was not only a geographic but a racial and cultural distance between the two halves; indeed, virtually their only common bond was an Islamic heritage and a distrust of India and Hinduism. The population of the East (about 70 million) was more than half of Pakistan’s total population, and the East through its exports of primary products such as jute generated most of the country’s foreign exchange earnings. Yet the center of political and military power lay emphatically in the West, which was the home of some of what the British had called the “martial races” of the subcontinent and of nearly all the leaders of the original movement for Pakistan. The foreign exchange earned by the East was controlled essentially by the Western-dominated central government and used to a large extent to strengthen the armed forces, and in this way also the ascendancy of the West. The impressive economic development of the Ayub period, which had been fueled to a large extent by American aid, had occurred in and benefited the West far more than the East. It is not hard to see why the majority community of the East, the Bengali, wanted constitutional changes that would give the East political equality with, and autonomy with respect to, the West. Such in essence was the program of the East’s principal political party, the Awami League, and its charismatic leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (often known simply as Mujib).

In late 1969, President Yahya Khan promised general elections for one year later. The outcome was to be the first National Assembly in the history of Pakistan to be elected on the basis of one person, one vote, so that a majority of the seats would be filled by Easterners. But shortly before the date on which the election was to be held a huge storm and tidal wave struck the low-lying coast of East Pakistan, causing many thousands of deaths and severe property damage. The elections were postponed for two months. An international relief effort was mounted, but it was directed largely by the Pakistani central government, which proceeded to display both monumental inefficiency and a considerable indifference to the suffering of the victims. The result was further alienation of the East.

When the elections were held, in December 1970, the Awami League won 167 seats, representing all but two of the total allotted to the East. The League had been expected to win, but no one had predicted a landslide of these proportions. In the West, Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party won a majority of the seats, although a much less commanding one (81 out of 138). On the basis of these results, Mujib’s position was that he should become Prime Minister of Pakistan (and not simply Chief Minister of East Pakistan), that the capital should be moved to Dacca (in the East), and that the East’s demands for equality and autonomy should be granted. Bhutto objected strongly to this and announced that his party would boycott the National Assembly; he evidently preferred a breakup of the country, in which case he would stand a good chance of coming to power in the West, to a condition of unity under which he would have to play second fiddle to Mujib. Caught between these two intransigent positions, Yahya moved closer, as time went on, to his fellow Westerner Bhutto, and as political methods failed he turned increasingly to the approach that he as a soldier understood best.

Yahya announced at the beginning of March 1971 that the convening of the National Assembly would be postponed. This step was interpreted in the East as a surrender to Bhutto and an effort to nullify the elections. Demonstrations and rioting spread rapidly in the East, and Mujib was forced by his own extreme followers into an uncompromising position. Yahya simultaneously tried, without success, to negotiate with him and Bhutto began a build-up of military strength in the East.

On March 25, the second anniversary of the proclamation of martial law, the Pakistani forces began systematic attacks on the largely unarmed population of the East, whom they regarded as little different from Indians. The emphasis was on the Hindu minority, and on educated people. Several hundred thousand people were killed during the ensuing weeks; some estimates run as high as three million. The troops also engaged in an orgy of raping and looting. They were helped by some members of the minority Bihari community, the Bihari being non-Bengali Moslems in East Pakistan. A huge stream of refugees, ultimately totaling about ten million and obviously including many Moslems as well as Hindus, began to pour into India, or more specifically into West Bengal. Mujib was promptly seized by the military and taken to the West, where he was kept under detention and was scheduled to be tried for treason. On April 17, some of his followers proclaimed the independent state of Bangla Desh as the successor to East Pakistan; they also began to organize a guerrilla resistance movement known as the Mukti Bahini. But actual independence was much more of a hope than a fact.

