Chapter 263: The World Watches
December 9–18, 1976Washington; London; Moscow; Tokyo; Cairo; Karachi; Bangkok; Dhaka; Singapore; New Delhi; Bombay; Gorakhpur; Lunglei — and the specific places where the news from Mizoram arrived and was understood differently by different people
The wire service reports that moved through the world's news agencies on December 9th, 1976, carried the specific quality of reports that were factually accurate and emotionally insufficient simultaneously.
The Associated Press filed at 0642 GMT: Indian Air Force aircraft conducted strikes against Burmese military airfields at Magwe and Meiktila today, the Indian Defence Ministry confirmed, in response to what New Delhi described as an "unprovoked act of war" in which Burmese Air Force Hawker Hunters attacked Indian civilian and military personnel at a construction site in Mizoram on December 3rd, killing at least 51 people. The Burmese military government, which has not confirmed casualty figures from the Indian air strikes, issued a statement calling India's response "naked aggression."
Reuters filed four minutes later with a slightly fuller account that included the background on the July 1976 coup attempt and the mutineer column's crossing into Indian territory.
AFP filed in French at 0713 with the headline: L'Inde frappe la Birmanie après le massacre de 51 civils et soldats.
The dispatch that did the most work in the first hours, that was quoted most widely in the editorial responses that followed, was a seven-hundred-word piece by a veteran South Asia correspondent for the International Herald Tribune named Edward Carmichael, who had been covering the subcontinent since 1962 and who had been in New Delhi when the December 3rd attack happened and had filed immediately and had been tracking the Indian military preparation since the December 5th coffin ceremony at Palam.
Carmichael's dispatch said, in its key passages: What distinguishes the Indian military response to the Tlawng Ridge massacre from previous instances of border incidents in the subcontinent is a quality that experienced observers of Indian policy have not often encountered: clarity of purpose. The Indian government, from the Prime Minister's parliamentary address to the Defence Ministry's operational briefings, has described an objective that is not punitive, not graduated, not designed to negotiate a return to the status quo ante. The objective is the removal of the military government that ordered the attack. This is a different kind of war than India has previously fought, and a different kind of war than the region has previously seen from India. Whether it succeeds or fails, it will permanently alter how India's neighbors calculate the cost of border violence against Indian citizens.
Carmichael's dispatch was reprinted, in translation, in Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Asahi Shimbun, the Straits Times, and the Daily Nation in Nairobi. It was not reprinted in Pravda or Izvestia, which had their own frameworks for understanding what was happening, and it was not reprinted in any Pakistani newspaper, for reasons that will be described.
Washington
The State Department's first formal response came at 1030 Washington time on December 9th, from the Press Office, in the form of a spokesman's statement that was drafted in the specific language of American diplomatic caution when addressing a situation involving a democratic ally whose actions complicated the preferred international order.
The statement said: The United States is deeply concerned by the escalation of military conflict between India and Burma. The United States reiterates its call for restraint by all parties and urges a return to diplomatic channels to address legitimate grievances.
The phrase "legitimate grievances" was a diplomatic formulation that had been inserted by the South Asia desk over the objection of the legal department, which had wanted to say "alleged grievances" on the grounds that the Indian account of the December 3rd attack had not been independently verified. The South Asia desk had prevailed on the grounds that fifty-one dead people, of whom at least nine were uniformed Indian military personnel confirmed dead by the Assam Rifles, did not constitute an "allegation."
The "concern" and the "restraint" language were the standard American diplomatic formulations for any situation involving military force, and they communicated approximately nothing about what the United States actually thought beyond the fact that the United States had noted that something was happening.
What the United States actually thought was a more complicated and in some ways more interesting story.
In the National Security Council's Situation Room on December 4th — the day after the attack, before any military response — the South Asia desk's senior director, a woman named Patricia Holsworth who had spent fifteen years in South Asian affairs and who had a precise and unsentimental understanding of the subcontinent's political dynamics, had presented a brief assessment that was not the document the State Department's spokesman read but was the document that the people making actual policy read.
