Every December 16, India celebrates Vijay Diwas, the day in 1971 when Pakistan’s Eastern Command signed the instrument of surrender in Dhaka, and a new country called Bangladesh came into being. The victory is remembered as one of India’s finest military moments. Schoolbooks credit Indira Gandhi’s leadership, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw’s strategic genius, the Soviet Union’s diplomatic cover, and the courage of the Mukti Bahini, Bangladesh’s guerrilla resistance movement.

Almost no one mentions Israel.

That omission is not an accident. It is a product of the same diplomatic awkwardness that defined the India-Israel relationship for four decades: a closeness that both sides found convenient to deny in public, even as they quietly depended on each other when it mattered most.

The World India Found Itself In During 1971

To understand what Israel did, you first need to understand how isolated India was.

On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown on Bengali civilians in East Pakistan. What followed was one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Estimates of the death toll range between 300,000 and 3 million people. Roughly 10 million refugees poured across the border into India, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that New Delhi could not ignore.

India began training and arming the Mukti Bahini in the months that followed, preparing for a military intervention it knew was coming. What it urgently needed were heavy mortars, the kind of artillery essential for supporting guerrilla operations. And it needed them quickly, before the monsoon season ended and military conditions on the ground changed.

The United States was not going to help. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, operating a deeply cynical Cold War calculation that required Pakistani cooperation to open their secret back channel to China, had publicly tilted toward Islamabad. Nixon privately called Indira Gandhi “a bitch” in recorded Oval Office conversations. The US had imposed an arms embargo on India. When war finally broke out formally on December 3, 1971, Nixon sent Task Force 74 of the US Seventh Fleet, led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, toward the Bay of Bengal in what was an undisguised attempt to intimidate India into a ceasefire.

The Soviet Union pushed back, dispatching a naval group of cruisers, destroyers, and nuclear-armed submarines from Vladivostok to shadow the American fleet. For a brief, terrifying period in December 1971, the Bay of Bengal was the most dangerous body of water on earth.

But none of that resolves the specific problem India faced in the months before the formal war. It needed mortars and ammunition. And it needed a country willing to supply them quietly, without diplomatic fanfare, without demanding a public acknowledgment, and without fear of antagonizing the United States or the Arab world.

That country was Israel, a state India did not even officially have diplomatic relations with.

The Man Who Made It Happen

His name was Shlomo Zabludowicz. Born around 1914 into a rabbinical family in Łódź, Poland, he survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. His parents and all his siblings did not. After the war, he made his way through Sweden to Finland, where he built a business career, eventually co-founding Soltam Systems, a prominent Israeli defense manufacturer, in the early 1950s. He operated internationally through Establissements Salgad, a firm registered in Liechtenstein, which had served as a discreet conduit for Israeli arms to sensitive clients across the world.

Crucially, Salgad had already quietly supplied Israeli arms to India during both the 1962 and 1965 wars with China and Pakistan, respectively. The channel was established, trusted, and deniable.

Zabludowicz knew P.N. Haksar, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, from Haksar’s earlier stint in London as Deputy High Commissioner. That personal connection became the bridge.

According to Haksar’s meticulously maintained papers, now held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, and drawn upon extensively by both American journalist Gary Bass in his book “The Blood Telegram” and Indian historian Srinath Raghavan in “1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh,” Haksar reached out to Zabludowicz in the summer of 1971. On August 3, 1971, Zabludowicz cut short his summer vacation and flew to London to meet Indian Deputy High Commissioner Prakash Kaul. When asked to expedite weapons deliveries, he promised that “as before, he will do what is possible and not disappoint.” He had already spoken to the Israeli government and was, in his words, “hopeful of airlifting ammunition and mortars in September.”

What happened next exceeded what he had promised. Zabludowicz not only diverted a consignment of heavy mortars originally produced for Iran to India instead but also persuaded the Israeli government to release additional quantities directly from Israeli Defense Forces stocks. He dispatched Israeli military instructors along with the first consignment.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was, as Raghavan writes, “eager to accede to Indira Gandhi’s request.”

