I was able to find an oral history interview of her on the Library of Congress website but it’s not in English. I was also able to find something about her on the Case Western University website.
The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
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I may be wrong here because I’m not a particularly knowledgeable guy, but an important reason I think for why the east is such a hotbed of peasant revolutionary movements is probably because of the way the EIC managed peasant policies in the east, like Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, where through the Permanent Settlement in 1793, which fixed the land revenue at a high rate and gave the zamindars (landlords) the right to collect it from the peasants and set rent limits (often beyond legal limits), making them stinking rich and very oppressive. Even when the British did try to maybe alleviate the colonial subjects’ suffering with directives like the act of 1859, most of the time the zamindars would just sidestep them.
So, imagine you’re a peasant already dealing with all of the above, plus the heavy taxation on a cash crop that you were forced to plant in the first place (indigo and the Taliban plant). You would understandably be pissed, which would spawn peasant revolutionary such as the Champaran Satyagraha (1917), the Pabna Agrarian Crisis (1873-76), the Indigo Rebellion (1859-60) and etc. (not including urban activists and intellectual supporters who would craft radical independence movements that would have a more national aspiration). And obviously, not even the supposed flourishing textile industry, trade, and commerce could change what’s happening around. In fact, the first one was probably obliterated for a few decades because of the infiltration of cheap British goods.
Chapter 229 - Operation Chengiz Khan
Operation Chengiz Khan
The strategic axis of an all-out war in South Asia never favored the Pakistanis. East Pakistan, or Bengal, was surrounded on all three sides by India. Indian troops were arrayed on each side of the border, ready to engulf the Communist stronghold in the outbreak of any war scenario. The Pakistani military always concentrated the bulk of their forces in West Pakistan, where the bulk of Pakistan's territorial disputes with India were (such as, but not limited to the Kashmir crisis that sparked the original war between the two). However, West Pakistan was in many ways a mess. The Communists had always been fairly unpopular in West Pakistan, with millions of refugees fleeing bouts of revolutionary violence that exploded. Operation Durga's Trident had ground daily life in the West to a halt - with most of the calls for revenge coming from the East.
Prominent Pakistani exiles in India, such as the former general Ayub Khan, informed his Indian supporters that the only way to defend East Pakistan would be in West Pakistan, an understanding which slowly permeated the entire armed forces of India. After all, the numerical superiority of India's armed forces seem so overwhelmingly, only in the West could it face a defeat based on tactical failure. Thus, the impetus was created to avoid such tactical failure. As it was understood, as long as they could hold the line in the West, East Pakistan would eventually fall, causing the regime to sue for peace. Significant Indian artillery and infantry formations were moved to the border with East Pakistan, with the doctirne emphasizing slow deliberate advances with artillery support in order to try to pulverize Pakistani army formations outside of cities - before slowly advancing into those cities. The extremely dense population of East Pakistan clearly necessitated these tactics.
The problem of course, is that the Pakistan which most Indians remembered had long since ceased to exist. Almost a decade had passed since the start of the Sifar Revolution. Estimates of the death toll varied, but it was generally understood to be in the hundreds of thousands. The olds had been smashed from statues, to old palaces, to even historical architecture. Even Urdu itself had been smashed. Being associated with "Indo-Aryan imperialism", Urdu was romanized and saw several Persian influences removed, which ironically brought it much closer to Hindi, something Pakistani authorities furiously denied even though it was true. The repeated governmental intrusions into Urdu made it relatively unpopular to many (since saying it in the wrong way opened people up to reprisal) - which ironically made English the de facto lingua franca of most West Pakistani elites. Bengali saw a rather lambasted romanization movement pushed by young radicals, but it was generally harder to say it in the "wrong way". Furthermore, demographic shifts (more refugees left West Pakistan than East Pakistan) quickly made Bengali the dominant language of Pakistan, alongside English.
This general program was more popular in East Pakistan than the West for many many reasons, something which Indian planners did not quite catch. Furthermore, with the bulk of the population in the East, the Pakistani popular militias were much much much larger in the East. Although the Pakistani Army was somewhat more numerous in the West, the popular militias were so numerous in the East, that the Pakistanis had in fact significantly more troops in the East in a significantly smaller territory.
Furthermore, the Pakistanis were receiving far more foreign tutelage than expected. One of the benefits of the joint nuclear program was that it also became a pretense for the nations of the Warsaw Pact, generally too scared to engage in air drills in actual Europe, to basically spend their time in Pakistan training. The last major war which saw significant air assets on both sides was the Three Years War - and that was a semi-limited war that saw relatively few attacks on air bases themselves. The North China-Israel war saw little such combat - nor did the UK-South Greece war. The Indonesian War and Burma War saw pretty one-sided aerial theaters. And so on and so on. As such, it was not as well understood how vulnerable unprotected air bases could be.
