 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We're back with the installment of Signs of Our Time with Professor Ajaz Ahmed. Ajaz, welcome to NewsClick. Thank you very much. Good to see you. On the 3rd of September in the New York Times, there was an interesting article written by Gary Bass about some tapes that had been released of Nixon and Kissinger in 1971 talking about India. Bass was the author of the book The Blood Telegram, which went over U.S. diplomatic history. It was quite a critical account of U.S. diplomatic history during the 1971 war. Most of the conversation about this essay and then what had been released as a consequence of Bass's freedom of information requests has been about the quite nasty things that Nixon and Kissinger said about Indians in particular, but of course, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi specifically. Is this all really that one should talk about with these revelations and with 1971 or surely there's something deeper that we should get to? Yes, that misogyny and racism was quite evident and quite repulsive. I mean, one feels repulsed, but I actually reflect both on the mentality of the imperialists and the mediocrity, cultural mediocrity of people who rule these countries, that in a White House conversation among the rulers of America, they can go on with that sort of thing. So it's both. It's revealing about the character of those people. The other thing though that stands out in those is that they're not the least concerned about the suffering of the Bangladeshis at that time, East Pakistanis. They're not at all interested in how to resolve this problem, etc. The focus is entirely on how to prevent a war which would deflect attention from the planned secret visit to Beijing, Kissinger's famous visit to Beijing, through Pakistan. And they're not talking so much about the war, but you realize that at the moment, at the moment they're working through Pakistan, this is a corridor to China, and part of their support for Pakistan and part of the irritation with India is actually based on that this war that Indians are about to fight would disrupt their geopolitics with. So then therefore, you now sort of ask yourself what kind of historical moment was it? What was at stake in that? And what have been the consequences of that? And why was the US always, for one reason or another, favoring Pakistan? Whereas due strategically speaking, if you just look at the surface of it, India was a much bigger country, more powerful country with far more sophisticated political structures and so on. On the surface, they always talked about the world's two largest democracies and so on and so forth, but the alignment was with Pakistan. This is a very, very interesting question in itself. And that interests me. Of course, immediately after independence, Americans did want to have primarily a relationship with India, but they could only have relationships with plants. You know, this thing that Bush later said, you're either for us or against us. Actually, that is what Ellen Dulles says about non-alignment. Non-alignment was not good enough. You have to be aligned with us. And therefore, this, you know, now who we are in India, not wanting to be a client of anybody wanting to have positive relations with all these parts. And actually, Nehru wanted to be friends with the United States very much. He was very much inclined to. But so there was that moment. But again, for Pakistan, the strategic relationship with Pakistan was both its location. In those days, the kind of technology you had in the 50s, early 60s, YouTube was a very big thing. And having a YouTube base, Pakistan did not have a contiguous or even close to the Soviet Union, which was, in American eyes, the main enemy. China was enemy, but China was weak, backward, was no threat to the Americans, as such, except, and I'll come to that. So, Pakistan had that geo-strategic position. Second, Americans were very aware of China-Sino-Soviet split, and they knew that they could make a wedge through this split, and they could use it to their own advantage. And therefore, Pakistan was particularly important because it could serve and eventually did serve as a conduit to establish relations between China and India. These were long-term objectives. But what was the immediate objective for the Americans? Absolutely immediate. A lot of the Soviet support for Vietnam used to go through China. If you normalize relations with China and say to them, well, what can we do about that? And to minimize Chinese support to Vietnam. That is to say, draw a wedge among these socialist countries using what dissensions already existed. So, within the context of the Vietnam War, the Americans are already losing that war by 71, creating difficulties for the Soviet Union to deliver support and trying to, hoping to persuade China to stop supporting Vietnam with very big strategic interests. And that is what is really in their minds. And it's really quite astonishing that Bangladesh itself is actually not in their minds. How to somehow prevent the war, at least postpone it until after