Manish Tewari | Why Kissinger's Legacy in South Asia is a Toxic One

Henry Kissinger lived to be one hundred years old. When he finally hung up his boots on November 29, 2023, he left behind a rather complex, convoluted and tortured legacy. You could love Kissinger or detest him, be in awe of him or be repulsed by him, but you could not ignore him. For over half a century whether he occupied any formal position or not he strode like a colossus on the international stage dwarfing many states persons of his times with his prodigious intellect.

He authored great tomes of knowledge and his seminal work called Diplomacy inspired a generation of scholars of international relations. However, there was a difference between the academic in him and the practitioner of realpolitik that he was while executing American foreign policy.

As President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford’s national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and then concurrently secretary of state to both the Presidents between 1973 and 1977, Kissinger oversaw a tumultuous period in American foreign policy and statecraft, including the escalation and subsequent ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. However, it was his opening to China, the détente and relaxation of tensions with China and the shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East after the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria On October 6, 1973, that paved the way for a ceasefire and the subsequent Israel-Egypt peace accords that are considered to be the high watermarks of his legacy. He is disdained for being the author of the most merciless bombing campaign of Laos and Cambodia between 1969 and 1973. It is estimated that the United States dropped more tonnage of munitions on these two small countries than they did during the entire Second World War. In Taiwan, too, he is viewed with scepticism as someone who sacrificed American commitment to Taiwan’s security to achieve a rapprochement between the US and China. However, his role during the Bangladesh War of 1971 is what’s most troubling for that is what shaped his relationship and, by extension, that of the Nixon Administration with India in perhaps the most acerbic manner possible.

Henry Kissinger was using the President of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, as an interlocutor to open a channel of communication with the Chinese leadership that was still reeling from the nastiest low note of the Sino-Soviet split that is the seventh month border war between the the two nations between the March and October of 1969. The Sino-Soviet split had commenced after the violent posthumous denunciation of Joseph Stalin by Nikita Khrushchev on February 25, 1956, to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Henry Kissinger, sensing an opportunity to sever China from the broader Communist bloc, executed an impetuous outreach. On July 9, 1971, he secretly flew out of Chaklala airport in a Pakistan International Airways (PIA) aircraft to Beijing where he met with the apex Chinese leadership including Premier Zhou Enlai. This set the stage for the eventual Sino-US rapprochement in February 1972 during a visit to Bejing by then President Richard Nixon. In the days leading upto the Kissinger outreach to China, the West Pakistan Army had perpetrated a brutal crackdown in West Pakistan. Commencing with Operation Searchlight on the night of March 25, 1971, the West Pakistani army was on a rampage driving millions of refugees across the border into India.

President Yahya Khan had ordered his army, “kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands”.

The Nixon Administration was receiving multiple reports from various sources, including their counsel general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, who in an angry cable to Washington DC used the word “genocide” to describe the atrocities being perpetrated on the hapless Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan by the West Pakistani Army and the Razakar militia who had turned on their own kith and kin.

However, Kissinger, unwilling to risk the backchannel to Beijing and grateful to President Yahya Khan for setting it up, set into motion a train of events that led to not only the formation of the independent nation of Bangladesh but, what perhaps remains undocumented so far, it inaugurated perhaps the most activist phase of American intervention into domestic Indian politics between 1972 and 1977. However, that story requires to be told in greater detail and must be saved for another day.

Between March and December of 1971 the Nixon-Kissinger duo gave overt
support to Pakistan including during the war for the liberation of East Pakistan when they sent the US Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal.

In November 1971, Henry Kissinger advised his deputy NSA Gen. Alexander Haig to direct the US Navy to keep an aircraft-carrier-led task force ready for deployment in the Indian Ocean. As the tide of war turned against Pakistan, the US Navy’s Task Force-74 of the Seventh Fleet led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise was ordered to sail at battle speed into the Bay of Bengal from the Gulf of Tonkin where it was then deployed for operations in the Vietnam war.

Concurrently, the British Navy also dispatched a naval group led by the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle towards the west coast of India. Obviously, this caused great consternation in India. Articulating India’s position, defence minister Jagjivan Ram thundered: “Even if the US were to send the 70th fleet, we would still not be deterred.”

However, on the ground, the situation was grim. Facing the British and the American Armada was Indian Navy’s Eastern Fleet commanded by its aircraft carrier Vikrant with barely 20 light fighter aircraft. The Indian Air Force would have had to provide the rest of the muscle.

Invoking the Indo-Soviet Treaty signed on August 9, 1971, India requested the Soviet Union for help. The Soviets responded with alacrity. The 10th Operative Battle Group (Pacific Fleet) commanded by Admiral Vladimir Kruglyakov slipped anchor at Vladivostok and in double quick time reached the Bay of Bengal. The Soviets stared down the Anglo-American flotilla and East Pakistan was liberated by the Indian Army ably assisted by the Mukti Bahini. These events left an indelible imprint on the South Asian psyche and made the Kissinger imprimatur toxic in this part of the world.