The assessment said: India's response to the Tlawng Ridge massacre is unlikely to be proportional or graduated. The nature of the incident — the scale of civilian casualties, the Burmese government's statement shifting blame to India, the domestic political context in which the Indian government is operating under INP outside support that has a strong nationalist orientation — creates pressure for a decisive military response that goes beyond a punitive strike. The Indian military has the conventional capability to conduct sustained operations against the Tatmadaw. The question is not whether India can defeat Burma militarily. The question is whether the United States wishes to be seen as obstructing an Indian military response to the verified massacre of Indian civilians, and what the costs of such obstruction would be to the US-India relationship.
The NSC's response to this assessment was the standard response that the NSC produced when presented with assessments whose conclusion was "the United States should not try to stop this": a statement of concern and a call for restraint, followed by intensive monitoring and the accumulation of information about the operational details of the Indian military campaign.
The monitoring was being done by the CIA's South Asia division, which had been tracking the Indian military's buildup since December 6th and whose operational intelligence on the Indian Air Force's capabilities had been significantly complicated by the fact that the S-35 Tejas-M's performance specifications remained unknown. The December 9th strikes at Magwe and Meiktila had produced the first operational data on the aircraft's actual combat performance, and the CIA's assessment of that data, filed within eighteen hours of the strikes, noted: Performance consistent with or exceeding the highest-end specifications attributed to this aircraft in open-source reporting. The Indian Air Force's capability gap relative to the Tatmadaw is wider than previous assessments indicated. This has implications for the conflict's likely duration and outcome.
The specific implication that the assessment noted but did not emphasise was that the wider-than-expected capability gap meant the Indian military was going to win faster than anyone had assumed. A war that was going to last three months was one thing. A war that was going to last six weeks was a different diplomatic calculation.
At the State Department, the Deputy Secretary of State convened a small meeting on December 10th to discuss the question that the official public statements were not addressing: whether the United States should consider more active efforts to bring about a ceasefire, and if so, what leverage the United States had to achieve one.
The meeting lasted forty minutes.
The conclusion: the United States had no meaningful leverage. India did not depend on American arms supply or American economic assistance in the way that previous American efforts to moderate Indian military behaviour had relied on. India was not going to accept a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire from a Council on which it held a permanent veto. India's domestic political situation made a government-initiated ceasefire politically toxic for any Indian political leader.
The Deputy Secretary said, at the end of the meeting: "We don't have a play here. We're going to watch this happen."
He was right.
The CIA's Harrison Whitmore — the same studio executive who had seen Star Wars at the Loews State in New York the previous May, who had subsequently joined a consulting firm that did work for the intelligence community, and whose name appeared on a contract for "cultural trend analysis" in the South Asia division's discretionary budget — filed a separate assessment that was not an intelligence product but that circulated in the Langley coffee rooms in December and that captured something the official assessments were missing.
He wrote: The India that bombed Magwe on December 9th is not the India that the United States has been analysing for the past decade. The country that built the Pinaka and the Tejas-M and the Siddharth computer and the Ennore desalination plant and produced a Nobel-winning LED and made the highest-grossing film in global cinema history in 1976 is operating at a different level of confidence and capability than the frameworks we use to model Indian behaviour were designed to capture. Our assessments have been consistently surprised by Indian capabilities — the nuclear test, the Mauritius Crisis, the technology developments, and now the military operation in Burma. We should examine whether the frameworks themselves need updating rather than continuing to be surprised each time.
The memo was read by seven people and produced no formal policy response. It was accurate.
London
The British response had a specific quality that reflected Britain's specific relationship to the geography of the conflict: Burma had been a British colony until 1948, the demarcation of the India-Burma border in 1914 had been a British exercise, and the Tlawng Ridge construction camp had been built on a ridge that British surveyors had mapped. The historical connection produced an institutional engagement with the details of the incident that the purely diplomatic British response did not convey.