On a sleepy morning in 1968, waves of Pakistani MiG-21 and Sukhoi-Su-7BMs crossed into India - not from West Pakistan as widely expected, but urban airfields in hyper-densely populated East Pakistan and much to India shock - from Burma - in either case often cleverly disguised by civilian buildings. Significant Indian bomber assets had been moved from West Pakistan and even Ceylon to East Pakistan to bomb Communist revolutionaries to smithereens (which they did fairly effectively), but Indian fighter coverage was still heavily slanted in the West. The result was catastrophic. What few Indian fighters managed to make it into the air were knocked out almost immediately, as East German-produced airfield destroying bombs rendered most airfields in Eastern India inoperable. Bombers on the ground were blown up on the ground - and whatever few managed to make it into the air rarely lasted long.
In the span of roughly two days, wave after wave of SU-7s peppered air fields in Eastern India, destroying hundreds of planes (one estimate up to 600 airplanes), representing a large majority of the entire Indian Air Force, and essentially rendering inoperable every major air base in Eastern India. By the end of the second day, it was assessed that the Pakistani Air Force had achieved total superiority over Bengal and Northeast India, causing the Pakistanis to start targeting every Indian railway connecting Northeast India to the rest of the country. Although the rail hubs in Siliguri survived, the rails around the fortress did not. Communist revolutionary groups, hunted down by India's expert anti-guerilla operations, cheered as bombers came to their rescue.
The Indian Army had mustered around 360,000 men to surround the borders of East Pakistan. In contrast, the East Pakistanis only had around 130,000 regular soldiers (out of a total Pakistani army of around 290,000), but they were supported by around 130,000 popular militias, some of which had received significant training in Burma. The coup de grace came when due to complicated factional politics in the increasingly labyrinthine world of Burmese political struggles, the more moderate white flags encouraged the more adventurist red flags to join in the war simply to get rid of them.
Obviously the borders were significantly guarded, but the main concentration of troops was clearly organized in preparation for an offensive into East Bengal. Furthermore, significant assets were tired down in combatting both Communist rebels as well as various ethnic rebels in regions like Nagaland, Tripura, and Mizoram. Although most of the rebels were non-Communist, they had a line of communication with the Communists in Burma as they were their primary arms suppliers through the Burmese jungle.
Although Indian army troops rapidly switched to the defensive and prepared the best they could, the situation became quite daunting. The Pakistanis had total air superiority, Burmese militants flooded in from the border into a much more weakly defended back in cooperation with various ethnic militias, their armies had no viable supply lines, and they had mere hours to quickly switch to a defensive posture, build secondary lines, and entrench themselves before the Pakistanis assaulted. Indian army concentrations on the Western border of East Pakistan were able to supplied to some extent, but the other groupings alongside the northern and eastern borders were put in one of the worst positions a major army grouping had been put in since the Second World War - and superior Indian training held back relatively poorly trained Pakistani militias until ammo ran dry (supply by the sky and by the seas was also impossible - and the situation in Northeast India was essentially non-salvageable). The total collapse of the army corps in those sectors was inevitable as soon as regular Pakistani forces joined the fray (which they did late, to minimize losses.) Within a week, one after another, Indian army corps trapped in Northeast India surrendered, totaling somewhere between 250,000-300,000 soldiers - or almost a third of the entire Indian Armed Forces.
All in all, India retained significant numerical superiority over Pakistan - but those numbers were disproportionately tied up in West Pakistan - or Ceylon. In West Bengal, the numerical superiority had fallen to overwhelmingly favor Pakistan. This was unsurprisingly unanimously seen as a catastrophe in India, the second of three great disasters to befall India that year. Shock fell upon the Indian war cabinet as several generals urged the Prime Minister to desperately shift troops from Ceylon and West Pakistan to the east. She approved the request for Ceylon (leaving only barely enough to hold the line) - but to their shock, denied their request with regards to West Pakistan. They would be given another order entirely - to advance. They had prepped an offensive for too long to simply throw it away to defend the east. The Prime Minister simply told the generals to make do in the east. She had seen thousands of West Pakistani refugees flood into India by the day - and had long since decided to end the bloody Marxist experiment to the west, an extremely fateful decision for both nations.
In the capitals of the West, diplomats and strategists were in dismay over this outcome, but not inclined to panic. It was a disastrous start to a war, but in their view, the Indians would be paying the price, so they simply didn't care. Furthermore, they were confident superior Indian numbers and materials would grind down the Pakistanis in a matter of time. In some sense they were right...but in others, they were not.
...this is going to end with a Mushroom Cloud over somewhere in India, isn’t it?
