India’s involvement in East Pakistan was condemned in West Pakistan, where war sentiment was running high by November 1971. On November 23, Pakistan declared a state of emergency and deployed large numbers of troops to the East Pakistani and West Pakistani borders with India. Then on December 3, 1971, Pakistani planes launched air strikes on air bases in India, particularly those in Jammu and Kashmir, Indian Punjab, and Haryana.
The next day, India declared war on Pakistan. India held a decisive military advantage, which would allow its armed forces to win the war in only 13 days. India had a 4:1 and 10:1 advantage over West Pakistan and East Pakistan, respectively, in terms of numbers of aircraft, allowing the Indians to gain mastery of the sky by the second day of the war.
India’s objective in the war was to achieve a rapid victory in East Pakistan before the UN imposed a ceasefire, and to hold off a possible Pakistani offensive from West Pakistan. In turn, Pakistan hoped to hold out in East Pakistan as long as possible, and to attack and make territorial gains in western India, which would allow the Pakistani government to negotiate in a superior position if the war went to mediation.
(Taken from Bangladesh War of Independence and Indian-Pakistani War of 1971 – Wars of the 20th Century – Volume 3)
Background The Bangladesh War of Independence began as a civilian uprising in East Pakistan that escalated into a civil war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan. India intervened in the civil war, sparking the Indian-Pakistani War of 1971. In the aftermath of the two wars, East Pakistan broke away from Pakistan and formed the new state of Bangladesh.
In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned (previous article) into two new countries (Map 13): the Hindu-majority India and the nearly exclusive Muslim Pakistan. Much of India was formed from the subcontinent’s central and eastern regions, while Pakistan comprised two geographically separate regions that became West Pakistan (located in the northwest) and East Pakistan (located in the southeast).
From its inception, Pakistan experienced a great disparity between West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The national capital was located in West Pakistan, from where all major political and governmental decisions were made. Military and foreign policies emanated from there as well. West Pakistan also held a monopoly on the country’s financial, industrial, and social affairs. Much of the country’s wealth entered, remained in, and was apportioned to the West. These factors resulted in West Pakistan being much wealthier than East Pakistan. And all this despite East Pakistan having a higher population than West Pakistan.
In the 1960s, East Pakistan called for social and economic reforms and greater regional autonomy, but was ignored by the national government. Then in 1970, the Amawi League, East Pakistan’s main political party, won a stunning landslide victory in the national elections, but was prevented from taking over the government by the ruling civilian-military coalition regime, which feared that a new civilian government would reduce the military’s influence on the country’s political affairs.
Leaders from East Pakistan and West Pakistan tried to negotiate a solution to the political impasse, but failed to reach an agreement. Having been prevented from forming a new government, Mujibur Rahman, East Pakistan’s leader, called on East Pakistanis to carry out acts of civil disobedience.
In Dhaka, the East Pakistani capital, thousands of residents undertook mass demonstrations that paralyzed commercial, public, and civilian functions. On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army arrested and jailed Mujibur, who then declared while in prison the secession of East Pakistan from Pakistan and the founding of the independent state of Bangladesh. Mujibur’s supporters aired the declaration of independence on broadcast radio throughout East Pakistan.
East Pakistanis then organized the Mukti Bahini, a guerilla militia whose ranks were filled by ethnic Bengali soldiers who had defected from the Pakistani Army. As armed clashes began to break out in Dhaka, the national government sent more troops to East Pakistan. Much of the fighting took place in April-May 1971, where government forces prevailed, forcing the rebels to flee to the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. The Pakistani Army then turned on the civilian population to weed out nationalists and rebel supporters. The soldiers targeted all sectors of society – the upper classes of the political, academic, and business elite, as well as the lower classes consisting of urban and rural workers, farmers, and villagers. In the wave of violence and suppression that took place, tens of thousands of East Pakistanis were killed, while some ten million civilians fled to the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, Assam, Bihar, and Meghalaya.
As East Pakistani refugees flooded into India, the Indian government called on the United Nations (UN) to intervene, but received no satisfactory response. As nearly 50% of the refugees were Hindus, to the Indian government, this meant that the causes of the unrest in East Pakistan were religious as well as political. (During the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, a massive cross-border migration of Hindus and Muslims had taken place; by the 1970s, however, East Pakistan, still contained a significant 14% Hindu population.)
Since its independence, India had fought two wars against Pakistan and faced the perennial threat of fighting against or being attacked simultaneously from East Pakistan and West Pakistan. India therefore saw that the crisis in East Pakistan yielded one benefit – if the threat from East Pakistan was eliminated, India would not have to face the threat of a war on two fronts. Thus, just two days into the uprising in East Pakistan, India began to secretly support the independence of Bangladesh. The Indian Army covertly trained, armed, and funded the East Pakistani rebels, which within a few months, grew to a force of 100,000 fighters.