The 1971 War

The fact that Bangla Desh actually became independent was due largely to Indian intervention. New Delhi was appalled by the massacres in East Bengal and even more by the influx of refugees, who increased the already impressive political instability of West Bengal and placed an intolerable burden on the economy not only of that state but of India as a whole, in spite of the emergence of a substantial international relief effort on behalf of the refugees. From India’s point of view, it was imperative that the refugees go home, but there was obviously no chance that they would go home as long as the Pakistani Army was on the rampage in East Bengal. This consideration alone would probably have been enough to lead India to eliminate the Pakistani Army from East Bengal, but there were others as well. Mrs. Gandhi’s party had just won a huge victory in the general election of March 1971, which had been called a year ahead of the next election in the states so as to separate national issues from local ones and give Mrs. Gandhi a clear national mandate. Her party won 350 out of 518 seats in the Lok Sabha. She was therefore in a strong position to take decisive action as the crisis over East Bengal unfolded, and doing so would tend to strengthen her political position even further and distract public attention from the difficulty she would inevitably have in fulfilling her pledge to stamp out poverty. By supporting the emergence of an independent state in East Bengal, India would obviously contribute to the dismemberment of Pakistan, the weakening of its armed forces, and the attainment of clear-cut Indian ascendancy over Pakistan. New Delhi had no serious interest in assuming full responsibility for East Bengal’s problems by absorbing it. New Delhi accordingly insisted from the beginning of the crisis that Yahya must negotiate in good faith with Mujib, even though it did not recognize Bangla Desh for the time being.

One probable reason for this caution was Moscow’s similarly cautious attitude, which was influential because New Delhi relied on the Soviet Union to deter Chinese intervention in the event of an Indo-Pakistani war. But Moscow committed itself increasingly to the Indian side, mainly because it felt a need for the support of India as a counterweight to what seemed to be an emerging Sino-American detente. Accordingly, after two years of inconclusive negotiations Moscow and New Delhi finally signed a treaty of friendship (not a formal alliance) on August 9, 1971; its most important part is Articles 8 and 9, which say by clear implication that if China should try to intervene in an Indo-Pakistani war, the Soviet Union would do whatever was necessary to cope with the problem. For extra insurance, India kept six divisions along the Sino-Indian border and waited until snow began to fall on Himalayan passes before intervening directly in East Bengal.

By about the middle of 1971, the Indian Army was providing arms and training for the Mukti Bahini, whose units moved back and forth across the border between East and West Bengal and made life increasingly difficult for the Pakistani forces. The latter tended to redeploy near the border and concede much of the interior to the Mukti Bahini. In October, both India and Pakistan massed troops near their common border in the West. Of the two adversaries, India was obviously the stronger, and in the refugees it felt that it had an issue that both required and justified intervention. It probably hoped that by intervening it would free Bangla Desh without bringing on a general Indo-Pakistani war, but it was also prepared for the latter eventuality. On November 20, Indian troops made limited penetrations into East Bengal and began to engage the Pakistani forces they encountered. Determined not to lose East Bengal without fighting what it termed the “final war” with India, Pakistan launched a surprise air attack against Indian airfields in the West on December 3. The Indian Army immediately began a full-scale invasion of East Bengal, while remaining essentially on the defensive in the West. On December 16 the Pakistani forces in the East had to surrender, and the fighting in the West ended at the same time.

During the entire crisis and particularly during the actual fighting, Chinese political and propaganda support for Pakistan was loud and strong. Any sympathy in Peking for the Mukti Bahini as a “national liberation movement” was much more than outweighed by the sense of commitment to Pakistan and hostility to India built up over the previous decade or more. Peking may have believed that acquiescence in the loss of East Bengal to Pakistan would weaken its own claim to Taiwan and encourage Soviet pressures on Chinese border territories. Soviet support for India and the White House’s sympathy for Pakistan (which was not shared by many in the United States government) also contributed to Peking’s attitude. But Chinese support for Pakistan was almost purely verbal, down to the end of the war, and two of its strongest propaganda broadcasts were timed to coincide with the Pakistani surrender in Dacca, when there was no chance that they might have to be acted on. Peking was prevented from doing more than make propaganda by snow in the Himalayan passes, by the presence of six Indian divisions along the Sino-Indian frontier, and above all by the possibility of Soviet retaliation.

