Time

"My dear Abdullah. I am here," read the message to the general in
beleaguered Dacca. "The game is up. I suggest you give yourself up to
me and I'll look after you." The author of that soothing appeal was
India's Major General Gandharv Nagra. The recipient was Lieut. General
A.A.K.("Tiger") Niazi, commander of Pakistan's 60,000 troops in East
Bengal and a onetime college classmate of Nagra's. Minutes before
expiration of India's cease-fire demand, Niazi last week bowed to the
inevitable. By United Nations radio, he informed the Indian command
that he was prepared to surrender his army unconditionally.

Less than an hour later, Indian troops rode triumphantly in to Dacca
as Bengalis went delirious with joy. "It was liberation day," cabled
TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin. "Dacca exploded in an ecstasy of
hard-won happiness. There was wild gunfire in the air, impromptu
parades, hilarity and horn honking, and processions of jammed trucks
and cars, all mounted with the green, red and gold flag of Bangladesh.
Bengalis hugged and kissed Indian jawans, stuck marigolds in their gun
barrels and showered them with garlands of jasmine. If ` jai Bangla!'
(Victory to Bengal!) was screamed once, it was screamed a million
times. Even Indian generals got involved. Nagra climbed on the hood of
his Jeep and led the shouting of slogans for Bangladesh and its
imprisoned leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman. Brigadier General H.S. Kler
lost his patches and almost his turban when the grateful crowed
engulfed him."

Late that afternoon as dusk was beginning to fall, General Niazi and
Lieut. General Jagjit Singh Aurora, commander of India's forces in
the East, signed the formal surrender of the Pakistani army on the
grassy lawn of Dacca's Race Course. Niazi handed over his revolver to
Aurora, and the two men shook hands. Then, as Pakistani commander was
driven away in a Jeep. Aurora was lifted into the shoulders of the
cheering crowd.

Thus, 13 days after it began, the briefest but bitterest of the wars
between India and Pakistan came to an end. The surrender also marked
the end of the nine-month-old civil war between East and West
Pakistan. Next day Pakistan's President Aga Mohammed Yahya Khan
reluctantly accepted India's cease-file on the western border. It was
a complete and humiliating defeat. The was stripped Pakistan of more
than half of its population and with nearly one-third of its army in
captivity, clearly established India's military dominance of the
subcontinent.

Considering the magnitude of the victory, New Delhi was surprisingly
restrained in its reaction. Mostly, Indian leaders seemed pleased by
the relative ease with which they had accomplished their goals -- the
establishment of Bangladesh and the prospect of an early return to
their homeland of the 10 million Bengali refugees who were the cause
of the war. In announcing the surrender to the Indian Parliament,
Prime Minister declared,"Dacca is now the free capitol of a free
country. We hail the people of Bangladesh in their hour of triumph.
All nations who value the human spirit will recognize it as a
significant milestone in man's quest for liberty."

Although both sides claimed at week's end that the cease-fire was
being violated, serious fighting did appear to be over for the
present. Initial fears that India might make a push to capture
Pakistani Kashmir proved to be unfounded. India undoubtedly wanted to
risk neither a hostile Moslem uprising in the region nor Chinese
intervention. But several major issues between India and Pakistan
remain -- and it may take months to resolve them:

1. repatriation of Pakistan's 60,000 regular troops in the East,

2. release of Sheik Mujibur Rahman, whom the Bangladesh
government has proclaimed President but who is still
imprisoned in West Pakistan on charges of treason.

3. disposition of various chunks of territory that the two
countries have seized from each other along the western
border.

Mrs. Gandhi may well try to ransom Mujib in exchange for release of
the Pakistani soldiers. India is also expected to press for a drawing
of the cease-fire line that has divided the disputed region of Kashmir
since 1949. The Indians have captured 50 strategic Pakistani outposts
in the high Kashmiri mountains. These are the same outposts that India
captured in 1965, and then gave up as part of the 1966 Tashkend
Agreement: India is not likely to be as accommodating this time.

In the chill, arid air of Islamabad, West Pakistan's military regime
was finding it difficult to come to grips with the extent of the
country's ruin. Throughout the conflict there had been a bizarre air
of unreality in the West, as Pakistani army officials consistently
claimed they were winning when quite the reverse was true. Late last
week the Pakistani government still seemed unable to accept its defeat
simultaneously with the announcement of the cease-fire, officials
handed newsmen an outline of Yahya's plans for a new constitution.
Among other things, it provides "that the republic shall have two
capitals, at Islamabad and at Dacca." It adds:"The principal seat of
Parliament will be located in Dacca." That will, of course, be news to
Bangladesh.

President Yahya Khan had declared the conflict a jihad (holy war) and,
even while surrender was being signed in the East, he was boasting
that his nation would "engage the aggressor on all fronts." He became
the first political victim of the conflict. At week's end, Yahya
announced that he would step down in favor of Deputy Prime Minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, head of the Pakistan People's Party. A rabid
anti-India, pro-China politician who served as Foreign Minister in the
government of former President Ayub khan, Bhutto was the chief
architect of Pakistan's alliance with China. In the nation's first
free election last December, his party ran second to Mujib's Awami
League. Regarding that as a threat to his own ambitions, Bhutto was
instrumental in persuading Yahya to set aside the election results.

Ali Bhutto, who had a brief interview with President Nixon last
Saturday concerning "restoration of stability in South Asia," will
return to Islamabad this week to head what Yahya said would be "a
representative government." A dramatic emotional orator, who tearfully
stalked out of the U.N. Security Council last week to protest its
inaction on the war. Bhutto has recently made little secret of his
displeasure with the military regime,"The people of Pakistan are
angry," he fumed last week, "The generals have messed up the land."

