Thursday, January 2, 2003
India planned to break Pakistan in 1971: Secret files
Press Trust of India London, January 2
The US administration in 1971 suspected India of "scheming" not just the separation of East Pakistan, but the "break-up" of West Pakistan and even moves against the "Pakistani side" of Kashmir, secret British official papers claim.
The US administration believed that India was about to "dismember" Pakistan, the papers released at the Public Record Office in London, after 30 years of the 1971 Indo-Pak war, show.
The papers include secret transcripts of a summit meeting between US and British leaders in December that year.
The papers show that US President Richard Nixon and his foreign affairs adviser Henry Kissinger "suspected India of scheming not just the separation of East Pakistan, but the break-up of West Pakistan and even moves against the Pakistani side of Kashmir."
Nixon told the British that Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was being steered by the Soviets, in response to the building of ties between Pakistan and China.
And Kissinger said Nixon had secretly contacted the Soviet leadership to seek an assurance it would restrain India from breaking up West Pakistan. But it was only after the American Seventh Fleet took up a threatening posture offshore that the promise was forthcoming, the papers show.
This was the war that saw a freedom struggle in which India played a helpful role against an oppressive military hierarchy in West Pakistan, led by General Yahya Khan, creation of Bangladesh under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees into India.
But the transcripts of talks between Indira Gandhi and Heath, and of the Heath-Nixon summit in Bermuda, show it was more than that. Gandhi, on a visit to Britain, told Heath of the pressure in her Cabinet for her to take Pakistani territory and not return it.
India, she said, had seen Pakistan tying itself to China and now the United States also was establishing links with China, the papers reveal.
Nixon's friendly overtures to the Chinese, and their closeness to Pakistan, she said, had made it necessary for India to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Yahya Khan was also seeking British support. He wrote to Heath outlining the Indian military build-up near Pakistani territory, which included seven army divisions confronting West Pakistan and eight near East Pakistan, the papers show.
He also wrote about the deployment by India of comparable Air Force and naval threats. The offensive posture adopted by India pointed in the direction of conflict, not of peace, he wrote, according to the papers.
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