Unless some sheer force has managed to make the Indians more incompetent than even the Egyptians in the six day war this is impossible. I won't say ASB as almost nothing truly is. But is it logically possible for a force that carried out such a complex mission like Durga's trishul to be this incompetent. Egypt knew of Operation Focus in 1967 from the Jordanians but did not react as they feared that they might inadvertently hit Field Marshall Amer's plane. ITTL from All the hills around East Pakistan or Burma the IAF would have a clear early warning and unlike the Egyptians, I do not think that they would be more incompetent than that.
There is also this contradiction that most of the IAF was in the west and still most of it got destroyed in the east. Is it really possible that on an opinion of a general who no longer has an Army one would be stupid enough to forget their flanks? I mean can the IAF looking West can they really forget the east? In 1971 they could afford to do so as all the PAF had was a squadron of old Sabres and still over a hundred aircraft were maintained. Runways damaged are not gone forever and within two days they would be back unless the PAF can keep on achieving an incredible sortie rate. Back to the incompetence part, the Indians are preparing for an offensive and not being alert for surprises from the East has to be ASB as even the Egyptians were not that incompetent, their doctrinal problems and distrust of the Jordanians did not allow an effective response and literally no one in history was that incompetent.
Even if the IAF is that incompetent why are assets from the west not transferred east to contest aerial superiority. Do not tell that all the runways are destroyed, first most of the targets cannot be reached from Burma as the effective combat range of the aircraft in strike configuration would not permit them to do so even to targets in eastern Assam which would be at the limit of their range in such missions. So not of the missions would have to be carried out from east Pakistan itself and as per your writing they would be caught by even half alert Indian Air Force. The coordination in the North East improved by the fact that the IAF Eastern command is located in Shillong. And from the hills they would be spotted practically as soon as they take off. Again it is impossible ASB even for airfields to be hidden in urban sprawl. An airfield will be known as the wide clearing required for the runway no matter how hard you try to conceal and the associated infrastructure to maintain jets will be known. The Egyptian Air Force did not possess strong airfield defence unlike the IAF and OTL PAF which had a large variety of anti aircraft guns placed on the approaches to the runway to prevent exactly that sort of thing which made keeping Dhaka airport closed extremely hard for IAF even with aerial supremacy I am for the sake of the story not even going into IAF's obsession with aircraft bunkers at every airfield of worth. The next thing is the area of operation, Northeast India and East India is huge compared to the small part of Egypt and next door Jordan and Syria that the Israeli's attacked. Two days of relentless sorties would still not be enough to hit all the targets to neutralise the IAF let alone going for secondary infrastructure targets.
Another absurdity is entire army corps surrendering. How can the Pakistani army be everywhere at once facing a three times numerous force ? No matter even if they have a Rommel it is not possible given the disparity in numbers. They can make a sweep into Agartala make headway into the Barak Valley and that's about it. Hitting and breaking into densely populated West Bengal with numerical inferiority is also a very very tall order with the Eastern Army Command in Calcutta.
As always, thanks for your feedback. So a few responses:
1. A lot of things you say are correct about OTL India/Pakistan in 1971, but the obvious response is that it's not OTL. For example, a lot of the improved tactics of the IAF, such as strong airfield defense, were adopted as a result of 1) experience in the 1965 Indopak war and 2) the IAF looking at what happened to Egypt in the Six Days War. ITL, neither of those are true.
2. The Pakistanis aren't that numerically inferior on the specific battlefield at hand (the Northern/Eastern borders of Bangladesh). We are really looking at 250,000 soldiers on both sides - with some number of Burmese troops decisively tilting it towards Pakistan. So at least in the specific battle here, the Pakistanis have a numerical superiority.
3. The OTL Egyptians weren't actually incompetent at all - and neither are the ITL Indians. A lot of surprises happen to people who are basically the first ones to figure out. The Americans got caught off-guard by North Chinese infiltration assault tactics. The British got caught off-guard by the first deployment of anti-ship missiles. Here, it's the Indians instead of the Egyptians getting caught off-guard by the new strategic calculus of air-to-air warfare.
OTL, the Egyptians were actually quite competent - Egypt's defeat of the Bar Lev Line proved that they were in fact actually quite a competent military and that Israel's existence was genuinely threatened in its various wars with them.
IAF started building hardened aircraft shelters since the late Fifties when that thing became common but there weren't enough funds after the 1962 war the funds became available and many were completed due to red tape and bureaucracy after the 1965 war leading to the erroneous conclusion that they were built due to war time experience and operation Focus and as for defences using anti-aircraft guns, it is literally a no brainer and every airforce of any worth has them. Everyone knows that military aircraft are the most vulnerable when they are on the ground since the Second World War, given that a vast portion of the losses took place on the ground and the soviet airforce lost 5000 aircraft in Barbarossa to the Luftwaffe on the ground. So it is expected that your airbases would be attacked and at the very minimum pom poms and ack acks alone should be generally present like OTL, with most barrels dating back to the Second World War. That alone disrupts the aim and increases the survivability to a great extent.
