1971

Srinath Raghavan is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and Senior Research Fellow at King’s India Institute at King’s College London.

[Raghavan’s] superb analysis of the global intricacies of 1971 uses [a wide] lens with great precision to explain the breakup of Pakistan more convincingly than any preceding account… Raghavan…draw[s] on an impressive array of far-flung and hitherto untapped sources as [he] investigate[s] the strategic ambitions, the moral pressures, the judgments of risk, and the sheer brutality of that pivotal year. [He] show[s] how the most powerful democracy in the world could become complicit in a mass slaughter, and how in turn India—the world’s largest democracy but also one of its poorest and militarily weakest—was pushed to intervene to stop the slaughter. For Raghavan, the origins of the Bangladesh crisis lie in the peculiarities of Pakistan and the intricacies of its politics. It is one of Raghavan’s consistent and convincing arguments that, contrary to retrospective nationalist narratives, there was nothing inevitable about the fact that Pakistan would break violently in half less than a quarter of a century after its creation… Raghavan provide[s] the first authoritative account of the debates among Indian decision-makers, as they weighed the pressures and risks of action to stop the violence… Raghavan’s [book] carries important warnings to Indian decision-makers about the costs of circumspection and delay. Raghavan argues that a swift and early intervention might well have been effective: helping save innumerable lives and much suffering, it would have left Bangladesh less battered and more able to rebuild as a democratic state… Raghavan [has] given us [an] indispensable stud[y] of one of the most sordid and important instances of horror and help.