Cast From The Past: When Kissinger failed to make China attack India during 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War

Born in the boom of telegraphs and trunk calls in Germany’s Bavaria region in May 1923, the immensely controversial and equally consequential US foreign policy practitioner Henry Kissinger died in the hyperconnected times of internet on November 30, 2023. The scholar-turned-diplomat was serving as the US National Security Adviser to President Richard Nixon in the December of 1971 when New Delhi intervened in the erstwhile East Pakistan after millions of refugees poured into India in the wake of atrocities committed by Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan military against their own Bengali brethren. 

With an indecipherable ink of a Harvard scholar acting as the signature of his diplomacy, Kissinger also shaped the geopolitics of Indian subcontinent during that strife, which later came to be known as Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.

India’s military intervention in Bangladesh began on December 3 that year. Ducca (now Dhaka) fell in 12 days. The then West Pakistan Army signed an Instrument of Surrender on December 16, 1971, leaving about 93,000 Pakistani soldiers effectively under New Delhi’s control in the newly-created Bangladesh. 

But one of the most curious things about this war was the ‘Chinese intervention’ that never happened.

According to the US state department Archives, the then US President Richard Nixon instructed Kissinger “to ask the Chinese to move some forces toward the frontier with India” in December 1971. 

“Threaten to move forces or move them, Henry, that’s what they (Chinese) must do now,” Nixon told Kissinger inside Oval Office on December 10, 1971.

The US did not share formal ties with Communist Party-led mainland China between 1949 to 1972, with absolute resumption of diplomatic relations only coming in 1979 — one of the most significant geopolitical events of the second half of 20th century which effectively tilted the balance of Cold War in Washington’s favour.

Kissinger’s efforts to establish diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing were being aided by Pakistan as a channel of communication at least since December 1970.

In April 1971, a month after Sheikh Mujibur Rehman proclaimed the birth of Bangladesh in the territory of erstwhile East Pakistan, and Pakistan reacted by launching ‘Operation Searchlight’, the Pakistani ambassador delivered Chinese leader Zhou Enlai’s reply to Washington. This correspondence paved the way for Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in July 1971 and beginning of events that fully restored US-China ties in 1979. The rest as they say, to use a cliche, is history.

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In an odd turn of events, while the US cosied up with Communist China, the Soviet Union, another Communist nation that two decades later become Russia, cemented its ties with India after signing a comprehensive treaty of ‘Peace, Friendship and Cooperation’ on August 9, 1971.

In order to aid Islamabad that was facilitating the dialogue between Washington and Beijing — and thereby giving Washington an edge against Moscow in Cold War — the US deployed Task Force 74 of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal to prevent India from overrunning Pakistan.

In response, the Soviets deployed two groups of cruisers and destroyers as well as a submarine armed with nuclear warheads in the region. 

The geopolitical calculations in the Oval Office where Nixon and Kissinger met on December 10, 1971, did not want the dismembering of Pakistan despite its mass atrocities on Bangla-speaking people of erstwhile East Pakistan.

According to former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, her father, erstwhile prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was worried that the Chinese would not  intervene militarily on the side of Pakistan. But both Islamabad and Washington were working in tandem to ensure a Chinese military intervention.

“While Papa is planning to ask Yahya to fly to Peking (now Beijing) as a last resort, Henry Kissinger, I read later, is having meetings with the Chinese in CIA ‘safe houses’ all over New York,” the late former prime minister wrote in her autobiography Daughter of the East.

Contrary to the expectations from some corners in US and Pakistan, China did not move its forces towards its unresolved frontier with India during crucial days of Indian operations in present-day Bangladesh.

Peking did not intend to militarily confront Moscow, a fellow Communist nation, even for an all-weather partner like Pakistan and despite the prospect of resumption of ties with Washington at the height Cold War. 

Nixon concluded to Kissinger at the end of that discussion on December 10, 1971 that “Russia and China aren’t going to go to war.”

“India, however, had emerged from the crisis confirmed as the preeminent power on the subcontinent, and Soviet support for India during the crisis had enhanced Soviet influence in India,” the US state department concluded in a document on the war.

And Kissinger’s secret diplomacy eventually led to American diplomatic recognition of and closer ties with China, only for him to see it all unravel in his own lifetime, in the past decade.