THE WAR IN BENGAL : INDIA ATTACKS
NEWSWEEK December 6, 1971
When nations go to war, they almost invariably claim to be acting out of the purest motives. Last week, as India’s leaders met in the high-domed central hall of the New Delhi Parliament, there was much pious table-thumping and jingoistic rhetoric to justify an attack against Pakistan. “If we have to silence the Pak guns,” vowed Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram' “we are not going to stop at the border but go inside Pakistan. We do not care how far inside we have to go if it becomes a matter of our self defense.” With that moral mandate thousands of Indian troops swarmed across the border into East Pakistan and the stage was set for a third round in the seemingly endless strife between the sub-continent’s two arch-enemies.
Inexorably, the two nations appeared to be heading for a wholly unnecessary war, one for which each side would have to shoulder an equal share of guilt. Over the past nine months, the Pakistani Government of President Mohammed Yahya Khan had indiscriminately slaughtered more than a million of its subjects in a cruel and myopic attempt to prevent autonomy for the Bengalis of East Pakistan. And India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had launched a calculated campaign to dismember Pakistan, turn its eastern wing into the client state of Bangla Desh and free itself of the burden of caring for nearly 10 million Bengali refugees who had fled Yahya’s reign of terror. As one diplomat in New Delhi cynically put it, “What was seen as a liability here a few months ago, is now seen as an opportunity.” What made the steady drift toward war even more tragic was that the one man who undoubtedly could stop it—Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—was being tried by Pakistan for treason, and Yahya Khan steadfastly refused to free him.
Worse still, none of the world’s major powers seemed able—or even very willing—to exert the kind of influence that could stop the conflict. Despite Washington’s $4 billion worth of assistance to Pakistan—aid largely designed to maintain leverage with Yahya Khan’s government—the U.S. appeared powerless to sway the Pakistani leader. And the Soviet Union, notwithstanding its recently signed friendship treaty with India, had no better luck reining in Mrs. Gandhi. Thus unchecked, the rush to war was on, even though both countries had much to lose by it. “All good Moslems believe they will go to a better reward if they die in battle,” sighed a Western diplomat, “and Yahya may just want to go that way.” As for India, it seemed determined to risk plunging 20 per cent of the world’s population into chaos in order to realise its long-cherished hope of becoming the unchallenged power on the sub-continent and a giant to rival China for predominance in Asia.
The clash between India and Pakistan had been a long time coming. Like a pair of angry cats, the two armies had been circling and spitting at each other for months before the first lunge came. At scattered points along the 1,300-mile frontier between India and East Pakistan, troops stood poised while each side probed and harassed the other with artillery and mortar barrages, piecemeal sniping and an occasional small fire fight. All the while, the Indian and Pakistani governments loudly accused each other of provocations and self- righteously maintained that they themselves would never be the aggressors. But, in fact, India was preparing to strike. And though New Delhi barred all reporters from border areas to conceal its troop movements, NEWSWEEK’S: Senior Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, along with a correspondent of The New York Times, managed last week to slip through the Indian net. De Borchgrave’s report:
There was not a sign of war as we drove the 54 miles from Calcutta to the border town of Bangaon no military traffic, no Indian Army units, no thudding artillery. When the road turned east, at a sign reading “Pak Border—Two Miles,” we followed it until an Indian major stopped us, explaining that the Pakistanis were firing on the road just ahead. The major took us down a roadside ditch toward the border, and though we could hear the tumble of distant shelling and the whistle of an occasional bullet as we walked, the area was still calm. Where is the fighting, we asked, and the major replied : “All quiet on this side. A bit of automatic stuff at night, a few mortar rounds but otherwise no movement.” At the border itself, Indian troops were well dug in and sturdy red-brick walls blocked the road. But beyond the walls, a sign was still visible, and it read: “Welcome to Pakistan.”
Bound For The Border
But tranquillity suddenly vanished as we were driving back to Bangaon. In choking clouds of red dust, an awesome convoy was churning toward the border. Lumbering Soviet- built trucks towed twelve 105-mm. artillery pieces, turbaned Sikhs manned a steady stream of jeeps mounted with recoil- less guns and cumbersome trailers hauled pontoon-bridge equipment. We slipped in among a seemingly endless procession of trucks, each jammed with soldiers in full combat gear and automatic weapons. Everything from amphibious armored personnel carriers to furniture for command posts was in the convoy, and it all indicated that the Indian Army was positioning itself for an incursion into Pakistan. Even though we were waved off the road just before the border, the army made no effort to conceal the border-bound caravan or India’s intentions. “My men have been waiting to move forward for a month,” one officer told us as we joined him for tea. “Their spirits are high.”
It was patently obvious from the unceasing convoy as well as from conversation with the field commanders that India, for all its public proclamations to the contrary, was finally lending the Mukti Bahini guerrillas a direct hand. After our observation of the Indian troop movements, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi acknowledged for the first time that her army had been given the go-ahead to cross the Pakistani border “in selfdefence.” But in fact, India’s tactics were more like the doctrine of “hot pursuit.” For even before we saw the convoy, Indian forces had crossed the border north of Ban- gaon and destroyed thirteen Pakistani tanks. And, in another clear indication that India was stepping up its involvement in the battle for Bengal, an Indian Cabinet minister told me: “There is no time now for interim or compromise solutions. Speed is now essential.”
For the time being, however, India refrained from mount¬ing an all out offensive. Instead, New Delhi’s tactics seemed designed to tie down large numbers of Pakistani troops with a series of quick, limited strikes and thereby pave the way for the Bengali guerrillas to seize control of more territory. To that end, the Indians reportedly thrust into the districts of Sylhet, Comilla and the Chittagong Hills along the eastern border, as well as pushing in from the west towards Jessore. Lying in the midst of a rich agricultural plain, Jessore is regarded as a key city in the rebels’ plan to take over East Pakistan, and India’s offensive seemed to. be aimed at speeding up that timetable. With the area around the city in Indian and Mukti Bahini hands, NEWSWEEK’S Tony Clifton flew into Jessore on a Pakistani Air Force plane and cabled this report:
It is obvious that the Indians are using regular troops, tanks and heavy guns to make incursions into Pakistan’s territory. In fact, when I flew into Jessore, Indian soldiers Mill held a salient of land west of Jessore and had the city’s airport under sporadic fire. I was quickly hustled off to the Pakistani headquarters where Maj.-Gen. M. H. Ansari the sector commander, described the Indian attack: “They came in strength, two brigades supported by a tank regiment and artillery fire from 130-mm. Russian guns. They pushed in about 6 miles. That was too much, so we counter-attacked and pushed them back almost to the border.” When I asked if the attackers could have been Bengali guerrillas, Ansari scoffed. “These weren’t rebels. They were using tanks and heavy guns and the rebels haven’t got that sort of weaponry These things don’t grow on trees.” He paused and added, somewhat wistfully, Although I wish they did because then we’d get some too.”
A Thankless Task
Ansari claimed that his forces had killed some 200 to 300 enemy soldiers and added: “We captured uniforms and papers which showed they were regular Indian troops. They came from the Fourteenth Punjab Regiment.” While refusing to say how many of his own men had been killed, he admitted that casualties were substantial: “They weren’t throwing rose petals at us, you know”. Even though Ansari said that he had driven the Indians back toward the border, no Pakistani official denies that the area surrounding Jessore is effectively in enemy hands. And wresting any part of East Pakistan back from a guerrilla force will be a thankless task for the army. Although the monsoons have ended, vast areas of land are still covered with water, and literally hundreds of rivers and streams crisscross the terrain. The few roads that do exist are puny tracks, all highly vulnerable to guerrilla attack.
