December in Dacca

ON 15th August 1975, the Bangladesh Army executed 13 family members of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the newly anointed Prime Minister of the democratic nation of Bangladesh, including the PM himself and an unborn baby. The Indira Gandhi led government of India was obviously appalled by this development, considering the role it had played in the Bangladesh liberation a mere 4 years prior, but certainly had lost any moral right to have an opinion on it, given that India was no longer a democracy at the time. K.S. Nair’s December in Dacca chronicles the events leading up to that fateful coup of 1975, as well as India’s 1971 military intervention in the ongoing humanitarian crisis that saw the Pakistani army kill millions, in what was then East Pakistan, with virtually no resistence from any western power of the day. The author expertly chronicles the ingenuity of tall military leaders such as General Maneckshaw and others, that went into the months-long strategizing prior to December 1971, following which the first ever democratic civil administration to exist in Bangladesh was comprised of capable and enterprising hand-picked civil servants from India. There are also detailed accounts of the non-trivial diplomatic effort undertaken by the Indian government in early 1971, in the face of the Nixon-Kissinger USA administration of the time, which was in the middle of a China outreach and therefore decidedly on the side of West Pakistan. There is damning evidence, albeit circumstantial, as referenced by the author, that Kissinger had a personal hand in enabling the coup and mass murder of 1975, as a response to India’s audacity at the time to go against the American stand on the issue

NAIR is a self-professed military enthusiast & historian. His interest and expertise in the area shines through in the blindingly brilliant attention to detail throughout the book, but is particularly potent in the middle sections where he describes the multiple smaller battles fought by the Navy, Air Force and Army within the larger war. His admirable care for naming every prominent member of the armed forces along with their designations as well as their writings on their experiences, where available, makes it clear to the reader that several people played stellar roles in the larger narrative of the war who are worth remembering. Nair also clearly outlines the humanitarian reasons for India’s intervention and makes a compelling case for why the liberation war and India’s role in it, deserves more attention from the world & especially India. In the author’s eyes, this war was in no way inferior to WWII in terms of the humanitarian intent and drive, but does not get even a tiny fraction of the pop culture attention that the latter does. One key reason for this rationale is the forward-thinking maturity displayed by the Indian armed forces in withdrawing completely from Bangladesh a mere 3 months after the bulk of the war was fought (as opposed to the 20 year stint of the Americans in Afghanistan, a point the author reminds us of) and the West Pakistani armed forces surrendered in a public ceremony. While it is clear that Nair sees this is as a defining moment in India’s post-independence history, and he seeks allotment of much more space in contemporary consciousness for it, he also outlines the lessons both India and Bangladesh ought to have learned from it, but for the most part did not - The 1975 coup was just the beginning of the tumultuous existence of Bangladesh as a country, although in the recent past the country has been performing really well on social and economic indicators. India (Indira, for Congressmen of the time), on the other hand, after enabling it’s neighbour to attain democracy, managed to completely rob it’s own citizens of all their rights for almost 3 years starting 1975 - an irrevocable black stain on our national identity. This and darker times that came next, possibly distracted our country’s governments from mounting any sustained campaign for subjecting Pakistan to war trials and reparatations for the horrendous loss of Bangladeshi lives in those years leading up to the liberation.

AS I was reading the book though, I could not help but wonder how should we process the history and events of the 1971 war, knowing what we know today. The years leading up to 1971 including the months when the war was fought, resulted in a massive influx of Bangladeshi refugees/migrants into NE India. In addition to fuelling the Ahom student movement of the 80s - the largest people’s movement in independent India as described expertly by veteran journalist Arun Shourie in his memoir, this massive migration has had long-standing cultural, social, economic & anthropological impact on the people of Assam and other NE states, and continues to remain a hot-button political issue to this day. Hindsight is always a luxury of the contemporary generation but I cannot help but feel that India did not do enough to modulate the refugee retention at the time, and to this day has failed across several elected central & state governments to find a solution to so fundamental a problem. If there is one thing I sorely missed in this book, it was a larger, big-picture context that takes these nuances into account. In order to fully process India’s role in this war and objectively have an opinion about it, while we certainly need to learn & remember the stellar successes of our armed forces, we also need to study & understand, I think, the socio-political context of India at the time (captured with much capability by Rahul Ramagundam in The Life and times of George Fernandes) as well as the long-standing detrimental consequences the massive migration has had and continues to have on our fellow citizens in the NE.