Battle for Bangladesh gathers pace

The war for Bangladesh's liberation gathered pace following the recognition accorded to the soon-to-be-born country by Bhutan and India in early December 1971. With the Pakistani attacks on Indian air bases in the western sector and the swift Indian move of hitting back, the war gained a new dimension.

India was now focused on two fronts – in the east with the Mukti Bahini and in the west all by itself. Beginning on 3 December, the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini formed a joint command, following which the drive to free East Pakistan of the occupation army speeded up, with one town after another falling to the allied forces.

Bangladesh's flag was raised in the liberated areas.

The outbreak of direct hostilities between India and Pakistan naturally raised concerns around the globe, notably in Peking (now Beijing) and Washington. By 9 December, President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger were beginning to worry about Indian intentions regarding West Pakistan, where Indian troops were beginning to make inroads. The US had by then come to the conclusion that while the fall of East Pakistan could not be averted, West Pakistan needed to be saved from complete collapse at the hands of Indian forces.

Illustration: TBS

Meanwhile, the Mujibnagar government, based in Calcutta, began by the second week of December to make arrangements to take charge in Dhaka since Pakistan's military defeat looked like a foregone conclusion. In Dhaka, an increasingly embattled Pakistan army was reduced to seeing its soldiers fall back in the border areas in the face of the Indo-Bangladesh forces' onslaught.

Despite their feeling that East Pakistan was a lost cause, Nixon and Kissinger, both in a state of fury, sought to convey the message to the Soviet leadership that an escalation of the war by India would result in the latter paying a heavy price for it. On 10 December, Kissinger met with Soviet envoy Yuli Vorontsov, who conveyed a message for President Nixon from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who reassured the White House that Moscow wished to have a ceasefire in place and wanted steps taken towards a resolution of the crisis in East Pakistan through a political approach. In other words, Brezhnev still hoped that there was scope for a political solution to the crisis.

Kissinger and Vorontsov met on 9 December and again on 10 December. Kissinger informed the Soviet envoy that Washington was ready to provide military aid to Pakistan if India moved to break up West Pakistan. The bigger reality for the Nixon administration was that it somehow had convinced itself that there was no possibility of a ceasefire as long as the Pakistan army did not go down to defeat in East Pakistan.

A notable development on 10 December was the dispatch of a message calling for a ceasefire by Dr AM Malek, governor of East Pakistan, to Paul Marc Henri, the principal United Nations representative in Dhaka. It was an early indication of the doomsday scenario the Pakistan army and its puppet provincial government could not help avoiding.