1971 was an exceptional year for India for the development and exercise of its national power dynamics. It had won and outstanding military victory against a foreign power the like of which it had not known in the centuries of the sub-continental history before it. Politically and diplomatically it kept at bay the rest of the world while its soldiers decisively defended its vital national interests, decisively defeated Pakistan’s military regime, and liberated the atrociously oppressed people of the erstwhile East Pakistan to become and independent Bangladesh.

The Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and the late field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw, decisively led the nation to use the vital instruments of statecraft and the nation’s armed power to give India a brilliant military victory that the nation had not experienced in the centuries gone by.

For the first time after the independence of India there was complete synergy between the political executive and its military power. When all other moves had failed, the soldiers created the necessary conditions for a political initiative to promote the long-term national purpose of peace with Pakistan. Unfortunately in the post war negotiations the political executive failed to build upon what the soldiers had won on the field to battle. Even more so in the years that have followed, the political executive and its vital military instrument of state power are being driven apart.