Nixon:I want to piss on the Indians

[Guest guest]

Nixon-Kissinger conduct - a first person account

 

By M.V.Kamath

"Later he (Nixon) told Kissinger: "I don't want the Indians to be

happy.... I want a public relations programme developed to piss on

the Indians. I want to piss on them for their responsibility...."

 

On June 30, 2005, The Time of India had a front page lead story from

Washington, written by its correspondent, Chidananda Rajghatta that

brings back old memories.

 

Wrote Rajghatta: "The U.S. may be cooing and billing over India now,

but just 35 years ago, its President and National Security Adviser

corrosively called the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi a

bitch and a witch, felt Indians were sanctimonious and hypocritical

bastards and wished India would be struck by a famine and lose badly

in a war".

 

He was quoting from the newly released declassified documents

released by the U.S. State Department. The occasion was the winter of

1971, when a military dictatorship in Pakistan had unleashed a brutal

genocide in East Bengal then still part of Pakistan looting and

killing and indulging rape on a scale that makes today's excesses in

the region look like a picnic.

 

The United States, under President Richard Nixon was strongly on the

side of Pakistan. Nixon hated India with an intensity of a burning

sun. His unprincipled Secretary of State a real chamcha and an

unscrupulous one at that was ever willing back his boss to the hilt.

If Nixon showed anger against India, Kissinger would happily fan it.

 

If Nixon abused India, Kissinger was willing to go all the way to

insult it. So, when Nixon called Indira Gandhi a "bitch and a

witch'', Kissinger went further to add that "Indians are bastards

anyway''.

 

The trouble was that U.S. diplomatic representatives both in Dacca

and Delhi were both aghast at what was going on, the former providing

all the gory details personally witnessed by him and his staff, the

latter, kenneth Keating, strongly supporting a stern action against

the Islamabad government.

 

For giving the right advice, Nixon called Keating "a bastard, a

traitor and a weak son-of-a-bitch", a man, having been posted

Delhi "got sucked in". To present India's case, Prime Minister Indira

Gandhi came to Washington via Europe and was received coolly and with

utter contempt.

 

The plane which she traveled was ordered to come a halt at New York's

Kennedy Airport close to a stinking urinal deliberately. One had to

hold one's nose while passing by. According to the lowest level of

protocol, she was received by a junior States Department official. I

was one of those present on the occasion.

 

She was billeted at the Presidential guest house, almost right

opposite the White House and the first meeting between her and Nixon

was fixed. Punctual to the point, Indira Gandhi presented herself but

Nixon again deliberately made her wait for some forty minutes to show

his contempt for his visitor. It was bad manners at their worst.

 

We (myself, my three Indian fellow corespondents and the Embassy

staff) felt appalled. Such a thing had never happened before. Not to

any visiting Prime Minister. Certainly not to anyone of Indira

Gandhi's standing.

 

In his Memoirs, Kissinger has recorded what happened at that first

meeting. ...Mrs. Gandhi began by expressing admiration for Nixon's

handling of Vietnam and the Chinese initiative, in the manner of a

professor praising a slightly backward student ...Nixon reacted with

a glassy-eyed politeness which told to those who knew him that his

sentiments were being kept in check only by his reluctance to engage

in face to-face disagreement.

 

Nixon had no time for Mrs. Gandhi's condescending manner. Privately

he scoffed at her moral pretensions.... Nixon was angry with Indira

Gandhi because the Government of India was very much opposed to his

Vietnam Policy.

 

As he later told Kissinger: "We can't let these goddam sanctimonious

Indians to get away with this. They've pissed on us on Vietnam for

five years".

 

In his Memoirs, Kissinger writes that "Nixon's comments after meeting

with her (Indira Gandhi) were not always printable." This wretched

sycophant does not say that he always expressed full agreement with

those sentiments. Kissinger is not one familiar with truth.

 

The second meeting between Indira Gandhi and Nixon was at the dinner

he gave his guest, one supposes, somewhat reluctantly. Correspondents

were not invited to the banquet but we were permitted to sit in an

adjacent room in the White House and to listen to the toasts that

were being proposed.

 

Said Mrs. Gandhi: It has not been easy to get away at a time when

India was beleaguered. To the natural calamities of drought, flood

and cyclone has been added a m a n - m a d e tragedy of vast

proportions.

 

I am haunted by the tormented faces in ever crowded refugee camps,

reflecting the grim events which have compelled the exodus of

millions from East Bengal.

 

I have come here for a deeper understanding of the situation in our

part of the world, in search of some wise impulse, which, as history

tells us has sometimes worked to save humanity from despair.