The Times of London's first editorial, published December 6th, two days before the Indian air strikes began, was titled "The Rangoon Regime's Miscalculation" and said, in its central passage: Ne Win's military government has committed an act of extraordinary strategic recklessness. India in 1976 is not India in 1962. The country that lost a border war with China fourteen years ago has, in the intervening period, built an indigenous defence industrial base of serious capability, tested a nuclear device, and demonstrated in two separate naval confrontations — the 1971 Bay of Bengal and the Mauritius Crisis — a willingness to use force when its interests are directly threatened. The Burmese military's calculation that India would respond to the Tlawng Ridge massacre with a diplomatic note and a quiet press conference reflects a level of strategic illiteracy that is difficult to explain. The massacre's aftermath will provide a corrective, though at a cost that fifty-one families will pay permanently.
The editorial generated significant correspondence. Most of the letters agreed with it. A minority objected to the phrase "strategic recklessness" on the grounds that it implicitly endorsed Indian military action. The editor's response to one such letter, published the following week, said: "We do not endorse military action as a general proposition. We describe the strategic consequences of one government's decision to bomb another government's citizens on the other government's soil. The consequences are what they are."
In Parliament, the Foreign Secretary fielded questions on December 9th, the day of the Indian air strikes. The questions came from both sides of the House — the opposition seeking to know whether Britain would condemn India's strikes, the government's own backbenchers seeking to know whether Britain would acknowledge that the strikes were a response to provocation that had been verified and documented.
The Foreign Secretary's response threaded the needle with the specific skill of a British diplomat managing a situation in which the correct answer was politically inconvenient: "The British Government has consistently called for restraint by all parties and for a return to diplomatic dialogue. We deeply regret the loss of life on all sides. We are monitoring the situation closely and remain in contact with both the Indian and Burmese governments."
The phrase "loss of life on all sides" was noticed by the Indian High Commission in London, who filed a note to the Foreign Ministry in New Delhi pointing out that the phrase implied moral equivalence between fifty-one Indians killed at a construction site and Burmese military personnel killed at combat airfields. The Indian Foreign Ministry's response, when it came, was the specific kind of response that the Indian Foreign Ministry under the current government had developed for exactly this situation: a formal diplomatic communication that was precise, undramatic, and completely clear about what India considered unacceptable.
The note said: India notes the Foreign Secretary's expressed regret at the "loss of life on all sides." India wishes to clarify that the relevant losses of life occurred on one side on December 3rd, when fifty-one Indian citizens and soldiers were killed by Burmese Air Force aircraft at a civilian construction site on Indian sovereign territory. India's military operations on December 9th were conducted against military targets and are distinct from the December 3rd massacre. The conflation of the two is noted.
The Indian High Commission delivered the note to the Foreign Office on December 12th. The Foreign Office read it, acknowledged it, and did not publicly respond to it. But the "loss of life on all sides" phrasing did not appear again in any subsequent British government statement on the conflict.
The Economist's analysis, published in its December 11th issue under the headline "India's Rubicon," was the most widely reprinted piece of British commentary: The India-Burma conflict of December 1976 is not, at its core, a border dispute or a regional security incident. It is a demonstration. India is demonstrating, at operational scale, that the country which struggled to manufacture its own rifle ammunition in 1947 has become, in thirty years and with accelerating speed in the past decade, a military power capable of projecting decisive force beyond its borders against a state-level adversary. The demonstration was not chosen — the Burmese military forced the occasion. But the demonstration is happening, and what it demonstrates will be read carefully in every capital from Beijing to Islamabad to Washington. The region in which India operates is about to become a different region.
Moscow
The Soviet response to the India-Burma conflict was the most carefully calibrated of any major power's reaction, reflecting the Soviet Union's specific and complicated interest in the situation.
The Soviet Union had a long-standing relationship with India — the 1971 Treaty, the arms supply, the diplomatic support during the Mauritius Crisis, and the specific and still-classified Project Foxbat Bharat and Project orel cooperation that had been established in October and that placed Soviet military engineers at ISMC facilities and Indian engineers at the Mikoyan Design Bureau. The relationship was real, and Soviet strategists in Moscow valued it for exactly the reasons Karan had articulated in the October negotiation: the mutual dependency created a durable partnership.
