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Authors: Dilip Hiro
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Indians tapped into their religious mythology to crown their triumph. They conferred the sobriquet of Goddess Durga (Sanskrit: Inaccessible) on Indira Gandhi. According to Hindu lore, Durga is a warrior goddess who decapitates the buffalo-demon Mahisasura. Now Gandhi slew the evil of the two-nation theory on which Jinnah had built Pakistan with its two far-flung wings.
East Pakistanâs secession proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different languages, dress, and cultures. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism was a bitter pill to swallow, not only for West Pakistanis but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan.
The third Indo-Pakistan War closed a tumultuous period in the postindependence history of South Asia.
Post-1971 Pakistan
India now had to deal with a Pakistan that had lost more than half of its population but was more cohesive racially and religiously, with its Hindu minority reduced to less than 2 percent. It was ruled by the popularly elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had built up the Pakistan Peopleâs Party (PPP) from scratch.
At the summit in Shimla in June 1972, he faced the victorious Gandhi, whose leading aim was to bring the Kashmir dispute to an official close. Bhutto was opposed to this. When their respective delegations reached a deadlock, he had a one-on-one meeting with Gandhi. He convinced her that after the loss of East Pakistan, if he were to abandon his countryâs claims to Kashmir, he would be thrown out by the military. Having agreed earlier to convert the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the LoC, Bhutto seemed willing to let it morph into an international frontier without a written declaration. On Gandhiâs insistence the final draft committed both sides to settle all their differences âby peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon,â thus ruling out third-party mediation. And it listed a final settlement ofJammu and Kashmir âas one of the outstanding questions awaiting settlement.â 5 In the subsequent decades, the 1972 Shimla Accord continued to be the basis of all Indo-Pakistan talks.
But progress on normalizing relations and resuming trade and economic cooperation got sidetracked by turmoil in Indiaâs and Pakistanâs domestic scenes. Bhutto faced insurgency by nationalists in Baluchistan. In June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhiâs parliamentary seat won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she imposed an emergency and ruled by decree.
In Pakistan, the rigged March 1977 general election gave the PPP a large majority. The opposition, rallying behind the Pakistan National Alliance, resorted to massive demonstrations. Army Chief General Muhammad Zia ul Haq intervened by mounting Operation Fair Play on July 5, arrested Bhutto, and promised fair elections within ninety days. That never happened.
An Islamist to the core, Zia ul Haq clung to power until August 1988, when he was killed, along with twenty-seven others, by an explosion in the transport plane ferrying them near the Bahawalpur airport. During his rule Pakistani state and society had undergone Islamization and drifted further away from secular, democratic India.
Any ill will that Zia ul Haq had generated for his military dictatorship in the United States evaporated when Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 to bolster the twenty-month-old Marxist regime in Kabul. Whereas India had recognized the leftist regime in Afghanistan, Pakistan had not. When President Jimmy Carter offered $400 million in aid to Islamabad to shore up armed Islamist resistance to the Afghan government, Zia ul Haq called it âpeanutsâ 6 and rejected it.
His prospect brightened when Ronald Reagan became US president in 1981. Washington poured funds and
East Pakistanâs secession proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different languages, dress, and cultures. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism was a bitter pill to swallow, not only for West Pakistanis but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan.
The third Indo-Pakistan War closed a tumultuous period in the postindependence history of South Asia.
Post-1971 Pakistan
India now had to deal with a Pakistan that had lost more than half of its population but was more cohesive racially and religiously, with its Hindu minority reduced to less than 2 percent. It was ruled by the popularly elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had built up the Pakistan Peopleâs Party (PPP) from scratch.
At the summit in Shimla in June 1972, he faced the victorious Gandhi, whose leading aim was to bring the Kashmir dispute to an official close. Bhutto was opposed to this. When their respective delegations reached a deadlock, he had a one-on-one meeting with Gandhi. He convinced her that after the loss of East Pakistan, if he were to abandon his countryâs claims to Kashmir, he would be thrown out by the military. Having agreed earlier to convert the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the LoC, Bhutto seemed willing to let it morph into an international frontier without a written declaration. On Gandhiâs insistence the final draft committed both sides to settle all their differences âby peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon,â thus ruling out third-party mediation. And it listed a final settlement ofJammu and Kashmir âas one of the outstanding questions awaiting settlement.â 5 In the subsequent decades, the 1972 Shimla Accord continued to be the basis of all Indo-Pakistan talks.
But progress on normalizing relations and resuming trade and economic cooperation got sidetracked by turmoil in Indiaâs and Pakistanâs domestic scenes. Bhutto faced insurgency by nationalists in Baluchistan. In June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhiâs parliamentary seat won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she imposed an emergency and ruled by decree.
In Pakistan, the rigged March 1977 general election gave the PPP a large majority. The opposition, rallying behind the Pakistan National Alliance, resorted to massive demonstrations. Army Chief General Muhammad Zia ul Haq intervened by mounting Operation Fair Play on July 5, arrested Bhutto, and promised fair elections within ninety days. That never happened.
An Islamist to the core, Zia ul Haq clung to power until August 1988, when he was killed, along with twenty-seven others, by an explosion in the transport plane ferrying them near the Bahawalpur airport. During his rule Pakistani state and society had undergone Islamization and drifted further away from secular, democratic India.
Any ill will that Zia ul Haq had generated for his military dictatorship in the United States evaporated when Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 to bolster the twenty-month-old Marxist regime in Kabul. Whereas India had recognized the leftist regime in Afghanistan, Pakistan had not. When President Jimmy Carter offered $400 million in aid to Islamabad to shore up armed Islamist resistance to the Afghan government, Zia ul Haq called it âpeanutsâ 6 and rejected it.
His prospect brightened when Ronald Reagan became US president in 1981. Washington poured funds and
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