Word: gandhis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pakistani President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's troops, most of them Punjabis from the West who were offended by the East's separatist demands, went on a murderous rampage. Bengali refugees began streaming into India, eventually numbering some 8 million. India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, protesting that the refugees were placing an intolerable burden on her country, soon began hinting strongly at a move against Pakistan. In Kissinger's view, the refugee situation was merely
...pretext for Mrs. Gandhi to seize the opportunity to dismember her hated neighbor. (Kissinger points out that the U.S. gave some $92 million in refugee aid, far more than any other single country.) The U.S. objective, says Kissinger, was "an evolution that would lead to independence for East Pakistan." But India, he adds, was too impatient to accept so gradual a solution. In August, "nonaligned" New Delhi aligned itself with Moscow by signing a Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty. "With the treaty," writes Kissinger, "Moscow threw a lighted match into a powder keg." By November, when Mrs. Gandhi visited Nixon...
Nixon and Mrs. Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, were not intended by fate to be personally congenial. Her assumption of almost hereditary moral superiority and her moody silences brought out all of Nixon's latent insecurities. Her bearing toward Nixon combined a disdain for a symbol of capitalism quite fashionable in developing countries with a hint that the obnoxious things she had heard about the President from her intellectual friends could not all be untrue. Nixon's comments after meetings with her were not always printable...
Without a doubt the two most unfortunate meetings Nixon had with any foreign leader were his conversations in the Oval Office on Nov. 4 and 5 with Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi began by expressing admiration for Nixon's handling of Viet Nam and the China initiative, in the manner of a professor praising a slightly backward student. Her praise lost some of its luster when she smugly expressed satisfaction that with China Nixon had consummated what India had recommended for the past decade...
Nixon had no time for Mrs. Gandhi's condescending manner. Privately, he scoffed at her moral pretensions, which he found all the more irritating because he suspected that in pursuit of her purposes she had in fact fewer scruples than Nixon...