Indira Gandhi had planned to annihilate Pakistan in 1971: Declassified CIA documents

New Delhi: In 1971 India missed out a chance to annihilate Pakistan "so that it never attempts to challenge India in the future". Why? Because a CIA agent operating out of Indira Gandhi's cabinet leaked out India's war objectives in the Bangladesh war. A minister of Indira Gandhi's cabinet betrayed India's "war objectives" to the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1971, causing an abrupt end to the Bangladesh war under vicious US armtwisting. This is the highlight of the book CIA's Eye on South Asia by journalist Anuj Dhar. The book compiles declassified CIA records on India and her neighbours. It specifically spotlights what arguably has been India's biggest spy scandal. In the run up to the 1971 India Pakistan war over what was then East Pakistan, The New York Times first hinted at the presence of a CIA operative in the Indian government. By December The Washington Post had reported that US President Richard Nixon's South Asia policy was being guided by "reports from a source close to Mrs. Gandhi." Records and telecons declassified recently - but not properly explained up till now - show that a dramatic turnaround came on December 6 when a CIA operative, whom Dhar pins down as a minister of the Indira Cabinet, leaked out India's "war objectives" to the agency. Prime Minister Gandhi told Union Cabinet that apart from liberating Bangladesh, India intended to take over a strategically important part of the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and go for the total annihilation of Pakistan's armed forces so that Pakistan "never attempts to challenge India in the future." When he came to know of the CIA report, a furious Nixon blurted out that "this woman suckered us," thinking that Mrs. Gandhi had promised him that India won't attack East Pakistan - not to speak of targeting West Pakistan and PoK. "But let me tell you, she's going to pay," he told his National Security Advisor Dr Henry Kissinger even as he tried to leak out the CIA report to give her bad press. As a direct result of the operative's information, the Nixon administration went on an overdrive to save West Pakistan from a massive Indian assault. Nixon personally threatened the USSR with a "major confrontation" between the superpowers should the Soviets failed to stop the Indians from going into West Pakistan. Dhar quotes in the book the official records showing that USSR's First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov visited Delhi after Nixon's threat and told the "Indians to confine their objectives to East Pakistan" and "not to try and take any part of West Pakistan, including PoW as "Moscow was concerned about the possibility of a great power confrontation over the subcontinent." Declassified records make it unambiguously clear that the month-long show of strength by the USS Enterprise and accompanying flotilla was a byproduct of the CIA operative's reports.