 

When she finished, some Ameri-cans who were sitting in the room with

us broke into applause. It was a wise toast. But for Nixon this was a

calculated insult and he thought that Mrs. Gandhi was trying to reach

over his head to appeal to some of the leading Democratic opponents

of his in the Congress who had been invited to the banquet. It only

made him more furious than ever.

 

Later he told Kissinger: "I don't want the Indians to be happy.... I

want a public relations programme developed to piss on the Indians. I

want to piss on them for their responsibility...."

 

Actually, soon after, the White House or Kissinger got a fourth rate

journalist to be sent as the Delhi correspondent of an important

American daily and his dispatches had to be read to be believed.

 

Right from the start he was hostile to India, painting India in the

blackest of colours. Not long after he was withdrawn, the US

government probably realising that this did not pay. Or, perhaps the

newspaper which hired him realised that it was being taken for a

ride.

 

It was not just Indira Gandhi that was hated and despised. The

Ambassador-designate to Washington, L. K. Jha, received similar

treatment from the White House, as well as the four Indian

correspondents in Washington, namely Easwar Sagar of The Hindu,

Krishna Bhatia of the Hindustan Times and T. V. Parasuram of Indian

Express, and myself, from The Times of India.

 

Jha had arrived in Washington DC to take up his appointment but was

made to cool his heels for weeks before being formally received by

Nixon. Word was sent to all top officials to place Jha in "deep

freeze", which meant that Jha, as ambassador, could hardly

communicate with anyone at the topmost bureaucratic level.

 

At one stage L. K. (as he was familiarly known) was so despairing of

his job that he told me he wished he could return home to do

something more useful. But when the "deep freeze" order came to be

known, the liberal press was so furious that Jha was specifically

invited to address the National Press Association, an honour seldom

accorded to mere ambassadors.

 

By being soft spoken and mild-mannered, L. K. had earned the respect

and regard of the US press which gave him a standing ovation, at the

end of the meeting.

 

Jha's talents have been acknowledged by Kissinger, in his Memoirs. As

he put it: "L. K. Jha served in Washington at a difficult period. He

was a superb analyst of the American scene; he understood

international politics without sentimentality...

 

He was skillful in getting the Indian version of the issues to the

press.... I could always trace his footprints through the columns...

I was supposed to be skillful in dealing with the press. On the India-

Pakistan issue, Jha clearly outclassed me".

 

We, the four Indian journalists were given the same hostile

treatment. In the first few months of my nine-year long stay in

Washington, I was invited to a couple of Kissinger's private

briefings, but Kissinger did not like being questioned. He dropped

me, as he dropped my other three colleagues.

 

For the next nine years neither Nixon (at his meetings with the

press) nor Kissinger at his, would even look us in our eyes, lot

alone let us ask questions.

 

The India Desk of the State Department was told not to cooperate with

us and to treat us coldly when we sought any information. Literally

we were to be boycotted.

 

It was embarrassing to the officials who were personal friends. Some

six months later, one of the seniors called me at home to ask me out

for lunch. He seemed deeply hurt.

 

He said to me: "Kamath, you are a friend and you must not

misunderstand my behaviour towards you at the State Department. We

are under orders to treat you coldly. Kindly forgive us. There is

nothing personal about it. All of us at the India Desk are

embarrassed".

 

I told him that I fully understood his and his colleagues' dilemma

and was not hurt but had only been puzzled. And I had a good laugh.

The Assistant Secretary of State, one Joseph Sisco, once summoned all

four of us and was insufferably rude and crude.

 

Knowing what the matter was, we returned the compliment in as

sophisticated a manner as was possible. Sisco couldn't take it. He

did not like being outclassed by four Indian correspondents. It was

only after the Nixon era was over and that poorly brought-up

President and his chamcha were thrown into the waste-paper basket,

did the State Department get back to normalcy.

 

I had only to ask for an exclusive interview with the new Secretary

of State Cyrus Vance and it was agreed upon in eight hours flat.

Something of a record. And when Vance received me at his door and

treated me as a friend and gave me more than 90 minutes of his time

and was even willing to give me even more if I wished it. I was

almost in tears.

 

Kissinger is a third rate diplomat, his smartness vastly overvalued.

He has given a lame excuse for calling Indians bastards, saying that

this was done at the height of the Cold War.

 

He is a sycophant. He says he admired Indira Gandhi. He might have.

Indira Gandhi, like most Indian diplomats could play rings round any

American politician and Kissinger in his Memoirs has admitted as

such.

 

We need to ignore Kissinger's `regrets', he would do the same thing

if the situation again demanded. A man utterly without any

principles, he was the right man to work for Nixon whose devotion to

principles was even less. It is a lesson to India for all times.

 

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