The Soviet Union also had its own complicated relationship with Burma. Ne Win had conducted his foreign policy on a strict non-alignment principle that made Burma neither a Soviet client nor an American one, and the Soviet Union had no particular affection for the Rangoon regime. The failed July 1976 coup had included factions with varying ideological orientations, and Soviet intelligence had been tracking the political instability in Rangoon for months without reaching a conclusion about whether instability served Soviet interests or not.
The Pravda editorial on December 11th was the authoritative statement of the Soviet position: The events in Burma must be understood in their full context. The Indian Government of Prime Minister Chavan responded to the verified massacre of its citizens and soldiers with measured military force targeted at the military apparatus responsible for the provocation. The Soviet Union notes that the Indian military response has been conducted with a precision and focus that distinguishes it from the kind of indiscriminate operations that characterize imperialist military adventurism. India is responding to an act of aggression.
The editorial did not call for a ceasefire. The editorial did not call the Indian military response disproportionate. The editorial did, in one passage, note that the Soviet Union "continued to call for a peaceful resolution of all international disputes through dialogue," which was the formulaic Soviet diplomatic language that appeared in every Pravda editorial on every international conflict and which communicated nothing specific about Soviet policy on this one.
What communicated something specific was what Pravda did not say. It did not describe India's military operation as "aggression." It did not call for UN Security Council intervention. It did not compare the Indian operation to American military adventurism, which was the standard Pravda framework for any Western military operation and which the Soviet press consistently applied when it served Soviet interests.
The editorial was, for a document produced by the Soviet state press apparatus, relatively sympathetic to India's position.
This was not an accident. Irina Volkova — the film reviewer who had seen Star Wars four times in November and who had written the most accurate piece of film criticism about the film in any language — had been assigned by her editor at Sovetsky Ekran to write a cultural piece about the Shergill phenomenon: the Indian company that made a Nobel Prize-winning LED and Star Wars and a desalination plant and aircraft and was now fighting a war. She was, her editor had said, the person who understood what the Shergill phenomenon was in cultural terms, and the cultural terms were important in December 1976 because the political terms were being handled by people who did not fully understand what they were looking at.
She wrote the piece in four days. It appeared in Sovetsky Ekran on December 14th and was reprinted in Literaturnaya Gazeta the following week.
She wrote, in the specific language that had characterised her Star Wars review: I have spent the past three years watching India produce things that should not yet exist. A film that was the first in global history to earn more from merchandise than from theatrical exhibition, and whose merchandise was being sold in Tokyo and New York and Cairo within weeks of its opening. A computer that a company in Gorakhpur designed and is now selling in South Korea. A desalination membrane that the British engineering establishment described as "premature" — by which they meant it had arrived twenty years before they expected it and they did not know what to do with the fact. Aircraft that the Israeli Air Force was reportedly modelling their operational doctrine around. These were not the achievements of a country catching up. These were the achievements of a country that had, at some point in the recent past, stopped catching up and started arriving ahead of where the others were going.
She continued: When I watched Star Wars in September 1976, I wrote one word in my notebook. I wrote the word True. I was describing the specific quality of something that expressed its own reality completely, without mediation. The film was made by people who believed something about the universe and had made a thing that made you believe it too.
The India of December 1976 has the same quality. When fifty-one of its citizens were killed on Indian soil by a foreign military, India did not file a protest note. It dismantled the military that had killed them. This is not warmongering. It is the action of a country that knows what it is and acts accordingly. The West is confused by this because the West has spent thirty years modelling India as a country that talked about non-violence and asked for economic assistance. That country still exists, somewhere, in the diplomatic notes. The country that is currently advancing through the Chin Hills is a different one.
I think the second one was always there. I think the first one was the performance, and the second one is the truth.
The piece circulated in Moscow's intellectual community in the weeks that followed in the specific way that things circulated in Soviet Moscow — officially permitted but with a semi-underground distribution that communicated that the piece had touched something that official channels did not fully accommodate.