An equal threat to the government exists on the opposite side of East Pakistan in the Comilla district. I flew into a Pakistani headquarters near the town of Brahmanbaria where army officers charged that Indian troops had mounted a major battle. The Pakistani commander led me to a rail road truck piled high with dead bodies and showed of! the weapons he had captured. While there was no way for me to tell whether the decomposing bodies were those of Bengali J guerrillas or ‘Indian regulars, the rifles, automatic weapons) and light machine guns were undeniably of those types used by the Indian Army. The brigadier had no doubts that his enemies were Indians, and he was almost gleeful when he described the battle. “We killed between 300 and 400 men, with three times that many wounded,” he crowed. “We destroyed the Nineteenth Punjab Battalion and badly mauled another.”
The brigadier’s bloodthirsty attitude was thoroughly typical of the feelings that Pakistanis and Indians have for each other. For the two states have been uneasy and often hostile neighbors since they were carved out of British-ruled India in 1947. The surgery that created Pakistan as a bifurcated Moslem state divided by 1,000 miles of Hindu India was hardly performed before countless thousands of people were slaughtered in the indescribably bloody “partition riots.” And although the festering hatreds born of differing religions and customs were kept leashed for much of the following quarter century, the open warfare that broke out between India and Pakistan over Kashmir in 1948-49 and again in 1965 ensured that the mutual antagonisms would not die.
Nor is the - India-Pakistan enmity the only hostility that scars the troubled sub-continent. Just as much antagonism exists between Pakistan’s two principal races the Punjabis who dominate West Pakistan and control both government and army, and the Bengalis of East Pakistan who bitterly resented the west’s economic exploitation of their prosperous agricultural land and their status as a subjugated people. When the Bengalis rallied behind Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in last December’s national election, they won a clear majority of seats in the nation’s parliament. But Yahya Khan postponed the parliamentary opening, provoking a general strike and murderous Bengali rioting in East Pakistan. Yahya’s response was brutal. He loosed the Punjabi army on the East in a terror campaign that eventually took the lives of more than 1 million Bengalis and drove 9.8 million into exile in India. And, however, unwittingly, he brought his country and India to the brink of war.
India Holds The Cards
For Pakistan, a head-on collision with India would likely verge on catastrophe. With India’s armed forces more than double Pakistan’s (980,000 men against 392,000) and its air force totaling 615 combat aircraft as opposed to 285 Pakistani planes, New Delhi holds a heavy statistical advantage. But beyond that, the weather, political geography and the Mukti Bahini have all combined to give India a virtually fail-safe position. The winter snows have closed off the Himalayan passes, thereby reducing the danger of a Communist Chinese attack in support of. Pakistan; in fact, so confident is India that its Chinese border isg safe that it recently re positioned some of its mountain troops along the Pakistani borders. Moreover, Yahya Khan, faces a logistical nightmare trying to resupply his forces, separated from each other by East Pakistan’s waterlogged terrain and from the West by India itself. Most important, Yahya’s 80,000 troops in East Pakistan must fight two enemies at once the Indians in front and the increasingly menacing Bengali guerrillas in the rear.
Indeed, the two-front nature of the fighting forms the' nucleus of India’s current strategy. For months, Mrs. Gandhi’s government trained and equipped the Mukti Bahini. But seeing no sign that Yahya Khan would agree to autonomy for the East, and bleeding to death economically from the cost of caring for the refugees, India upped the ante. “They couldn’t afford to let the Mukti Bahini rebel¬lion mature at its own rate,” a diplomat explained, “so they decided to telescope the process.” The incursions were the result, and last week, as Mrs. Gandhi began a series of visits to border troops, New Delhi abounded with rumors of further dramatic escalation.
While the Indians and Pakistanis were trading bullets and talking of a larger war to come, the rest of the world was merely talking. Despite the fact that they had supplied both the arms and the money to fuel the fighting, the world’s major powers seemed unable to stop the conflict. Russia,, which has supplanted the West as India’s premier armorer,; confined itself mainly to low-key tongue-clicking in Pravda, perhaps because Moscow feels it is backing the eventual winner. Military conflict, the Pravda article said, “would cause dire human and material sacrifice and would cause further difficulties in the long run”. And the People’s Republic of China—a principal supporter of Pakistan’s cause —concentrated chiefly on bawling out the Soviets.
Nobody Is Listening
Nowhere was the impotence of a major power more evident than in Washington. Although the Nixon Administration called on the combatants to show restraint, the pleas fell on deaf ears. In India, where anger at the fact that the U.S. continued arms shipments to Pakistan until a month ago still runs high, a senior official bristled at the U.S. request: ‘‘We got the pats on the back for our restraint and they got the arms,” he snapped. “You say you’re putting pressure on the Pakistanis. We say you’re trying to eat the cake and keep it.” Nor did the U.S. meet with any greater success in Islamabad. For all his reliance on U.S. support, Yahya resolutely clung to the view that Pakistan could be saved without the release of Mujib and without buckling under to the Mukti Bahini.
Given Yahya’s intransigence and the increasingly provocative Indian border crossings, it was difficult to see bow full scale war could be avoided. Indeed, many foreign military attaches in New Delhi predicted that Jessore would fall to the Mukti Bahini by the end of this week—thus setting the scene for the proclamation of an independent Bangladesh and, perhaps, a retaliatory declaration of war by Pakis¬tan against India. If that should happen the sub-continent would be engulfed in a more punishing conflict than any it has ever seen. For unlike past wars between India and Pakistan, this might well decide the ultimate fate of one of the antagonists. “The birth-pangs of Bangladesh will signal the death-throes of Pakistan as we have known it,” said one American diplomat. “Yahya knows that. His army knows it. And they won’t go down without putting up one bell of a fight.”
"Why India Won’t Risk Peace
If India fails to provoke Pakistan into an all-out war, it surely will not be for lack of trying. True enough, no one seriously believed that New Delhi had precipitated problems in East Pakistan where none had existed before. But neither did anyone doubt that the Indians had sought to take every possible advantage of the crisis from the beginning. Nor was there any question but what with the “opportunity of a life¬time," as one Indian politician described it, now in hand, New Delhi would risk everything to transform its dream of a weak, dismembered Pakistan into a reality.
As most Indians saw it, there was really no other choice. With the bills for refugee care soaring astronomically, officials in New Delhi were convinced that a full-scale war would be far cheaper than being stuck with the refugee problem for even one more year. And they even produced the figures to prove it. By next March, according to official estimates, the refugees will have cost the Indian government $900 million—or more than thirteen times the cost of the entire 1965 war with Pakistan. In short, if the current crisisi dragged on, the financial drain on the Indian budget might well become unbearable. Indeed, what the Indians seemed to fear most was a Palestinian-style denouement—in which the government would have to contend with both the refugees and a continuing and costly standoff with hostile Pakistani forces in East Bengal. “We have accepted the risk of war,” said one Indian official, “because we believed the risks to India of letting things go on as they have been are far greater than the risks of war.”
That kind of attitude has confronted Pakistan’s Mohammed Yahya Khan with a painful dilemma: whether to accept defeat and proceed with a humiliating withdrawal from East Pakistan or to risk initiating a devastating war himself. Given the dismal alternatives, Yahya has understandably tried to carve out a more favorable position somewhere in between. Under pressure from Pakistan’s so-called “22 families” (the nation’s most powerful business leaders, who originally favored the crackdown on the Bengali rebellion to preserve their investments in the east but who now fear losses at home due to protracted war), Yahya has even begun to talk of compromise privately suggesting the possibility of a plebiscite in the east. As one U.S. diplomat explained it: "It’s obvious that Yahya is beginning to understand some things he missed a few months ago.”
