Henry Kissinger and India, Pâkistân
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India
1971
Arjun Sengupta, May 27, 2023: The Indian Express
Henry Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday today (May 27). First as the United States National Security Adviser, then as Secretary of State, Kissinger led US interventions around the world during the 1970s, shaping events in China, Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, with consequences that reverberate even today.
For some, he was a master in statecraft and diplomacy; for many, especially those who bore the brunt of his political and military interventions, he is a bully and a warmonger — even a war criminal.
With India, Kissinger’s relationship was tumultuous — and neither he nor President Richard Nixon under whom he served — made any attempt to hide their almost visceral dislike of this country and its then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The contours of this deep antipathy of the Nixon White House towards India were revealed in tapes that were declassified recently. (Details below)
Kissinger was a proponent of (mostly unprincipled) realpolitik.
Born on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, Germany, Kissinger, who is Jewish, fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Upon coming to the US, Kissinger excelled academically at Harvard University and soon found himself rising in the ranks of the US political establishment. He would go on to play a prominent role in US foreign policy between 1969 and 1977 as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.
Kissinger’s approach to diplomacy was characterised by realpolitik, which emphasised pragmatic considerations and the pursuit of national interests ahead of moral and ethical concerns. It was Kissinger’s position that as long as decision-makers in major states were willing to accept the international order, it was “legitimate” — and questions of public opinion and morality could then be dismissed as being irrelevant.
This meant that Kissinger’s diplomatic successes were accompanied by a bloody legacy of undermining sovereignty and democratic functioning of smaller countries. He was behind the US bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, the US’s involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, the US’s tacit support to Argentina’s military junta, and notably, the US support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War, ignoring and condoning the terrible atrocities committed by the Pakistani state and army on the Bengali people of what was then East Pakistan.
It was the crisis in East Pakistan that brought India face-to-face with Kissinger’s policies.
General elections were held in Pakistan in 1970 to elect members of the National Assembly. Voting took place in 300 general constituencies, of which 162 were in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
In a landslide victory, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won 160 out of 162 seats in the East, securing an absolute majority in the assembly. To stall the rising tide of Bengali nationalism in the East, Pakistan’s political and military elite, mostly from the Punjab in the West, stalled the inauguration of the new assembly, triggering civil unrest.
On March 25, 1971, the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown on East Pakistan’s nationalist movement, in which anywhere between 300,000 to 3 million Bangladeshi civilians were killed, and as many as 10 million refugees poured into India.
Pakistan was a key ally of the US during the Cold War for reason of its strategic location and as a counterbalance to India, which had aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Kissinger, NSA to President Nixon at the time, also hoped to use Pakistan for diplomatic openings to China, again as a part of his grand strategy to counter Soviet influence.
With the Pakistani atrocities continuing unabated, the US Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, wrote to Washington DC to intervene, but met with what Blood would describe as a “deafening silence”. As the US continued to supply military and economic aid to Pakistan, Blood and his staff drafted a strongly worded dissent memo.
“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them,” the telegram read.
Blood would immediately be recalled to the US, with the rest of his diplomatic career marred by his show of dissent.
Both Nixon and Kissinger had a strong dislike of Indira, and disdain for Indians.
As a steady stream of refugees entered the country, India, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, went to war with Pakistan in December 1971. A month prior to India’s intervention, Indira had met with Nixon and Kissinger, who were unsympathetic to India to the point of being obnoxious.
During conversations between Nixon and Kissinger in the aftermath of the meeting, both men called Indira a “b**ch”, with Kissinger accusing her of “starting a war” there. Kissinger called Indians “b*****ds”, and “the most aggressive people around”.
Earlier, at a meeting on June 17, 1971, Nixon and Kissinger badmouthed India freely, calling Indians the “most sexless” and “pathetic” people, and “superb flatterers”, and Indian women “most unattractive women in the world”.
This meeting, held between 5.15 pm and 6.10 pm, was captured by the Oval Office taping system, and appears as Conversation 525-001 of the White House Tapes that were declassified in 2020.
Towards the 50th minute of the 54-minute, 42-second tape, Nixon says: “Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women. Undoubtedly.”
He continues: “The most sexless, nothing, these people. I mean, people say, what about the Black Africans? Well, you can see something, the vitality there, I mean they have a little animal-like charm, but God, those Indians, ack, pathetic. Uch.” As he says this, there is laughter.
Both Nixon and Kissinger had deep misgivings about then US Ambassador to India Kenneth B Keating, and Nixon is heard on the tape wondering why Keating was on the side of the Indians.
