When the Pakistani Army launched Operation Searchlight in East Bengal in March 1971 in order to eliminate Bengali political and military opposition, news of its atrocities spread all the way to Brazil. Liberal newspapers such as Jornal do Brasil and Correio da Manhã published articles based on reports from the Press Trust of India and Free Bengal Radio, while giving little weightage to official statements from West Pakistan. Watching this narrative build was the Indian government.
“This discreet sympathy for East Bengal should be understood in the internal Brazilian context in which the middle class intelligentsia is clamouring for more democratic rights,” Sushil Dubey, charge d’affaires at the Indian embassy in Rio de Janeiro wrote in a secret memo on April 1, 1971, to Rukmini Menon, joint secretary of the Americans division of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.
Another newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo, wrote an editorial on the developments in South Asia in which it stated that East Bengal had more in common with India than West Pakistan.
All this negative coverage in the Brazilian press angered the Pakistani establishment, prompting its embassy in Rio de Janeiro to send off a protest note that some newspapers published. Condemning the “continuous Indian interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs”, the embassy said in the letter, “Pakistan hopes that India will recognize the need to comply with international norms regarding border countries.”
In his memo to New Delhi, Dubey said the Brazilian government tried to maintain a position of “strict neutrality” in matters concerning India and Pakistan, in spite of having greater “technical, scientific and cultural ties” with India. “The Brazilian government’s attitude in this particular case may be influenced by the attitude adopted by Washington,” he added.
In response to the Pakistani comments in Brazilian newspapers, the Indian embassy sent a press note of its own to the media denying Indian interference in Pakistan. “All that the Government and people of India have done is to raise their voice against the systematic and wide scale massacre of the defenceless and unarmed people of East Bengal,” the embassy said. “In short India has raised her voice against genocide.”
The Indian note called on Pakistan to allow the re-entry of 32 foreign correspondents expelled from East Bengal and lift censorship “so that the truth can be verified”.
Wielding influence
Although Brasilia became the capital of Brazil in 1960, many countries, including India and Pakistan, still had their embassies in Rio de Janeiro until the early 1970s. To meet senior foreign ministry officials in Brasilia, diplomats would travel 1,100 kilometres from Rio. Dubey was one of them.
When Dubey went to meet officials of the Asia division of the Brazilian foreign ministry in early April, he was told by Andrea Amado, the division in-charge, that India, being a “great country”, should not interfere in Pakistani affairs. Dubey denied the insinuation. In a memo to Joint Secretary Menon, Dubey recounted his conversation with Amado, including the denial.
“I also urged him to consider (i) using Brazilian influence in Islamabad in an effort to stop the massacre in East Bengal; and (ii) consider Brazilian participation in any international efforts to bring relief to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were crossing into Indian territory from East Bengal,” Dubey wrote, adding that Amado took notes and promised to study the situation in depth.
A few weeks after meeting Amado, Dubey once again went to Brasilia, this time with Gurdial Singh Dhillon, the Lok Sabha Speaker, and Chandulal Chunilal Desai, a parliamentarian from Gujarat. On this trip, the three of them met Brazilian Foreign Minister Mario Gibson Barboza, who at the outset seemed more sympathetic to the cause of East Bengal.
“Learning that Mr. C.C. Desai had been the Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan for a number of years, the Brazilian Foreign Minister asked him about the situation and whether, in his opinion, ‘the war will last long,’” Dubey wrote to Menon. “Mr. Desai replied that, in his opinion, East Bengal will obtain her independence probably sooner than later.”
At the meeting, Barboza told the Indian visitors that the idea of a country whose halves were divided by a thousand miles of foreign territory was “preposterous”.
But since Brazil was not a democracy at the time and was known for crackdowns on individual liberties and freedom of the press, it stopped short of supporting India on the East Bengal issue.
“In analysing the lack of public reaction on the part of the Brazilian government to events in East Bengal, we have to bear in mind the internal Brazilian political context and the fact that the Brazilian government has, in the recent past, been accused by international organisations, for example, the Human Rights Commission of the OAS [Organization of American States], the International Jurists Commission in Geneva, the American Society for Information on Brazil, etc., for violating human rights and of the systematic torture of political opponents within this country,” Dubey wrote. “In all these instances, the Brazilian government has refused to allow the entry of fact-finding missions into Brazil and has, on several occasions, arrested, persecuted and deported foreign and Brazilian journalists who have reported on the violation of human rights by the Brazilian authorities.”