What Israel Said Out Loud Before Acting in Private

The arms supply was not Israel’s only contribution to the 1971 war effort. Months before the mortars arrived, Israel had already made its position on the conflict unmistakably clear in a way that no other country, other than India itself, had chosen to do.

In June 1971, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban stood before the Knesset and delivered a full-throated condemnation of Pakistan’s military campaign in East Bengal. “It is difficult to measure precisely the size of the catastrophe that has swept that country,” Eban said, “but there is no doubt that this is the largest and most terrible human spectacle on earth at this time.” He spoke of Israel’s special obligation, as a people that had suffered genocide, to recognize and name mass atrocities wherever they occurred. He called Pakistan’s campaign “a human tragedy amounting to genocide.”

This was not a careful, hedged diplomatic statement. This was Israel, a country of three million people, standing up in its parliament and calling out a Muslim-majority nation for genocide, while the United States was calling the atrocities in East Pakistan an “internal affair” of Pakistan.

When I read Eban’s speech for the first time, something about the plain moral clarity of it stayed with me. Here was a country that the world’s most powerful nations had spent decades trying to isolate, calling out an atrocity that those same powerful nations were choosing to enable. There is something worth sitting with in that.

The Price Golda Meir Asked For

Israel’s help was not given without expectation of something in return. Golda Meir was a practical woman. She asked Zabludowicz to relay a message to Indira Gandhi: that Israel was helping India at a moment of real difficulty, as it had helped before, and that it “believed she will know to appreciate our help.”

The implication was clear. In exchange for the mortars, the instructors, and the quiet support, Israel wanted what it had been seeking from India since 1950: full diplomatic recognition and the establishment of formal relations.

Indira Gandhi took the weapons. She did not grant Israel full diplomatic relations.

It would take 21 more years, until January 29, 1992, when Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao finally opened embassies in Tel Aviv and New Delhi.

The historian P.R. Kumaraswamy, who has written more carefully about this relationship than almost anyone else, has called the period between 1950 and 1992 one of “recognition without relations.” In 1971, that policy reached a particularly sharp point. India was willing to accept Israeli weapons, Israeli instructors, and Israeli moral solidarity at its moment of greatest military need but was not willing to acknowledge any of it.

The Irony Nobody Mentions

There is one aspect of the 1971 story that I find genuinely astonishing, and that almost never comes up.

Bangladesh does not recognize Israel and has again restored the “except Israel” passport wording. Furthermore, Bangladesh restricts travel to Israel, including through passport limitations.

Bangladesh came into existence because India fought a war that was supplied, in part, with Israeli weapons. The heavy mortars that helped arm the Mukti Bahini, the guerrilla force whose resistance made Bangladesh possible, were diverted from Iranian orders by a Jewish Auschwitz survivor on instructions from Golda Meir. Israel’s foreign minister called Pakistan’s campaign against Bengali civilians a genocide before most of the world was willing to use that word.

And Bangladesh, the country that exists in part because of that assistance, refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

History, in that particular corner, has a very dark sense of humor.

What 1971 Actually Established

The 1971 episode deserves more attention in the India-Israel story not because it was strategically decisive on its own but because of what it revealed about the nature of the relationship. Two countries with no formal diplomatic ties, separated by decades of Indian public hostility toward Israel, maintained a functioning covert alliance through every major Indian military crisis of the 20th century: 1962, 1965, and 1971. Israel showed up each time. It asked for something in return each time. And India took what it needed and kept the relationship in the dark each time.

When formal ties finally came in 1992, and when Modi stood in Jerusalem in 2017 and called this a partnership built on shared values, there was a quieter, less comfortable truth beneath the ceremony. The partnership had been real, functional, and consequential for decades before anyone was willing to say so in public.

The war India doesn’t credit Israel for created a country that won’t credit Israel at all.

And the country that kept the relationship secret the longest eventually became one of Israel’s biggest arms markets.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)