1971

A G L O B A L H I S T O RY O F T H E

C R E AT I O N O F B A N G L A D E S H

Srinath Raghavan

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2013
 Copyright © 2013 by Srinath Raghavan
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raghavan, Srinath.
1971 : a global history of the creation of Bangladesh / Srinath Raghavan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-72864-6 (alk. paper)
1. Bangladesh—History—Revolution, 1971. 2. India-Pakistan Conflict, 1971.
3. South Asia—Politics and government. I. Title. II. Title: Global history
of the creation of Bangladesh.
DS395.5.R199 2013
954.9205'1—dc23 2013012267
 CONTENTS

Prologue: The Chronicle of a Birth Foretold? 1

1. The Turning Point 14

2. Breakdown 34

3. The Neighbor 54

4. The Grand Strategists 80

5. The Reluctant Russians 108

6. Poster Child and Pariah 131

7. Power and Principle 155

8. The Chinese Puzzle 184

9. Escalation 205

10. Strange Victory 235

Epilogue: The Garden of Forking Paths 264

Notes 275

Bibliography 331

Acknowledgments 347

Index 351
 PROLOGUE:
THE CHRONICLE OF A BIRTH FORETOLD?

“It is very bad with your prime minister,” blurted the burly Russian
guard to the private secretary, “It is very bad.” By the time the secretary
rushed to the bedroom the prime minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri,
was dead. It was a little past midnight in Tashkent on 11 January 1966.
Less than twelve hours ago, Prime Minister Shastri and President Ayub
Khan of Pakistan had agreed on a declaration restoring status quo ante
between their countries after the war of 1965. The declaration had for-
mally been inked in the presence of Premier Alexei Kosygin of the Soviet
Union. Now it was Kosygin’s turn to sign the condolence book placed
near the deceased prime minister.
Later that morning, the casket mounted on a gun carriage and ringed
with wreaths began moving toward the airport. The seventeen-kilometer
route was lined by the city’s mourning residents and flanked by Indian,
Pakistani, and Soviet flags flying at half-mast, draped in black. At the
airport, Ayub Khan joined the Soviet leaders in paying final homage to
Shastri. As the casket was lowered from the carriage, Ayub and Kosygin
stepped forward and became the lead pallbearers. When the coffin was
placed on the gangway of the aircraft, the Red Army band sounded the
funeral dirge, and Soviet soldiers reversed their arms. At 11 am, the air-
craft took off for New Delhi.1
None witnessing this tragic yet remarkable scene on that icy morning
would have contemplated the possibility of another India-Pakistan war
any time soon. The 1965 war was not, of course, the first conflict between
the two countries. India and Pakistan had been rivals from the moment
of partition and independence in August 1947. A few months later, the
two neighbors were at war over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The ceasefire agreement of January 1949 left the state divided between
1
2 1971

USSR
Amu
D ary a Faizabad
N

Gilgit
A F G H A N I S TA N
Herat NWFP Ceasefire Line
Kabul
Peshawar Srinagar In
Islamabad J

du
s C H I N A
Rawalpindi
Jammu
Kandahar Amritsar
Lahore

bb
na
Quetta Ch
e T i b e t
P P
WEST B r ah ma p u t r a
PA K I S TA N Lhasa
N
New Dehli Ga E P
Sukkur ng A L
e
Indus

s
Agra BHUTAN
Jaipur Lucknow Darjeeling
Jodhpur Kanpur
Ajmer Patna
Hyderabad Allahabad
Karachi Benares EAST U
Jhansi
PAKISTAN
I N D I A Dhaka Agartala
Gandhinagar
Ahmedabad Jabalpur Chandernagore Comilla
Arabian Sea Indore
Baroda Calcutta Jessore
Chittagong
Mandalay
Surat Raipur
Diu BURMA
Daman Nagpur
God Bhubaneswar
ava
ri
Bombay

