India's response to the 1971 East Pakistan crisis: hidden and open reasons for intervention

Based on recently declassified materials from the Indian government archives and on the private papers of the principal secretary to the Indian prime minister, this article investigates how India formulated its response to the 1971 East Pakistan genocidal crisis that culminated with the third Indo-Pakistani war. India's victory changed the balance of power in South Asia: Bangladesh emerged as a new independent state, while Pakistan was significantly reduced. The 1971 war is cited in the international literature as one of the first cases of humanitarian intervention in world history. The Indian official position, recently reinforced by a new major publication, highlights the ‘humanitarian’ character of the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, depicting a reluctant India compelled to intervene by international inactivity towards the atrocity. This article contests this interpretation and argues that humanitarian considerations were only one side of the picture. Clear political interests drove the actions of New Delhi, which autonomously formulated a specific strategy aimed at making capital out of the dramatic humanitarian crisis. In advancing this argument, this article contributes to the complex debate about humanitarian intervention by observing that the inability of the UN system to intervene is bound to open the way to two possible outcomes: one is the continuation of the genocidal massacres; the other is the unauthorized humanitarian armed intervention by a regional power, which is likely to act according to its own interests. The specific case under review demonstrates that unauthorized armed intervention cannot per se always be branded as deplorable, since in certain cases such a scenario is better than no intervention at all.