On Trial For Treason
- But it may already be too late for Yahya Khan to'salvage an acceptable compromise. For despite his apparent willingness to haggle,- he remains unwilling to make the only concessions that would seem to appeal to New Delhi: the -release of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and negotiations for an independent Bangladesh. Still on trial for, treason, Mujib remains in jail in the Punjab town of Layallpur. And Yahya is by no means ready to accept the humiliation of Bengali independence just yet. As the Indian pressure has escalated, in fact, Yahya has stiffened too talking very much like a man who knows a fight is coming. “If she (Mrs. Gandhi) wants war,” he declared last week, “then I will give it to her. If that woman thinks she is going to cow me, I refuse to take it,’
If all-out war comes, most people expect the Pakistanis to trigger it with a strike into Kashmir or across India’s western plains. An escalation of the conflict by that degree, the Pakistanis were said to believe, might be enough to force the U.N. Security Council to take up the crisis and perhaps even to implement a U.N. supervised cease-fire along the entire Indo-Pakistani border. But that ploy seemed doomed from- the beginning. For one thing, great-power rivalries over the sub-continent appeared significant enough to forestall any U.N. action at the moment. For another, a Pakistani attack would give the more powerful Indian Army the excuse it has been waiting for to deal Yahya’s forces a decisive defeat.
No matter what short-term tactics Yahya chose, in other words, Pakistan ultimately seemed on the way out of the eastern zone. Nonetheless, no one was suggesting that India had any ideas of annexing the territory. For while the predominantly Moslem rebels were more than willing to accept help from India’s Hindus across the border, they would undoubtedly look with a much colder eye on Indian efforts to bring about a full political take-over. In fact, India appeared likely to inherit enough troubles just by acquiring an independent Bangladesh on its doorstep to discourage any thoughts of bringing it into the Indian fold.
An international welfare case even in its palmiest days, East Bengal is in worse shape than usual as a result of the 'current tumult. Its rickety communications network and minuscule industrial base have been all but destroyed. The region will plainly need massive infusions of, Indian money and materials to get back even minimal stability. Without that aid, Bangladesh could collapse into anarchy and become a focal point for Marxist radicalism on the sub¬continent. Finally, though social scientists on both sides of the border discounted the theory, some government officials in New Delhi still feared that an independent Bengali state would fan the flames of India’s own separatist movement in adjacent West Bengal.
From the Indian point of view, however, there was no question that an independent Bangladesh would do far more good than harm. For starters, it would allow New Delhi at least to ease the refugee problem somewhat. In the long run, the re-establishment of traditional trading pat¬terns between East and West Bengal should hold some economic benefits for India. But most important of all the breakup of Pakistan would assure India’s undisputed supremacy on the sub-continent. For with the loss of an estimated 60 per cent of its population, 50 per cent of its foreign exchange and 20 per cent of its tax revenue, Pakistan seemed likely to present little in the way of a sustained military threat to the New Delhi government and appeared destined to wind up with just about as much diplomatic clout as that wielded by neighboring Afghanistan.
China’s Influence
With the Pakistani counterweight safely out of the way, India would no doubt also seek to flex its political muscles beyond the limits of the sub-continent. Particularly in Asia, Mrs. Gandhi & Co. have their sights set on chiselling away at Peking’s preponderant influence. The Indians have long resented playing diplomatic second fiddle to their Chinese rivals, and in view of the international attention lavished upon the Chinese, the Foreign Office in New Delhi is smarting more than ever. “Why is Nixon treating China like a big power ?” complained one Indian political scientist : “Because they have nuclear weapons ? In 1960, we were as advanced as China in these weapons but we chose not to go on, in the interest of everyone. And now we are treated like step¬children.” Obviously, even without nuclear weapons, India hopes to change that relationship soon.
The U.S. itself faces an uphill fight to improve its own relations with South Asia. For in supporting the Pakistanis in the latest upheaval, however reluctantly, Washington clearly seems to have bet on the wrong team. As one American diplomat put it last week: “If there’s an all-out war, the Indians will see us as being against them and the Paks will think we’ve betrayed them. Only the Russians have done their maths right. They know that any way you add West Pakistan’s 60 million and the East’s 80 million, it doesn’t equal India’s 550 million.” Indeed, next to India, the Soviet Union appeared likely to be the big winner in the battle for East Bengal. In fact, some people were predicting that Moscow would parley its sup¬port for India into vastly increased influence on the sub¬continent and all around the Indian Ocean. But while the Russians have plainly enhanced their standing in the area, that assessment seemed a bit overdrawn. For throughout, the current crisis, Mrs. Gandhi has resolutely steered her own course—neither asking for nor accepting direction from any quarter. And with India riding high, there seemed to be little reason to suspect that the headstrong Prime Minister was about to begin listening to outsiders now.
No Place Worse Than Home
These days, the telephone in P.N. Luthra’s modest, third- floor flat in Calcutta starts jangling at 6 each morning. And with the first ring Luthra, a 54 year old retired army colonel who is responsible for coordinating India’s relief program for Bengali refugees, is jolted awake by one of the seemingly endless series of problems that confront him daily. The first caller on a recent morning informed him that the Indian territory of Tripura, abutting East Pakistan’s Comilla district, had received only 45 freight-car loads of food the previous, day instead of its normal allotment of 67. Rushing to his makeshift office in the Calcutta branch of the Labour Ministry, Luthra ordered food stocks diverted from “a little reserve I have managed to build up in Assam.” But when an aide found the phone connections to Assam so bad that he could not make himself understood, a telegraphed order had to be sent instead. “It will take 24 hours to get there,” Luthra muttered helplessly. “I won’t even receive confirmation for another 48 hours.”
And so the problems mounted through the day. Accord¬ing to Indian Government figures, 9.8 million Bengali refugees have already fled to India and some 12,000 more stagger across the 1,300-mile-long East Pakistani border every day. Among other things they create a mind-boggling logistical puzzle for Luthra and his 280-man staff. With the onset of winter, some 4 million blankets must be distributed immediately in the colder districts near the Himalayan foothills, but fewer than a half million have arrived from abroad. Another
(oo) wells for drinking water have to be drilled in West Bengal to supplement the 6,000 already sunk. Concerned with reports that perhaps 30 per cent of the drug supplies and 15 per cent of the foodstuffs earmarked for the refugees vanish before reaching the 1,000 camps India now maintains, Luthra recently decreed: “We must tighten security.” But an aide disagreed. “The more we tighten up,” he argued, “the more bottlenecks we’ll have. Speed is more important now than trying to prevent the inevitable pilfering that goes on.”
Yeoman Service
In fact, for all the snarls, the Indian relief workers have performed yeoman service. At the sprawling Salt Lake camp near Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport, a new hospital staffed by sixteen doctors has helped to drastically cut the death rate among the camp’s estimated 50,000 children to an average of only three a day. In addition the children at the camp now attend an open-air school under the direction of 110 teachers who are themselves refugees from East Pakistan. Salt Lake’s population consumes some 200 truckloads of food and supplies a day—which amounts to a daily ration of 10'5 ounces of rice, 3.5 ounces of wheat and 3.5 ounces of wheat and 3.5 ounces of vegetables per person. Children also get a pint of milk per day plus a multiple vitamin pill under a supplementary feeding program to cure the malnutrition that afflicted most of them when they first crossed the border.
To be sure, the Salt Lake camp is reputed to be a “show- place.” And there, as in the other, 150 camps that foreign reporters are permitted to visit, it is not the least bit uncommon for ten families, or about 50 people, to huddle under a single tent measuring 50 by 24 feet. Babies are scattered all over the place, crying and vomiting, and the overpowering stench of human waste pervades the camp from one end to the other. The conditions seem intolerable, but the refugees endure because, unbelievable as it may seem, many of them never even had it this “good” in the Bengali villages whence they came. At most camps, all a refugee has to do is to look over to an adjoining Indian village, sometimes only 300 yards away, to see that, thanks to the relief program, he usually gets more to eat and receives better medical care than does the local Indian population.
