A Scholastic Vision of 1971: How Academic Prodigies Illustrated Our Liberation War

 
The glorious Liberation War of 1971 was going on during such a time while the Cold War between the western nations led by the United States and the East European countries headed by Soviet Union (present day Russian Federation) was at its peak. The Vietnam War was also underway at the same time.

The resentment that existed among the Bangladeshis over the exploitations enforced by West Pakistan had a severe outburst through the Independence War that started in March 1971. The United States of America and Soviet Union, two formidable superpowers, confronted one another from two absolutely opposite angles as far as the Liberation War of 1971 was concerned.

American geopolitical expert Robert S. Litwak analyzed the way Richard Nixon wanted to envisage the US approach to the third world in his famous book “Détente and The Nixon Doctrine”. In light of the elaborations by Robert S. Litwak, the Nixon Doctrine principally aimed at reformulating the US security policy keeping in view the Vietnam War, the Liberation War of Bangladesh and the burgeoning influence of the Soviet Union.

Pakistan has been an ally to the United States for decades and through the ruling hierarchy of Islamabad the Nixon administration sought to curtail the diplomatic aloofness that existed during those years between Washington, Beijing and Kremlin. However, tackling the expansion of the Kremlin-propagated norms and theorems across South Asia and other parts of the world was the prime goal of the Guam Doctrine.

Shockingly true that, just to uphold the principles of the Guam Doctrine, the Nixon administration did virtually nothing to prevent the genocide in East Pakistan because allowing West Pakistan to go ahead with whatever it wanted to do with East Pakistan was more important for the White House back then to take care of its international geopolitical interests.

The United States was well aware that what was being done by the Pakistani forces on the soil of East Pakistan was a blatant example of brutality. But still the US party in power back then preferred to remain “cautiously callous”, knowing explicitly about the mass murders being committed by Pakistani soldiers but appearing not to have a lucid vision of the ghastly scenario.

Though the détente promulgated by Richard Nixon apparently aimed at reducing antagonism with the Soviet Union, but in fact its ulterior motive was to occupy all greener pastures by means of US diplomatic stratagems or military muscles before the Soviet Union could do that, as found in the book by Robert S. Litwak. So, the underlying duplicity of the Nixon Doctrine was not too abstruse to unscramble.

In Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey, the author refers to the US target to keep Pakistan undivided by deterring the independence of Bangladesh. The mindsets of general Indians infuriated by Richard Nixon’s honey-coated diplomacy with Pakistan during those years are reflected in this book through the dialogues of the novel’s characters. The murderous military drive mobilized by the Pakistani Army against the common Bangladeshi people is also stated in this book with a special reference to some ten million Bangladeshis who took shelter in the refugee camps of Indian border provinces. Moreover, in Such a Long Journey Rohinton Mistry recalls the anxiety that gripped Richard Nixon about the alliance between India and Soviet Union, one of the key reasons that made the Nixon administration oppose the Liberation War of 1971.

Srinath Raghavan’s book 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, published in November 2013 by Harvard University Press should also be cited in this regard. According to this book, Richard Nixon was under a tremendous amount of stress placed on him by the general Americans who were outraged by the deaths of thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam. While Vietnam was apparently slipping out of the US clutches, Richard Nixon became desperate to fortify his hold over South Asia by aiding Pakistan. He wanted to keep the American muscles gleaming across South Asia by warding off Soviet influence on this region.

The first three chapters of the book address the internal political infirmity in Pakistan during the closure of 1960s that fixed up the stage for the collapse of political harmony in the country and India’s reaction to the worsening crisis next door. The following five chapters focus on the responses to this chain of events that came from Beijing, Moscow and Washington and from other vital quarters of the world and how things culminated in the liberation of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury is
a contributor to different
English newspapers and magazines