The filth that spewed from the mouths of former US president Richard Nixon and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger over Indira Gandhi's gallant endeavour to save East Pakistan from the horrors of West Pakistani rule is not a new story. But, placed in the evolving context of the riveting account of Bangladesh 1971 by Gary J. Bass in The Blood Telegram, the language of these vulgar adolescents acquires a particular horror.
For Nixon and Kissinger, driving the world order to the edge of self-destruction was a small price to pay for attaining narrow ends and rewarding friends. It is hardly surprising that the US has refused to sign on to the International Criminal Court. Kissinger could quite easily be arraigned as an early version of Slobodan Milosevic. Instead, he was rewarded by the west with the Nobel Prize.
For those who think this an excessive reaction to Bass's book, they are invited to read the story. First off is the extraordinary love story between Nixon and that drunken, lecherous oaf Yahya Khan. "Over and over again," remarks Bass, listening into the White House tapes with which Nixon bugged himself (and eventually hung himself over Watergate), "[Nixon] spoke of Yahya with an uncharacteristic blend of admiration and affection". The deep calling unto the deep.
Illustration: Bhaskaran
He thus approved of Yahya's ferocious crackdown on unarmed civilian Bangladeshis. "Apparently Yahya has control of East Pakistan," Kissinger stupidly tells Nixon on March 29, 1971, four days into the massacre. "Good," says Nixon. And, on Kiss-inger reassuring him that 30,000 Pakistani troops can quell 75 million raging Bengalis, Nixon says of Yahya that whatever his difficulties, "I wish him well".
Of course, Nixon's affection for Yahya was more than just a personal fondness. Kissinger was exploring the alternatives of using Nicolae Ceaus-escu of Romania or Jean Sainteny of France or Yahya for opening his road to China. Yahya eventually became the crucial channel for covert communication with the Chinese. Nixon was tickled pink with Yahya's covering note on a message from Mao: "From a President [Mao] through a President [Yahya] to a President [Nixon]". It might equally have been labelled, "From a mass murderer through a mass murderer to a mass murderer".
The contrast with their approach to Indira could not be more stark. Routinely calling her a "bitch" and Indians "bastards", Nixon congratulated himself on having "really slobbered over the old witch" at his first meeting with her in the White House. At this, Kissinger comforts his president with the assessment, "How you slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in things that did matter, you did not give her an inch." And the ever-vulgar Nixon gloated at "the way we worked her around. I dropped stilettos all over her".
They were quite wrong. Their disgraceful behaviour only made it too plain to Indira that they were not about to live up to their vaunted ideals. Within days of her return to Delhi, Yahya ordered widespread Pakistan air force bombing flying over India. With Pakistan clearly the aggressor, India threw its full force behind the Mukti Bahini and they together captured Dhaka, Gen. A.A.K. Niazi and 90,000 Pakistani soldiers within two weeks.
Throughout that fortnight, Nixon and Kissinger raged like men gone mad. "We will cut the gizzard out," orders Nixon. The duo, so utterly indifferent to the raping of hundreds of thousands of Bengali women, saw the liberation of Bangladesh as "the Suez '56 episode of our administration".
And, so they urged the Chinese to attack India, ready to face the prospect of this widening into a Soviet-China war, and doing their little bit to stoke a third world war by ordering the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to "frighten off" the Indians, as this would help the US tame the Middle East! But, by then, Generals Jacob and Aurora were already in Dhaka.
The US has quite rightly refused a visa to Modi for being complicit in crime, the precise grounds on which we should refuse a visa to Kissinger to ever again visit our country.
Aiyar, former Union minister, is an MP and a social commentator.