Frankly, if 10mn bangladeshis wont need to cross the border, India wudnt have cared to cross the border themselves. and there was no USA, Russia standing in our region like today in Afganistan and hence we ourselves had to take charge. Why dispute this practical factor?
Gary J. Bass writes in his book '
The Blood Telegram':In fact, Indira Gandhi and her top advisers were
coldly calculating strategists, even if their actions served a humane cause. India put itself in a position of
breathtaking hypocrisy: demanding freedom for the Bengali people in East Pakistan, while conducting its own repression of restive populations under Indian control in
Kashmir, as well as lesser-known groups like the
Mizos and Nagas and ”
with painful irony leftist Bengalis within India's own volatile state of West Bengal.
While Indira Gandhi's government professed its unwavering desire for peace, she almost immediately turned to aggressive options.From the early days of the Pakistani crackdown, she had the Indian military covertly prepare for a full-scale regular war against Pakistan.
India secretly had its army and security forces use bases on Indian soil to support Bengali guerrillas in their fight against the Pakistani state. India devoted enormous resources to covertly sponsoring the Bengali insurgency inside East Pakistan,
providing the guerrillas with arms, training, camps, and safe passage back and forth across a porous border. Indian officials, from Gandhi on down, evaded or lied with verve, denying that they were maintaining the insurgency. But in fact, as
India's own secret records prove, this massive clandestine enterprise was approved at the highest levels, involving India's intelligence services, border security forces, and army.
In the event, Pakistan rashly struck the first blow of a full-scale conventional war, with a surprise air attack in December 1971 that brought fierce combat in both West and East Pakistan. But while Indians today generally remember the war as outright Pakistani aggression, India's actual path to war shows a great degree of Indian responsibility as well. India knew it had a fearsome military advantage, and Gandhi's government used that ruthlessly.
According to senior Indian generals, Gandhi wanted her forces to go to war not long after the start of Pakistan's crackdown, and had to be persuaded to wait for cooler fighting
weather and more time to train. While the Indian military waited for winter, the Indian- backed insurgency bled the Pakistan army, leaving it demoralized and stretched thin.
India's support for the Bengali rebels led to border clashes with Pakistani troops, and, as winter approached, to several substantial Indian incursions onto Pakistani territory. It is a patriotic delusion to imagine, as some Indian nationalists do today, that Pakistan's airstrikes were unprovoked.
Following text is from the book 'Behind the myth of three million' by ' Dr. M. Abdul Mu’min Chowdhury with some added comments.
The
Indians professed to having trained 130,000 'freedom fighters' , 3,300,000 actually claimed that distinction and obtained certificates by all manner of means to prove that they were bona fide.
As disclosed by
Morarji Desai, about
5,000 regular Indian soldiers were killed while fighting in the disguise of Mukti Bahini. This was further confirmed by the Indian Army's later demand for the formal recognition of these fallen soldiers. Members of Border Security Forces were also known to have fought under the guise of the Mukti Bahini. The presence of BSF might explain the killing and raping of the civilians in East Bengal.
BSF are not regular army and in reputation they are considered
a little more than uniformed thugs, tales of their atrocities in Kashmir are known to everybody. Their involvement in raping the Kashmiri women is also well known. No wonder prostitutes were recruited to fulfill their sexual needs.
First female Indian troops 'are prostitutes' - Telegraph
First, the Mujib Bahini, a major component of the 130,000 or so Mukti Bahini, was specially trained and kept in reserve away from insurgency duty in case the ordinary Mukti Bahini become defiant of India and needed to be brought in line. Secondly, the ordinary Mukti Bahini's primary function was not so much to fight the Pakistan Army but to gather intelligence and to serve as scouts to the Indian Army. Last but not least,
much of the publicized encounters between Pakistan Army and the Mukti Bahini were in fact clashes between Pakistan Army and Indian Forces in the guise of Mukti Bahini.