Indira Gandhi wanted to liberate Pakistani Kashmir: Advani

[ajtr]

Rumors were there that Indira Gandhi had such plan on her mind but she abandoned it under usa pressure.To some extent advani may be true other side being just a ploy to sell his book........

Indira Gandhi wanted to liberate Pakistani Kashmir: Advani​

American leaders were convinced during the 1971 war that then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was thinking of breaking up West Pakistan and "liberate" Pakistani Kashmir, LK Advani posted on his blog on Sunday. Quoting a new book, Advani said wrote that the question about Gandhi's objectives had been on his mind after he read "Bangladesh Liberation War: Myths and Facts" by BZ Khasru, the editor of a New York financial publication.
"A question that had been on my mind since some weeks was: when in 1971 Indiraji decided to help Sheikh Mujibur Rahman carve out an independent Bangladesh for the Bengalis of East Pakistan, was she also simultaneously thinking of an operation in West Pakistan aimed to achieve two major objectives, namely to balkanize West Pakistan, and to liberate Pakistan occupied Kashmir," Advani said.

"Till now I have never before heard anyone else even suggest this. But this book carries ample data to show that whether or not Gandhi actually contemplated to achieve these objectives, Washington's top leaders of those times, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the president's national security adviser, were both convinced that Gandhi was seriously thinking of action in that direction, and that the Soviets were likely to help India in achieving its objective," he said.

Advani said US relations with India those days were very bitter and Nixon disliked Gandhi. He said America had developed a great liking for successive Pakistan presidents, Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan.

"After Gen Yahya Khan's meeting with President Nixon at the White House, Kissinger seriously probed with Pakistan whether they would be willing to use their influence with China for a US-China rapprochement," he said.

The BJP leader said that during the India-Pakistan crisis in relation to East Bengal, the US not only dispatched its nuclear-armed Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal and warned Moscow "to stop India from destroying West Pakistan" but also tried hard to make China threaten India against any armed intervention in East Pakistan.

"If what US apprehended was what actually had been planned, USA's threats and moves really paid off," he said.

Advani quoted a chapter titled "'Balkanize' West Pakistan: Why Gandhi backed off" from the book.

"As the Indian military marched into East Pakistan, full throttle, and international efforts to stop the fighting gained momentum at the United Nations, Gandhi found herself between a rock and a hard place.

"On the one hand, if she advanced her campaign to completely crush the Pakistani military in the West as she had promised to her cabinet months earlier, she would face a potential fight with Washington and Beijing and antagonize Moscow, which had wanted to end the war after capturing Dhaka. On the other hand, if she backed off, her colleagues would give her a hard time and India would lose a rare opportunity to permanently cripple an arch enemy."

Advani said Gandhi explained to her cabinet that if India accepted the UN ceasefire proposal after Bangladesh's liberation, it could avoid further complications with the US and this "might also rule out the current possibility of a Chinese intervention in Ladakh".

India's defence minister Jagjivan Ram and several other military leaders, however, opposed a ceasefire until India had taken certain unspecified areas of Kashmir and destroyed "the war mechanism of Pakistan".

"Gandhi overruled the opponents, saying that 'for the moment India would not categorically reject' the UN ceasefire proposal. India would accept a ceasefire after the Awami League regime was installed in Dhaka," Advani said.

The BJP leader said he saw no reason to doubt the findings of the author.

Advani added that after reading the book he wished some objective Indian historian researched Indian source material and government documents to give the country a version of events as seen from the Indian side.

 

[ajtr]

Was it defence minister jagjeevan ram or Morar ji desai who betrayed Indira's war plans???????

CIA Records Take Lid Off High Treason By Indira Cabinet Minister​

A minister of Indira Gandhi's cabinet betrayed India's "war objectives" to the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1971, causing an abrupt end to the Bangladesh war under vicious US armtwisting.

