The Indian Way of Humanitarian Intervention

This Article seeks to restore India's 1971 war for Bangladesh to ongoing debates about the legality of humanitarian intervention, using recently declassified documents from Indian and U.S. archives. This momentous case reveals India's approach to international law, showing how the world's largest democracy and a major Asian postcolonial power engaged with legal norms of intervention, widening the discussion of intervention beyond Western states. Although some political theorists have viewed India's 1971 war against Pakistan as a justifiable humanitarian intervention, international legal authorities at the time chastised India for violating Pakistan's sovereignty and threatening the international order. Rather than a Nehruvian insistence on non-intervention, India's legal approach showed considerable convergence with the arguments used by Western liberal democracies in the 1990s. India, with a complex mix of strategic and altruistic motives, justified its intervention with a series of interlocking claims: (i) an argument from human rights, (ii) an argument from genocide, (iii) an argument from self-determination, and (iv) an argument from Indian sovereignty. While India sought multilateral support, it was widely condemned at the United Nations for an illegal unilateral intervention, with no prospect of a Chapter VII resolution to legitimize its policies. This outcome was partially due to weaknesses in India's legal case, but more the result of Cold War hostility toward India from both the United States and China. Looking forward from 1971, the Bangladesh war might be considered as part of a controversial but evolving pattern of state practice of humanitarian intervention.