I OFTEN RECEIVE ANONYMOUS POSTS AND ARTICLES WHICH YOU MAY AGREE WITH OR NOT, ARE OF IMMENSE ACADEMIC VALUE AND WORTH READING. ONE OF SUCH ARTICLES I AM REPRODUCING HEREUNDER.
“Yahya had been talking to Bhutto -who was at the U.N. meetings in New York- by telephone about several matters. At one point Yahya said that he was far away, of course, but that the Polish resolution looked good, and ‘we should accept it’. Bhutto replied, ‘I can’t hear you.’
Yahya repeated himself several times, and Bhutto kept saying ‘What? What?’ Operator in New York finally intervened and said, ‘I can hear him fine,’ to which Bhutto replied ‘Shut up’. Yahya seemed still bemused. and bewildered by all this in 1979”.
(page 306, Quiet Diplomacy authored by Jamshed Marker)
On Dec 14, Poland tabled Resolution S/10453 in the Security Council calling for the immediate release of Mujib, a ceasefire after the process of transfer of power had begun. Withdrawal of Pakistani troops and civilian personnel, withdrawal of Indian troops and return of both sides to their pre-war positions in the west. The next day it revised the draft in two respects, both in Pakistan’s favour. The reference to Mujib’s release was dropped and there was a tighter provision for withdrawal of India’s forces. “The Indian armed forces will be withdrawn from East Pakistan.” It spelt an orderly transfer of power, withdrawal of India’s troops in both sectors to pre-war positions. Not a single Pakistani prisoner of war would have been left and there would have been no Shimla pact.
Sisson and Leo Rose write, on the basis of interviews in India, that it “was the most controversial and potentially embarrassing of the resolutions … since it was the only resolution that had a high probability of adoption … [and] aroused considerable distress in New Delhi”
Pakistan, India, and the creation of Bangladesh; page 219
“Indeed, several key figures in India could not understand why Pak did not readily agree to the proposal, since it would have left India in a most difficult and compromising position (interviews, India, 1978).
But the resolution would have left Yahya in power. Bhutto was all set on his ouster. At a breakfast at the Waldorf Towers earlier, on December 11, Kissinger scolded him like a schoolboy for his “mock-tough rhetoric … we should not waste them [the next 48 hours] in posturing for history books”.
Nixon, Indira and Indiaby Kalyani Shankar; Macmillan, 2010; pages 234, 278-279.
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