You only mentioned that there are 130,000 regulars, who are the only ones that count. militiamen cannot stand up to regular army and have a tendency to break and flee and their most effective use is as human waves. We have seen that again and again and again from the current Ukraine war, the Iraq Iran war, the German Invasion of Poland and even earlier.
There's the thing that the Egyptians weren't caught off guard they were warned by the Jordanians that the Israeli Airforce was heading towards them. They did not put their air defence on alert for fear of hitting a single plane carrying to Field Marshall Amer. They did not scramble their jets which could have dramatically lessened the impact. They practically learned nothing from 1956 when their air force was also suffered 200 aircraft lost on the ground. Forget hardened shelter, they did not even install anti-aircraft guns. The Iraqis did better during the Six-Day war. The Jordanians did as well as they could given their puny little airforce. It is not insulting but what it showed is that a politically involved officer class coupled with poor relations between the lower and upper ranks leads and the rank and file to an ineffective force. The Egyptian Air Force for the remainder of the war generated 1-2 sorties a day compared to 3-4 by the Israelis and they wondered how Israel had so many aircraft.
Now let's come back to land the Egyptians ahead of the six-day war changed their plans 4 times in the span of a month requiring many redeployments and lowered morale and assumed that the Israelis would attack from the south ignoring the warning that the Israelis were building up along Gaza. Their tank crews drove in straight lines instead of manoeuvring which made them perfect targets for the Israelis. On being flanked they even did not turn to present their frontal armour and rather attempted to turn their turrets slowly making them perfect targets.
As Iraqi military became more and more involved politically, they too lost their capability. When Israel attacked the Osirak reactor, they flew over King Hussein's yacht who promptly deduced the target and informed the Iraqis, who again ignored it and were caught by surprise. The reality is that it is not a new strategic calculus but a very old one and you suffer if you forget the basics or negligently avoid the due diligence.
The day Bar Lev line was breached 90,000 Egyptians crossed the canal. 20,000 crossed in the initial attack. How many men did the Israeli's have? 450! It is very very hard to lose against that kind of odds. And what happened when they decided to venture beyond the anti-aircraft cover? Again the same thing that led to their defeat multiple times before.
Another relatively less known fact is the Egyptian's adventures in Yemen where they took horrible losses and did not even bother to obtain topographical maps before a military operation and handed aerial navigation maps to ground troops. Naturally due to that and the inability of a political military to take offensive actions they suffered huge losses. Such was the defeat that when the Americans suffered in Vietnam, the Egyptians called it America's Yemen.
Israel's existence was never really threatened. 1948 was the only time they could have been beaten but the Arabs did not commit enough forces until it was too late and the Israelis, matched them in manpower and equipment by the end of the war. During the Six-day War too, manpower wise the size was nearly the same and only in terms of sheer numbers of tanks and aircraft that the Arabs were ahead, the Syrians even fielding Panzer IVs. Again the same in the Yom Kippur War, the Egyptians were afraid to leave the air defence zone, and the Syrians embarrassed themselves in the Golan. and when finally the Israelis breached the Egyptian defences and crossed the canal, a major military feat in its own right and would not have been possible had the Egyptian Army taken steps to contain the breach at least even on the western bank of the canal but it was an utter disaster with the third army encircled. Syrians, the less said of them the better. Had the war not ended even Damascus was under threat and neither the Iraqis nor the Jordanians(due to numbers) were of any help. Had the Egyptian Military command been of a standard of the Jordanians, the disaster of Operation Focus would not have occurred. Even if they wee as competent as the Iraqis the scale would had been far less.
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First time I see Pakistan actually winning in a TL. It usually just gets annexed by India or it just collapse
Besides guarding the borders with South China, Pakistan and Burma, they also have to deal with insurgents in Ceylon and other areas in India
TBF, the Indian armed forces are also more stretched thin than OTL.
Besides guarding the borders with South China, Pakistan and Burma, they also have to deal with insurgents in Ceylon and other areas in India
Inb4 (Indira) Gandhi declares that her words are backed by nuclear weapons ITTL.
Is this the end of the timeline? I heard that the author got kicked a couple of months ago. So I was wondering if we could call this timeline dead.
I doubt it. This timeline has entered a slowdown state, but still has at least one update each year.
It was kick not ban so they could continue this TL if have yet intrest/idea/time. Writer will continue or then not. It is their decision. It is not unusual that TL not be dated for months.
For sure, especially Cold War TLs. The interconnectedness of everything and the sheer amount of research necessary can lead to a lot of mental fatigue.
I hope this TL does continue though, its very interesting.