Much of the developing world continues to face obstacles related to one of the most common consequences inflicted by the age of imperialism - post-colonial borders. In the post-World War II era, exiting colonial powers (particularly in Africa and most of South and Southeast Asia) left behind a slew of borders, most of which are unchanged, that often came to exist without consideration to the demographic or human components of the areas that would be affected. The geopolitical sphere of South Asia continues to be dominated by the political arrangements drawn up as the British departed. India and Pakistan were created as modern political entities in 1947. The modern Indian nation is only the latest state to claim dominance over the subcontinent, but the trappings of being a modern political entity - a nation-state, a sovereign power, a series of designations arranged by West definitions of nationhood - required increased specificity.
So, on August 15, the predesignated date of independence, suddenly you have India, and you have Pakistan. One is secular, the other is Muslim. They are now entirely distinct, and the border will put them right next to each other. The sectarian violence accompanied by the 1947 Partition of India, especially in the Punjab region, has become the notorious stuff of legend, though sadly not as much in the West as it ought to be. But the source of this violence, while complex, is worryingly callous in one respect. The border, a rush job done by inexperienced hacks who hadn't taken the time to survey the land, was haphazardly drawn by a British commission on a deadline. It resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the largest mass migration in history.
The borders on the other side of Pakistan makes even less sense. The different regions of the British Protectorate of India had the opportunity to vote as to which independent new nation they wanted to join. The Muslim-majority country now known as Bangladesh, on the border of the Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, voted to join Pakistan. Thousands of miles away from the governing center of Islamabad, East Pakistan was more populous than West Pakistan and had an entirely different people and culture, despite the common Islamic heritage. So what you had, from 1947 to 1971, is an unwieldy, incongruent Pakistan divided by thousands of miles of India.
This geographic situation in the Bengal region was very messy under these circumstances and continues to be. The Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh have much in common culturally but their national governments debate over water and refugee issues. Springing from the Mughals, the British initially governed the whole region as one body, up until a violently-received attempt to partition them in 1905. But in modern history, the region has been continually bisected until the "Bangla Desh" once envisioned by Rabindranath Tagore is hardly recognizable.
In 1971, the struggles with this ridiculous Pakistan-bisected-by-India came to a head in the complicated crisis detailed by Gary J. Bass in The Blood Telegram, which provides a strong overview of the events from a geopolitical perspective and accomplishes a fine piece of Nixon-bashing in the process. Despite the advent of such institutions as the United Nations and a ruling generation scarred by the unspeakable genocide of the European Jews, the United States found itself not only standing by while an allied regime committed a genocide, but almost deliberately abetting it. In power at the time was Richard Nixon. His primary foreign policy advisor was Henry Kissinger.
The United States backed the standing president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, whose power and support were concentrated in West Pakistan. But East Pakistan, the region now known as Bangladesh, was more populous than the West, and united behind a single political party - which happened in the elections of 1970 - they could overwhelm the West's entrenched political stranglehold. In the December 1970 elections, the Bengalis of East Pakistan united behind the Awami League candidate, Mujib-ur-Rahman, who called for greater autonomy from Pakistan for the Bengalis. Yahya Khan banned the Awami and declared martial law, and began sending the Pakistani military - armed with American weapons - into Bangladesh. In the ensuing crackdown the military wiped out hundreds of thousands of Bengalis and displaced millions, most of whom fled to India's western states. Meanwhile, the American government willfully did nothing, deeming the matter an internal Pakistani affair.
It's remarkable how bad Nixon can still look after all these years. After extensive archival research from recently-released White House documents (which seem to be a very authoritative source; rarely does Bass complain about a dearth of American information), Bass paints a scathing picture of the sitting president and his advisor. Nixon seems like an embittered, racist bull in a china shop, but also like a defensive, sad little man (there's a very funny story about Nixon's chief of staff worrying about the boss's isolation and attempting to find him a friend). The man disliked almost everybody he knew, but inexplicably held Yahya Khan in high esteem. Nixon, not a subtle man, appreciated Khan's militant bluntness, a bluntness reflected also in the vicious crackdowns of 1971.
On the other hand, Nixon despised the Indians, and in particular the sitting prime minister Indira Gandhi (not a lovable woman herself). He hated the poverty and squalor of India and found its leader pretentious and pandering. To Nixon, this whole corner of the world was destitute and largely faceless, and he simply did not care much about them. There is no other conclusion to reach from Bass's book - Nixon just didn't give a shit.
The whole of South Asia was to Nixon a pawn in what was, admittedly, he and Kissinger's diplomatic coup in opening relations with China. In this respect his alliance with Yahya Khan was instrumental. Pakistan and China had cordial relations and both opposed India, which in turn was friendly with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger used Khan to ferry messages between themselves and Zhou Enlai (Khan, who for all his brutality was little more than a blustering drunk, apparently loved the cloak-and-dagger aspect). It was largely for this reason, which Nixon could not reveal to the Indians, that they continued their alliance with the military dictator. In the face of the genocide in Bengal, the whole thing is, of course, deplorable.