In response, Kissinger says: “They (Indians) are superb flatterers, Mr President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That’s how they survived 600 years. They suck up — their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions.”
When the 1971 war began, Kissinger and Nixon tried to make things difficult for India.
When India went to war after Pakistan preemptively bombed nine Indian air bases, Nixon was livid. “She (Indira) suckered us. Suckered us…..this woman suckered us,” he exclaimed to Kissinger.
On December 6, three days into the war, Nixon came up with the idea of urging China to move troops to its border with India. “We have got to tell them that some movement on their part toward the Indian border could be very significant,” he told Kissinger.
However, Kissinger knew that any Chinese intervention could also draw in the Soviets. So he came up with a plan to send a naval fleet to the Bay of Bengal to “scare off Indira”.
Thus, on December 10, 1971, Task Force 74, including the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, was asked to proceed to the Indian Ocean. But the Soviets responded to the US action with their own naval vessels — and as the Enterprise stayed in the region for almost a month, it was constantly tailed by a fleet of Soviet ships. The presence of the Soviet navy effectively neutralised the US threat and India’s multi-pronged assault into East Pakistan could continue successfully.
On December 16, Pakistani forces in the East unconditionally surrendered to India, bringing an end to the war and Pakistan as it had existed since Independence. Despite all sorts of pressure by the US and Kissinger, India and Indira stood firm, ultimately achieving its objectives in the war.
However, Kissinger would change his opinion on Indira Gandhi over time.
He would later describe her as a person of “extraordinary character” and acknowledge her determination and assertiveness in pursuing India’s goals.
“[The foul language has] to be seen in the context of a Cold War atmosphere 35 years ago, when I had paid a secret visit to China when President Nixon had not yet been there and India had made a kind of an alliance with the Soviet Union,” Kissinger told NDTV in 2005.
Henry Kissinger and Pâkistân
Kissinger: a friend of Pakistan
APROPOS of Mr Abdullah’s letter, ‘A wish’ (Jan 29), criticising President Musharraf for looking at Henry Kissinger (Jan 29), I have to inform him that Mr Kissinger, though a practising Jew, the second important man after president Nixon in the US, prior to and during 1971, was a friend of Pakistan.
It was perhaps due to the help provided by president Yahya Khan for becoming a bridge between Washington and Beijing. (At this time president Nixon had mused: “By not recognising China, we are saying that one billion people do not exist”.)
Both Nixon and Kissinger wanted to help Pakistan during the Pakistan-India war but the entire US administration, mesmerised by Indian lobby, went against Pakistan – and manoeuvred Nixon into installing the help.
He had to turn an enemy, or what we think of him, due to the change in the US policy after Nixon’s resignation.
When he met Z. A. Bhutto in Larkana in August 1974, Kissinger asked him to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel in the wake of Arabs recognising it after Ramazan War of 1973.
To this suggestion, Bhutto replied to him with all his hate-America policy: “We are the men of desert, Indus is in flood, and we are affected by torrents. My emotions are high so I cannot do what my people won’t accept”.
Well then, Kissinger told him that he must give up the idea of developing the nuclear programme; and compensation would be offered for the nuclear energy, and also more benefits for recognising Israel. The answer was an emphatic ‘no’. Did it seal Bhutto’s fate? This was what Mr Abdullah refers to as the threat of ‘making an example out of Z. A. Bhutto.’
The question of recognising Israel is nothing new. Tel Aviv has been trying it right from 1948 through the US and the UK. In trying to create good will, the Mumbai-born Israeli president Shimon Perez has congratulated the president of Pakistan on becoming a civilian president recently.
Before his death Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had said that he was neither against Jews nor against establishing a state of their own, recognising their state would be premature; we are not yet ready for that.
Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and President Musharraf have tried to know if our nation is ready now.
M. K. NAQVI Karachi
By Vijay Gokhale, IFS
Vijay Gokhale, Dec 1, 2023: The Indian Express
Henry Kissinger, who served as the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to two US Presidents — Richard M Nixon and Gerald R Ford — between 1969 and 1977, has died at the age of 100. He was regarded by the West as its most famous diplomat in the 20th century, and by China as their “friend”. Although he has been a polarising figure, he is remembered for his role in ending the two-decade-long American involvement in the Vietnam War and in the opening of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The world will shower him with praise for what Politico magazine calls his “transformative diplomatic actions”.
