In the spring of 1971 a major crisis erupted in Indo-Pakistani relations that culminated in a full-scale war in December of that year. The war led to the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of a new state known as Bangladesh. The immediate casus belli for the war was the forced flight of some 9.8 million refugees from East Pakistan into India. Faced with this intolerable refugee burden, the indifference of much of the global community to India's plight, and the intransigence of the U.S. administration of Richard Nixon, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had concluded as early as April–May 1971 that India would have to resort to war to ensure the safe return of the refugees.
A substantial body of scholarship exists on the crisis and the ensuing war. As early as 1975, a British academic, Robert Jackson, in his book South Asian Crisis: India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh,...