'Nixon turned a blind eye to Hindu genocide by Pak Army'

Ahead of Bangladesh's liberation in 1971, the Pakistan Army "systematically committed genocide" of the Hindu community in the then East Pakistan and the Nixon administration turned a blind eye to it, a new book says.

While the Indian government was aware of the situation, it tried to play it down and instead referred to it as genocide of the Bengali community in Bangladesh so as to avoid an outcry from the leaders of the then Jan Sangh, the predecessor of Bharatiya Janata Party, says Gary J Bass, author of the book The Blood Telegram: Nixon Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide, which recently hit bookstores.

"Rather than basing this accusation primarily on the victimisation of Hindus, India tended to focus on the decimation of the Bengalis as a group," Bass, who is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, says.

"The Indian foreign ministry argued that Pakistan's generals, having lost an election because their country had too many Bengalis, were now slaughtering their way to 'a wholesale reduction in the population of East Bengal' so that it would no longer comprise a majority in Pakistan," said Bass.

As the Pakistan Army continued with the systematic targeting of the Hindu community, the book says, Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jan Sangh party.

"From Moscow, D P Dhar, India's ambassador there, decried the Pakistan army's pre-planned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery, but, fearing inflammatory politicking from rightist reactionary Hindu chauvinist parties like Jan Sangh, he wrote, 'We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicised in India'," Bass writes in his book.

The then US Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, according to the book, thought there was no logic to this campaign of killings and expulsions of the Hindus, who numbered about 10 million — almost 13 per cent of East Pakistan's population.

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