> You really need to read up on Indian history my friend.

Probably true. I need to read up on almost every topic in existence.

> Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence

Please see my response to AkshayGenius at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12866503

> At that time, India was not even a nuclear power

That's not relevant to the veracity of the "was never the aggressor" claim, which was not conditioned on nuclear anything.

> Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

It's possible that the sources cited in Wikipedia for this claim are all Pakistani propaganda, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukti_Bahini#cite_note-47 doesn't obviously look like it to me.

> With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict.

Now we are back to deciding at what point national interest justifies military action, yes?

I'm not claiming the action was not justified, because I do not have sufficient knowledge to make that determination. But the original post I replied to wasn't talking about "justified" aggression either.

> What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, and maybe in this case it's not, then the situation here was as follows:

1) The territory in question was disputed, and not generally permanently occupied by either side.

2) Pakistan was granting permission to mountaineering expeditions into the territory, based on various maps claiming that parts of the territory were in Pakistan as opposed to correctly showing that the border was not agreed on.

3) India responded by sending a military-sponsored (but not clear whether "military" in the sense of "armed") expedition .

4) Pakistan decided to establish a more permanent military presence in the area.

5) India found out about this plan and acted first to move its military into the area.

6) Pakistan attempted to dislodge the Indian troops.

etc. As I said, hard to decide who exactly is the aggressor here, as in most slowly-escalating disputed-area conflicts.

> I can counter all your points with just 1 point

I think you misunderstood my points. You seem to be responding to a strawman "India is an aggressive country out to get its neighbors" claim that I never made. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I think India has done a pretty good job of not being a military aggressor, and I think Pakistan has clearly been the aggressor a number of times in wars with India. I also think the claim that India was _never_ an aggressor is wrong.

> You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

That's about the 1965 war, not the 1971 one. It also says India did not occupy Lahore, though it did get quite close to doing so. But to your larger point....

> Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

Assuming we're still talking about the 1965 war, Wikipedia's article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965 claims:

"Hostilities between the two countries ended after a United Nations mandated ceasefire was declared following diplomatic intervention by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration."

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965#Cea... talks about some of the same.

If we're talking about that situation, then the 1956 capture and return of the Gaza Strip and Sinai by Israel is a similar situation.

Going a bit further back in time, Prussia returned almost all of the territory that it controlled at the end of the Franco-Prussian war of 1872, though they extracted a monetary indemnity for doing so. Even further back, in 1814 the Sixth Coalition restored the territorial integrity of France after exiling Napoleon.

Again, India acted honorably here, and such actions are reasonably rare. They're not unique.

> Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Sure. At the end of World War I, millions of POWs were released by the various belligerents. Numbers from back then are not very reliable, but http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_o... lists somewhere in the 300k-400k range for just German prisoners of war held in France.

Returning prisoners of war at the end of the conflict is the _normal_ thing that happens. Not always, of course; an obvious counterexample is the Soviet Union after World War II, and to a lesser extent the other Allies at the end of that war. But nevertheless, it's the expected behavior. Obviously it's to India's credit that it did that, but it's a much lower bar than the return of territory, in my view.