Time

Darkness had just fallen in New Delhi when the air-raid sirens began
wailing. In the big conference room at the Indian government's press
information bureau, newsmen had gathered for a routine 6 o'clock
briefing on the military situation in the East Pakistan. "Suddenly
the lights went out," cabled TIME correspondent James Shepherd, "and
everyone presumed it was yet another test, though none had been
announced. When the breifing team arrived, newsman complained that
they couldn't see to write anything."

"Gentlemen," said the briefing officer, "I have to tell you that this
is not a practice blackout. It is the real thing. We have just had a
flash that the Pakistan air force has attacked our airfields at
Amritsar, Pathankot and Srinagar. This is a blatant attack against
India."

EMBROILED AGAIN

Who attacked whom was still open to question at week's end, and
probably will be for sometime. Nor was it clear whether any formal
declaration of war had been issued. But the fact was that for the
fourth time since the two nations became independent from Britain in
1947, Pakistan and India were once again embroiled in a major conflict.
On previous occasions, the fighting was confined mostly to disputed
region of Kashmir on India's western border with Pakistan. This time,
however, there was even heavier fighting in Pakistan's eastern wing,
separated from West Pakistan by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. The
war even reached to the Bay of Bengal, where naval skirmishes occurred,
and to the outskirts of major cities in both countries as planes
bombed and strafed airfields. Having teetered on the edge of all-out
war for many weeks, India and Pakistan had finally plunged over, and
the rest of the world was powerless to do anything but watch in
horror.

GREAT PERIL

As usual, the two sides offered substantially differing accounts --
and both barred newsman from the battle fronts. According to Indian
sources, the Pakistani attack came at 5:47 p.m., just as dusk was
falling. The sites seemed selected for their symbolic values much as
their strategic importance: Agra, site of Taj Mahal; Srinagar, the
beautiful capital of Kashmir; Amritsar, holy city of the Sikhs.
India's bearded warriors. Forty-five minutes after the attack,
Pakistani troops shelled India's western frontier and were reported to
have crossed the border at Punch in the state of Jammu.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had just finished addressing a mass
rally in Calcutta when she received the news, immediately boarded her
Tupolev twin-jet for the two-hour flight to New Delhi. At Delhi's
airport, where her two sons and a small cluster of ministers were on
hand to greet her, she quickly got into a car and was driven without
lights to her office in Parliament House. Shortly after midnight the
Prime Minister, speaking first in English and then Hindi, addressed
the nation.

"I speak to you at a moment of great peril to our country and our
people," she began, "some hours ago, soon after 5:30 p.m., on the
third of December, Pakistan suddenly launched a full-scale war against
us." She announced that the Pakistan air force had struck eight Indian
airfields, and that ground forces were shelling Indian defence
positions in several sectors along the western border. "I have no
doubt that it is the united will of our people," she said, " that this
wanton and unprovoked aggression of Pakistan should be decisively and
finally repelled."

NO RESTRAINTS

According to the very different Pakistan version, regular Indian army
troops on the western frontier had moved earlier in the afternoon
toward seven posts manned by Pakistani rangers. On being challenged ,
the Indians opened up with small arms, and the Pakistani rangers began
firing back. Normally, border forces of both countries follow a
gentlemanly procedure for handling firing across the frontier; they
meet and talk it over. "In this case ," reported a Pakistani officer,
"when our rangers approached their oppsite numbers, they were
surprised to find regular troops and they were fired upon." The
Indians mounted attacks with artillery support two hours later, he
claimed, and Indian jet planes provided support. Pakistan planes then
fanned out to strike at India's airfields, one of them 300 miles deep
inside India.

Radio Pakistan made no mention of the Indian border attack until India
announced that Pakistan's planes had struck, but it wasted no time in
acknowledging its bombing missions. "we are at liberty now to cross
the border as deep as we can," a Pakistani army officer said. A
Foreign Ministry representative added that Pakistani troops were
"released from any restraints."

FABRICATION

Earlier in the week, newsmen including TIME's Louis Kraar, reported
Pakistani movements at Sialkot, about eight miles from Indian border.
Kraar saw comandeered civilian truck carrying fuel tins, portable
bridges and other supplies. A train loaded with military vehicles
chugged by, and wheatfields bristled with camouflaged gun
emplacements. Families were moved out of the army cantonment at
Sailkot, and civilian hospitals were advised to have blood plasma
ready beside empty beds.