Poona Rangoon
Hyderabad Vishakhapatnam

Pondicherry
Bijapur

Bay of Bengal

Mangalore Bangalore Madras

Pondicherry
T
Karikal
Cochin
L Madurai Jaffna

0 200 km Trincomalee
Trivandrum
0 200 miles CEYLON
Kandy
Colombo
INDIAN
OCEAN

the belligerents. Although the dispute continued to simmer, the ceasefire

held for sixteen years. India sought no more than to cement the status
quo. Given the asymmetry of power between the two countries as well
as India’s willingness to flex its military muscle, Pakistan refrained from
using force to wrest Kashmir.2
This prudent policy was jettisoned by the Pakistani leadership follow-
ing a standoff with India over the Rann of Kutch in early 1965. Embold-
ened by India’s tepid response to this crisis, Ayub Khan authorized a
covert invasion of Kashmir that escalated into all-out war.3 When the
ceasefire was brokered, Indian forces were in control of territory ahead
 Prologue 3

of India’s western borders with Pakistan. The Tashkent agreement not

only restored the territorial status quo but also stipulated against the use
of force in resolving outstanding disputes. In consequence, the negotiators
at Tashkent could look forward to another long spell of armed peace.
The conclusion of this agreement in Tashkent underscored the interest
of the superpowers in preserving peace in the subcontinent. Indeed, su-
perpower encroachment had been an endemic feature of postcolonial
South Asia. In the early years after decolonization, the United States
preferred to follow Britain’s lead on subcontinental affairs. In the wake
of the Korean War, the United States—fearing a Soviet thrust into the
Middle East and desirous of tapping into Pakistan’s military potential—
concluded a defense pact with Pakistan in 1954. By the end of his term
in office, President Dwight Eisenhower was ruing the damage wrought
on US-India relations by his decision to arm Pakistan.4 His successor,
John F. Kennedy, undertook a drive to shore up ties with India. The out-
break of war between China and India in late 1962 afforded him an
opening. Trounced by China, India desperately sought military assistance
from Washington. Pakistan, however, lobbied to stem the flow of Ameri-
can matériel to India. President Kennedy responded by coaxing India to
negotiate with Pakistan on Kashmir. The failure of these talks left all
parties disenchanted.5 When war broke out between India and Pakistan
in August 1965, the Johnson administration—knee-deep in the bog of
Vietnam—adopted a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude, imposing an
arms embargo on the antagonists and allowing the Soviet Union to
forge a postwar settlement.
The Soviet Union was a relatively late entrant to the geopolitics of
South Asia. Not until the advent of Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, with his
emphasis on peaceful coexistence to woo the postcolonial states, did
South Asia acquire importance in Moscow’s eyes. This led to an upswing
in relations with India, which coincided with a downturn in Moscow’s
relations with Pakistan owing to the latter’s entry into US-led alliances.6
By the end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union was the one great power that
supported India in the Kashmir dispute.
From late 1964 onward, there was a gradual shift in the Soviet out-
look toward Pakistan. The backdrop to this was the rift between the
Soviet Union and China. Moscow watched with concern as China drew
close to Pakistan after the Sino-Indian war of 1962. The emerging Sino-
Pakistan entente prompted the Russians to invite Ayub Khan to visit
Moscow—the first visit at this level. Ayub’s trip in April 1965 led to a
4 1971

thaw in Soviet-Pakistan relations. When Prime Minister Shastri visited

Moscow seeking Soviet support on the Rann of Kutch, General Secretary
Leonid Brezhnev observed that “every question like a medal has two
sides to it.”7 After war broke out later that year, the Soviet Union urged
both sides to cease hostilities. Even before the ceasefire was announced,
Kosygin offered his good offices for mediation. In so doing, Moscow
sought primarily to forestall American intervention.8 An ancillary aim
was to prevent China from deepening its relationship with Pakistan.9
After the Tashkent Conference, the Russians were understandably san-
guine that they had paved the way to a settlement of the Kashmir dis-
pute and to peace in the subcontinent.10

