Indira Gandhi on Nazi analogies

“In London, exhausted, Gandhi seemed close to breaking under the strain. She once again went clangingly heavy on the Nazi analogies, saying that she could no more meet with Yahya before the woes of the Bengali refugees were addressed than Winston Churchill could have met with Adolf Hitler before the end of World War II. When a British reporter challenged her for supporting the Mukti Bahini, for a moment she seemed almost overcome with anger and grief, blinking rapidly and swallowing hard, but not faltering. Did quieting the situation “mean we support the genocide?” she shot back with steely fury. “When Hitler was on the rampage, why didn’t you tell us keep quiet and let’s have peace in Germany and let the Jews die, or let Belgium die, let France die?””

“She saw no signs of political accommodation from Yahya. India, she wrote, was “greatly embarrassed” by the recent news of fresh U.S. arms shipments to Pakistan... —she reached shocking rhetorical heights: “Would the League of Nations Observers have succeeded in persuading the refugees who fled from Hitler’s tyranny to return even whilst the pogroms against the Jews and political opponents of Nazism continued unabated?” This was hardly the first Indian use of Nazi imagery. Countless Indian officials had accused Pakistan of genocide; Jayaprakash Narayan spoke of a “Hitlerian junta” in Islamabad; and Haksar had privately written that Pakistan’s propaganda was “based, as always, on the pattern set by Gobbels.” But here was the prime minister of India, in a formal letter to the president of the United States, comparing a U.S. ally to Nazi Germany.”