India, more or less, understood that it could not count on open Brazilian support. As expected, Brazil abstained from criticising Pakistan when the East Bengal crisis was discussed at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in Geneva.
Humanitarian aid
But as East Bengal refugee numbers began to swell across the border in India, there was a discernible shift in the air: public opinion in Brazil turned in New Delhi’s favour. The Indian embassy began to receive donations from Brazilians as well as Indians living in the country for the Bangla Desh Assistance Committee in New Delhi, which oversaw the welfare of refugees.
Sensing the general mood and moved by the plight of the refugees, the Brazilian authorities sprung into action. In June, the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Raymundo Padilha, arranged for 1.1 million units of cholera vaccines to be sent to India, a gesture greatly appreciated in India. The vaccines were flown in batches of 1 lakh to Rome and then trans-shipped to Delhi and West Bengal.
By the middle of June, the Brazilian press was consistently publishing reports about the refugee crisis. “Each day newspapers carry not only news items, but photographs of the deplorable suffering of these most unfortunate people,” the Indian Ambassador in Brazil, Prithi Singh, wrote in a letter to the Ministry of External Affairs. “These items in the press are carried from the foreign news agencies, such as Reuters, AFP, UPI, AP, etc. I say this, because any reference to Indian Embassy handouts would have brought the usual representations to the Brazilian government and press from the local Pakistan mission.”
When Singh met Brazilian President Emílio Garrastazu Médici to present his credentials, the president told him that Brazil “fully understood the magnitude of the human distress and the task facing the government of India and the need to help”.
In his letter, Singh said, Brazilian government officials agreed that “this was a human problem and not an India-Pakistan affair”. “They assured me that they did not believe that there was any interference by India in East Pakistan,” he wrote. “In fact, if India had interfered and physically supported the Awami League, the Pakistan Army would have been prevented from behaving the way they have done and there would have been no refugees today in India.”
By June 1971, five million refugees from East Bengal were living in India and the international press was full of reports and images of their suffering. Brazilian journalists too travelled to India to write about the refugee crisis and openly began to use words like genocide.
In September, Jornal do Brasil carried an interview with Indian sitar maestro and composer Ravi Shankar, who had passionately taken up the cause of Bangladesh. The musician, who had organised a major concert a month earlier in support of the country with George Harrison, told the Brazilian newspaper that India was now hosting 12 million refugees.
The interview prompted an angry response from the Pakistani embassy. “The people of East Pakistan know exactly where their interests lie and it is difficult to believe they are ready to undo a century’s struggle to return to the condition of being a backyard of Calcutta,” charge d’affaires Gul Hanif wrote.
“Mr. Ravi Shankar firmly and using a highly tendentious note during the interview suggested that the number of refugees who have left East Pakistan for the neighbouring country is between 10 and 12 millions,” Hanif added. “It is understandable that India’s intention is to obtain the maximum possible aid from the international community by publicising these highly exaggerated numbers but the fact that India prefers to drag the misery of these persons is lamentable.”
India sent Erasmo de Sequeira, a 32-year-old parliamentarian from Goa, to South America to win wider support. A fluent Portuguese speaker, he represented India at a summit of the Latin American Parliament in Caracas, Venezuela, where a resolution was passed condemning the “brutal suppression of human rights, genocide, the proposed liquidation of politically conscious elements and intellectuals and the imposition of a reign of terror in East Bengal by the Pakistan Army, which resulted in an exodus of more than 7.5 million refugees to India, an exodus which continues and which has caused dangerous tensions in the area.”
While the resolution was approved by all other countries present at the summit, Brazil abstained. A big reason for this was the politics of the Cold War.
When war clouds hovered over the Indian subcontinent, the Brazilian press, largely influenced by the government, started to blame the crisis on the Russians. In an editorial that called Indira Gandhi a “woman of peace”, O Globo wrote, “The Soviet Union has smelled another war in the air and, there it goes, with its weapons and ‘counsellors’ to make the possibilities come true. The interference between India and Pakistan is not just casual. On the contrary, it is a previously calculated interference in which the Soviet Union already has experience and by this time almost a tradition.”
Other Brazilian newspapers said the Soviets were egging on India to attack Pakistan. Even when war broke out between India and Pakistan, Brazil continued to maintain its neutrality. In May 1972, however, once East Pakistan was free, it became the first Latin American country to recognise Bangladesh.
Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.
