Early on Christmas morning in 1962, the Indian diplomat S.S. Banerjee heard a mysterious knock on his door in Dacca, East Pakistan. Standing outside in the darkness was a 14-year-old boy, who beckoned to him to follow, and minutes later Banerjee found himself opposite the firebrand politician Mujibur Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali activist who had recently transformed from a Pakistani nationalist into one of the country’s fiercest critics.
For the next hour, the two men engaged in small talk, with Banerjee growing increasingly mystified as to why he had been summoned. Then, just as he was about to go home, he was handed a small envelope intended for the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Rahman explained that it contained a plan to break East Pakistan away from West Pakistan and establish a new ‘sovereign independent homeland’ called Bangladesh. All he needed was India’s help.
Meticulously researched, Avinash Paliwal’s India’s Near East offers a detailed history of India’s intelligence services and the country’s attempts to influence the politics of its neighbours. The cast is phenomenal, from the reclusive Indian spymaster R.N. Kao to Angami Zapu Phizo, the partially paralysed former Bible salesman who kick-started a decades-long proxy war between India and Pakistan. Many of the events described remain enormously controversial, but, armed with a slew of intelligence files, Paliwal tells a tale of espionage worthy of Ben Macintyre.
The book opens in April 1949, two years after India, Pakistan and Burma gained independence from Britain, when all three countries were racked by refugee crises and roaming militias. India and Pakistan had just been at war over Kashmir, yet their intelligence agencies now began to co-operate with one another to prevent a communist takeover in Burma.
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