- By Shivangi Sharma
- Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:18 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
Unsealed Watergate-era records have revealed that former US President Richard Nixon privately asked China to be prepared to intervene against India during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, raising the prospect that the conflict could have escalated into a much wider regional war involving major powers. The disclosure comes from seven pages of Nixon’s sworn testimony to a US grand jury, which remained sealed for nearly five decades as part of the Watergate investigation.
In his testimony, Nixon described a secret assurance conveyed to Beijing at the height of the war. “The Russians were supporting India. … Nobody was supporting Pakistan because there was an embargo on the shipment of arms. … But we were giving moral support to them, and also we gave to the Chinese an assurance privately that if India jumped Pakistan and China decided to take on the Indians that we would support them,” Nixon said. He emphasised that the decision was his alone, adding: “My decision, not Kissinger’s.”
Operation Searchlight And Road To War
The 1971 conflict was triggered by Pakistan’s brutal military crackdown, Operation Searchlight, launched on March 25, 1971, against Bengali civilians and students in Dhaka. The violence sparked a mass refugee crisis, with millions fleeing into India, and eventually led to New Delhi’s military intervention in December.
Indian forces moved swiftly. Dhaka fell within 12 days, and on December 16, 1971, about 93,000 Pakistani troops surrendered to Indian commanders, paving the way for the creation of an independent Bangladesh and fundamentally reshaping the regional balance of power.
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Artists, Intellectuals And Global Outcry
The war resonated far beyond South Asia. Artists and intellectuals rallied to the Bengali cause, most famously through George Harrison and Pandit Ravi Shankar’s “Concert for Bangladesh” in New York. Singer Joan Baez also captured global attention with “The Song of Bangladesh,” written soon after the initial crackdown.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the war was the Chinese intervention that never materialised. US State Department archives show Nixon instructing Henry Kissinger on December 10, 1971, to urge China to threaten troop movements along its disputed frontier with India.
Superpower Standoff In Indian Ocean
As Washington deployed Task Force 74 of the US Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, the Soviet Union responded by sending cruisers, destroyers and a nuclear-armed submarine to back India, underscoring how close the conflict came to a wider Cold War confrontation.
Despite pressure from both Washington and Islamabad, Beijing ultimately chose restraint. China was unwilling to risk a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, even for its ally Pakistan. Nixon later conceded to Kissinger that “Russia and China aren’t going to go to war.”
In a later assessment, the US State Department concluded that India emerged from the crisis as the preeminent power in the subcontinent, with Soviet support during the war significantly enhancing Moscow’s influence in New Delhi.