Resentment
Understandably, the impression that the refugees are getting favored treatment from the Indian Government has bred resentment among the locals. When a human tidal wave of 200,000 East Bengali refugees suddenly inundated the frontier village of Balat in India’s Meghalaya state for example, Luthra’s relief workers hastily organized a 400-bed hospital and dispatched a mobile X-ray unit, an electrical generator and surgical instruments there. Balat’s 3,000 permanent inhabitants, most of whom had never even seen a hospital before, marveled at the attention showered on the newcomers and, naturally enough, began asking why they were not treated at the new hospitals too. Similarly in Calcutta, where no fewer than 500,000 of the teeming city’s 8 million people are jobless and where 70 per cent of the families subsist on about $ 12 a month, there are bitter com¬plaints that refugees have been offering their services for 1 Rupee a day, instead of the going daily wage of 3 Rupees for unskilled laborers. Only stem measures by the authorities have thus far prevented wholesale rioting between Calcutta’s slum dwellers and the equally impoverished refugees in their desperate scramble for any sort of paying jobs.
These social strains and the staggering financial burden of refugee relief seem more than India can possibly bear. Estimates indicate that the program will have cost $ 900 mil¬lion by next March, of which only $ 250 million has been offset by donations and pledges from abroad. Fully 16 per cent of India’s current national budget is now eaten up in refugee relief, and the country’s food-stocks, painstakingly built up over two good crop years as a cushion against leaner times, are fast dwindling. Special taxes have been levied, and the government has cut back drastically on all other spending areas, even to the extent of shelving of long-planned development programs. “We cannot even reckon how much the refugees will cost us in ’72, an Indian official told Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave, “because the prospect is too hor-xentous to contemplate.”
Nightmares
But contemplate it India must because there is growing evidence that many of the refugees have no intention of returning to East Pakistan—not even to an independent Bangladesh. Some 80 per cent of the refugee population is composed of Hindus who have been the special targets in the Pakistani Army’s bloody repressions, and now that they are in India many wonder why their parents failed to take them out of Moslem-dominated Bengal when the sub-continent was partitioned in 1947. Despite efforts to convince them that a new Bangladesh will be a secular state with equal rights for all, few of the Hindus seem persuaded that a return to their disaster-prone villages in East Bengal is preferable to the nascent welfare state of the refugee camps. Key Indian officials told de Borchgrave, however, that unless the refugees are “unloaded very soon, Indian, troops may have to drive them back home at bayonet point.” Such a prospect conjures up nightmares in New Delhi and, without doubt, is a major factor behind India’s current effort to resolve the Bangladesh crisis quickly through military pressure.
'‘Wonderful Job’
Although its “President,” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is currently being tried for treason by the Pakistani Government, the self-proclaimed nation of Bangla Desh has set up a four-man government led by “Acting President” Syed Nazrul Islam. Recently, in the first interview he has granted any journalist, Syed Nazrul Islam talked with NEWSWEEK’S Senior Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave. Below, excerpts:
On The Rebels’ Campaign
My boys have done a wonderful job. We are now well- organized and effective. The people’s sense of patriotism, is also an excellent source of military intelligence; all the educated people are on our side. I don’t think it will take much longer. You have seen for yourself, both in occupied and liberated areas, the support we enjoy.
On Outside Influence
It is entirely our own show, and there is no pressure from
India of any kind The Communists are supporting us and
have pledged explicit loyalty to my government. But they are not a big factor.
On The United States
The U.S. press has spelled out the basic issues. The story is now known. As a result, your Congress is supporting us,, too. But we cannot understand why the U.S. Government is. against us.
On An End To Fighting
If Yahya has the foresight to see that independence ist inevitable, then we can negotiate the details of withdrawal without bloodshed. First, he must release Mujib, then. recognize independence. Fighting can then stop and troops be withdrawn. If Yahya Khan wants a settlement and a peaceful transfer of power, then all he has to do is release Mujib. If he doesn’t want a peaceful transfer, then we will fight to the bitter end.
BENGAL’S ELITE DEAD IN A DITCH
By Nicholas Tomalin From Dacca
BEFORE THEY surrendered at Dacca on Thursday, the Pakistani Army arrested and then shot more than 50 of the •city’s surviving intellectuals, scientists and businessmen. It was a closely planned elimination of elite Bengali citizens, carried out as a sudden military operation. It must therefore have been done with the full knowledge of the Pakistan high command, including the commanding officer, General Niazi.
The discovery of the bodies can only increase tension in Dacca, make revenge killings and riots more likely, and possibly even cause friction between the Mukti Bahini guerrillas and the Indian Army.
If the occupying forces have to clamp down on the liberated Bengalis, they could come to resent even Indian occupation; and there are small signs of this ominous development already in Dacca.
The murdered intellectuals were discovered in some isolated clay pits on the outskirts of the town, at a place called Rayar Bazar. I actually saw 35 bodies there, in a decomposed condition which indicates they were killed four or five days ago. There are probably many more and from kidnap reports, some in Dacca are putting the number of killed as high as 150.
UPI reports that among the victims were Dr. F. Rabbi, chief cardiologist of Dacca Medical College, and Dr. Munier Chowdhury, head of the Department of Bengali Language at Dacca University.
The killing ground is a brick-field beyond the middle-class Dacca district of Danmondi. It is an oddly desolate place, despite the water hyacinths which float on the Whiteley clay pools.
Hundreds of Dacca citizens came here today, walking along the mud dykes to view the bodies, many of them looking for their own relatives.
The kidnapping was apparently done early in the morning last Tuesday, when squads of Punjabi soldiers drove to selected addresses, and took away men and women under armed guard/ Probably they were taken to the Rayar Bazar brickfields and immediately shot, lined tip along the mud dykes so as to fall into the pools.
There they still lie, with clay dust on them, beginning to decompose. There is one skeleton on a dyke picked dramatically bare by the Dacca dogs.
The Bengali crowds are circulating among these pools ini a strange, gentle fashion. They don’t seem angry here. Else-where they are wild. But here they were walking, talking in a gentle murmur, like tourists in a cathedral.
At one pool there was a particular large crowd, and the biggest pile of corpses. Here a Moslem, his mouth wrapped in his wool scarf, was howling and keening. It sounded like the muezzin call to prayer.
We asked the man his name. He said he was Abdul Malik, a Dacca businessman. In the water before him he had recognized the bodies of his three brothers, Badruzzaman, Shahjahan, and Mulluk Jahan. They lay side by side. They too. were Dacca businessmen. It was a family firm. He had no other brothers.
“The Pak army came for them at seven o’clock in the morning on Tuesday,” he said. “Just by chance, I had gone out early,”
At this moment my companion began to cry. He was a Dacca student, named Najiur Rahman, who brought me to the brick-fields. He was looking for his brother-in-law.
Dr. Aminuddin is head of the Bengal Research Laboratories, with an Oxford Ph. D, and he was last seen at 7 o’clock on Tuesday morning when the Pakistan army took him away.
“I’m sorry, I must leave you, and look,” said Rahman. His woollen scarf was now also around his face.
. I was in Dacca for only three hours yesterday and during that time the news had scarcely spread. The crowds were excited but quite good-natured, still waving to Indian troops and racing up and down in cars.
But there has been a great deal of shooting, particularly at night. Correspondents at the Intercontinental Hotel con¬firm that the atmosphere is explosive. The Bengalis allege that the hated Biharis, those “foreigners” from across the border who long ago came to settle here because they were Muslims, have been helping the Pakistani troops to murder Bengalis.
This was precisely what led to a riot and massacre of Bihari civilians in Jessore when I was there eight months ago.
This murder of Dacca intellectuals is infinitely worse than anything that happened at Jessore. Therefore some kind of retribution is almost inevitable.
Apart from swiftly gathered hearsay in Dacca, and the evidence of other journalists in Dacca that such killings have been taking place, I can offer only the evidence of the two boys who drove me back to Dacca airport.
Both were Mukti Bahini. One, Parvez Mamasalek, told me proudly he had been Biharihunting the day before.
“We heard shooting,” he said. “We knew it was those Bihari bastards killing our boys. We closed in on them in a circle. Two of us with stench rushed into their house.” The Biharis had climbed a tree in the garden. They shot them down like crows from a branch. “Of course, we kill them, they killed us.”