the trip? I was very struck by actually Kissinger's, especially Kissinger's, but also Nixon's emphasis on that. Maybe that's a good point to talk a little about that, because it's true. They are quite crude and repulsive in the manner in which they're talking to each other. There is something quite terrible happening in what was then East Pakistan. You were very active at that time in the movement to prevent what would became cascading atrocities and so on. You're right. They don't have any empathy for the people of then East Pakistan. Could you just lay out very quickly for our viewers, many of whom may not also know what was happening at the time during the length of 1971, before the war broke out? Look, Pakistan at one level was really an untenable country, which had two of its wings separated by a stretch, a geographical stretch in which some 400 million people lived. In India, the whole widths of India, there are two sides. The East Pakistan, which is to say what became Bangladesh, East Pakistan was culturally and otherwise ethnically as the word now is much more homogeneous than any other South Asian country, certainly not Pakistan, Pakistan for major nationalities and so on. But 70% of Pakistani Pakistani population and at least 70% of the wealth is Punjabi. So during that time, it was essentially Pakistani domination of Bangladesh on East Pakistan. To cut the long story short, Bengalis were an absolute majority. They had won the absolute majority of seats in National Assembly. I was involved in these things. I talked to some of the top leaders and intellectuals of that movement. They repeatedly said, what interest would we have now that we have won these elections? Absolute majority. What interest would we have in a session when we control the whole country? So all we want to say to Mr. Bhutto is please sit in opposition and we'll normalize. The Pakistan is a democratic country. We should cooperate on that. I can answer some anecdotes I'll tell you in a moment. So there was that from the Bangladesh side. Bangladesh would not have fought for independence except for the atrocities. When the West Pakistani government, there's a book that Bhutto wrote on what he called the great tragedy. There's an amazing moment in which negotiations are going on in Dhaka. The three parties are Mujibur Rahman, Bhutto and Yahya Khan. Mujibur Rahman says something why he can't stay and can we have another adjourn the meeting and so on. And as they adjourn and disperse, Mujibur Rahman holds Bhutto by the arm and says we need to talk. Takes him into the garden and said look we could not talk inside because the army is listening devices. You and we have won an election. We have to fight the army together and we have to reach upon a formula to which the army is not a party. So you and we have to open a dialogue separate from this. And then we can figure out both things. Then he also says to Bhutto we are both progressive parties. We can have a very different program. Bhutto says that he said to Mujibur Rahman, army is the strong pillar of Pakistani politics. I will never betray Pakistan. I am not going to make to do any of this, et cetera. This is in Bhutto's book. This is not Mujibur Rahman speaking. This is Bhutto's book. So what did Bhutto and others, I mean we can talk about those motivations separately. We can go on with all this. How did Bhutto and expect from China or the United States with kind of support which might have saved Pakistan for them to rule is not clear to me. My sense is that he did not expect that much support. My sense is that he opted to break up the country and become a head of state of an independent country rather than a country in which he would be helped to sit in opposition. And this is something he says. That was his stand. That you want you want me to sit in opposition forever. To which they said well win some seats from East Pakistan. You won't be in opposition. Et cetera. So that is how I understand it. I think Bhutto wanted the break up and did not want to make a compromise in Mujibur Rahman. One last thing and I was very involved about it. So it's very real for me. After the Indian forces had crossed Babna in India, Poland produced resolution in the Security Council asking for ceasefire in place. So this obviously saw you do. I was actually in New York from where I was doing all that stuff. I knew the people, the Algerian diplomats and Tanzanian diplomats. Now I don't remember if the Tanzanians were one of the non-permanent members of the Security Council but Algeria I remember was. And they had a very interesting take. They said look of course what's happening is for it. Et cetera. But you can't break up great big countries. Once they start this business of breaking up countries because etc. So we have to do something anyway. So once Poland put that resolution there, there was an immense effort to get to Pakistan to accept it from all these people. And the idea was to save Pakistan. Soviet Union did not want to break up Pakistan. They wanted to create a military advantage for India. So that Indian forces had crossed Babna, ceasefire