There is no doubt that Kissinger played a significant part in global diplomacy in the 1960s and 1970s and as a senior advisor to several presidents thereafter in interpreting world events — in particular the opaque Chinese communist regime. He was the go-to person for CEOs of global corporations, world political figures and the international media who wanted to understand how opportunities in China could be leveraged for gain. He profited handsomely from the advice he dispensed. But while the West feted him as a statesman and a strategist, his record with India is less savoury.
After the Nixon administration took office, Kissinger prioritised relations with Pakistan over India. He was instrumental in pressing for significant military and economic assistance during President Yahya Khan’s visit to Washington in October 1970. In May 1971, when India confronted its most significant national security crisis in living memory after ten million refugees from East Pakistan poured into India as a result of the atrocities by the Pakistani military, Nixon and Kissinger were more intent on securing Pakistan’s help in establishing ties with China rather than in compelling the Pakistani regime to stop the carnage at home. Despite the widespread international reportage of the genocide, Nixon wrote to Yahya Khan on May 7, 1971, to “understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced.” Although Kissinger had personally seen the Nazi persecution of the Jewish community in Germany, from where he finally fled in 1938, he showed neither compassion for the people of East Pakistan nor contrition for America’s unwavering support to the Pakistani regime’s activities until the bitter end.
Kissinger continually acted in a deceitful manner so far as India was concerned. In July 1971, during his visit to India on the eve of his secret visit to China, he told P N Haksar, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, that the US would “under any conceivable circumstances” back India against Chinese pressure. He never disclosed that he intended to visit China only days later to normalise relations. He also told External Affairs Minister Swaran Singh that the US had only “disinterested concern in the balance of national or political forces within South Asia”. In reality, he was doing everything possible to sustain the Pakistani genocide in future Bangladesh and assist Pakistan in dealing with India. When the Bangladesh crisis worsened, Kissinger advised Nixon to “introduce the question of what would happen to our (American) aid if India attacked Pakistan”, during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s visit to Washington in November 1971, in a transparent attempt to blackmail India. When the war began, Kissinger, on the one hand, routed military equipment to Pakistan through its middle-eastern allies and on the other, suspended all economic assistance to India. His instructions were specific — a case was to be made, technically and legally, to differentiate between the aid given to India from the aid given to Pakistan.
His most perfidious actions were his efforts to put pressure on India through the Chinese. Even before the conflict started, Kissinger met the Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations, Huang Hua, on November 23, 1971, to propose that they coordinate action in the UN Security Council on the India-Pakistan issue so that the US “not move too far away from you (China) on this issue”. It was also at this meeting that Kissinger (and George H W Bush, later the President of the United States) shared the specific location of Indian military units deployed along the frontier with East Pakistan, as well as crucial information that India had diverted two mountain divisions from the China front to East Pakistan. He even offered to send further specific information “in a sealed envelope to the hotel if you want us to”. This was but a prelude to Kissinger’s subsequent actions during the Bangladesh war.
In his meeting with the Chinese on December 10, 1971, Kissinger described what was happening “in the Indian Subcontinent as a threat to all people,” and that Pakistan was being punished by India because it was a friend of China. Kissinger conveyed that “if the People’s Republic of China were to consider the situation on the Indian subcontinent a threat to its security, and if it took measures to protect its security, the US would oppose efforts of others (Soviet Union) to interfere with the People’s Republic.” It was as direct a suggestion as could possibly be made by a high-ranking political figure to the Chinese to open a third front when India was already fighting Pakistan on two fronts.
He would later tell Nixon, wrongly as it turned out, that China “might be more inclined to step up its own activities”. China had understood the game the Americans were playing and had neither the intention nor the capability to threaten India with military action. India figured in many of Kissinger’s subsequent meetings with the Chinese until he demitted office in 1977. Kissinger usually talked about India in a derogatory and patronising manner. Outwardly a champion of democracy and freedom, Kissinger in reality was instrumental in supporting an authoritarian regime against the one nation in Asia that was democratic and hewed to the values that defined the United States.
After his retirement, he built a hugely profitable consultancy practice by using his first-mover advantage with the Chinese leadership. He would visit China regularly, and help others build the connections that gave the Chinese access to much of the capital and technology for their modernisation. The Chinese well understood Kissinger’s immense value and pandered to his vanity and ego. In a sense, Kissinger was harnessed by Mao Zedong and his successors to pull the Chinese cart into the 21st century and has contributed, perhaps more than any other single individual, to helping China emerge as a true challenger to American power.
Kissinger had many undeniable achievements but let us, as Indians, not succumb to amnesia and join the others in heaping praise upon an individual who, for whatever reason, harmed India’s interests.