When nations go to war, they almost invariably claim to be acting out of the purest motives. Last week, as India’s leaders met in the high-domed central hall of the New Delhi Parliament, there was much pious table-thumping and jingoistic rhetoric to justify an attack against Pakistan. “If we have to silence the Pak guns,” vowed Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram' “we are not going to stop at the border but go inside Pakistan. We do not care how far inside we have to go if it becomes a matter of our self defense.” With that moral mandate thousands of Indian troops swarmed across the border into East Pakistan and the stage was set for a third round in the seemingly endless strife between the sub-continent’s two arch-enemies.
Inexorably, the two nations appeared to be heading for a wholly unnecessary war, one for which each side would have to shoulder an equal share of guilt. Over the past nine months, the Pakistani Government of President Mohammed Yahya Khan had indiscriminately slaughtered more than a million of its subjects in a cruel and myopic attempt to prevent autonomy for the Bengalis of East Pakistan. And India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had launched a calculated campaign to dismember Pakistan, turn its eastern wing into the client state of Bangla Desh and free itself of the burden of caring for nearly 10 million Bengali refugees who had fled Yahya’s reign of terror. As one diplomat in New Delhi cynically put it, “What was seen as a liability here a few months ago, is now seen as an opportunity.” What made the steady drift toward war even more tragic was that the one man who undoubtedly could stop it—Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—was being tried by Pakistan for treason, and Yahya Khan steadfastly refused to free him.
Worse still, none of the world’s major powers seemed able—or even very willing—to exert the kind of influence that could stop the conflict. Despite Washington’s $4 billion worth of assistance to Pakistan—aid largely designed to maintain leverage with Yahya Khan’s government—the U.S. appeared powerless to sway the Pakistani leader. And the Soviet Union, notwithstanding its recently signed friendship treaty with India, had no better luck reining in Mrs. Gandhi. Thus unchecked, the rush to war was on, even though both countries had much to lose by it. “All good Moslems believe they will go to a better reward if they die in battle,” sighed a Western diplomat, “and Yahya may just want to go that way.” As for India, it seemed determined to risk plunging 20 per cent of the world’s population into chaos in order to realise its long-cherished hope of becoming the unchallenged power on the sub-continent and a giant to rival China for predominance in Asia.
The clash between India and Pakistan had been a long time coming. Like a pair of angry cats, the two armies had been circling and spitting at each other for months before the first lunge came. At scattered points along the 1,300-mile frontier between India and East Pakistan, troops stood poised while each side probed and harassed the other with artillery and mortar barrages, piecemeal sniping and an occasional small fire fight. All the while, the Indian and Pakistani governments loudly accused each other of provocations and self- righteously maintained that they themselves would never be the aggressors. But, in fact, India was preparing to strike. And though New Delhi barred all reporters from border areas to conceal its troop movements, NEWSWEEK’S: Senior Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, along with a correspondent of The New York Times, managed last week to slip through the Indian net. De Borchgrave’s report:
There was not a sign of war as we drove the 54 miles from Calcutta to the border town of Bangaon no military traffic, no Indian Army units, no thudding artillery. When the road turned east, at a sign reading “Pak Border—Two Miles,” we followed it until an Indian major stopped us, explaining that the Pakistanis were firing on the road just ahead. The major took us down a roadside ditch toward the border, and though we could hear the tumble of distant shelling and the whistle of an occasional bullet as we walked, the area was still calm. Where is the fighting, we asked, and the major replied : “All quiet on this side. A bit of automatic stuff at night, a few mortar rounds but otherwise no movement.” At the border itself, Indian troops were well dug in and sturdy red-brick walls blocked the road. But beyond the walls, a sign was still visible, and it read: “Welcome to Pakistan.”
Bound For The Border
But tranquillity suddenly vanished as we were driving back to Bangaon. In choking clouds of red dust, an awesome convoy was churning toward the border. Lumbering Soviet- built trucks towed twelve 105-mm. artillery pieces, turbaned Sikhs manned a steady stream of jeeps mounted with recoil- less guns and cumbersome trailers hauled pontoon-bridge equipment. We slipped in among a seemingly endless procession of trucks, each jammed with soldiers in full combat gear and automatic weapons. Everything from amphibious armored personnel carriers to furniture for command posts was in the convoy, and it all indicated that the Indian Army was positioning itself for an incursion into Pakistan. Even though we were waved off the road just before the border, the army made no effort to conceal the border-bound caravan or India’s intentions. “My men have been waiting to move forward for a month,” one officer told us as we joined him for tea. “Their spirits are high.”
It was patently obvious from the unceasing convoy as well as from conversation with the field commanders that India, for all its public proclamations to the contrary, was finally lending the Mukti Bahini guerrillas a direct hand. After our observation of the Indian troop movements, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi acknowledged for the first time that her army had been given the go-ahead to cross the Pakistani border “in selfdefence.” But in fact, India’s tactics were more like the doctrine of “hot pursuit.” For even before we saw the convoy, Indian forces had crossed the border north of Ban- gaon and destroyed thirteen Pakistani tanks. And, in another clear indication that India was stepping up its involvement in the battle for Bengal, an Indian Cabinet minister told me: “There is no time now for interim or compromise solutions. Speed is now essential.”
For the time being, however, India refrained from mount¬ing an all out offensive. Instead, New Delhi’s tactics seemed designed to tie down large numbers of Pakistani troops with a series of quick, limited strikes and thereby pave the way for the Bengali guerrillas to seize control of more territory. To that end, the Indians reportedly thrust into the districts of Sylhet, Comilla and the Chittagong Hills along the eastern border, as well as pushing in from the west towards Jessore. Lying in the midst of a rich agricultural plain, Jessore is regarded as a key city in the rebels’ plan to take over East Pakistan, and India’s offensive seemed to. be aimed at speeding up that timetable. With the area around the city in Indian and Mukti Bahini hands, NEWSWEEK’S Tony Clifton flew into Jessore on a Pakistani Air Force plane and cabled this report:
It is obvious that the Indians are using regular troops, tanks and heavy guns to make incursions into Pakistan’s territory. In fact, when I flew into Jessore, Indian soldiers Mill held a salient of land west of Jessore and had the city’s airport under sporadic fire. I was quickly hustled off to the Pakistani headquarters where Maj.-Gen. M. H. Ansari the sector commander, described the Indian attack: “They came in strength, two brigades supported by a tank regiment and artillery fire from 130-mm. Russian guns. They pushed in about 6 miles. That was too much, so we counter-attacked and pushed them back almost to the border.” When I asked if the attackers could have been Bengali guerrillas, Ansari scoffed. “These weren’t rebels. They were using tanks and heavy guns and the rebels haven’t got that sort of weaponry These things don’t grow on trees.” He paused and added, somewhat wistfully, Although I wish they did because then we’d get some too.”
A Thankless Task
Ansari claimed that his forces had killed some 200 to 300 enemy soldiers and added: “We captured uniforms and papers which showed they were regular Indian troops. They came from the Fourteenth Punjab Regiment.” While refusing to say how many of his own men had been killed, he admitted that casualties were substantial: “They weren’t throwing rose petals at us, you know”. Even though Ansari said that he had driven the Indians back toward the border, no Pakistani official denies that the area surrounding Jessore is effectively in enemy hands. And wresting any part of East Pakistan back from a guerrilla force will be a thankless task for the army. Although the monsoons have ended, vast areas of land are still covered with water, and literally hundreds of rivers and streams crisscross the terrain. The few roads that do exist are puny tracks, all highly vulnerable to guerrilla attack.
