Overthrowing Tashkent: the demise of the Soviet-American consensus over the Asian subcontinent following the Second Kashmir War

The partition of India of 1947 brought British imperial rule of the subcontinent to an end, creating two new states, the republics of India and Pakistan. Simultaneously, the United States and the Soviet Union, the preeminent military, political and economic powers of the postwar world, continued to expand their influence into the postcolonial nations of Asia and Africa. This thesis examines the efforts to incorporate India and Pakistan into the rival power blocs of the United States and Soviet Union, and the consequences those efforts had following the Second Kashmir War of 1965. Its findings demonstrate the complex power relationship that existed between the nuclear powers and the postcolonial nations moving into the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, in which both the United States and Soviet Union abandoned their previous position of mediation between India and Pakistan, instead tacitly endorsing the third Indo-Pakistani War.