The Aftermath of the Indian Victory

Normally the country most affected by a war is the loser. The first political effect of losing the 1971 war to India was another change of government in Pakistan. A scapegoat had to be found, and the military leadership fixed on the obvious candidate, its own senior member, Yahya Khan. Being politically discredited by its excesses in East Bengal, and its defeat, the Army permitted Bhutto to become President at the end of 1971. He remained obviously vulnerable to potential removal by the Army, but the prevailing political climate made this unlikely as long as he did not permit a further break-up of the country following the loss of the East.

Bhutto was very much on his mettle to hold what was left of Pakistan together and begin healing the wounds suffered in 1971. An able and energetic man, he responded in a most remarkable fashion. By frequent dramatic public appearances, he rallied popular support for his leadership and program. With a judicious combination of force and political concessions, he successfully combatted secessionist tendencies and incipient insurgencies in the western state of Baluchistan (where they were supported by Iraq) and in the Northwest Frontier Province (where they were supported to some extent after July 1973 by Afghanistan).

In April 1973 Bhutto restored the parliamentary system after a lapse of about fifteen years. He became Prime Minister, with a largely figurehead President as chief of state. Less on account of any dictatorial tendencies on Bhutto’s part than because of continuing instability, there was nevertheless a tendency toward government by decree, fairly rigorous censorship, and other such departures from the practice of a liberal democracy.

Although a rich man, Bhutto was a socialist of sorts and favored greater equality of incomes and a curb on the influence of the twenty-two wealthy families who had emerged at the top of the economic heap during the previous two decades. He nationalized heavy (but not light) industry, promoted social legislation, and fought corruption. His problems were formidable; they included the strains of the war, the loss of the East’s export earnings and a resulting acute shortage of foreign exchange, a major flood (in August 1973), and the agricultural difficulties normal in a poor agrarian country.

Bhutto effected some major changes in Pakistan’s foreign policy. He appeared genuinely to accept the verdict of 1971 and adopted a relatively conciliatory line toward India and Bangla Desh, except for a probably ritualistic revival of propaganda on the Kashmir question. It is likely, although not certain, that the Army leadership joined him in accepting the verdict of 1971. By way of insurance, Bhutto was careful not to antagonize the Army and public opinion by moving too rapidly toward reconciliation with India. He withdrew from SEATO and increasingly emphasized ties with the Middle Eastern countries, notably Iran; there was a possibility that Pakistan might emerge with Chinese aid and support as a major producer and supplier of arms to the Middle East. He continued to cultivate friendship with China, which rewarded him with a continued and substantial flow of economic and military aid. He was less successful with the United States, which regarded itself as a political friend of Pakistan but declined to resume large-scale arms shipments. The Soviet Union, unwilling to leave the field entirely to China, engaged in a limited aid-and-trade relationship with Pakistan.

As with many wars, it was not certain that the victor of 1971 was much better off than the loser. The Indian economic and social system was badly strained by the refugees, the war, continued and virtually uncontrolled population growth, serious commodity shortages (including grain), the persistence of caste barriers, insufficient social change (including land reform), educated unemployment and widespread underemployment, and a greatly increased bill for oil imports as a result of the Middle Eastern crisis of 1973. These conditions inevitably found a reflection in the political sphere. There were rather numerous strikes, riots, and other manifestations of discontent, including student demonstrations. In spite of severe police repression, the Naxalite movement lingered on. Mrs. Gandhi’s recognition of English as a national language (in 1967) notwithstanding, agitation over language problems persisted in the southern states.

Although Mrs. Gandhi and her party retained the Congress’s traditional dominant role in the central government, and in most of the state governments through a series of state elections in 1972 and afterward, there was inevitably some erosion. Part of it was due to Mrs. Gandhi’s secretiveness and lack of forcefulness, her indecisiveness on domestic policy questions, and her tendency to rely on cronies rather than on individuals of real political stature for advice. The bureaucracy through which she had to work was cumbersome, inefficient, and often corrupt. The Congress leaderships in the states showed increasing unwillingness to be manipulated or controlled from New Delhi. The narrowness of the Congress’s victory in some important state elections in 1974 made Mrs. Gandhi more dependent than before on the support of the pro-Soviet wing of the Indian Communist movement, the Communist Party of India.

