million. And refugees arc still coming twenty or thirty thousand of them a day. And there are between two and three million Hindus still holding out in East Pakistan, like hostages fortune. There are no fewer than seventy million Muslims in India today, who might as well be so many return pledges, since they are sitting targets for the Hindu resentment that has been simmering all these years and has been stirred up anew by the latest tide of refugees—a resentment that the Indian government has so far been able to keep under control by the deflection of Hindu revanchists and by judicious management of the news but the pressure of religious, or so-called “communal,” tension is building all the lime, and some people privately fear that the seventy million Indian Muslims may become innocent victims or Hindu retaliation. If that should ever happen, the burden of all the Hindu refugees that India is carrying would seem nothing compared to what Pakistan would have to bear,
Since, in the long run. Pakistan has so much more to lose than India has, manyobservers have been asking whether Pakistan might not have been able to prevent the latest exodus, especially since it was a consequence of what was essentially an internal quarrel between the two wings of Pakistan. The Punjabis of West Pakistan and the Bengalis of East Pakistan have much more in common with the Punjabis and Bengalis across the border in India than with each other; they are divided not only by geography but also by differences in language, in economic and social systems, in dress, and in diet. In fact, the only real bond between East Pakistan and West Pakistan is Islam, but, as other Muslim countries have discovered, religion alone cannot bind together politically disparate entities. From the start, the Punjabis, who were much more prosperous than the Bengalis, ran Pakistan's Army, civil service, and industry. Their operation can therefore consist only of frequent punitive expeditions launched from fortified military strongholds expeditions that may devastate the countryside and decimate the population but cannot conquer the one or studue the other. Moreover, the guerrillas have easy access to India and can come on support from across the border for an indefinite period.
Clearly, it had always been only a matter of time before India would be officially involved, because the brunt of the Pakistan Army's initial attack few. naturally, on the Hindus turning what was originally a war between the two Muslim factions into a Muslim persecution of Hindus, and so foisting Pakistan's greatest internal problem upon India. About ninety per cent of the nine million refugees in India today are Hindus. (Hindus and Muslims in East Pakistan were often indistinguishable, and in those cases the only way the Army could tell them apart was by making them strip, for Muslims are circumcised and Hindus arc not. A few of the Hindus, however, were easily identified; they were small time businessmen or petty landowners, and were therefore natural scope-goats in their communities, much as Jews had been in Europe in the nineteen-thirties.) There was no dearth of escape point for the fleeing Hindus, since India shares a thirteen hundred and fifty-mile border with East Pakistan. It has been seriously suggested in some quarters that India could have avoided the whole refugee problem by turning back the first onrush of fugitives at gunpoint, on the theory that the boundaries of a country arc sacrosanct and no country is obliged to receive an alien population. In fact, some people here say that the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, should at once have made