Pakistan
Pakistan's reaction to the India-Burma conflict was the most anxious of any of India's neighbours, and the anxiety was real rather than performed.
The Pakistani press — Dawn, The News, the Jang — produced the range of editorial responses that Pakistani coverage of Indian military actions typically produced: from the frank acknowledgment in Dawn's December 10th editorial that "India's military capability in 1976 bears no resemblance to what Pakistan faced in 1971" to the more strident analysis in the Jang that read the Indian operation as evidence of "Indian expansionist intentions in Asia."
The ISI's assessment, which circulated internally and was not publicly available, was more analytically precise than anything in the press: The Indian military operation in Burma demonstrates several capabilities that were not previously fully assessed. The S-35 Tejas-M's performance at Magwe and Meiktila exceeded previous specifications attributed to this aircraft in available intelligence. The logistics tail for a sustained multi-division operation into difficult terrain has been demonstrated to be functional. The political coherence of India's decision-making — from the December 5th public declaration to the December 6th parliamentary authorisation to the December 9th air strikes — reflects an institutional maturity that was not characteristic of Indian strategic decision-making in previous decades.
The ISI assessment concluded with an observation that was circulated to a very small number of senior Pakistani officials: The Indian military capability demonstrated in this conflict is not aimed at Pakistan. The conflict is with Burma, and the casus belli is specific and documented. However, the capability demonstrated is general-purpose, and its demonstration in operational conditions provides information about Indian military readiness that updates the threat assessment in every direction.
The Pakistan Army's chief of staff convened a private briefing on December 12th that was described by participants who were later interviewed by historians as "uncomfortable." The meeting reviewed the implications of the Magwe and Meiktila strikes for Pakistani Air Force planners' assumptions about Indian air power. The S-35 Tejas-M's demonstrated performance parameters — the supercruise capability, the radar characteristics inferred from the attack profiles, the precision of the ordnance delivery — required revisions to the planning assumptions that the Pakistani Air Force had been operating on.
The meeting's conclusion was not that Pakistan faced an imminent threat. It was that Pakistan's strategic planning had been based on intelligence about Indian military capability that was now known to be incomplete in ways that required reassessment.
General Zia ul-Haq, who was the Army Chief at this point, said at the meeting's close: "We need better intelligence on what they have built. What we knew three months ago is not sufficient."
This was a mild understatement.
Japan
The reaction in Japan was different in quality from every other country's reaction because Japan had a specific recent history with the aircraft that was doing the fighting.
The seventeen letters from Japanese film studios that had been sent to the Shergill Cinema production office after Star Wars opened — seeking technical exchange meetings about the motion control system and the visual effects work — had been followed, in the months between May and November, by a parallel set of technical exchange inquiries to the ISMC division about the Siddharth computer and the LED manufacturing process. The Japanese industrial community had developed a specific awareness of Shergill Industries that was different from the generalised awareness in other countries — it was the awareness of professional peers encountering work that they recognised as being at a level they needed to take seriously.
The seven men from Toho Studios who had seen Star Wars in May were, in December, more prepared than most Japanese observers to contextualise what they were reading about the India-Burma conflict. They had seen what Shergill Industries built. The specific, enormous quality of the Star Destroyer crossing the screen — the model that was two and a half metres and looked real — had been their first encounter with the quality of what was being produced in Gorakhpur. The aircraft attacking Magwe and Meiktila were from the same industrial base.
The Asahi Shimbun's coverage of the India-Burma conflict was thorough and included a sidebar analysis under the headline "The Shergill Industrial Base and Its Military Applications" that described the ISMC semiconductor capability, the S-35 Tejas-M's specifications as understood from available sources, and the specific connection between the civil and military applications of the technology being produced at the Gorakhpur complex.
The sidebar noted, in its conclusion: The Indian aircraft conducting operations in Burma were designed, engineered, and manufactured in India using Indian-designed semiconductor components. This is not a country operating purchased technology. It is a country that has developed a full-spectrum indigenous defence industrial base, from the chip to the airframe. The closest analogy in Asian experience is Japan's own post-war industrial development, but compressed into a shorter timeline and starting from a lower base. The analogy is imperfect. The phenomenon it points toward is real.