I
And yet India and Pakistan were at war inside of six years. More in-
triguingly, the war was fought not over Kashmir but over the eastern
wing of Pakistan. The West Pakistani military regime’s use of force to
suppress a popular movement for independence in East Pakistan led to a
massive exodus of refugees to India and eventually to an Indian military
intervention. The war of 1971 was the most significant geopolitical event
in the subcontinent since its partition in 1947. Few contemporary con-
flicts have been so brief and localized but had such protracted and global
ramifications. At one swoop, it led to the creation of the large and popu-
lous state of Bangladesh, and tilted the balance of power between India
and Pakistan steeply in favor of the former. The consequences of the
conflict continue to stalk the subcontinent. The Line of Control in Kash-
mir, the nuclearization of India and Pakistan, the conflicts on the Siachen
Glacier and in Kargil, the insurgency in Kashmir, the political travails of
Bangladesh: all can be traced back to nine intense months in 1971.
For the peoples of South Asia, the conflict has not really finished. For
historians, it has barely begun. To be sure, the guns had hardly fallen
silent when the first accounts by journalists and analysts began to be
published. Hundreds more have been written in the four decades since.
Although this body of writing remains important, there are remarkably
few books that provide a historical account and explanation of the crisis
and war of 1971. Most existing accounts lack the detachment and dis-
tance as well as the sources that make for good contemporary history. A
superb exception to this trend is Richard Sisson and Leo Rose’s War and
Secession.11 Drawing on interviews with key participants in Bangladesh,
 Prologue 5

Pakistan, and India, the authors presented an excellent and scholarly ac-
count that rose above the partisanship of the literature.
In the twenty years since Sisson and Rose wrote their book, there has
been a deluge of documentary sources, but no single account has yet
emerged that makes full use of this trove of materials to revisit the
1971 crisis. This is partly because professional historians of South Asia
remain reluctant to venture beyond the boundary of 1947. Further, over
the past two decades cultural and social history have occupied the cen-
ter ground of South Asian history, evacuating political and diplomatic
history to distant suburbs that are rarely visited and are increasingly
uninhabited. It is not surprising that to the extent the emergence of Ban-
gladesh attracts scholarly interest the subject tends to be viewed from
the perspective of memory, violence, and identity.12 This emerging lit-
erature has already expanded our horizons of inquiry and will no doubt
enrich our understanding of the period. It would be a pity, however, if
these themes detracted from a serious engagement with the staid but
ineluctable questions on the causes, course, and consequences of the
conflict.
This is all the more important because this emerging body of work
leaves undisturbed some key parameters and assumptions of the older
literature. The existing historiography on the creation of Bangladesh is
beset by two dominating characteristics: insularity and determinism.
Most of the books are written from the standpoint of one of the subcon-
tinental protagonists and are often inflected by their nationalism. Thus,
accounts from a Pakistani perspective tend to portray the conflict as a
war of secession in which the Bengalis—a mistreated group in some ac-
counts, benighted in others—betrayed the idea of Pakistan as the home-
land for the Muslims of South Asia. These accounts invariably blame
India for instigating Bengali separatism and for using the ensuing crisis
to vivisect Pakistan—arguments that were originally advanced by the
Pakistan government in a white paper published at the height of the
crisis.13
By contrast, books from a Bangladeshi standpoint present the conflict
as a war of national liberation: the story of the rise and realization of
Bengali nationalism.14 In most Indian accounts, the conflict of 1971 is
the third India-Pakistan war: a continuation and decisive resolution of
the long-standing military rivalry between the two countries as well as the
contest between India’s secular nationalism and Pakistan’s “two-nation
theory” that posited Hindus and Muslims as separate nations. Indian
6 1971