In New Delhi, Indian spokesmen vigorously denied the story that Indian
troops had launched an attack in the west to justify the air strike.
"No sensible general staff attacks first on the ground," said Defence
Secertary, K.B. Lall. Some six hours after the Pakistani air raids,
India hit back in force, bombing eight West Pakistani airfields
including one at Karachi. Some time after midnight, Pakistani and
Indian planes entangled in dogfights over Dacca in East Pakistan. When
asked to account for the six-hour delay in India's response. Lall
joked that there had been some difficulty in getting the air force to
move. It did appear that India was taken by surprise: nearly every
senior cabinet official was out of the capital at the time, including
Mrs. Gandhi, who was in Calcutta. During the night, Pakistani planes
repeatedly attacked twelve air fields. On the ground, Pakistan
launched attacks along the western border

RECKLESS PERFIDY

The next morning, Prime Minister Gandhi went before the Indian
Parliament, "This morning the government of Pakistan has declared a
war upon us, a war we did not seek and did our utmost to prevent," she
said. "The unavoidable has happened . West Pakistan has struck with
reckless perfidy." In a broadcast at noon the same day, Pakistani
President Aga Mohammed Yahya Khan accused India of starting a
full-scale war and declared that it was time "to give a crushing reply
to the enemy." He made no mention of a formal declaration of war, but
a proclamation in the government gazette in Islamabad declared: "A
state of war exists between Pakistan on one hand and India on the
other." Mrs. Gandhi did not issue a formal declaration of war, but
Foreign Secretary T.N. Kaul told newsmen: "India reserves the right to
take any action to preserve her security and integrity."

The conflict had its genesis last March when the Pakistani President
and his tough military regime,

1. moved to crush the East Pakistani movement for greater
autonomy,

2. outlawed the Awami League, which had just won a majority in
the nation's first free election,

3. arrested its leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, and

4. launched a repressive campaign that turned into a civil war
with East Pakistan's Bengalis fighting to set up an
independent Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation).

Nearly 1,000,000 people were killed and 10 million refugees streamed
into India. "We have borne the heaviest of burdens," Mrs. Gandhi said
last week, "and withstood the greatest of pressure in a tremendous
effort to urge the world to help in bringing about a peaceful solution
and preventing the annihilation of an entire people whose only crime
was to vote democratically. But the world ignored the basic causes and
concerned itself only with certain repercussions. Today the war in
Bangla Desh has become a war on India."

SELF-DETERMINATION

It soon became clear that India would make an all-out effort to
ensure self-determination for Bangla Desh. India's desire to bring
about an independent nation there has soon as possible stems from two
factors. First is tremendous economic and social burden of the
refugees who have sought santuary in India. Second is that in a
prolonged guerilla war the moderate leadership of the Awami League
would probably give way to more radical political forces, perhaps
leading to a Peking-oriented government on India's border. A third
factor, of course, is India's unspoken desire to weaken its neighbour
by detaching a sizable chunk of its territory.

For several months, Indian troops and Pakistani forces have been
engaged in almost daily border skirmishes. In the past two weeks,
Indian forces, working with bengali guerillas, have stepped up
pressures against Pakistan's troops in the east; in retaliation the
West Pakistanis have been rampaging through Bengali villages in
kill-and-burn raids slaughtering some 2000 people in the vicinity of
Dacca alone.

Even while Mrs. Indira Gandhi was speaking to Parliament, India was
launching an invasion of East Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, former Foreign
Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who is slated to be deputy premier in a
civilian government the Yahya is said to be planning, declared: "I
don't see the Indian army just sweeping through East and West Pakistan
in a matter of weeks. Either there will be a stalemate, or each side
will take some territory from the other and then negotiate."

That may prove an optimistic appraisal, in view of India's numerical
superiority. As far as troop strength goes Pakistanis are outnumbered
by more that two to one in the east. In the west, both countries are
reported to have about 250,000 men deployed along the border for an
almost even balance. India's overall troop strength is about 980,000
compared with Pakistan's 392,000, but an estimated eight mountain
divisions are on guard along India's borders with China.

In materiel, India also has the edge: of its 1,450 tanks, about 450
are Russian medium tanks, and about 300 Indian-made Vijyanta tanks.
India has 625 combat aircraft, including some 120 MIG-21 supersonic
fighters and eight squadrons of Indian-made Gnats. For its part,
Pakistan has about 1,100 tanks, including 200 American Patton tanks,
255 Chinese T-59s, and numerous old American Shermans and Chafees of
limited utility. Pakistan's 285 combat aircraft include two squadrons
of Mirage III fighters and eight squadrons of American F-86 Sabres.

