| শিরোনাম | সূত্র | তারিখ |
| ১১৮। ভারত কখন আক্রমণ করবে | টাইম | ২৯ নভেম্বর, ১৯৭১ |
TIME MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 29, 1971
INDIA NOT IF, BUT WHEN
When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi returned home from her three week tour of Western nations last week, one of the first things she did was to go before her hawkish Parliament and plead for patience toward her handling of the crisis with Pakistan. The urgent need for a solution was all too apparent. Officials in New Delhi said that the biggest frontier battle yet between Indians and Pakistanis occurred when 1.800 Pakistani regulars crossed the border into West Bengal. Defense Minister Jagjivan Ram rose in Parliament to say that if India was attacked, it would “carry the war into Pakistan.” Indians across the country, meanwhile, were placing bets on when-not if war with Pakistan would take place.
Nonetheless Mrs. Gandhi was evidently hopeful that the civil war between West and East Pakistan would be resolved. “Solutions have been found even to seemingly insoluble problems.” she said. She added that India would take no independent action until Western leaders have had a chance to defuse the crisis. She hope: that they would pressure Pakistan President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan's military regime into finding a political solution acceptable to the East Pakistanis.
Though Indira's Western trip is credited with bringing in several sizable donations from abroad for Bengali refugee relief, India is still faced with a Financial burden that is expected to reach $ 830 million by the end of the fiscal year next March. With a 1970 gross national product of only $ 50 billion and a population of 560 million, India can scarcely afford such a drain on its economy.
Communal Tensions
Beyond the Financial cost, the presence of 9,700.000 refugees threatens to create social turmoil and revive communal tensions. There are 7.000.000 in West Bengal alone, and still they come. The Indian government, moreover, is fearful that many of the refugees, particularly the Ilindus who are singled out for persecution by Pakistan's Moslem military, will refuse to return to their homes.
Last March, when the exodus began, thousands of Indians living in the border areas rushed forward to offer assistance. Today the torrent of men. women and children has so excited tensions that armed guards have been placed at the camps and West Bengal officials are securing relief camps with barbed-wire fencing.
The tensions are caused mainly by the competition for scarce commodities and even scarcer jobs. Inside the comps, to discourage refugees from seeking work, loudspeakers daily warn them not to go into the villages. It is perhaps the sorest point with local residents, who say that the refugees will work for one Rupee (13c) a day when the local