An equal threat to the government exists on the opposite side of East Pakistan in the Comilla district. I flew into a Pakistani headquarters near the town of Brahmanbaria where army officers charged that Indian troops had mounted a major battle. The Pakistani commander led me to a rail road truck piled high with dead bodies and showed of! the weapons he had captured. While there was no way for me to tell whether the decomposing bodies were those of Bengali J guerrillas or ‘Indian regulars, the rifles, automatic weapons) and light machine guns were undeniably of those types used by the Indian Army. The brigadier had no doubts that his enemies were Indians, and he was almost gleeful when he described the battle. “We killed between 300 and 400 men, with three times that many wounded,” he crowed. “We destroyed the Nineteenth Punjab Battalion and badly mauled another.”
The brigadier’s bloodthirsty attitude was thoroughly typical of the feelings that Pakistanis and Indians have for each other. For the two states have been uneasy and often hostile neighbors since they were carved out of British-ruled India in 1947. The surgery that created Pakistan as a bifurcated Moslem state divided by 1,000 miles of Hindu India was hardly performed before countless thousands of people were slaughtered in the indescribably bloody “partition riots.” And although the festering hatreds born of differing religions and customs were kept leashed for much of the following quarter century, the open warfare that broke out between India and Pakistan over Kashmir in 1948-49 and again in 1965 ensured that the mutual antagonisms would not die.
Nor is the - India-Pakistan enmity the only hostility that scars the troubled sub-continent. Just as much antagonism exists between Pakistan’s two principal races the Punjabis who dominate West Pakistan and control both government and army, and the Bengalis of East Pakistan who bitterly resented the west’s economic exploitation of their prosperous agricultural land and their status as a subjugated people. When the Bengalis rallied behind Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in last December’s national election, they won a clear majority of seats in the nation’s parliament. But Yahya Khan postponed the parliamentary opening, provoking a general strike and murderous Bengali rioting in East Pakistan. Yahya’s response was brutal. He loosed the Punjabi army on the East in a terror campaign that eventually took the lives of more than 1 million Bengalis and drove 9.8 million into exile in India. And, however, unwittingly, he brought his country and India to the brink of war.
India Holds The Cards
For Pakistan, a head-on collision with India would likely verge on catastrophe. With India’s armed forces more than double Pakistan’s (980,000 men against 392,000) and its air force totaling 615 combat aircraft as opposed to 285 Pakistani planes, New Delhi holds a heavy statistical advantage. But beyond that, the weather, political geography and the Mukti Bahini have all combined to give India a virtually fail-safe position. The winter snows have closed off the Himalayan passes, thereby reducing the danger of a Communist Chinese attack in support of. Pakistan; in fact, so confident is India that its Chinese border isg safe that it recently re positioned some of its mountain troops along the Pakistani borders. Moreover, Yahya Khan, faces a logistical nightmare trying to resupply his forces, separated from each other by East Pakistan’s waterlogged terrain and from the West by India itself. Most important, Yahya’s 80,000 troops in East Pakistan must fight two enemies at once the Indians in front and the increasingly menacing Bengali guerrillas in the rear.
Indeed, the two-front nature of the fighting forms the' nucleus of India’s current strategy. For months, Mrs. Gandhi’s government trained and equipped the Mukti Bahini. But seeing no sign that Yahya Khan would agree to autonomy for the East, and bleeding to death economically from the cost of caring for the refugees, India upped the ante. “They couldn’t afford to let the Mukti Bahini rebel¬lion mature at its own rate,” a diplomat explained, “so they decided to telescope the process.” The incursions were the result, and last week, as Mrs. Gandhi began a series of visits to border troops, New Delhi abounded with rumors of further dramatic escalation.
While the Indians and Pakistanis were trading bullets and talking of a larger war to come, the rest of the world was merely talking. Despite the fact that they had supplied both the arms and the money to fuel the fighting, the world’s major powers seemed unable to stop the conflict. Russia,, which has supplanted the West as India’s premier armorer,; confined itself mainly to low-key tongue-clicking in Pravda, perhaps because Moscow feels it is backing the eventual winner. Military conflict, the Pravda article said, “would cause dire human and material sacrifice and would cause further difficulties in the long run”. And the People’s Republic of China—a principal supporter of Pakistan’s cause —concentrated chiefly on bawling out the Soviets.
Nobody Is Listening
Nowhere was the impotence of a major power more evident than in Washington. Although the Nixon Administration called on the combatants to show restraint, the pleas fell on deaf ears. In India, where anger at the fact that the U.S. continued arms shipments to Pakistan until a month ago still runs high, a senior official bristled at the U.S. request: ‘‘We got the pats on the back for our restraint and they got the arms,” he snapped. “You say you’re putting pressure on the Pakistanis. We say you’re trying to eat the cake and keep it.” Nor did the U.S. meet with any greater success in Islamabad. For all his reliance on U.S. support, Yahya resolutely clung to the view that Pakistan could be saved without the release of Mujib and without buckling under to the Mukti Bahini.
Given Yahya’s intransigence and the increasingly provocative Indian border crossings, it was difficult to see bow full scale war could be avoided. Indeed, many foreign military attaches in New Delhi predicted that Jessore would fall to the Mukti Bahini by the end of this week—thus setting the scene for the proclamation of an independent Bangladesh and, perhaps, a retaliatory declaration of war by Pakis¬tan against India. If that should happen the sub-continent would be engulfed in a more punishing conflict than any it has ever seen. For unlike past wars between India and Pakistan, this might well decide the ultimate fate of one of the antagonists. “The birth-pangs of Bangladesh will signal the death-throes of Pakistan as we have known it,” said one American diplomat. “Yahya knows that. His army knows it. And they won’t go down without putting up one bell of a fight.”
"Why India Won’t Risk Peace
If India fails to provoke Pakistan into an all-out war, it surely will not be for lack of trying. True enough, no one seriously believed that New Delhi had precipitated problems in East Pakistan where none had existed before. But neither did anyone doubt that the Indians had sought to take every possible advantage of the crisis from the beginning. Nor was there any question but what with the “opportunity of a life¬time," as one Indian politician described it, now in hand, New Delhi would risk everything to transform its dream of a weak, dismembered Pakistan into a reality.
As most Indians saw it, there was really no other choice. With the bills for refugee care soaring astronomically, officials in New Delhi were convinced that a full-scale war would be far cheaper than being stuck with the refugee problem for even one more year. And they even produced the figures to prove it. By next March, according to official estimates, the refugees will have cost the Indian government $900 million—or more than thirteen times the cost of the entire 1965 war with Pakistan. In short, if the current crisisi dragged on, the financial drain on the Indian budget might well become unbearable. Indeed, what the Indians seemed to fear most was a Palestinian-style denouement—in which the government would have to contend with both the refugees and a continuing and costly standoff with hostile Pakistani forces in East Bengal. “We have accepted the risk of war,” said one Indian official, “because we believed the risks to India of letting things go on as they have been are far greater than the risks of war.”
That kind of attitude has confronted Pakistan’s Mohammed Yahya Khan with a painful dilemma: whether to accept defeat and proceed with a humiliating withdrawal from East Pakistan or to risk initiating a devastating war himself. Given the dismal alternatives, Yahya has understandably tried to carve out a more favorable position somewhere in between. Under pressure from Pakistan’s so-called “22 families” (the nation’s most powerful business leaders, who originally favored the crackdown on the Bengali rebellion to preserve their investments in the east but who now fear losses at home due to protracted war), Yahya has even begun to talk of compromise privately suggesting the possibility of a plebiscite in the east. As one U.S. diplomat explained it: "It’s obvious that Yahya is beginning to understand some things he missed a few months ago.”