Clearly Mrs. Gandhi regarded the Soviet Union as India’s main foreign friend. A major indication of this fact was a visit by Brezhnev in November 1973. The Soviet side agreed to continue its substantial economic aid to India, although on the understanding that Indian economic planning would be modeled to a greater extent along the centralized lines favored by Moscow. Soviet military aid and general Soviet-Indian cooperation in foreign policy were also to continue, although the Indian side declined to give public endorsement to the Soviet concept of “collective security” and (apparently) to grant naval bases or special port facilities as Moscow evidently desired.

Although under considerable Soviet influence, India Was by no means a Soviet satellite and was determined not to become one. It was partly for this reason—in the hope of maintaining a counterweight to Soviet influence, in other words—that New Delhi began to show an interest in improving its relations with the United States, which had reached a record low in 1971. Another, even more important, reason was a felt need for American economic aid, which was quietly resumed in 1974, and above all for American grain. On the other hand, tensions in Indo-American relations remained. Mrs. Gandhi criticized the American bombing campaigns in Vietnam in 1972, and the United States excluded India from any role in the Vietnam settlement, including participation in the ICCS. Indian official and public opinion was hostile to American naval activity in the Indian Ocean, and in particular to the American plan to construct major naval facilities on the island of Diego Garcia.

Again as a counterweight to the possibility of excessive Soviet influence, New Delhi showed an interest in improving relations with Moscow’s main adversary, Peking, even though Sino-Indian relations since the late 1950s had usually been only slightly less bad than Indo-Pakistani relations. But there was little overt response from Peking, which was still angry over what had happened in 1971, lacked Bhutto’s reasons for conciliating India, and regarded Mrs. Gandhi as unduly receptive to Soviet influence. On the other hand, there were some elusive indications that Peking might be prepared to moderate its stand if Mrs. Gandhi should become willing to weaken her ties to Moscow. In any case, the only significant source of Chinese influence in the subcontinent was being reduced to the extent that Indo-Pakistani relations improved.

When it began its independent career, Bangla Desh was described, unkindly but not inaccurately, as an “international basket case.” It had been devastated and decimated by war. Thousands of its women who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers, and in many cases made pregnant, were having great difficulty in being accepted by their families. There was continuing civil violence, especially among the Biharis, some of whom had collaborated with the Pakistani. There was considerable political instability, and the new government by no means enjoyed universal support. There were serious shortages, and the economy was burdened by the gradual return of the refugees. On the other hand, there was no massive blood bath and no massive famine. The latter blessing was due to a large extent to a sizable international relief and aid program, in which the Soviet Union, India, and the United States figured prominently.

At the beginning of 1972 Bhutto released Mujib unconditionally, and he returned triumphally to become Prime Minister of the new state. In elections held in March 1973, his Awami League won a huge electoral victory; the opposition parties were almost wiped out. The Awami League’s political position was somewhat eroded with the passage of time, however, by internal factional bickering, Mujib’s inadequacies as a policymaker and administrator, and economic problems. Bangla Desh gathered in a growing number of diplomatic recognitions, including those of the Soviet Union and the United States. Its application for admission to the United Nations, however, was vetoed by China in August 1972, at the request of Pakistan and contrary to the wishes of the United States. Pakistani recognition of Bangla Desh in February 1974, however, was followed by indications that Peking might do the same.