There were no estimates of casualties at week's end. But India claimed
to have destroyed a total of 33 Pakistani aircraft. The Indian Defence
Ministry admitted to the loss of eleven of its own fighters. As India
seemed to be engaged primarily in a holding action in the west while
aiming a quick knock out in the East. Pakistani ground forces claimed
to have seized "significant territory" on India's western border. One
of the Pakistani advances was in the Sialkot sector in Kashmir; India
admitted loosing "some ground" on the Punjab border near Ferozepore.

STRAY CATTLE

Outmanned and likely to be outgunned, Pakistan's Yahya Khan may well
have realized that he had only two options: negotiations or war, both
with probable result of independence for Bangla Desh. Since
negotiations without a war would mean going down without a fight, the
generals might have decided to choose war; such a course would enable
them to say that the breakup of Pakistan was caused not by
faintheartedness but by superior forces.

Islamabad also figured that timely intervention on the part of the
United Nations, which might be expected if war is declared , would
enable West Pakistan to extricate its troops as part of a cease-fire.
At U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, however, the big powers seemed
paralysed. With the subcontinent about to burn, the Security Council
spent most of the week fiddling around with a debate over an obscure
border dispute between Senegal and Portuguese Guinea involving some
stray cattle. As one oldtimer quipped: "India-Pakistan is too
important to get into the U.N."

With Russia lined up behind India, China supporting Pakistan and the
U.S. also leaning sharply toward Pakistan, no one wanted to risk a
session that would dissolve into a sulfurous shouting match.
Nonetheless, at week's end, the 15-member Security Council met to take
up the problem.

PRESERVING LEVERAGE

In Washington , Secretary of State William Rogers cancelled a
scheduled trip to Iceland. After huddling with state department
advisers and conferring by telephone with Richard Nixon at the
President's Key Biscayne retreat in Florida, Rogers announced his
decision late last week to take the issue to the U.N. "The U.S. hopes
that the Council can take prompt action on steps which could bring
about a cease-fire, withdrawal of forces and an amelioration of the
present threat to international peace and security," he said. But no
one was optimistic about its outcome -- and rightly so.

U.S. Ambassador George Bush introduced a resolution calling for a
cease fire, an immediate withdrawal of armed personnel by both sides,
and the placement of observers along the borders. The proposal won
eleven votes, with two abstentions (Britain and France) and two nays
(teh Soviet Union and Poland). It was the veto by the Soviet Union's
Yakov Malik, who blamed "Pakistan's inhuman repression" for the
conflict, that killed the measure.

In any event, the Administration's decision to get involved in the
situation was belated at best. Seeking to preserve its leverage with
Yahya in hopes of inducing him to restrain his troops, the U.S.
managed only to outrage India, which felt among other things that it
had become the pawn in the Administration's move to use Pakistan as
the bridge for Nixon's detente with Peking.

TWO SIDES

At the week's end, the U.S. seemed determined to alienate New Delhi
even further with a harsh State Department declaration that in effect
officially blamed India for the war on the subcontinent and failed to
mention the brutal policies pursued by the Pakistani military regime.
"We believe," the statement said, "that since the beginning of the
crisis, Indian policy in a systematic way has led to perpetuation of
the crisis, a deepening of the crisis, and that India bears the major
responsibility for the broader hostilities which have ensued," The
statement was cleared with the President, one high official stressed.

Clearly, there were at least two sides to the conflict, and the U.S.'s
blatant partiality toward Pakistan seemed both unreasonable and
unwise. India has legitimate grievances: the cost of caring for 10
million refugees, $830 million by the end of March; the threat of
large scale communal turmoil in the politically volatile and
hard-pressed state of West Bengal, where the bulk of refugees have
fled; the presence on India soil of large numbers of guerillas who
could become a militant force stirring up trouble among India's own
dissatisfied masses; and finally, the prospect of a continued inflow
of refugees so long as the civil war continues.

To be sure, New Delhi is not above criticism. The Indians have seemed
entirely too eager to convert the situation into geopolitical profit by
ensuring that Pakistan would be dismembered. Whatever the motives,
however, both India and Pakistan stand to lose far more that they can
afford. As a Pakistani general, a moderate, put it last week while the
conflict worsened: "War could set India back for years -- and ruin
Pakistan."