On Trial For Treason
- But it may already be too late for Yahya Khan to'salvage an acceptable compromise. For despite his apparent willingness to haggle,- he remains unwilling to make the only concessions that would seem to appeal to New Delhi: the -release of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and negotiations for an independent Bangladesh. Still on trial for, treason, Mujib remains in jail in the Punjab town of Layallpur. And Yahya is by no means ready to accept the humiliation of Bengali independence just yet. As the Indian pressure has escalated, in fact, Yahya has stiffened too talking very much like a man who knows a fight is coming. “If she (Mrs. Gandhi) wants war,” he declared last week, “then I will give it to her. If that woman thinks she is going to cow me, I refuse to take it,’
If all-out war comes, most people expect the Pakistanis to trigger it with a strike into Kashmir or across India’s western plains. An escalation of the conflict by that degree, the Pakistanis were said to believe, might be enough to force the U.N. Security Council to take up the crisis and perhaps even to implement a U.N. supervised cease-fire along the entire Indo-Pakistani border. But that ploy seemed doomed from- the beginning. For one thing, great-power rivalries over the sub-continent appeared significant enough to forestall any U.N. action at the moment. For another, a Pakistani attack would give the more powerful Indian Army the excuse it has been waiting for to deal Yahya’s forces a decisive defeat.
No matter what short-term tactics Yahya chose, in other words, Pakistan ultimately seemed on the way out of the eastern zone. Nonetheless, no one was suggesting that India had any ideas of annexing the territory. For while the predominantly Moslem rebels were more than willing to accept help from India’s Hindus across the border, they would undoubtedly look with a much colder eye on Indian efforts to bring about a full political take-over. In fact, India appeared likely to inherit enough troubles just by acquiring an independent Bangladesh on its doorstep to discourage any thoughts of bringing it into the Indian fold.
An international welfare case even in its palmiest days, East Bengal is in worse shape than usual as a result of the 'current tumult. Its rickety communications network and minuscule industrial base have been all but destroyed. The region will plainly need massive infusions of, Indian money and materials to get back even minimal stability. Without that aid, Bangladesh could collapse into anarchy and become a focal point for Marxist radicalism on the sub¬continent. Finally, though social scientists on both sides of the border discounted the theory, some government officials in New Delhi still feared that an independent Bengali state would fan the flames of India’s own separatist movement in adjacent West Bengal.
From the Indian point of view, however, there was no question that an independent Bangladesh would do far more good than harm. For starters, it would allow New Delhi at least to ease the refugee problem somewhat. In the long run, the re-establishment of traditional trading pat¬terns between East and West Bengal should hold some economic benefits for India. But most important of all the breakup of Pakistan would assure India’s undisputed supremacy on the sub-continent. For with the loss of an estimated 60 per cent of its population, 50 per cent of its foreign exchange and 20 per cent of its tax revenue, Pakistan seemed likely to present little in the way of a sustained military threat to the New Delhi government and appeared destined to wind up with just about as much diplomatic clout as that wielded by neighboring Afghanistan.
China’s Influence
With the Pakistani counterweight safely out of the way, India would no doubt also seek to flex its political muscles beyond the limits of the sub-continent. Particularly in Asia, Mrs. Gandhi & Co. have their sights set on chiselling away at Peking’s preponderant influence. The Indians have long resented playing diplomatic second fiddle to their Chinese rivals, and in view of the international attention lavished upon the Chinese, the Foreign Office in New Delhi is smarting more than ever. “Why is Nixon treating China like a big power ?” complained one Indian political scientist : “Because they have nuclear weapons ? In 1960, we were as advanced as China in these weapons but we chose not to go on, in the interest of everyone. And now we are treated like step¬children.” Obviously, even without nuclear weapons, India hopes to change that relationship soon.
The U.S. itself faces an uphill fight to improve its own relations with South Asia. For in supporting the Pakistanis in the latest upheaval, however reluctantly, Washington clearly seems to have bet on the wrong team. As one American diplomat put it last week: “If there’s an all-out war, the Indians will see us as being against them and the Paks will think we’ve betrayed them. Only the Russians have done their maths right. They know that any way you add West Pakistan’s 60 million and the East’s 80 million, it doesn’t equal India’s 550 million.” Indeed, next to India, the Soviet Union appeared likely to be the big winner in the battle for East Bengal. In fact, some people were predicting that Moscow would parley its sup¬port for India into vastly increased influence on the sub¬continent and all around the Indian Ocean. But while the Russians have plainly enhanced their standing in the area, that assessment seemed a bit overdrawn. For throughout, the current crisis, Mrs. Gandhi has resolutely steered her own course—neither asking for nor accepting direction from any quarter. And with India riding high, there seemed to be little reason to suspect that the headstrong Prime Minister was about to begin listening to outsiders now.
No Place Worse Than Home
These days, the telephone in P.N. Luthra’s modest, third- floor flat in Calcutta starts jangling at 6 each morning. And with the first ring Luthra, a 54 year old retired army colonel who is responsible for coordinating India’s relief program for Bengali refugees, is jolted awake by one of the seemingly endless series of problems that confront him daily. The first caller on a recent morning informed him that the Indian territory of Tripura, abutting East Pakistan’s Comilla district, had received only 45 freight-car loads of food the previous, day instead of its normal allotment of 67. Rushing to his makeshift office in the Calcutta branch of the Labour Ministry, Luthra ordered food stocks diverted from “a little reserve I have managed to build up in Assam.” But when an aide found the phone connections to Assam so bad that he could not make himself understood, a telegraphed order had to be sent instead. “It will take 24 hours to get there,” Luthra muttered helplessly. “I won’t even receive confirmation for another 48 hours.”
And so the problems mounted through the day. Accord¬ing to Indian Government figures, 9.8 million Bengali refugees have already fled to India and some 12,000 more stagger across the 1,300-mile-long East Pakistani border every day. Among other things they create a mind-boggling logistical puzzle for Luthra and his 280-man staff. With the onset of winter, some 4 million blankets must be distributed immediately in the colder districts near the Himalayan foothills, but fewer than a half million have arrived from abroad. Another
(oo) wells for drinking water have to be drilled in West Bengal to supplement the 6,000 already sunk. Concerned with reports that perhaps 30 per cent of the drug supplies and 15 per cent of the foodstuffs earmarked for the refugees vanish before reaching the 1,000 camps India now maintains, Luthra recently decreed: “We must tighten security.” But an aide disagreed. “The more we tighten up,” he argued, “the more bottlenecks we’ll have. Speed is more important now than trying to prevent the inevitable pilfering that goes on.”
Yeoman Service
In fact, for all the snarls, the Indian relief workers have performed yeoman service. At the sprawling Salt Lake camp near Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport, a new hospital staffed by sixteen doctors has helped to drastically cut the death rate among the camp’s estimated 50,000 children to an average of only three a day. In addition the children at the camp now attend an open-air school under the direction of 110 teachers who are themselves refugees from East Pakistan. Salt Lake’s population consumes some 200 truckloads of food and supplies a day—which amounts to a daily ration of 10'5 ounces of rice, 3.5 ounces of wheat and 3.5 ounces of wheat and 3.5 ounces of vegetables per person. Children also get a pint of milk per day plus a multiple vitamin pill under a supplementary feeding program to cure the malnutrition that afflicted most of them when they first crossed the border.
To be sure, the Salt Lake camp is reputed to be a “show- place.” And there, as in the other, 150 camps that foreign reporters are permitted to visit, it is not the least bit uncommon for ten families, or about 50 people, to huddle under a single tent measuring 50 by 24 feet. Babies are scattered all over the place, crying and vomiting, and the overpowering stench of human waste pervades the camp from one end to the other. The conditions seem intolerable, but the refugees endure because, unbelievable as it may seem, many of them never even had it this “good” in the Bengali villages whence they came. At most camps, all a refugee has to do is to look over to an adjoining Indian village, sometimes only 300 yards away, to see that, thanks to the relief program, he usually gets more to eat and receives better medical care than does the local Indian population.