victory, these accounts argue, not only cut Pakistan to size but also shat-
tered the ideological underpinnings of the Pakistani nation-state.15
The problem with these narratives is not simply one of bias. Rather, it
is their shared assumption that the crisis was primarily a subcontinental
affair—the world beyond playing only a bit part, if that. In thrall to
their chosen national narratives, the authors of these accounts have
rarely considered the impact of the wider global context in which the
crisis began and played out to its denouement. Even the best accounts,
such as the one by Sisson and Rose, tend to relegate the international
dimensions of the crisis to the margins.
For all the differences of perspective, these narratives also tend to as-
sume or argue that the breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of an
independent Bangladesh were inevitable. This determinism is nicely cap-
tured in Salman Rushdie’s mordant image of united Pakistan—in his
novel Shame—as “that fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a
body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but
God.” The historian Badruddin Umar, to take but one example, writes
that “from the beginning Pakistan was an unstable state. The physical
distance between the two wings of Pakistan . . . and the very consider-
able differences in the social, cultural and political life and traditions . . .
differences in the economic conditions of the two parts and the imbalance
in the structure of power. All these factors, from the very beginning, de-
cided the course of political developments which logically and inevitably
led to the disintegration and partition of Pakistan.”16 Similarly, Anatol
Lieven argues that “no freak of history like united Pakistan with its two
ethnically and culturally very different wings separated by 1,000 miles
of hostile India, could possibly have lasted for long.”17 Even those scholars
who shy away from such a strongly teleological and determinist posi-
tion tend to argue that united Pakistan was structurally predisposed to
fragmentation.18 The history of the emergence of Bangladesh, then, is no
more than the chronicle of a birth foretold.
Indeed, apart from the geographic separation of the two wings there
was a widening gulf between them along two axes. First, there was the
question of language. From the outset, the central leadership of Pakistan
made it clear that Urdu would be the sole official language of the state.
This triggered protests by Bengali students in East Pakistan, who feared
that this policy would undermine their career prospects and demanded
that Bengali be recognized as an official language. During his visit to
Dhaka in March 1948, the founding father of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali
 Prologue 7

Jinnah, brusquely turned down their demand. The reiteration of Jin-

nah’s stance by Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin—himself an East
Pakistani—in February 1952 led to widespread agitation in the province.
The government’s ham-handed response resulted in police shootings and
deaths of student protesters. Thereafter, the language movement contin-
ued at a lower ebb until the Constituent Assembly’s decision in 1956 to
accept both Bengali and Urdu as state languages. It is argued that the
events of 1952 “marked a sharp psychological rupture. For many in the
Bengal delta it signified the shattering of the dream of Pakistan.”19
The second axis of conflict was economic. The partition of India had
sundered the trade and transportation links between East Pakistan and
other parts of Bengal and Assam; the few industrialized areas of undi-
vided Bengal remained in India. These problems were compounded by
the economic policies adopted by successive governments of Pakistan.
Thus, the foreign exchange earnings from the export of jute grown in
East Pakistan—the principal export of Pakistan—were used to procure
imports for the industrialization of West Pakistan. Moreover, the foreign
aid received by Pakistan was largely diverted to projects in the western
wing. Even when allocation of public funds to East Pakistan was in-
creased in the late 1950s, the economic disparity between the wings re-
mained stark. Although East Pakistan’s annual growth rate increased
from 1.7 percent for the years 1954–55 to 1959–60 to 5.2 percent for
the period 1959–60 to 1964–65, the corresponding figures for West Paki-
stan shot up from 3.2 percent to 7.2 percent.20
Nevertheless these differences did not of themselves make an indepen-
dent Bangladesh inevitable. How do we account for the fact that the
language movement peaked in the early 1950s but the nationalist strug-
gle for Bangladesh began only late in the next decade? Similarly, why
did it take almost twenty-five years for the economic “contradictions”—
present from the outset—to come to a head?
More persuasive are explanations that link these axes of conflict to
the nature of the Pakistani state.21 In this account, the move from linguis-
tic regionalism to nationalism occurred only because of the tightly cen-
tralized character of the Pakistani polity. This system stemmed from the
viceregal tradition bequeathed by the British Raj and reflected the do-
mestic and foreign interests of the West Pakistani ruling elites. In partic-
ular, the bureaucratic-military oligarchy that ran the state from the early
1950s felt threatened by the political demands voiced by the Bengalis
and sought continually to derail them. For a start, they sought to whittle
8 1971