In Toho's production offices, the cinematographer who had called the Indian visual effects team's work "people who know what they are doing" — and who had spent the subsequent six months in correspondence with the ISMC's Shergill Cinema division about the motion control rig — sent a telex to the Shergill Cinema offices on December 11th. The telex said, in the specific formal Japanese of professional communication: We have been reading the news from Mizoram and Burma. The precision of the operations described is consistent with the precision we observed in the production work of your team. We hope the conflict concludes quickly and with minimal casualties. We remain interested in the technical exchange discussions we have been in correspondence about.
The telex was not a political statement. It was the communication of a professional who had encountered a level of capability and whose reference for that capability was a film rather than a weapons system, and whose response to the news was the specific response of someone who had already measured what they were dealing with and was not surprised by its application to other domains.
Egypt and the Arab World
Cairo's reaction carried a specific emotional quality that was different from the strategic assessments being produced elsewhere.
Egypt in December 1976 was three years past the October War, still processing the specific transformation that the 1973 conflict had produced in Egyptian self-understanding and in the Arab world's sense of what was militarily possible. The Indian operation against Burma arrived in this context as a story about Asian military capability confronting a sovereignty violation, and in Cairo's specific political culture — which read international events through the lens of its own experience of both sovereignty violations and military operations — it produced a response that was neither analytically detached nor reflexively hostile.
The Al-Ahram editorial on December 10th said: India has responded to the murder of its citizens with the force that the situation required. The international community should note that the country doing so is not a Western power and is not an American client. It is an Asian democracy that built its own aircraft, made its own chips, and decided for itself when its sovereignty had been violated beyond the point of diplomatic response. This is what Asian sovereignty looks like when it is exercised rather than talked about.
The editorial was reprinted in Lebanese, Jordanian, and Kuwaiti papers. It was not reprinted in Saudi papers, which had a different set of considerations about the precedent being set. The Saudi concern was specific: a country that responded to sovereignty violations with the full-scale dismantling of the offending regime was a country that had established a precedent that other countries — countries with their own complaints about Saudi territory, border management, or neighbouring-state conduct — might find useful to invoke.
In a Maadi drawing room on December 13th, Fatima — the woman who had described seeing Star Wars to her daughter as being like looking at the stars from the desert — was listening to her son-in-law argue about the India-Burma conflict with a neighbour. The son-in-law was an engineer who had spent three years in India in the late 1960s and who had specific opinions about the country's trajectory.
Thailand and ASEAN
Bangkok's reaction was the most geographically immediate of any country outside India's immediate neighbourhood, and the most practically consequential for the conflict's logistical context.
Burma shared a border with Thailand, and Burmese refugees — people fleeing the Tatmadaw's operations in Shan State, Karen State, and the central divisions — had been crossing into Thailand in waves for decades. The India-Burma conflict produced a new category of refugee movement: people fleeing not the Tatmadaw's operations but the areas where the Tatmadaw and the Indian Army were engaging, which were areas where ordinary Burmese people lived and where the physics of military operations produced displacement regardless of which side was conducting them.
Thailand's immediate concern was the border. The Thai Army's border command filed its own assessment, separate from the government's diplomatic communications, that focused on the refugee situation and the likely displacement from the Chin Hills as the 57 Mountain Division's advance continued.
The Thai government's public statement, issued December 10th, was careful: Thailand calls for all parties to respect international humanitarian law and to protect civilian populations. Thailand is monitoring the situation on the Thai-Burma border and is prepared to provide humanitarian assistance to displaced persons. The statement did not call for a ceasefire and did not condemn India's operations. It was the statement of a government that understood that the military situation was not going to be reversed by diplomatic statements and that the practical priority was managing the humanitarian consequences.