Resentment
Understandably, the impression that the refugees are getting favored treatment from the Indian Government has bred resentment among the locals. When a human tidal wave of 200,000 East Bengali refugees suddenly inundated the frontier village of Balat in India’s Meghalaya state for example, Luthra’s relief workers hastily organized a 400-bed hospital and dispatched a mobile X-ray unit, an electrical generator and surgical instruments there. Balat’s 3,000 permanent inhabitants, most of whom had never even seen a hospital before, marveled at the attention showered on the newcomers and, naturally enough, began asking why they were not treated at the new hospitals too. Similarly in Calcutta, where no fewer than 500,000 of the teeming city’s 8 million people are jobless and where 70 per cent of the families subsist on about $ 12 a month, there are bitter com¬plaints that refugees have been offering their services for 1 Rupee a day, instead of the going daily wage of 3 Rupees for unskilled laborers. Only stem measures by the authorities have thus far prevented wholesale rioting between Calcutta’s slum dwellers and the equally impoverished refugees in their desperate scramble for any sort of paying jobs.
These social strains and the staggering financial burden of refugee relief seem more than India can possibly bear. Estimates indicate that the program will have cost $ 900 mil¬lion by next March, of which only $ 250 million has been offset by donations and pledges from abroad. Fully 16 per cent of India’s current national budget is now eaten up in refugee relief, and the country’s food-stocks, painstakingly built up over two good crop years as a cushion against leaner times, are fast dwindling. Special taxes have been levied, and the government has cut back drastically on all other spending areas, even to the extent of shelving of long-planned development programs. “We cannot even reckon how much the refugees will cost us in ’72, an Indian official told Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave, “because the prospect is too hor-xentous to contemplate.”
Nightmares
But contemplate it India must because there is growing evidence that many of the refugees have no intention of returning to East Pakistan—not even to an independent Bangladesh. Some 80 per cent of the refugee population is composed of Hindus who have been the special targets in the Pakistani Army’s bloody repressions, and now that they are in India many wonder why their parents failed to take them out of Moslem-dominated Bengal when the sub-continent was partitioned in 1947. Despite efforts to convince them that a new Bangladesh will be a secular state with equal rights for all, few of the Hindus seem persuaded that a return to their disaster-prone villages in East Bengal is preferable to the nascent welfare state of the refugee camps. Key Indian officials told de Borchgrave, however, that unless the refugees are “unloaded very soon, Indian, troops may have to drive them back home at bayonet point.” Such a prospect conjures up nightmares in New Delhi and, without doubt, is a major factor behind India’s current effort to resolve the Bangladesh crisis quickly through military pressure.
'‘Wonderful Job’
Although its “President,” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is currently being tried for treason by the Pakistani Government, the self-proclaimed nation of Bangla Desh has set up a four-man government led by “Acting President” Syed Nazrul Islam. Recently, in the first interview he has granted any journalist, Syed Nazrul Islam talked with NEWSWEEK’S Senior Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave. Below, excerpts:
On The Rebels’ Campaign
My boys have done a wonderful job. We are now well- organized and effective. The people’s sense of patriotism, is also an excellent source of military intelligence; all the educated people are on our side. I don’t think it will take much longer. You have seen for yourself, both in occupied and liberated areas, the support we enjoy.
On Outside Influence
It is entirely our own show, and there is no pressure from
India of any kind The Communists are supporting us and
have pledged explicit loyalty to my government. But they are not a big factor.
On The United States
The U.S. press has spelled out the basic issues. The story is now known. As a result, your Congress is supporting us,, too. But we cannot understand why the U.S. Government is. against us.
On An End To Fighting
If Yahya has the foresight to see that independence ist inevitable, then we can negotiate the details of withdrawal without bloodshed. First, he must release Mujib, then. recognize independence. Fighting can then stop and troops be withdrawn. If Yahya Khan wants a settlement and a peaceful transfer of power, then all he has to do is release Mujib. If he doesn’t want a peaceful transfer, then we will fight to the bitter end.
BENGAL’S ELITE DEAD IN A DITCH
By Nicholas Tomalin From Dacca
BEFORE THEY surrendered at Dacca on Thursday, the Pakistani Army arrested and then shot more than 50 of the •city’s surviving intellectuals, scientists and businessmen. It was a closely planned elimination of elite Bengali citizens, carried out as a sudden military operation. It must therefore have been done with the full knowledge of the Pakistan high command, including the commanding officer, General Niazi.
The discovery of the bodies can only increase tension in Dacca, make revenge killings and riots more likely, and possibly even cause friction between the Mukti Bahini guerrillas and the Indian Army.
If the occupying forces have to clamp down on the liberated Bengalis, they could come to resent even Indian occupation; and there are small signs of this ominous development already in Dacca.
The murdered intellectuals were discovered in some isolated clay pits on the outskirts of the town, at a place called Rayar Bazar. I actually saw 35 bodies there, in a decomposed condition which indicates they were killed four or five days ago. There are probably many more and from kidnap reports, some in Dacca are putting the number of killed as high as 150.
UPI reports that among the victims were Dr. F. Rabbi, chief cardiologist of Dacca Medical College, and Dr. Munier Chowdhury, head of the Department of Bengali Language at Dacca University.
The killing ground is a brick-field beyond the middle-class Dacca district of Danmondi. It is an oddly desolate place, despite the water hyacinths which float on the Whiteley clay pools.
Hundreds of Dacca citizens came here today, walking along the mud dykes to view the bodies, many of them looking for their own relatives.
The kidnapping was apparently done early in the morning last Tuesday, when squads of Punjabi soldiers drove to selected addresses, and took away men and women under armed guard/ Probably they were taken to the Rayar Bazar brickfields and immediately shot, lined tip along the mud dykes so as to fall into the pools.
There they still lie, with clay dust on them, beginning to decompose. There is one skeleton on a dyke picked dramatically bare by the Dacca dogs.
The Bengali crowds are circulating among these pools ini a strange, gentle fashion. They don’t seem angry here. Else-where they are wild. But here they were walking, talking in a gentle murmur, like tourists in a cathedral.
At one pool there was a particular large crowd, and the biggest pile of corpses. Here a Moslem, his mouth wrapped in his wool scarf, was howling and keening. It sounded like the muezzin call to prayer.
We asked the man his name. He said he was Abdul Malik, a Dacca businessman. In the water before him he had recognized the bodies of his three brothers, Badruzzaman, Shahjahan, and Mulluk Jahan. They lay side by side. They too. were Dacca businessmen. It was a family firm. He had no other brothers.
“The Pak army came for them at seven o’clock in the morning on Tuesday,” he said. “Just by chance, I had gone out early,”
At this moment my companion began to cry. He was a Dacca student, named Najiur Rahman, who brought me to the brick-fields. He was looking for his brother-in-law.
Dr. Aminuddin is head of the Bengal Research Laboratories, with an Oxford Ph. D, and he was last seen at 7 o’clock on Tuesday morning when the Pakistan army took him away.
“I’m sorry, I must leave you, and look,” said Rahman. His woollen scarf was now also around his face.
. I was in Dacca for only three hours yesterday and during that time the news had scarcely spread. The crowds were excited but quite good-natured, still waving to Indian troops and racing up and down in cars.
But there has been a great deal of shooting, particularly at night. Correspondents at the Intercontinental Hotel con¬firm that the atmosphere is explosive. The Bengalis allege that the hated Biharis, those “foreigners” from across the border who long ago came to settle here because they were Muslims, have been helping the Pakistani troops to murder Bengalis.
This was precisely what led to a riot and massacre of Bihari civilians in Jessore when I was there eight months ago.
This murder of Dacca intellectuals is infinitely worse than anything that happened at Jessore. Therefore some kind of retribution is almost inevitable.
Apart from swiftly gathered hearsay in Dacca, and the evidence of other journalists in Dacca that such killings have been taking place, I can offer only the evidence of the two boys who drove me back to Dacca airport.
Both were Mukti Bahini. One, Parvez Mamasalek, told me proudly he had been Biharihunting the day before.
“We heard shooting,” he said. “We knew it was those Bihari bastards killing our boys. We closed in on them in a circle. Two of us with stench rushed into their house.” The Biharis had climbed a tree in the garden. They shot them down like crows from a branch. “Of course, we kill them, they killed us.”
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