During the war in East Pakistan in 1971, some ten million refugees fled to India. Photograph by Raymond Depardon / Magnum

“Did you read today about what America is doing?” one of the Indian characters in Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey” asks. “CIA bastards are up to their usual anus-fingering tactics.” The novel is set in 1971, the year that India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war and helped create a new nation-state—Bangladesh—from the Bengali-speaking province of East Pakistan. Like Mistry’s characters, Indians were confused and incensed by President Richard Nixon’s support for Pakistan’s military rulers and by his hostility toward India. After all, Pakistan had launched a murderous campaign against the Bengalis, leaving India’s impoverished and volatile border states to cope with ultimately some ten million refugees fleeing the carnage. The total number of the dead is unknown, but Bangladesh’s official estimate is three million. (Pakistan’s clearly understated figure is twenty-six thousand.)

When, during the short ensuing war between India and Pakistan, Nixon implicitly threatened India by ordering a nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal, millions of Indian minds went dark with geopolitical paranoia. Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, became, as Mistry puts it, “names to curse with.” Mistry’s protagonist amplifies a commonplace conjecture: “The CIA plan” involves supporting Pakistan against India, because India’s friendship with the Soviet Union “makes Nixon shit, lying awake in bed and thinking about it. His house is white, but his pyjamas become brown every night.”

Little did such Indians know that their wildest suppositions were indeed being ratified by Nixon, himself a gifted conspiracy theorist, who wholly reciprocated Indian antipathy. The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. But it is still startling to hear Nixon musing that what “the Indians,” then lucklessly hosting millions of refugees, “need—what they really need—is . . . a mass famine.” Kissinger loyally chimes in: “They’re such bastards.”

The explanation for Nixon’s bizarre apportionment of blame lies in a complicated network of regional loyalties. Pakistan was a trusted American ally, to be protected against any threats from India and the Soviet Union, two countries that were on the verge of signing a “friendship treaty.” Nixon and Kissinger tried to persuade China, which they were hoping to befriend, to open up a front against India, its enemy since the Sino-Indian War of 1962. When India moved decisively against the overstretched Pakistani military—the war ended in just two weeks—the Oval Office, like the alleys of Calcutta, became feverish with speculation. The White House tapes contain this extraordinary exchange during the war’s final days:

Kissinger: If the Soviets move against them [the Chinese] and then we don’t do anything, we’ll be finished. Nixon: So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?

That’s indeed what Kissinger meant. “That will be the final showdown,” he said. Nixon quickly backed off from “Armageddon,” as he called it, but thinking seriously about this option evidently had its consolations. “At least we’re coming off like men,” Kissinger said. Nixon, too, was pleased to advertise that “the man in the White House” is “tough.” In this Washington bubble, reality had receded. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her review of the Pentagon Papers, later that year, the assertion of American machismo had weirdly supplanted all strategic and military aims and interests. The U.S. had to behave like the greatest power on earth for no other reason than to convince the world of it.

How did the President of the United States find himself contemplating nuclear assault against the Soviet Union on behalf of Mao Zedong’s China while still embroiled in Vietnam? And why did he choose not to abandon Pakistani allies who were clearly guilty of mass killings? Two absorbing new books—Srinath Raghavan’s “1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh” (Harvard) and Gary Bass’s “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide” (Knopf)—describe, from different perspectives, this strangely neglected episode of the Cold War. Raghavan covers a range of mentalities, choices, and decisions in Islamabad, Moscow, Beijing, Washington, New Delhi, and other capitals. Bass focusses mainly on American actions and inaction. His previous book, “Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention,” has been cited by advocates of a United Nations doctrine, known as Responsibility to Protect, that enjoins the international community to intervene when a state cannot protect its citizens from genocide or war crimes. His heroes are such Americans as Archer Blood, the consul-general in Dhaka, whose office lambasted Washington for supporting a murderous Pakistani regime, in a cable subsequently known as the Blood telegram.

“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy,” the telegram said. “Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. . . . Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.” Kenneth Keating, the U.S. Ambassador to India, likewise called on the Nixon Administration to “promptly, publicly, and prominently deplore this brutality.” But Nixon stonewalled Keating, and recalled Archer Blood from Dhaka. He and Kissinger showed contempt for dissenting American voices both within the Administration and in the Democratic opposition and the media. Bass draws up a severe indictment of Nixon and Kissinger, holding them responsible for “significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis.” He writes, “In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda.”

This is not how Nixon would have liked to be remembered. By the nineteen-seventies, he had abandoned his reflexive anti-Communism of the forties and fifties. He had come to pride himself on taking a “long view” of things, believing that a balance of power, rather than the standoffs of the Cold War, was the best way to insure international stability. He and Kissinger were pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and laying the groundwork for his spectacular visit to China, in 1972. Nixon also fancied himself, after several tours to the region, to be a “man who knows Asia.” But, as Bass’s book makes clear, neither he nor Kissinger took a deep interest in Pakistan. In 1947, the violent partition of British India had divided the subcontinent into separate homelands for the Hindus (India) and the Muslims (Pakistan). Pakistan was created out of two regions that were separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory and that had little in common except religion. West Pakistan’s Punjabi-speaking military-feudal élite looked down on the Bengali-speaking natives of East Pakistan, whom they saw as racially inferior. They treated the province, which contained more than half of Pakistan’s population, as little better than a colony, a source of revenue for West Pakistan and a captive market for its goods.