down the political significance of East Pakistan’s demographic and elec-

toral majority by insisting on “parity” between the two wings—a move
aimed at blunting the Bengalis’ legislative and political influence. The
East Pakistan government’s continued prostration before the central
leadership upended it in the first provincial assembly elections of 1954.
These elections ushered into office a United Front government that had
campaigned on the basis of a twenty-one-point program. This charter
called for a greater role for East Pakistan in national affairs and sought
“complete autonomy” for the province. Unsurprisingly, this proved un-
congenial to the West Pakistanis, and the United Front was swiftly dis-
missed by the governor-general. The imposition of martial law in 1958
and the abrogation of representative democracy under General Ayub
Khan sealed the political hopes of the Bengalis and turned them toward
independence.
The argument that the breakup of Pakistan was in the cards from at
least the late 1950s still does not explain why the inevitable took over a
decade to come about. This is because it underestimates the willingness of
the Bengali political elites to reach an accommodation with the central
leadership and to work within the framework of a united Pakistan. Given
the numerical preponderance of their province, Bengali politicians were
always enticed by the glittering prize of high office at the national level
as were Bengali civil servants and diplomats. This entailed a dilution of
their quest for maximum autonomy for East Pakistan. When and why
the Bengalis chose to exit Pakistan cannot be explained solely by re-
course to the nature of the polity. In any case, an explanation for why
this option was chosen does not tell us why the move to exit was bound
to succeed. In short, the inevitability thesis—whether in its strong or
milder formulations—does not really wash.

II
Against the grain of received wisdom, this book contends that there was
nothing inevitable about the emergence of an independent Bangladesh
in 1971. Far from being a predestined event, the creation of Bangladesh
was the product of conjuncture and contingency, choice and chance. To
understand why united Pakistan ceased to remain a viable political entity,
we need to focus on a much shorter period starting in the late 1960s. It
was then that the politics of Pakistan took a turn that made regional
autonomy a non-negotiable demand of the Bengali political leadership.
The military regime’s unwillingness to countenance this set the stage for
 Prologue 9

a rupture in March 1971. However, this breakdown of the political or-

der of Pakistan did not automatically imply its breakup. The story told
here is not of inevitable victory and forward march, but rather of nar-
row squeaks and unanticipated twists. The book argues that the break-
down and breakup of Pakistan can only be understood by situating
these events in a wider global context and by examining the interplay
between the domestic, regional, and international dimensions, for much
of the contingency stressed in this account flowed from the global con-
text of the time.
Owing to the marginalization of this dimension in the existing litera-
ture, our understanding of its impact remains rudimentary. Most books
continue to purvey a picture of the Cold War’s imperatives leading to a
lineup of the United States and China on Pakistan’s side and the Soviet
Union on India’s—a caricature that has etched itself into the popular
imagination. This grossly simplifies both the complicated context of the
period and its multifarious impact on the events in South Asia.
The global context of the late 1960s and early 1970s was shaped by
three large historical processes, each of which was at an interesting junc-
ture. The decolonization of the European empires, which had begun in
the aftermath of World War II, gathered pace in the late 1950s: a little
over a decade on, scores of new nation-states swelled the ranks of the
international system. The rise of the Third World altered the political
topography of the globe and turned the spotlight on the divide between
the developed North and the backward South.22 It also put paid to at-
tempts by the former colonial powers to devise new groupings—such as
the modified British Commonwealth—that would perpetuate their influ-
ence in Asia and Africa. More importantly, it was possible by the early
1970s to discern a general crisis in the postcolonial world. Wrought by
the frequently ill-conceived drive toward decolonization, by the baleful
authoritarian legacy of colonialism, and by the rapacity and ineptitude
of the new governing elites, this crisis saw a series of nationalist govern-
ments in Asia and Africa succumb to military or authoritarian rule.
Then there was the Cold War, which had begun in Europe as an ideo-
logical and security competition between the United States and the
Soviet Union, backed by their allies. By the mid-1960s, the rivalry in
Europe had stabilized, but the Cold War had gone global, and its hottest
locales were in the Third World.23 By this time, the Cold War had also
ceased to be a simple bipolar contest. The spectacular postwar economic
recovery of Western Europe and Japan had loosened the ties that hand-
cuffed them to the United States. Cracks had also opened up in the
10 1971