This is the highlight of the book CIA's Eye on South Asia by journalist Anuj Dhar. Published by Delhi-based Manas Publications, which is facing government's ire for coming out with a book on the R&AW, the book compiles declassified CIA records on India and her neighbours. It specifically spotlights what arguably has been India's biggest spy scandal.

In the run up to the 1971 India Pakistan war over what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), The New York Times first hinted at the presence of a CIA operative in the Indian government. By December The Washington Post had reported that US President Richard Nixon's South Asia policy was being guided by "reports from a source close to Mrs. Gandhi."

Records and telecons declassified recently - but not properly explained up till now - show that a dramatic turnaround came on December 6 when a CIA operative, whom Dhar pins down as a minister of the Indira Cabinet, leaked out India's "war objectives" to the agency. Prime Minister Gandhi told Union Cabinet that apart from liberating Bangladesh, India intended to take over a strategically important part of the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and go for the total annihilation of Pakistan's armed forces so that Pakistan "never attempts to challenge India in the future."

When he came to know of the CIA report, a furious Nixon blurted out that "this woman [Indira Gandhi] suckered us," thinking that Mrs. Gandhi had promised him that India won't attack East Pakistan - not to speak of targeting West Pakistan and ***. "But let me tell you, she's going to pay," he told his National Security Advisor Dr Henry Kissinger even as he tried to leak out the CIA report to give her bad press.

The CIA went on assess that fulfillment of India's "war objectives" might lead to "the emergence of centrifugal forces which could shatter West Pakistan into as many as three or four separate countries."

As a direct result of the operative's information, the Nixon administration went on an overdrive to save West Pakistan from a massive Indian assault. Because the President felt that "international morality will be finished - the United Nations will be finished - if you adopt the principle that because a country is democratic and big it can do what the hell it pleases."

Nixon personally threatened the USSR with a "major confrontation" between the superpowers should the Soviets failed to stop the Indians from going into West Pakistan. Kissinger secretly met Chinese Permanent Representative at the UN to apprise him of the CIA operative's report and rub in that what India was planning to do with Pakistan with the Soviet backing could turn out to be a "dress rehearsal" of what they might do to China.

Dhar quotes in the book the official records showing that USSR's First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov visited Delhi after Nixon's threat and told the "Indians to confine their objectives to East Pakistan" and "not to try and take any part of West Pakistan, including Azad Kashmir" as "Moscow was concerned about the possibility of a great power confrontation over the subcontinent." Kuznetsov also extracted a guarantee from Prime Minister Gandhi that India will not attack West Pakistan. This decision was promptly conveyed to Nixon. On 16 December 1971 when Nixon was told that India had declared a ceasefire, he exulted: "We have made it"¦ it's the Russians working for us." Kissinger congratulated him for saving West Pakistan - India's main target, as per the operative's report to the CIA.

Dhar repudiates recent assertion by a former Indian Navy chief that showing up of America's biggest nuclear powered carrier into the Bay of Bengal during the war had something to do with the accidental destruction of a US plane in Dhaka during an Indian strafing. "Declassified records make it unambiguously clear that the month-long show of strength by the USS Enterprise and accompanying flotilla was a byproduct of the CIA operative's reports," he writes, reproducing chunks from official records detailing how Nixon ordered a naval task force towards the subcontinent to "scare off" India from attacking West Pakistan.

In subsequent years, former Prime Minister Morarji Desai, and two deputy PMs - Jagjivan Ram and Y B Chavan - were alleged to be the CIA operative active during the 1971 war. However, all such charges lacked any substantiation because there was no confirmation whether or not such an operative ever existed. As such no constructive discussion on the issue ever took off. This has changed now given the unassailable evidence in the form of US records making it clear that the CIA had a "reliable" agent operating out of the Indian cabinet in 1971.

In declassified records the name of the operative has been censored because the CIA Director has "statutory obligations to protect from disclosure [the Agency's] intelligence sources." Dhar writes: "Naming the Indian operative even after so many years will adversely impact the Indo-US relations, and hit the Agency's prospects of recruiting new informants."

