Sadly, those in power have understood neither the popular mood nor the demands of statecraft. Contrary to Jaswant Singh's suggestion, the options for India were not black-and-white: to bomb Bangladesh or do what it did—turn the other cheek. One extremity cannot be justified by pointing to another extremity. 

The reasons for popular despair are self-evident. Authorities woke up only after official comments and grisly photographs from Bangladesh appeared in the Indian press. Even then, India's first reaction was to issue a clean chit to Sheikh Hasina's government, even as her loyalists, the home minister and BDR chief, were acclaiming the action. New Delhi insisted it is a case of a rogue general-led" "local adventurism" (later raised to "criminal adventurism") 

Few could have missed the parallels with Kargil and Kandahar. New Delhi was quick to absolve Nawaz Sharif and blame General Musharraf for Kargil, and to clear the Taliban and blame Pakistan for the hijacking even as the Taliban was supplying fresh arms to the hijackers. Just the way the mutilation-killings of six Indian troops by Pakistanis in Kargil and the hijackers' fatal slitting of the throat of one passenger were forgotten, New Delhi has already put behind itself the cold-blooded murders of BSF men in Bangladesh captivity. 

India has damaged its interests not so much from failing to hit back at Bangladesh as from failing to dissuade its 'friendly' neighbour (particularly its military establishment) from making a confrontational move to taunt and humiliate it. It is the failure of dissuasion that carries serious long-term costs, as it conveys to one and all (including to Nepal and Bhutan) that it is possible to challenge Indian interests and get away with it. 

In dissuasion strategy, a credible threat to use force can help deter aggressive conduct effectively without the need to employ force. The failed dissuasion is clear evidence that India's punitive power is not seen as credible or backed by requisite political will. The Indian republic is widely perceived as flabby, corrupt and craven. The just-launched large-scale military maneuvers on the western front, code-named Poorna Vijay, can do little to change such perceptions. 

The newest debackle, shortly after the 30th anniversary of the blood-soaked proclamation of Bangladesh, raises a deeper issue—the manner India has frittered away the gains from its dismemberment of Pakistan. It is a poor reflection on India's diplomacy and defence strategy that the momentous outcome of the 1971 war is today looking like strategic deadweight. 

India's military triumph was extraordinary. Considering India's prolonged subjugation by foreign rulers from the advent of Mahmud Ghauri in the 12th century to the departure of the British in 1947, the 1971 victory was the first decisive, native Indian-led triumph in a major war in eight centuries. 

Bangladesh was conceived in mayhem and bloodletting, with General Tikka Khan's forces adopting scorched-earth tactics, Bengalis and Bihar is killing each other, and Muslims of different ethnic hues targeting Hindus. Bangladesh, however, would not have been born had Indian not intervened. Even as the genocide was going on, India held off its intervention for nine months so that the Himalayan mountain passes along the Indo-Tibetan border were snow-blocked. 

Declassified documents published in William Burr's The Kissinger Transcripts affirm Mrs Gandhi's wisdom in waiting until winter as the Nixon administration had been engaging on China to militarily intervene on Pakistan's side. During the war, Washington despatched the nuclear capable USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India and hold back the Soviet Union in case the Chinese decided to bail out Pakistan. But it was not until the war ended that Nixon realised, according to his own memoirs, that China did not have the capability to do a 1962 on India. 

India's strategic reasons for intervention were compelling, and the victory was fashioned astutely by Indira Gandhi. Despite the two blunders she committed (Emergency and Operation Bluestar), she was the only leader India has produced with a vision as well as guts on national security. India's misfortune has been that all the men who have served as its Prime Minister have been wobbly on national security. 

In fact, a succession of shortsighted leaders have turned Pakistan's dismemberment into a strategic inconsequentiality, raising a number of questions. What did India achieve by cutting Pakistan into two? Does India feel more secure today? Did dismemberment make Pakistan politically, economically make Pakistan politically, economically and militarily more compact? 

Pakistan's dismemberment was never and end in itself, but a means to tame and contain that country. Indira Gandhi certainly did not conceive of 1971 as a stand-alone operation. Given Pakistan's congenital hatred towards India and its untamed belligerence, the dismemberment had to be part of a larger plan to keep in check or tear down the rest of Pakistan. 

No sooner Mrs Gandhi realised that she had been duped by Z.A. Bhutto at Simla than she launched the Baluch operation in late 1972. In her second term in office, she expanded her efforts to hemorrhage Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi's successors, in contrast, were not strategic thinkers and, by neglecting the purpose of 1971, allowed Pakistan to recoup from the dismemberment and consolidate itself. 

As a result, the Pakistan problem has come back to haunt India with a vengeance. The Pakistan-sponsored destabilization of India has flowed from the politics of revenge. Ironically, it is that very humiliation that Islamabad seeks to avenge that created a more compact Pakistan with the strategic space to pursue destabilization games against India. 

Had East Pakistan not become Bangladesh, Pakistan would have remained highly vulnerable to Indian military pressure, with the east wing an enduring drain on Pakistan's defence and economy. With those vulnerabilities, Pakistan would have had little strategic room to methodically wage the kind of unconventional warfare it has done against India. No other country in modern history has systematically worked to undermine its neighbour's security through subversion and clandestine war for so long without the victim State imposing any retaliatory costs. 

With the world's eighth largest army, Pakistan is now a stronger military entity than it was in 1971 despite its serious political and economic problems at home. The consolidation of defence assets from two widely-separated wings into one geographically compact entity has helped Pakistan to considerably narrow the military gap with India. 

Further, India lowered its guard along the long, porous border with Bangladesh in the belief that it had secured a new friend. This triggered a heavy flow of illegal refugees whose continued influx has seriously weakened Indian security. 

India intervened in 1971 because 10 million refugees had taken shelter on its soil. But since Bangladesh's birth, as many as 15 million new refugees have reportedly entered India without it being able to stop the influx. These migrants have swamped parts of India, sparking social and political problems at the local level. Such demographic changes are one of the elements destabilizing India. 

Had East and West Pakistan remained together, the deep-rooted dissimilarities, disagreements and antiphaties between the two wings would have kept them in perpetual opposition and conflict. Soft India's long-term interests would have been better served had the conflict between West and East Pakistan been allowed to fester indefinitely. This discord would have kept Pakistan preoccupied in internal war, leaving it little room for waging a proxy or limited war against India. By now, it could have become a failed State. 

By liberating East Pakistan from the clutches of West Pakistan, India facilitated the resurgence of the very feelings among the Muslims of Bangladesh that contributed to the subcontinent's partition in 1947. The idea to carve out Pakistan from India was born not in what remains of Pakistan today, but in what is now Bangladesh and in Uttar Pradesh. East Bengal was the birthplace of the Muslim League and the catalyst in the partition of India. 

It is thus no surprise that Bangladesh has been breeding anti-India elements. While the schism between West and East Pakistan was linguistic and quasi-racial, the gulf between India and Bangladesh is rooted in history and religion. Such a gulf demands strategic handling. The lesson from Indira's lost legacy is that a foe's dismemberment is not for a pusillanimous State. 

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