In Bangkok's diplomatic quarter, the Indian ambassador — a career diplomat named Krishnaswami who had been in the role for eighteen months and who had developed good working relationships with his Thai counterparts — was receiving calls. Not complaint calls. Information calls. Thai counterparts asking practical questions: what was the timeline of the advance? What were India's intentions regarding the Burmese civilian population in the conflict zones? Was India coordinating with the UN refugee agency on the displacement situation?
The questions were the questions of a government trying to prepare for the practical consequences of what was happening, rather than the questions of a government trying to stop it.
Krishnaswami filed a cable to the Foreign Ministry in New Delhi: Thai government's private posture toward the operation is neutral-cooperative. Public statements are humanitarian-focused. The practical concern is the displacement from the Chin Hills. Recommend coordination with UNHCR as a confidence-building measure with regional neighbours.
The recommendation was acted on within forty-eight hours. The Indian Humanitarian Coordination Office for the Burma operation, established December 13th, was the first time India had created a formal humanitarian coordination structure alongside a military operation, and its establishment communicated something to the ASEAN governments watching that no press release had communicated: that India was thinking about what came after the military operation.
India: The Public
The Indian domestic reaction to the conflict had a specific character that distinguished it from the official statements, the parliamentary proceedings, and the diplomatic exchanges — the character of a country that had been told something happened and had decided what it thought about it before the government had finished deciding what to say.
The December 3rd attack reports reached the major Indian cities on the evening of December 3rd through the AIR evening news bulletin and through the newspaper wire services that ran their late editions. By December 4th morning, the attack was front-page news in every major Indian newspaper, in every language.
The front-page coverage in December 4th's papers had the specific quality of front pages that are produced when the event being reported is simultaneously documented and incomplete — when the numbers are being revised upward as the morning goes on and when the photographs arriving from the site are insufficient and when the editorial staff is making decisions about what to say about something that is still happening.
But the reaction to the coverage had a quality that the editorial staff had not entirely anticipated.
The Indian public's response to the December 3rd attack was not the ambivalent, divided response that had characterised some previous border incidents. It was the response of a country that had, in the previous five years, developed a different relationship to what Indian people were capable of and what India had built, and that read the Tlawng Ridge massacre through that lens.
In Gorakhpur — where the Shergill complex employed 84,000 people and where the LED manufacturing lines and the Motor Works and the ISMC facility had changed the physical and economic character of the city in ways that were visible and daily — the reaction was the reaction of people who knew the engineers who had been on the ridge. Not all of them, but some of them. The engineers who had gone to Mizoram from the Gorakhpur complex were people whose names were known in the neighbourhood, whose families lived in the city, whose faces were in the company photographs that hung in the facility's reception areas.
The Gorakhpur Shergill Cineplex, which had been showing Star Wars for seven months and which was scheduled to transition to the new Hindi films arriving for the winter season, remained on Star Wars through December. Not because of any instruction — because the audiences kept coming and the management understood that at this specific moment, this specific film was the thing that the city needed to watch.
The young man who had sat in seat J-5 at the opening night premiere — who was now twenty-two and had not yet decided what he was going to do with his life but had understood since May that the options were larger than he had been told — went to the Gorakhpur Cineplex on December 5th, the day the coffins arrived at Palam, and watched the film for the sixth time.
He thought: they died building a bridge. The bridge will be named for them. The bridge will still carry people across the Tlawng River when his grandchildren are old.
He was not thinking in political terms. He was thinking in terms of what permanence meant and what the people on the ridge had been doing and why it mattered that it had happened.
He left the cinema and went home and wrote a letter to the Shergill Foundation's address in Gorakhpur, which he had found in the company's published materials, offering to donate one month's salary — he had recently started working at an electrical fittings shop near the railway station — to the families of the workers who had died.
He was one of approximately fourteen thousand people who wrote similar letters to the Shergill Foundation in December 1976.
The Foundation's Gorakhpur office processed them.
