Opinion Dhaka calling

India’s contribution to the liberation of Bangladesh was not only a definitive moment for the subcontinent but also a major landmark in the evolution of international politics after World War II. In today’s jargon,it would be called a “humanitarian intervention”.

Those who talk loudly today about the “responsibility to protect” people against genocide by their own government,however,were all opposed to India’s military intervention. It was not just the West and China that opposed India’s intervention. Very few from the non-aligned movement that India claims to lead supported India on Bangladesh at the United Nations.

Bangladesh’s war of liberation produced three distinct strategic outcomes for the region. One was a change in the regional balance of power in India’s favour. The second was an ideological blow against the two-nation theory that saw the bloody Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The third,the vivisection of Pakistan,reconfigured India’s eastern flank.

As it celebrates the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Bangladesh,India would do well to remember its dismal failure to consolidate the strategic gains from 1971.

A self-absorbed India in the 1970s was unable to anticipate the regional reaction to the liberation of Bangladesh and frittered away a historic opportunity to transform the subcontinent’s geopolitics.

Despite its many good intentions,New Delhi was unable to convert the division of Pakistan into a lasting peace with the surviving western half,or build a sustainable partnership with the newly created Bangladesh.

The promise of a “durable peace” that India thought it negotiated with Pakistan in the Simla Agreement of 1972 has remained elusive. Worse still,within a decade-and-a-half,Pakistan would go on the offensive,leaving Delhi scrambling to cope with new security challenges from the west.

In India,many critics of the Shimla pact have argued that Pakistan’s Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto got the better of Mrs Gandhi. Whatever might be the merits of that argument,the reality is that,while India won the war in 1971, it could not win an effective peace settlement.

In Pakistan,the army saw the Simla Agreement as an “imposed peace” by the victor of 1971. If India thought it had a settled framework for the resolution of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir in the Simla Agreement,a revisionist Pakistan has successfully made the 1972 pact largely irrelevant to bilateral relations over the last three decades.

Central to Pakistan’s revisionism was the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent. The first decision by Bhutto after the 1971 war was to launch a clandestine nuclear weapon programme. From Islamabad’s perspective,the nuclear move was indeed logical,but India failed to assess it properly despite Bhutto’s talk in the 1960s about making the bomb even if Pakistan had to “eat grass”.

China,which clearly understood the strategic implications of the 1971 war,rendered massive assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes in a bid to reverse what it called “India’s hegemony” in the subcontinent.

If the South Asian balance tilted in India’s favour at the end of 1971,a nuclear Pakistan reversed it by the end of the 1980s. Armed with a nuclear deterrent,Pakistan found that it could support insurgencies in India — first in Punjab,then in Kashmir,and eventually the extremist forces all across India.

With its margin of conventional military superiority made irrelevant by Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,Delhi has struggled for more than two decades in dealing with Rawalpindi’s low-intensity proxy war against India that was defined in terms of a retribution for 1971.

Delhi’s own half-cocked move of conducting a “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974 but refusing to exercise the military nuclear option engineered the worst of all possible atomic outcomes for Delhi.

India inadvertently lent a strategic legitimacy to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. Deluding itself with the disarmament rhetoric,Delhi let a nuclear gap with Pakistan emerge.

India’s gains in the east too evaporated rapidly after a bloody coup in August 1975 that killed the founder of Bangladesh,Mujibur Rahman.

If India seemed a helpless bystander,the coup helped restore the influence of many ideological and political forces — internal and external — that opposed the liberation war in 1971.

The deep internal divisions in Bangladesh and India’s own ineffective regional policy put Delhi’s relations with Dhaka in a deep freeze and undermined the gains of 1971.

If the liberation of Bangladesh was a great triumph,Delhi’s failures after 1971 were monumental. They were rooted in the refusal to think strategically about the implications of the liberation war and prepare adequately for its consequences.

Forty years after 1971,India is in danger of losing a second opportunity at hand to transform relations with Bangladesh. In her visit to Delhi in January 2010,Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took bold risks to make a fresh beginning with India.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s return visit to Dhaka last September did much to advance the bilateral relationship. But the failure to sign the agreement on the Teesta waters,thanks to the tantrums of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee,has helped revive the trust deficit between Delhi and Dhaka.

The inability of India,once again burdened with inchoate leadership,to quickly correct the course with Bangladesh could turn out to be as disastrous as the post-1971 policy failures.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
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