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 customs were kept leashe 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 dic.
Nor is the India-Pakistan enmity the only hostility that scars the troubled subcontinent. Just as much antagonism exists between Pakistan's two principal races-the Panjabis 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 scats 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 lased 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 this country and India to the brink of war.
India Holds The Cards
For Pakistan, a head-on collision with India would likely verge on catastrophc. 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. Bui 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 is safe that, it recently repositioned some of its mountain troops along the Pakistani borders. Morcover. Yahya Khan, facts 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 Babini rebellion mature at its own rate,” a diplomat
