Manish Tewari on Emergency: Internal siege, external forces

Indian Express

5 days ago

It has often crossed my mind that in the wake of the infamy of the internal Emergency imposed by the then Congress government five decades ago, the history of the period from December 16, 1971, to June 25, 1975, has never perhaps been properly documented. Was there a context to that decision that has never been clinically explored?
This is by no means a defence of the Emergency. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, speaking at a public meeting on January 24, 1978 in Yavatmal, Maharashtra admitted to a lapse of judgement and said that she was taking the 'entire responsibility for the same'. She added that even if others responsible for mistakes and excesses were not willing to own up, she would own the responsibility for those mistakes. She, however, reminded the audience that the situation just before the imposition of the Emergency was grave, and the survival of the nation was threatened. If things were allowed to continue, the situation that had developed in Bangladesh would have been repeated in India.
What was this situation the late PM was referring to? December 1971 had been India's finest hour. The map of South Asia was redrawn after 1947 with the force of Indian arms, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. Pakistan, a nation created in the name of faith, had been dismembered because it could not keep people of the same faith, who were linguistically distinct, within its fold. With that, the two-nation theory was consigned to the dustbin of history.
A genocide being perpetrated by the Pakistan army on its hapless citizens in the eastern part of the country under the aegis of Operation Searchlight, which commenced on March 26, 1971, was halted after the Pakistan army was bludgeoned into a historic surrender of over 90,000 officers and soldiers. This event sent shockwaves in influential capitals around the world that believed that only they had the monopoly to shape the global order.
The world then was divided into two power blocs — the West, led by the US, and the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union. India was 'officially' non-aligned but with a perceived tilt towards the Eastern bloc. However, within the Eastern bloc, there were deep cleavages, with China trying to outcompete the Soviet Union for ideological leadership. The seven-month-long Sino-Soviet border war had ended just two years earlier, to the detriment of China.
Two things happened in the monsoon of 1971. In July, Henry Kissinger visited Peking, as it was then known — a trip arranged by the then Pakistani dictator, Field Marshal Yahya Khan. A month later, India signed a treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the situation in East Pakistan continued to deteriorate, and millions of refugees crossed the border into India. Archer Blood, the US consul general in Dhaka, sent a series of telegrams and memos to the State Department in Washington documenting the genocide and urging Washington to act. However, such entreaties fell on deaf ears as the Richard Nixon-Kissinger duo, grateful for Pakistani help in opening the doors to China, refused to intervene to stop the atrocities in East Pakistan.
Things came to a head in mid-December 1971 when the US government dispatched Task Force 74, comprising ships from the Seventh Fleet and led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, to sail at battle speed to the Bay of Bengal from the Gulf of Tonkin, where it was deployed for operations in the Vietnam War. The British navy also dispatched a naval group led by the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle towards India's west coast. The objective was to stop Dhaka from falling into Indian hands.
Invoking Article Nine of the Indo-Soviet Treaty, India requested the Soviet Union's help. The Soviets responded with alacrity. The 10th Operative Battle Group (Pacific Fleet) reached the Bay of Bengal and stared down the Anglo-American flotilla.
By the time the war ended in December 1971, India was facing a hostile and dismembered Pakistan, a humiliated US and a burgeoning US-Pakistan-China alliance inimical to both the Soviet Union and India. Around the world, CIA-KGB covert wars were raging. The CIA's complicity in the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende is now well documented. The Indian success in creating Bangladesh animated anti-neo-imperialist solidarity around the world, especially the struggle of the Vietnamese against the US.
India did two more things. It audaciously gatecrashed the exclusive club of nuclear weapon states by carrying out a nuclear test on May 18, 1974. Though classified as a peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE), the implications of Smiling Buddha were lost on nobody. On May 16, 1975, Delhi again redrew the political map of South Asia by merging Sikkim into India, taking advantage of Mao Zedong's weakening grip on China.
Meanwhile, the cost of war had started impacting the Indian economy. Inflation and food shortages were creating disaffection among people. It gave the Opposition a chance to mobilise public opinion against Mrs Gandhi. Every successful wartime leader has to pay a price for leading a nation during a crisis. Winston Churchill also lost a general election within two months of winning World War II in Europe.
Was there a ubiquitous 'foreign hand' in the internal disturbances that India experienced in 1974-1975, as Mrs Gandhi repeatedly emphasised? There has been no in-depth scholarship that has examined the three-and-a-half years between December 1971 and June 1975.
Mrs Gandhi referred to Bangladesh in the Yavatmal speech. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated on August 15, 1975. Could the Emergency have been avoided, and was there a smarter way of handling things? Only a cold, dispassionate and clinical analysis of the global and domestic events leading up to it can perhaps provide an answer.
The writer is a lawyer, third-term MP and former minister