1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh by Srinath Raghavan (review)

In the spring of 1971 a major crisis erupted in Indo-Pakistani relations that culminated in a full-scale war in December of that year. The war led to the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of a new state known as Bangladesh. The immediate casus belli for the war was the forced flight of some 9.8 million refugees from East Pakistan into India. Faced with this intolerable refugee burden, the indifference of much of the global community to India’s plight, and the intransigence of the U.S. administration of Richard Nixon, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had concluded as early as April–May 1971 that India would have to resort to war to ensure the safe return of the refugees.

A substantial body of scholarship exists on the crisis and the ensuing war. As early as 1975, a British academic, Robert Jackson, in his book South Asian Crisis: India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh, ably chronicled the principal factors that had led to the sanguinary genesis of Bangladesh. Subsequently, more than a decade later, two noted U.S. scholars of South Asian politics, Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, wrote a mostly compelling account of the key decisions in Islamabad, New Delhi, and Washington, DC, that led to the crisis and its bloody aftermath. Despite the book’s obvious strengths, it was not bereft of flaws. Sisson and Rose glossed over the dubious moral and strategic premises that led the Nixon administration to support a brutal and callous military dictatorship in Pakistan. They also almost completely overlooked the unparalleled savagery of the Pakistani army in its efforts to suppress the uprising in East Pakistan.

With the availability of much declassified material in numerous capitals, most notably in Washington, DC and to a lesser degree in New Delhi, scholars and at least one journalist have devoted renewed attention to the origins of the crisis, the ensuing war, and its wake. AU.S. diplomatic historian, Gary Bass, in his book The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Vintage, 2013), has provided what is easily the most gripping and detailed account of U.S. decision-making during the crisis. Also, an Indian journalist, Salil Tripathi has written a moving and disturbing account of the crisis and its aftermath, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), based on careful interviews with a range of survivors.

Srinath Raghavan’s book 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh understandably covers much ground that is already familiar to most specialists on the contemporary international politics of South Asia. To some degree this is inevitable given that a large body of scholarship already exists on the subject.

Raghavan’s central conceit, however, is that his analysis differs from past accounts in that he contends that the creation of Bangladesh was far from inevitable. Instead he argues that it was a mostly contingent event dependent on key choices and turning points. In itself, this argument hardly amounts to a shifting of historical tectonic plates. Structural factors in international politics—the most important being material forces—create predisposing conditions for certain events. Human agency or contingency then plays a vital role in shaping specific political or strategic outcomes. Structure and contingency, more often than not, act in tandem.

The breakup of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh was no exception. Raghavan, intent on demonstrating that the emergence of Bangladesh was far from inevitable, focuses on the choices of key decision-makers in world capitals extending from Washington, DC, to Islamabad and beyond. However, in his effort to bolster his thesis, he underemphasizes the role of certain key structural factors that had long made Pakistan highly susceptible to an eventual collapse. At the outset, the most obvious factor was geography: the two wings of the country were separated by well over a thousand miles of hostile territory. To compound matters, systematic linguistic discrimination against...