Socialist bloc—the most dramatic manifestation of these dissensions be-

ing the uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968, which was put down by the
Red Army, and the Sino-Soviet military clashes of 1969.
The third, and incipient, historical current that swirled through this
period was globalization. Spurred by unprecedented improvements in
transportation, communications, and information technology, various
parts of the world were being pulled into an increasingly integrated
global market for goods and money. The unfolding process of globaliza-
tion was not, however, restricted to the economic domain. The rise of
multinational corporations and financial institutions that straddled the
globe was impressive, but so was the rapid increase in the number of
transnational nongovernmental organizations focused on development
and relief in the Third World.24 Equally important was the surge in
movement of people, particularly of skilled labor, from the developing
world to the advanced industrial economies of Western Europe and
North America.25 The existence of these diasporas was as crucial to the
emergence of a transnational public sphere as the development of satel-
lite telephones and television. Terms such as “global village” and “space-
ship earth,” which came into circulation in the 1960s, captured this
emerging consciousness of a global whole. The upshot of this was the
global diffusion of standards in various spheres that ranged from ac-
counting practices to sartorial style, from language to political action.26
The confluence of these three processes shaped the origins, course,
and outcome of the Bangladesh crisis. Viewing the conflict in this larger
global perspective is not merely the conceit of a historian. The subconti-
nental protagonists in the drama themselves realized the importance of
the international and transnational dimensions. By turns, the Bangladeshis,
the Indians, and the Pakistanis sought to inform and mobilize interna-
tional opinion—not just governmental support—behind their own causes.
Winning this contest for world opinion, they felt, was at least as impor-
tant as winning the conflict on the ground. Moreover, individuals and
groups far removed from the scene of action consciously worked to in-
fluence the unfolding crisis.

III
In recovering the global dimension of the crisis, I have drawn on the
work of international historians who have reminded us that there was
much more to this period than the deep freeze of the Cold War.27 But
 Prologue 11

this book would have been impossible without the tremendous expan-
sion over the past decade in archival sources relating to the Bangladesh
crisis. The documentary foundations of this study are based on materials
from the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Russia, and Australia
as well as the United Nations and the World Bank. In India, I have used
the mass of private and official papers available at the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, which throw considerable light on Indian decision-
making at the highest level. The Indian ministry of external affairs has
begun to transfer its materials to the National Archives. More are avail-
able in the ministry’s in-house archive—though only for a privileged few.
I have proceeded on the premise that the book that awaits all evidence is
unlikely to be written. Archives in Pakistan remain firmly shut on this
controversial episode in the country’s history. And there are no official
archives relating to 1971 remaining in Bangladesh, as most of the docu-
ments were destroyed by the Pakistanis before they surrendered to the
Indian forces. However, I was able to conduct a series of oral history
interviews in Dhaka to supplement the memoirs and other accounts.
The book follows a broadly chronological approach, with individual
chapters analyzing events and decisions in particular countries or insti-
tutions. As the story moves from one country to the next, there is also an
unfolding logical sequence of knock-on events and decisions. The book
opens with the downfall of Ayub Khan in early 1969, which I argue was
the critical turning point that led toward the road to Bangladesh. Chap-
ter 1 also examines the subsequent developments up to the mammoth
victory of Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League in the general election of
December 1970. Chapter 2 considers why the negotiations for transfer
of power failed and why the military brass led by General Yahya Khan
decided to crack down on the Bengalis. Chapter 3 looks at India’s re-
sponse to this turn of events; in particular, it asks why India took a cau-
tious tack and refrained from an early military intervention to curb the
flow of refugees from East Pakistan.
The next five chapters focus on the international response to the cri-
sis. Chapter 4 looks at the approach of the Nixon administration in the
United States to the developing situation in South Asia. It examines the
reasons behind Washington’s reluctance to lean on Pakistan and asks
whether alternative courses were open to the US leadership. In any
event, that administration’s stance played an important role in elbow-
ing India toward the Soviet Union, resulting in the Indo-Soviet treaty of
August 1971. Chapter 5 analyzes Moscow’s position on the crisis and
12 1971