in place. Negotiations began under the supervision of the Security Council, power sharing, etc. The Algerians, the Tanzanians also got in touch with me at that time. Can you people do something and so on. There was a very famous individual called Yusuf Bach, the Kashmiri gentleman. We can talk about it some other day. But the point is that Yusuf, Yusuf Bach, when I asked him what do you do in the Pakistan embassy, he said somewhere between the Piyan and the High Commissioner. He was very close to Vittor. He wrote all Vittor's speeches and so on. So Yusuf Bach said, told me that he said to Vittor, please accept the ceasefire. The Soviets have given you an opportunity to save your country. He said, yes, I know that. But if I do that, they won't let my plane land in Islam. I can save the country. But then I have to accept it. So anyway, that's the historical moment that those tapes are in the middle. The fact is that they are historical tapes and they tell us a lot about the mentality of the, as you said, the kind of people who govern very powerful countries like the United States. As you said, it's most likely a matter of irritation that Indira Gandhi or at least the contradictions of South Asia were going to prevent their own plans. I mean, they were mostly interested in their own plans and their own plans came to fruition. It's not like Kissinger wasn't able to go to China and the deal wasn't cut and so on. But coming back again to the question of independence of India's foreign policy in this period or, you know, however one understands it, there were atrocities committed in East Pakistan. Indian Army did end up intervening. I mean, there is something interesting because in Gary Bass's book, The Blood Telegram, he does talk a lot about the indifference of US diplomacy to this level of suffering. And I think that bears some comment that it's not just Kissinger and Nixon being nasty about Indian women in general or Indira Gandhi, that misogyny and vulgarity. There's something about it there, yeah. Actually, but you see, first of all, that indifference, their indifference to the people, they themselves killed and, you know, Iraq, Syria, Libya, you begin to understand that this is an imperial mentality which is completely indifferent to human suffering. You know, this reflects very, very deeply. In the United States again, the history of atrocities on their own people and this misogyny and, you know, their unattractive, etc., etc. they produce to any children, etc. This is their own history from the time of slavery on. This is part of what in these stages is called white supremacy. You know, indifferent to the lives of people of these countries, deep misogyny, deep racism, and their own interest, their own interest overrides everything. I need to just make this visit. Now, you could pay, they could pay attention to what was actually going on in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and say, okay, we'll go to Beijing some other day. It isn't as if the Chinese would object to some postponement of it. You know, so an overriding preoccupation with their own geopolitics and this mass suffering of people, mass suffering imposed by your ally and, in fact, with your weapons, completely indifferent to that. And because India has has had this independent policy or whatever you put it, and it really was independent at the time of Indira Gandhi. Therefore, you dislike them and therefore this immense burden of having hundreds of thousands, maybe a million or whatever the number, the refugees and so on. None of it matters to you. You know, there aren't even words of sympathy for India having to play this role. And interestingly, there's no discussion of the fact that India effectively will break up the country of their ally. They're not even interested in that. So share indifference, your just background material for their ambitions. One of the outside contexts of this is that 1971 was a particularly difficult year for the Vietnamese liberation movement. It's also a year where a number of scandals came to court, including William Kelly of the Mai Lai. You know, while they're talking in the White House, these scandals are swirling about. There was Operation Texas Star taking place as they are talking. I mean, the sheer violence against the Vietnamese people, the use of chemical weapons and so on. Eventually, the final bombings of Hanoi, the TNT was greater than the two atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But so that is another way of looking at it, that these are people who are indifferent to their own victims. Whatever takes it doesn't matter if you kill every Vietnamese, which they tried very hard. So you know, there's certain, you learn something about the imperial mindset. It is vulgar. It is misogynistic. It is racist. And it is indifferent to human suffering. And these are the people who talk about democracy, human rights, this that and the other. It's extraordinary, you know, disjunction. And these are the people who talk of democracy and human rights, et cetera. Eja Sehma, thanks a lot for joining us at NewsClick. Thanks.