Bass doesn't claim to give a comprehensive account of the genocide, focusing instead on the role that world leaders played in allowing or downplaying it. But we do get a window into the terror through the eponymous eyes of Archer Blood, the foreign consul in Dhaka. His telegram, sent and signed by most members of his staff, excoriated American policy in Bangladesh and the Nixon administration in particular for doing nothing about what he saw clearly as a "genocide," - a difficult word that unfortunately is the only correct term for what in Bangladesh was little more than a concerted effort to wipe out an ethnic group.
This bit has to give you some faith in humanity, in that most people on the ground saw clearly what was happening and felt obligated to risk their careers (in Blood's case) to stand up for what was just. The ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, also saw the horror of the refugee crisis on India's eastern borders and unsuccessfully implored Nixon and Kissinger to do something; Senator Ted Kennedy, while he certainly had a political agenda, became an outspoken advocate of intervention after he visited the refugee camps in West Bengal and Bihar.
But it also raises troubling questions for everybody who doesn't see these things in person. Hopefully Nixon is an appalling outlier, but one wonders about an age in which the influence of great powers has become so far-reaching that their leaders have literally no ability to conceive of the suffering they may be engendering. Caught up in his Cold War diplomatic games, Nixon didn't notice or didn't care about what happened on the ground. One hopes that it was the latter and that this principle extends just to grumbling crooks like him.
Bass deserves enormous credit for bringing to harsh light one of the most brutal human consequences of the Cold War and the complicity of the United States - and frankly, most of the world - in this tragedy. It also is an interesting tale of pre-Emergency Gandhian politicking. The Indian government has been even more guarded than the U.S. with its state secrets, and Indira Gandhi's personal papers and correspondences have not been released. But through the papers of her chief foreign policy advisor, P.N. Haksar, a clear Indian perspective emerges. Though India ultimately liberated Bangladesh and before that armed and trained its guerrilla force, they also aggressively provoked war with Pakistan for their own belligerent reasons rather than out of sympathy for the human crisis at their doorstep. They make out better than the Americans in "The Blood Telegram," however.
This is not a definitive story of the "Cruel Birth" of Bangladesh, as Archer Blood later put it in his memoirs, but it is an incredibly important story of the consequences of geopolitical maneuvers and schemes in this still-recently globalized world, and a harsh reminder of the racist, ignorant lows to which this country only recently could still sink. Bass infuses the whole work with a clear moral directive. While there is no doubt that the nations of the world found themselves laying with bizarre bedfellows and mired in shades of grey in the early years of the Cold War, "The Blood Telegram" shows that even in these situations, right and wrong can and ought to be distinguished.
- For more information on the Partition of India and Pakistan, which is much more complex than what I've given here, I'd like to recommend Freedom at Midnight by Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins and this more recent article from the Journal of Genocide Research on the specifics of the genocide. There is also a new book called Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari, which I've just ordered.
So, on August 15, the predesignated date of independence, suddenly you have India, and you have Pakistan. One is secular, the other is Muslim. They are now entirely distinct, and the border will put them right next to each other. The sectarian violence accompanied by the 1947 Partition of India, especially in the Punjab region, has become the notorious stuff of legend, though sadly not as much in the West as it ought to be. But the source of this violence, while complex, is worryingly callous in one respect. The border, a rush job done by inexperienced hacks who hadn't taken the time to survey the land, was haphazardly drawn by a British commission on a deadline. It resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the largest mass migration in history.
The borders on the other side of Pakistan makes even less sense. The different regions of the British Protectorate of India had the opportunity to vote as to which independent new nation they wanted to join. The Muslim-majority country now known as Bangladesh, on the border of the Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, voted to join Pakistan. Thousands of miles away from the governing center of Islamabad, East Pakistan was more populous than West Pakistan and had an entirely different people and culture, despite the common Islamic heritage. So what you had, from 1947 to 1971, is an unwieldy, incongruent Pakistan divided by thousands of miles of India.
This geographic situation in the Bengal region was very messy under these circumstances and continues to be. The Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh have much in common culturally but their national governments debate over water and refugee issues. Springing from the Mughals, the British initially governed the whole region as one body, up until a violently-received attempt to partition them in 1905. But in modern history, the region has been continually bisected until the "Bangla Desh" once envisioned by Rabindranath Tagore is hardly recognizable.
In 1971, the struggles with this ridiculous Pakistan-bisected-by-India came to a head in the complicated crisis detailed by Gary J. Bass in The Blood Telegram, which provides a strong overview of the events from a geopolitical perspective and accomplishes a fine piece of Nixon-bashing in the process. Despite the advent of such institutions as the United Nations and a ruling generation scarred by the unspeakable genocide of the European Jews, the United States found itself not only standing by while an allied regime committed a genocide, but almost deliberately abetting it. In power at the time was Richard Nixon. His primary foreign policy advisor was Henry Kissinger.