However, he suggests that Indian government may have known the identity of the operative. "R&AW under the most capable R. N. Kao could not have missed the reference to the 'source close to Mrs. Gandhi' and must have dug deeper," he writes, adding that in 1972 Mrs. Gandhi herself charged that "she had information that the CIA had become active in India".

More pertinently, Dhar quotes from the declassified record of a 5 October 1972 meeting between Indian Foreign Minister Swaran Singh and US Secretary of State William Rogers. During the meeting, Singh asserted that "CIA has been in contact with people in India in 'abnormal ways.'" and that India had information that "proceedings of Congress Working Committee were known to US officials within two hours of meetings".

End the secrecy: CIA Records Take Lid Off High Treason By Indira Cabinet Minister

 

[ajtr]

Manekshaw's secret, Indira's plans: a '71 mystery​

By Dipankar De Sarkar
London, July 1 (IANS) Field Marshall Sam Manekshaw's death robs Indians of a vital source of information on one of recent Indian history's unresolved questions: did New Delhi have secret plans to dismember Pakistan in the west after comprehensively defeating it in the east? India's plans in the western sector toward the close of the 1971 war over Bangladesh have long been a matter of controversy and speculation by historians and others.

American declassified documents say President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wanted to dismember West Pakistan.

Equally, some Russian commentators have said they dissuaded her from doing so.

But some leading Indian - as well as Pakistani - diplomats and strategic experts say if Gandhi had wanted to march in to Pakistan, she could have done so. They attribute the American and Russian claims to interventionist zeal.

The hero of the 1971 war, Manekshaw, was a garrulous man. But he never spoke publicly about the issue.

The divided opinion found an echo at a just-ended conference on India and Pakistan organised by the Tehelka media group in London.

"Mrs Gandhi never had a territorial ambition, but she did want to finish off Pakistan's military capability," former Pakistan foreign secretary Tanvir Ahmad Khan told IANS.

"But that would have ultimately led to the break up of Pakistan. There would have been chaos," he added.

Khan's assessment is similar to that of the late Nixon and Kissinger, who is a prominent commentator in the US media.

Declassified US documents claim that details of a briefing given by Gandhi to members of her cabinet in early December 1971 were leaked to the US intelligence.

A summary of the documents by the State Department says: "Gandhi outlined her war aims: she would not accept a settlement until Bangladesh was liberated, the 'southern area of Azad Kashmir' was liberated, and the Pakistani armoured and air force strength was destroyed to prevent any future challenge to India.

"Nixon and Kissinger took this as proof that India planned not only to foster the independence of East Pakistan, but to use the opportunity of the crisis to inflict a crushing military defeat on Pakistan, which would lead to the break-up of West Pakistan. Kissinger attributed to the Gandhi government the goal of Balkanizing West Pakistan."

With the Bangladesh war seen in Cold War terms by the Americans and Russians, exchanges between Nixon and Kissinger sometimes bordered on the paranoid - the two men even contemplated using nuclear weapons against Russia if China entered the conflict.

The US archives quote Kissinger as telling Nixon: "If the Soviets move against them (the Chinese) and we don't do anything, we will be finished."

"Nixon asked: 'So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?' Kissinger responded: 'If the Soviets move against them in these conditions and succeed, that will be the final showdown"¦ and if they succeed we will be finished'.

"He added that 'if the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese and the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis"¦ we may be looking down the gun barrel.' In the end, they concluded that the projected confrontation with the Soviet Union would not involve a nuclear exchange."

But at the London conference June 26-27, at least two former senior Pakistani figures - spy chief Lt Gen Assad Durrani and finance and foreign minister Sartaj Azeez - were not sure if Indira Gandhi would have wanted to dismember Pakistan.

"There was neither the intention, nor the capability. The relative strength of Pakistan on the western front would not have encouraged a major Indian invasion," said Durrani.

