India-US ties: How it became an aid- to-trade story

It’s well evinced that the ignominious late United States’ President Richard Nixon, who was disgraced from office, reviled Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ad nauseam. He despised her, if not despised India, and all things Indian itself.

Gary Bass’ riveting ‘Blood Telegrams’ documents Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s complicity in overlooking the atrocities committed by West Pakistan in East Pakistan in the build-up to the 1971 war. Recently, Bass penned an Op-ed, based on declassified intel, a treasure trove of White House tapes that accentuate Nixon’s abhorrence towards Gandhi and India.

Call it misogyny, bigotry, racism or an insidious combination of the three, Nixon was caught on tape even making denigrating remarks on Indira Gandhi’s looks. Mukul Kesavan’s beautifully quips “why someone as peculiar-looking as Nixon would even venture a view on the ugliness of other people. Say what you like about Indira Gandhi’s politics, in the looks department she was Rita Hayworth to his W.C. Fields”.

Nixon abhorred India for a few reasons, one of them being where he saw India as a nuisance, one that was intervening in the “internal affairs” of West Pakistan and a direct hindrance to his natural ally Yahya Khan of West Pakistan who played a vital role in Nixon’s olive branch to Beijing.