Former CIA official Bruce Reidel says Indira Gandhi was paranoid about the ‘evil designs’ of the US, holding it responsible for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination 38 years ago.
“She was convinced they got him and that the CIA was determined to assassinate her next to avenge 1971,” Reidel says in his latest book “Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back”.
The book is published by Harper Collins.
Indira Gandhi simply “did not need America”, but she was “convinced that Nixon was her enemy”, says Riedel.
Her suspicion about a CIA assassination attempt on her intensified after the “hero of Bangladesh’s independence struggle, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was murdered in a bloody coup in 1975. She believed it was orchestrated to punish her for the 1971 war.”
In October 1974, however, the then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was sent to India to “repair the damage of 1971 and acknowledge the past errors.”
Riedel says in unambiguous terms that the 26/11 Bombay attack was masterminded by the ISI. But the US could not give up on Pakistan, despite what had happened in 1971, he says.
The US’s quest for a firm foothold in South Asia began with President Harry S Truman. However, successive presidents, from Eisenhower to Obama, found the area extremely hard to succeed in. This is essentially because of the diverse interests and aims of India and Pakistan.
India, through the non-aligned movement, wanted to move independently through a bipolar world and try to create a niche for itself with the use of its soft power under Jawaharlal Nehru; Pakistan was not confident doing so owing to its smaller size and overall limited capability in comparison to India.
Hence, Pakistan’s rulers, who were soon dethroned by the military general, sought the assistance of a bigger and greater power than its neighbour India, to guarantee the country’s safety, security and sovereignty. And who could be better than the US? Naturally India disliked the permanent presence of a distant big brother in the vicinity.
Seeds were sown for long “Indo-US relations which were cordial but not close.” Nehru and Indira Gandhi were welcome to the US through diplomacy sans intimacy, the book says.
Pakistani generals, on the other hand, were allowed to be “personal” guests and their requests for arms and aid were considered with utmost care. Thus, during the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, when Indira Gandhi visited the US to gain world “support for the Bengali people and India, she met a brick wall in the Oval office” of President Richard Nixon. Understandably the Americans failed in their assessment of Indira Gandhi’s mettle; “she ordered her army chief to prepare for war.”
Interestingly, the book reveals once again the American expertise in preparing false reports, such as those made by the CIA. Richard Helms, the then director of the CIA, reported “that Indira Gandhi had designs beyond East Pakistan and was determined to destroy Pakistan entirely in the war.”
Nixon was elated and called it “one of the few really timely pieces of intelligence the CIA had ever given him.”
Subsequent events made Helms concede that though “the report was inaccurate, it was too important to be ignored.” Does this report sound suspiciously like CIA and American reports on present-day Iraq, Syria and Libya?
Source: Bd news24