Gokhale was India’s Ambassador to China and retired as Foreign Secretary in 2020. He’s the author, most recently, of After Tiananmen: The Rise of China
Statesman? Warmonger? The Man Who Was India’s 1971 Nemesis
Kissinger has many admirers and as many detractors. But in India he is essentially remembered for being responsible for the worst days of the bilateral relationship
Navtej Sarna
It is a milestone of sorts. At age hundred, Henry Kissinger passes into the beyond. Undeniably brilliant and always controversial, he lived a life in the spotlight: a long-time adviser to presidents, an interlocutor to global personalities, a well-paid consultant to corporate houses, even an escort of Hollywood actresses to film premieres. Anwar Sadat is said to have kissed him under a mango tree, in the manner of a brother; Zhou en-Lai can be seen in archival photographs putting choice morsels onto his plate.
Kissinger was, after all, the original shuttle-diplomat and the ultimate back-channel boy; he believed less in ideology and more in realpolitik, less in policy and more in strategy. He hero-worshipped Bismarck for his deployment of strength in politics; he played out the 19th century realism of Castlereagh and Metternich in our time. Living under the dark shadow of his German Jewish childhood, he worked relentlessly to prevent the war that he had seen. Conflicts, he believed, could be ameliorated if not resolved, as shown by his work on détente with the Soviets and in the Middle East.
And yet he also helped extend the Vietnam war, oversaw the disastrous US invasion of Cambodia, and made ill-advised exacerbations in Africa and Latin America. His admirers regard him as a brilliant American statesman, a giant of international relations; his detractors, of whom there is no dearth, would have him tried for war crimes; in the event he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1973.
Controversial legacies leave choices for posterity; you pick what impacts you most. For India, Kissinger’s legacy is essentially 1971 when he, along with President Nixon, was responsible for the worst days of the bilateral relationship. He was by then inordinately close to President Nixon as his national security adviser, meeting him several times a day and lunching with him once a week, so the two must share responsibility.
Nixon was bent on normalising relations with Communist China so as to create a better geopolitical lever against Moscow; Kissinger, initially sceptical, soon became fully invested in the project. The US state department was kept in the dark as Nixon and Kissinger looked for a secret intermediary to approach China. Yahya Khan of Pakistan it ultimately was, as Nixon liked him. He spoke with a clipped Sandhurst accent and carried a swagger stick, almost like a British officer; in sharp contrast, Nixon disliked Indira Gandhi.
Even as Nixon and Kissinger were dreaming of the historic opening to China, the East Pakistan crisis erupted. Reports of human rights violations, genocide and mounting refugee figures were unwanted irritants for the US; India’s diplomatic outreach and reports of possible military action were seen as threats to Kissinger’s precious back-channel that ran through Pakistan to China. Despite congressional and media pressure, Nixon famously instructed his administration not to “squeeze Yahya at this time”. Unaware of Pakistan’s role in the larger scheme of things, the US consul general Archer Blood and his colleagues sent the famous ‘Blood Telegram’ that reported a “reign of terror” by the Pakistan army and protested US silence, an early demonstration of the dissent channel now so active on Gaza. The telegram leaked, as expected, and Kissinger and his boss were livid.
Kissinger came through India before going to Pakistan and from there, secretly and under the subterfuge of a stomach bug, going on to China on a PIA Boeing 707. During the India leg, he made several duplicitous statements to the Indian leadership that would continue to rankle for years, including an assurance that America would not support China against India; five months later, he was egging on the Chinese the other way. In Washington, meanwhile, he told the Indian ambassador that India was on its own. US arms spares and supplies to Pakistan continued; a beleaguered India finally signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace and Friendship that August.
When hostilities broke out after Pakistan’s attack on December 3, Kissinger and Nixon blamed India for the conflict, freezing millions of dollars of aid. They fostered the idea, despite clear clarifications to the contrary, that India would destroy the rest of Pakistan too and sent the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal, as much to deter India as to impress China about American reliability. Eventually, the Nixon visit to China would take place but it would take years for India-US relations to recover from that period of mistrust.
The conversations between Nixon and Kissinger, revealed later, would add their own sexist and racist notes. Nixon believed that the Indians needed a “mass famine”; Kissinger chimed in: “They’re such bastards.” Kissinger also said Indians were “scavenging people”, “superb flatterers” and “the most aggressive goddamn people around”. And there is more in the transcripts.
One must not, it is said, speak ill of the dead. But there’s nothing against telling the truth, once in a while.
The writer is a former ambassador to the US
