The Blood Telegram

The Blood Telegram


Read: March 2021

This book is set in March-Dec 1971 will sicken you to your stomach. It is largely based on recorded oval office conversations between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, in whose hands the fate of millions of persecuted Bengalis lay. In the end, the duo knowingly let the genocide in Bangladesh happen as they were negotiating a crucial diplomatic breakthrough with China, and Pakistan’s dictator Yahya Khan was the intermediary.

I have always considered the astoundingly brilliant Kissinger to be the real butcher of Bangladesh. What new I got from the book was glimpses of his utter insensitivity towards human suffering. That too from a man who lost 13 of his close relatives to the horrors of holocaust. At one point, he snickers about Yahya getting a kick out of massacring Hindus! And casual racism of his boss is well known, nauseating nevertheless. There is only one instance in the entire episode where Kissinger feels the horrors of war when he is informed mid way in a meeting that one of his students, Professor Razak, was executed in one of the raids on Dhaka University.

Not to forget Archer Blood here, who was instrumental in writing the first ever dissent note in the history of US State Department. His words in a letter to the US state department "our policy serves neither our moral interests broadly defined nor our national interests narrowly defined" still is the totem pole for diplomacy all these decades later.

Must read book for history aficionados. Written from a refreshingly US perspective on one of the biggest human tragedies of 20th century.






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