argues that the Soviet Union and Indian stances on the crisis were not in
sync until late in the crisis. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 ask why the South
Asian crisis caught the global imagination and whether trends in the
transnational public sphere had any impact on the major powers and
the United Nations. Chapter 8 considers China’s response to the crisis
and suggests that its support for Pakistan was at best ambivalent.
Chapter 9 returns to the subcontinent, examining why the crisis esca-
lated into all-out war toward the end of November 1971. Chapter 10
considers why the war ended with a Pakistani surrender on the eastern
front and the creation of an independent Bangladesh. Both these chap-
ters challenge conventional accounts and underline the importance of
the international dimension for satisfactory explanations of these events.
The conclusion argues that things did not have to turn out the way they
did: at various points, there were alternative choices open to the various
actors and forks on the road that were not taken. These are not hypo-
thetical choices conjured up in the comforting light of hindsight, but
options that were actively weighed and discarded by the protagonists
themselves. The conclusion also considers the longer-term consequences
of some key choices made during the crisis.
The analytical focus of this book unavoidably leaves out swaths of
issues related to a conflict that was played out at multiple levels: be-
tween combatants and noncombatants (especially women), between
non-Bengalis and Bengalis, between West Pakistanis and East Pakistanis,
and between Pakistan and India. I also avoid adjudicating on the con-
troversy over the total number of casualties and victims. Bangladeshi
accounts tend to put the figure at 3 million; Pakistani official figures
claim no more than 26,000. A recent study claims that “at least 50,000–
100,000 people perished in the conflict” but that anything above this
figure is speculative.28 The fact, however, remains that we cannot know
with any degree of certainty the total number of victims. In the first
place, the crisis and war occurred in the immediate aftermath of the
worst natural disaster to strike the Bengal delta in the twentieth century.
Disentangling the numbers of fatalities caused by these natural and
man-made crises is likely to be impossible. In the second place, the Paki-
stan army left behind no record of civil casualties during the crisis—if it
maintained any at all. In principle, it should be possible to arrive at an
approximation of the number of “missing” people by a demographic
analysis comparing the census data of 1961 and 1972. In practice, the
reliability of the result would depend on the quality of data collection
 Prologue 13

during these censuses and the availability of age-specific and gender-

differentiated mortality rates. There is the additional problem of ac-
counting for the number of Bengali refugees who stayed back in India
after 1971—another politically charged minefield. At any rate, my spirit
quailed before this task. However, my approach and focus are aimed not
at downplaying the agency of those who struggled against a murderous
military regime, but rather at placing their struggle in the broader con-
text in which it occurred and by which it was so decisively shaped.
People, as Marx famously observed, make their own history but not in
circumstances of their own choosing.
A final reason for privileging such a broad treatment is the contempo-
rary resonance of the Bangladesh crisis. Today, similar crises and their
attendant international debates continue to occur against different re-
gional and political backdrops. In exploring the 1971 example, therefore,
I hope to open a window to the nature of international humanitarian
crises and their management. In particular, I wish to underscore the
complex mixture of motives that drives such crises and the manner in
which strategic interaction in such situations can produce unintended
outcomes. This story is unlikely to provide nostrums for our current
predicaments or answers to contemporary debates, but it can perhaps
prompt us to consider whether we are even asking the right questions.