Dubious strategist, ruthless diplomat, South Asian loser: Kissinger's bull run was stopped by Indian defiance

There is a gentle irony of fate on a day when news breaks that police in the US have indicted an Indian government official on attempts to kill Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen. Within hours of this, we get news of the demise at the ripe age of 100 of Henry Kissinger, who, depending on who you are talking to — and where — is a master diplomat who promoted American interests or a war criminal who left a bloody trail across the planet thanks to the superpower-hungry behaviour of Uncle Sam.

Also read | Henry Kissinger, America's most controversial and equally influential diplomat, dies at 100

If Alexander the Great's historic attempt to conquer the world through an eastward march of his army was stopped on the shores of the Indus, you could argue with some imagination that Henry Kissinger's attempts to do pretty much the same in Cold War mode for America met the same fate on the shores of the Yamuna, when Indira Gandhi was the Indian prime minister who steered the emergence of Bangladesh as a new nation on the world map, defying Washington's bully diplomacy.

She was aided ably by an Indian Army headed by General Sam Manekshaw, on whom a Bollywood biopic is scheduled to release later this week.

I have shared on social media my modified version of a joke that used to be popular in the Lutyens' zone of the Indian capital in the 1970s, after he visited India in 1974, three years following the diplomat's failed attempts to use Pakistan and China to contain Soviet influence on India.

Kissinger visits Israel and is gifted a suit length. Tel Aviv tailors say it is too small. Tailors in Cairo say the same thing. Arriving in Indira Gandhi's New Delhi he is taken to Lodi Colony, famous for its Sikh tailors who can handcraft the best of outfits. 

Come evening, the American super diplomat gets a perfect-fit suit stitched from the same cloth. 

"How could you do it? They couldn't do it in the Middle East," he tells the tailor.

"You are big man there," the tailor says, adjusting his turban. "Not here."

Kissinger, a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany to become a highly educated diplomat and served first as National Security Adviser and later as Secretary of State during the administrations of US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1969 and 1977, ostensibly served American interests through his shuttle diplomacy but merrily oversaw the violation of other ostensible values of US foreign policy: democracy and human rights. 

Also watch | Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dies aged 100

Kissinger went soft on Pakistan and hard on India when an estimated 10 million refugees fleeing for their safety streamed into India from the erstwhile East Pakistan that became Bangladesh in 1971.

The Pakistani army and its affiliated groups are estimated to have killed three million people and raped about 300,000 women in one of the biggest human rights disasters in a century notorious for such violations of human principles.

The My-America-right-or-wrong approach of Kissinger, also described as "realpolitik" was just sheer pragmatism in reckless short-term motion.

Backroom chats revealed later in which Kissinger described Indira Gandhi as a 'b..ch' and Indians as "bastards" show that old Henry was far from the Harvard-educated savant that some chose to see him as.

He explained his behaviour later as born out of dedication to American "values" — but was basically little more than "Stop the Kremlin any which way".

India in August 1971 signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union that helped Indira Gandhi stand up to US naval threats during the Bangladesh War. Pakistan's political implosion after the war and a newborn Bangladesh standing with India proved that in South Asia, Kissinger was not a big man but a sore loser — true to the tailor joke.

Enough details are available on America's record in the Viet Nam War (which won Kissinger a controversial Nobel Prize) and the US Central Intelligence Agency's role in the assassination of democratically elected president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 to suggest that Washington's human rights and democratic postures have been dubious and questionable.

Kissinger pressed  President Richard Nixon to overthrow Allende, who was killed in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, whose regime was notorious for human rights violations. Kissinger would later laud the general by saying: "We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende."

The fact that Kissinger won the Nobel Prize in the same year as the Chilean coup says a lot — about the prize, Kissinger, and US diplomacy. 

Should one mention the fact that he was the National Security Adviser in the Watergate phone-tapping scandal years that led to Nixon's ouster from the White House? Perhaps Kissinger's unintended contribution to democracy was the eventual rise of investigative journalism.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)