In Bombay, the film community's reaction was different in flavour from the engineering workers' reaction but not different in direction. The same Amitabh Bachchan who had played Vijay Sen in Star Wars, whose face had been on the front page of every film magazine since May, gave an interview to Filmfare on December 9th that ran with the headline "When India Goes to War" and that said, in its key passage: "The people who died on that ridge were not different from the people who will go to see this film on Friday. They were people who went to work. The country they went to work for has decided that this is not acceptable and has said so in the only language that was available to say it in. I don't have a political opinion about what comes next. I have a human opinion, which is that fifty-one people died building a bridge and the country noticed."
In Delhi, at the Lok Sabha cafeteria on December 11th — two days after the air strikes, one day after the ground advance orders were issued — a group of opposition MPs, including several from the Jan Sangh and two from the Socialists, were eating lunch and discussing the war. The conversation was the conversation of politicians who had voted for the military authorisation and who were now processing what that vote meant in practice.
One of the Jan Sangh MPs — a man from Rajasthan who had been in Parliament since 1957 — said something that several of his colleagues later quoted in interviews: "In 1965, we fought Pakistan and the world told us to stop. In 1971, we fought Pakistan and the world complained and then accepted it. Now we are fighting Burma and the world is watching and they are not telling us to stop because they can see that we are not asking permission."
He paused and drank his tea.
"We have not been in this position before," he said. "We have always been the country that needed someone's permission to defend itself. We are not, at this specific moment, asking anyone's permission."
He was accurate.
The World After Magwe
The international diplomatic pattern that emerged in the ten days following the December 9th strikes was the specific pattern that emerged when a military operation was succeeding faster than the diplomatic community had time to respond to.
The United Nations Security Council convened an emergency session on December 12th. The session was requested by Burma's diplomatic mission, whose ambassador — a small man named U Khin Maung who had been a career diplomat for thirty years and who was, by the second week of December, visibly exhausted by the task of defending a government whose continued existence was increasingly uncertain — addressed the Council in the specific register of a man reading a statement he had been instructed to read rather than one he had written.
The Council's President for December was India. India did not chair the emergency session on the Burma situation — the acting President from the previous month's Council president took the chair for the session. But India's permanent representative, a woman named Vijaya Lakshmi who had been in the UN system for twelve years and who had negotiated India's permanent seat on the Council in 1972, was present and participated with the specific combination of composure and precision that the Indian Foreign Ministry had developed for exactly this kind of session.
When the Burmese ambassador had finished reading his statement — which used the words "aggression," "international law," "sovereignty," and "peace" in combinations that struck experienced UN observers as increasingly disconnected from the documented events of December 3rd — Vijaya Lakshmi spoke.
She spoke for eight minutes.
She described the December 3rd attack. She cited the specific ordnance — rockets and 20mm cannon from Hawker Hunters of the Burmese Air Force, delivered in three salvos over forty-two seconds. She cited the casualties. She cited the Burmese government's official statement, which she read in full. She noted that the statement had been issued before the Burmese government had offered any investigation, any apology, or any contact with the Indian government through diplomatic channels.
She said: "The Council is being asked by the representative of Burma to condemn India's military response to the verified massacre of fifty-one Indian citizens and soldiers. Before the Council considers that request, I ask the Council to consider the alternative that India had available to it. The alternative was to receive the statement from Rangoon blaming India for the deaths of the people that Rangoon had killed, to file a diplomatic protest, and to continue building the railway bridge at the Tlawng River while waiting for Rangoon to explain its actions. India was not willing to accept that alternative."
She said: "India is not asking the Council's permission for its military response. India notes the Council's composition and the veto position of the permanent members and is aware that no resolution on this matter will be adopted. India has informed the Council of its actions in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, which recognises the inherent right of individual and collective self-defence. India's military operations are conducted under that right and will continue until the security situation that produced the December 3rd attack is durably resolved."
The Council did not vote. No resolution was tabled. The session ended with the standard procedural conclusion of a Council session that had produced no formal action.
As the members filed out, the Soviet representative — who had said nothing during the session — said quietly to Vijaya Lakshmi as they left the chamber: "Article 51 was well-cited."
She said: "The drafters made it clear."
He said: "Yes. They did."
End of Chapter 263