The legacy of the 1971 war to the international relations of the subcontinent was a complex and bitter one. Indian troops soon withdrew from Bangla Desh, but they remained in occupation of limited areas of West Pakistan. India was holding 93,000 Pakistani military prisoners, including some Bihari irregulars. Hundreds of thousands of Bihari in Bangla Desh and of Bengali in Pakistan wanted to go to Pakistan and Bangla Desh respectively; the Bihari in particular were having a very difficult time where they were. Difficult though these problems were, and great though the bitterness was, the domestic situations of the three countries were too serious to permit the luxury of further international conflict, and progress toward a relaxation of tension on the subcontinent was on the whole surprisingly rapid. In July 1972, India and Pakistan agreed to establish a state of peace and friendship between them, to return to the military status quo ante (except with respect to Bangla Desh), and to begin negotiations on exchange of prisoners, repatriation of civilians, and a Kashmir settlement. Although Indian troops withdrew from West Pakistan by the end of the year, implementation of the political aspects of this accord was delayed and complicated by Mujib’s position, to which India felt compelled to pay some attention. He was demanding both Pakistani recognition and war crimes trials for a sizable number of the Pakistani prisoners. Bhutto was willing to consider the first of these demands, but only if the second were dropped; if he had accepted the second, he might have been overthrown by his own military leadership. In this and some other respects Bhutto essentially prevailed, partly because of his own dynamism and partly because of the reluctance of Mrs. Gandhi and Mujib to risk his downfall and the further balkanization of Pakistan. In August 1973, another Indo-Pakistani agreement was reached that provided for the repatriation of all Pakistani prisoners of war and some of the two civilian groups already mentioned, the dropping of all but a small number of war crimes trials, Pakistani recognition of Bangla Desh, and the end of Pakistani opposition to Bangla Desh’s admission to the United Nations. Pakistan recognized Bangla Desh in February 1974, on the occasion of a conference of Moslem nations at Lahore. The repatriation process was under way by that time. In April 1974, Pakistan apologized to Bangla Desh for the behavior of its Army, Bangla Desh dropped the idea of war crimes trials completely, and India and Pakistan agreed to move ahead with the development of the ties visualized in the accord of July 1972.

A further major shift in the international politics of South Asia could occur if India were to become a nuclear power. India has long had the technical capability of doing so but has been restrained by a combination of domestic and external considerations, including cost. The 1971 war tended to tip the balance of the argument in the other direction, however, by intensifying India’s self-image as the major power of South Asia and yet one still subject to “nuclear blackmail” as long as it lacked its own nuclear weapons. Such was the Indian public reaction to the entry of the American nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 (see Chapter XI); soon afterward Indian officials were saying privately that it was only a matter of time before India became a nuclear power. The first Indian nuclear detonation, an underground one alleged to be for peaceful purposes and conducted in May 1974, obviously brought that day closer. In spite of the considerable improvement in Indo-Pakistani relations that had occurred by that time, the effect on Pakistan of this advance in the Indian nuclear program seemed likely to be serious. To the extent that it was, it also appeared likely that Pakistan would be driven further into the arms of Peking, and that Sino-Indian reconciliation would be put off if not prevented altogether. All this would be a high price to pay for an Indian nuclear capability that would be of little use against China (or any other adversary beside Pakistan), since Chinese missiles and bombers could threaten major Indian cities from bases in Tibet far more easily than Indian missiles and bombers could threaten major Chinese cities.

After a generation of intermittent struggle, a clear Indian ascendancy over Pakistan had been established and had gained recognition from everyone except perhaps a few Pakistani diehards. India’s fairly close relationship with the Soviet Union further enhanced its international position and rendered very unlikely the possibility of another humiliation of India at the hands of China like the one of 1962. More than ever before, India’s main problems were internal rather than external. This important new situation seems to have had at least an indirect causal effect on two political shifts that occurred along the northern rim of the subcontinent in 1973. In April, political demonstrations by the Nepalese majority against the ruling minority of Lepchas in the Himalayan principality of Sikkim led to Indian intervention in favor of the former and an increase in India’s already considerable political influence; Sikkim is highly strategic because it lies astride the main route through the Himalayas between Tibet and eastern India. In July, the King of Afghanistan was overthrown by a leftist military coup, with the result that Soviet influence increased somewhat and Afghanistan began again, after a lapse of ten years, to work toward the detachment of the Pushtu areas of Pakistan and their establishment as an Afghan-dominated state to be known as Pushtunistan.

* Not related to Mahatma Gandhi.