> Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005 - President Nixon and his national
> security adviser Henry Kissinger saw India as a "Soviet stooge"
> during the South Asia crisis of 1971, downplayed reports of Pakistani
> genocide in what is now Bangladesh, and even suggested that China
> intervene militarily on Pakistan's side, according to startling new
> documentation from White House files and tapes contained in the State
> Department's Foreign Relations of the United States series and
> reposted today by the National Security Archive.
Kissinger is already in damage-control mode.
NDTV.com
Kissinger 'regrets' remarks on Indira
Maya Mirchandani
Saturday, July 2, 2005 (New York):
In an exclusive interview to NDTV, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has clarified his remarks on former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
According to declassified documents, Kissinger had abused Gandhi in the strongest language in the earlier seventies.
Speaking to NDTV, he said he regrets the kind of language that was used. However, he explains that the words were simply out of frustration.
"This was not a formal conversation. This was somebody letting off steam at the end of a meeting in which both President Nixon and I were emphasizing that we had gone out of our way to treat Mrs Gandhi very cordially. There was disappointment at the results of the meeting.
"The language was Nixon language. There are 10s of thousands of conversations of mine that have been published and I think you will find very very few, if any, words of this nature and in any event I regret that these words were used.
"I have extremely high regard for Mrs Gandhi as a statesman. The fact that we were at cross purposes at that time was inherent in the situation but she was a great leader who did great things for her country," he said.
Cold war
>From his Park Avenue offices in New York City, America's most well
known former diplomat says it is impossible to separate the context of
the cold war from the comments that were made.
"First of all I want to make clear that I am a strong supporter and promoter of the close relationship that is developing between India and the US so all of this has to be seen in the context of the cold war atmosphere of 35 years ago where I had paid a secret visit to China, President Nixon had not yet been there and India had made what amounted to a kind of an alliance with the Soviet Union.
"So it was in that context that we had assessed the immediate situation and you can't say we were angry. We wanted to avoid a war between India and Pakistan because we thought it would be very damaging to what we were trying to do and Mrs Gandhi for her reasons, which were very understandable from the Indian point of view wanted to settle the issue militarily.
"That was the cause of the tension but it was a one time event that did not reflect any fundamental attitudes and for 30 years since then I have been a strong proponent of India and America's friendship and have spoken on many public occasions both here and in the US," said Kissinger.
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