The United States backed the standing president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, whose power and support were concentrated in West Pakistan. But East Pakistan, the region now known as Bangladesh, was more populous than the West, and united behind a single political party - which happened in the elections of 1970 - they could overwhelm the West's entrenched political stranglehold. In the December 1970 elections, the Bengalis of East Pakistan united behind the Awami League candidate, Mujib-ur-Rahman, who called for greater autonomy from Pakistan for the Bengalis. Yahya Khan banned the Awami and declared martial law, and began sending the Pakistani military - armed with American weapons - into Bangladesh. In the ensuing crackdown the military wiped out hundreds of thousands of Bengalis and displaced millions, most of whom fled to India's western states. Meanwhile, the American government willfully did nothing, deeming the matter an internal Pakistani affair.
It's remarkable how bad Nixon can still look after all these years. After extensive archival research from recently-released White House documents (which seem to be a very authoritative source; rarely does Bass complain about a dearth of American information), Bass paints a scathing picture of the sitting president and his advisor. Nixon seems like an embittered, racist bull in a china shop, but also like a defensive, sad little man (there's a very funny story about Nixon's chief of staff worrying about the boss's isolation and attempting to find him a friend). The man disliked almost everybody he knew, but inexplicably held Yahya Khan in high esteem. Nixon, not a subtle man, appreciated Khan's militant bluntness, a bluntness reflected also in the vicious crackdowns of 1971.
On the other hand, Nixon despised the Indians, and in particular the sitting prime minister Indira Gandhi (not a lovable woman herself). He hated the poverty and squalor of India and found its leader pretentious and pandering. To Nixon, this whole corner of the world was destitute and largely faceless, and he simply did not care much about them. There is no other conclusion to reach from Bass's book - Nixon just didn't give a shit.
The whole of South Asia was to Nixon a pawn in what was, admittedly, he and Kissinger's diplomatic coup in opening relations with China. In this respect his alliance with Yahya Khan was instrumental. Pakistan and China had cordial relations and both opposed India, which in turn was friendly with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger used Khan to ferry messages between themselves and Zhou Enlai (Khan, who for all his brutality was little more than a blustering drunk, apparently loved the cloak-and-dagger aspect). It was largely for this reason, which Nixon could not reveal to the Indians, that they continued their alliance with the military dictator. In the face of the genocide in Bengal, the whole thing is, of course, deplorable.
Bass doesn't claim to give a comprehensive account of the genocide, focusing instead on the role that world leaders played in allowing or downplaying it. But we do get a window into the terror through the eponymous eyes of Archer Blood, the foreign consul in Dhaka. His telegram, sent and signed by most members of his staff, excoriated American policy in Bangladesh and the Nixon administration in particular for doing nothing about what he saw clearly as a "genocide," - a difficult word that unfortunately is the only correct term for what in Bangladesh was little more than a concerted effort to wipe out an ethnic group.
This bit has to give you some faith in humanity, in that most people on the ground saw clearly what was happening and felt obligated to risk their careers (in Blood's case) to stand up for what was just. The ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, also saw the horror of the refugee crisis on India's eastern borders and unsuccessfully implored Nixon and Kissinger to do something; Senator Ted Kennedy, while he certainly had a political agenda, became an outspoken advocate of intervention after he visited the refugee camps in West Bengal and Bihar.
But it also raises troubling questions for everybody who doesn't see these things in person. Hopefully Nixon is an appalling outlier, but one wonders about an age in which the influence of great powers has become so far-reaching that their leaders have literally no ability to conceive of the suffering they may be engendering. Caught up in his Cold War diplomatic games, Nixon didn't notice or didn't care about what happened on the ground. One hopes that it was the latter and that this principle extends just to grumbling crooks like him.
Bass deserves enormous credit for bringing to harsh light one of the most brutal human consequences of the Cold War and the complicity of the United States - and frankly, most of the world - in this tragedy. It also is an interesting tale of pre-Emergency Gandhian politicking. The Indian government has been even more guarded than the U.S. with its state secrets, and Indira Gandhi's personal papers and correspondences have not been released. But through the papers of her chief foreign policy advisor, P.N. Haksar, a clear Indian perspective emerges. Though India ultimately liberated Bangladesh and before that armed and trained its guerrilla force, they also aggressively provoked war with Pakistan for their own belligerent reasons rather than out of sympathy for the human crisis at their doorstep. They make out better than the Americans in "The Blood Telegram," however.
This is not a definitive story of the "Cruel Birth" of Bangladesh, as Archer Blood later put it in his memoirs, but it is an incredibly important story of the consequences of geopolitical maneuvers and schemes in this still-recently globalized world, and a harsh reminder of the racist, ignorant lows to which this country only recently could still sink. Bass infuses the whole work with a clear moral directive. While there is no doubt that the nations of the world found themselves laying with bizarre bedfellows and mired in shades of grey in the early years of the Cold War, "The Blood Telegram" shows that even in these situations, right and wrong can and ought to be distinguished.
- For more information on the Partition of India and Pakistan, which is much more complex than what I've given here, I'd like to recommend Freedom at Midnight by Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins and this more recent article from the Journal of Genocide Research on the specifics of the genocide. There is also a new book called Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari, which I've just ordered.
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