Every December 16, India celebrates Vijay Diwas, the day in 1971 when Pakistan’s Eastern Command signed the instrument of surrender in Dhaka, and a new country called Bangladesh came into being. The victory is remembered as one of India’s finest military moments. Schoolbooks credit Indira Gandhi’s leadership, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw’s strategic genius, the Soviet Union’s diplomatic cover, and the courage of the Mukti Bahini, Bangladesh’s guerrilla resistance movement.

Almost no one mentions Israel.

That omission is not an accident. It is a product of the same diplomatic awkwardness that defined the India-Israel relationship for four decades: a closeness that both sides found convenient to deny in public, even as they quietly depended on each other when it mattered most.

The World India Found Itself In During 1971

To understand what Israel did, you first need to understand how isolated India was.

On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown on Bengali civilians in East Pakistan. What followed was one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Estimates of the death toll range between 300,000 and 3 million people. Roughly 10 million refugees poured across the border into India, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that New Delhi could not ignore.

India began training and arming the Mukti Bahini in the months that followed, preparing for a military intervention it knew was coming. What it urgently needed were heavy mortars, the kind of artillery essential for supporting guerrilla operations. And it needed them quickly, before the monsoon season ended and military conditions on the ground changed.

The United States was not going to help. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, operating a deeply cynical Cold War calculation that required Pakistani cooperation to open their secret back channel to China, had publicly tilted toward Islamabad. Nixon privately called Indira Gandhi “a bitch” in recorded Oval Office conversations. The US had imposed an arms embargo on India. When war finally broke out formally on December 3, 1971, Nixon sent Task Force 74 of the US Seventh Fleet, led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, toward the Bay of Bengal in what was an undisguised attempt to intimidate India into a ceasefire.

The Soviet Union pushed back, dispatching a naval group of cruisers, destroyers, and nuclear-armed submarines from Vladivostok to shadow the American fleet. For a brief, terrifying period in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)