The Bangladesh war

In December 1970 Pakistan held general elections, its first since independence. The Awami League, headed by East Pakistan's popular Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib; 1920-75), won a majority of seats in the new assembly, but West Pakistan's chief martial law administrator and president, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, refused to honour the democratic choice of his nation's majority. At the end of March 1971, after failed negotiations in which Mujib demanded virtual independence for East Pakistan, Yahya Khan ordered a military massacre in Dhaka (Dacca). Though Mujib was arrested and flown to prison in West Pakistan, he called upon his followers in the east to rise up and proclaim their independence as Bangladesh ("Land of the Bengalis"). No fewer than 10 million refugees fled East Pakistan across the border to India in the ensuing eight months of martial rule and sporadic firing by West Pakistan's army. Soon after the monsoon stopped, India's army moved up to the Bangladesh border and by early December advanced virtually unopposed to Dhaka, which was surrendered in mid-December 1971. Mujib, released by President Bhutto, who had taken over from the disgraced Yahya Khan, flew home to a hero's welcome and in January 1972 became the first prime minister of the People's Republic of Bangladesh.

India's stunning victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh war was achieved in part because of Soviet military support and diplomatic assurances. The Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation, signed in 1971 by India with the Soviet Union, gave India the arms it used in the war. With the birth of Bangladesh, India's position in South Asia became dominant, and its foreign policy, which remained officially nonaligned, tilted toward the Soviet Union.

In a last-ditch but futile effort to support Pakistan, a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was sent to the Bay of Bengal, ostensibly to evacuate civilians from Dhaka, but the war ended before any such assistance could be rendered. Many Indians viewed the aircraft carrier's presence so close to their own shores as provocative "nuclear weapons rattling," and by 1972 India launched an atomic program of its own, detonating its first plutonium explosion under the sands of Rajasthan in May 1974. The atomic explosion was felt in Pakistan's Sindh province and triggered that country's resolve to produce a bomb of its own as swiftly as possible. Pakistan subsequently forged stronger ties with China and with Islamic nations to the west but found itself further diminished as a potential challenge to Indian hegemony over South Asia.