"You wouldn't turn your guns to the western sector when the bulk of your forces were in Bangladesh, and achieve a strategic result," he added.

Sartaj Azeez said both the US and the Soviet Union "overstated the case" in order to give their impression that it was their intervention that had stopped the Bangladesh war from spiralling out of control.

"In any case, Pakistan would have been ready for such an invasion as the bulk of our troops - something like 600,000 men - was in West Pakistan," Azeez said.

The late Indian foreign secretary Jyotindra Nath Dixit too has dismissed Nixon's and Kissinger's claims.

"The Indian government's attitude after the war disproved the theory of those who still believed that India had opposed the existence of Pakistan," he is quoted as saying in British journalist Victoria Schofield's book, "Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War".

"Had India wanted to dismember Pakistan completely, the army could have marched straight on to Rawalpindi," Dixit said.

Whether Indira Gandhi ever contemplated such an invasion, or whether the claims were part of an elaborate Cold War drama played out by the Americans and Russians is something that still awaits clarity.

And Sam Manekshaw isn't telling. He never did tell.

 

[prahladh]

Prime Minister Gandhi told Union Cabinet that apart from liberating Bangladesh, India intended to take over a strategically important part of the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and go for the total annihilation of Pakistan's armed forces so that Pakistan "never attempts to challenge India in the future."

Wow. Is it true or what. If true then I'm her fan. If she was alive during Kargil she might have taken PoK.

 

[tarunraju]

Wow. Is it true or what. If true then I'm her fan. If she was alive during Kargil she might have taken PoK.

Coming from Advani, I think that statement is very credible (if not absolutely true). Vajpayee and Advani were two of Indira's emergency-gate victims. They're the last people who you'd expect pro-Indira commentary from. Yet Advani made these assertions. So there's a good chance that it's true. Indira indeed was a woman of steel. She was India's Lincoln.

 

[maomao]

Can some one give the list of cabinet ministers during 1971? The name I got to know has no reference or an article on google? Strange?

If someone can provide the list, then I can confirm this guy did exist!

 

[S.A.T.A]

Indira Gandhi may have included destruction of west Pakistan's military capability as part of the war objective,but its clear that part of the objective was vague and general and was largely contingent upon Pakistan's own maneuvering on the western front.Indira's primary objective was bring east Pakistan under our complete control and ASAP.In the west,as its clear from how things played out,we were going to just hold out any Pakistani military thrust in that sector.

I dont think Mrs Gandhi had seriously contemplated a unilateral surge from our side on the western front,on the Kashmir front in particular.However it is conceivable that Yahya Khan in all earnestness must have contemplated compensating Pakistan's considerable loss of land in the east with some from jammu & Kashmir,Indira Gandhi must have certainly prepared for full scale conduct of hostilities on the western front if the Pakistanis chose so after the fall of east Pakistan.It didn't happen.

Various voices of reason have deliberated over the question whether India should have continued hostilities in the west.Given the international situation and perhaps the fact that the soviets were uncomfortable with the fact that India might expand the war on the western front with greater vigor,and that we could ill afford to lose either soviet aide or support,forced Indira Gandhi to abandon any such plan,if she had any to begin with.It would have been considered reckless under the circumstances.

But then this is all in hindsight,we probably will never know the real truth.

 

[The Messiah]

We need leader like her...if she was present today (now that India is stronger) im sure we'd be way ahead.

 

[anoop_mig25]

one question she wanted to free pakistan occupied kashmir or recapture/integrate remaining part of kashmir?
but one hing is sure if plans where not relieved by Indian traitors to then CIA then at this time we would had pipeline/road line to many central Asian countries

shame on atleast on this case they should have sided with india then going fro dollars . :angry_10:

And FOR Indira Gandhi :happy_8:

 

[The Messiah]

I cant even imagine what sort of person would sell out countries plan to foreign countries.

Atleast he should be identified and hanged as he committed treason.