Yahya's overconfidence had undoubtedly been fed by the outcome of the
two nations' previous tangles, all of them inconclusive territorial
disputes that altered little and allowed both sides to claim victory.
This time, though, the Indians felt they were fighting for a moral
cause. Pakistan's army in the East, moreover, was cut off by Indian
air and naval superiority from the West, and had to contend with a
hostile local populations well as combined forces of the tough Mukti
Bahini guerrillas and a numerically superior and better equipped
Indian army. Despite the brief duration of the war, the fighting was
fierce. The Indian alone reported 10,633 casualties -- 2,307 killed,
6,163 wounded, 2,163 missing in action. Pakistan's casualties, not yet
announced, are believed to be much higher, and there are no figures at
all for guerrilla losses.

BATTLE OF THE TANKS

India also claims to have destroyed 244 Pakistani tanks, against a
loss of 73 of its own. No fewer than 60 tanks -- 45 of Pakistan's, 15
of India's -- were knocked out in the last day of the war in a fierce
struggle that raged for more than 24 hours. The incident took place on
the Punjabi plains, where the Indians tried to draw the Pakistanis out
of the town of Shakargarh (meaning "the place of sugar"), in order to
attack the important Pakistani military garrison of Sialkot.

In the East, Indian troops skirted cities and villages whenever
possible in order to avoid civilian casualties, a strategy that also
scattered the demoralized Pakistani forces and led to their defeat.
After the signing of the surrender, a military spokesman in New Delhi
announced triumphantly:"Not a single individual was killed in Dacca
after the surrender." Unhappily, that turned out not to be true. One
report said that Bengali guerrillas had executed more than 400
razakars , members of the West Pakistani army's much-hated local
militia.

Although General Aurora was firm in his insistence that the Mukti
Bahini disarm, it was unlikely that the bloodshed could be totally
halted for sometime. The new government of Bangladesh, if only to
satisfy public opinion, will almost certainly hold a number of
war-crimes trials of captured members of the former East Pakistan
government. Potentially the most explosive situation is the Bengali
desire for vengeance against 1,500,000 Biharis -- non-Bengali Moslems
living in East Pakistan, many of whom are suspected of collaborating
with the Pakistani army. In some villages, the Biharis have been
locked in jails for their own protection. In an unusual conciliatory
gesture, Aurora permitted Pakistani soldiers to keep their weapons
until they had reached prison camps. He explained:"You have to see the
bitterness in Dacca to believe it."

THE LOSERS

Islamabad, of course was the principal loser in the outcome of the
war. But there were two others as well. One was the United Nations,
The Security Council last week groped desperately toward trying to
achieve an international consensus on what to do about the struggle,
and ended up with seven cease-fire resolutions that were never acted
upon at all. The other loser was Washington, which had tried to bring
about a political settlement but from the New Delhi viewpoint -- and
to other observers as well -- appeared wholeheartedly committed to the
support of Pakistan's military dictatorship.

Indian anger at U.S. backing of Pakistan was compounded last week when
the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise and a task force of
destroyers and amphibious ships from the Seventh Fleet sailed into the
Bay of Bengal. Although Soviet vessels were reported to be moving
toward the area, word of the U.S. move touched off a storm of
anti-American demonstrations. In Calcutta, angry protesters burned
effigies of Richard Nixon and Yahya Khan. The Seventh Fleet action was
justified by the Navy on the grounds that it might have to evacuate
American civilians from Dacca. (As it turned out, most of the
foreigners who wanted to leave were flown out the same day the carrier
left Vietnamese waters by three British transports.) All across India,
though, there were rumors that the Navy had been sent to rescue
Pakistani troops and that the U.S. was about to intervene in the war.

LIP SERVICE

Mrs. Gandhi made several gestures to try to dampen the anti-American
feeling, and refused to allow debate in the Indian Parliament on the
U.S. moves. But she also sent a long, accusatory and somewhat
self-serving letter to President Nixon, in which she argued that the
war could have been avoided "if the great leaders of the world had
paid some attention to the fact of revolt, tried to see the reality of
the situation and searched for a genuine basis for reconciliation,"
Instead, Mrs. Gandhi said, only "lip service was paid to the need for
a political solution, but not a single worthwhile step was taken to
bring this about."

India's triumph is in large measure a stunning personal one for Mrs.
Gandhi. Throughout the crisis Indians have been united behind her as
never before, and she is even being compared with the Hindu goddess
Durga, who rid the world of the demon Mahasura. Quite apart from war,
India seems to be feeling a new self-assurance. The land that for
centuries was synonymous with famine now enjoys a wheat surplus and
will soon become self sufficient in rice, thanks to the Green
Revolution. Mrs. Gandhi, backed by overwhelming mandate in last
March's elections, has been able to bring about a large measure of
political stability for the first time since Nehru's death. India is
still poverty-ridden and in need of foreign aid, but its industries
are developing rapidly in size and sophistication. All these factors,
reinforced by military victory, may bring profound psychological
change in India and a lessening of corrosive self-doubt.

For that reason, there is no feeling in New Delhi that the Soviet
Union, whose aid was primarily diplomatic rather than military, in any
way won this war for India--any more than China or the U.S. lost it
for Pakistan. Despite the current popularity of the Soviet Union and
the unpopularity of the U.S., Indians are probably as horrified by
Russian totalitarianism and Chinese Maoism as by what they consider
"American materialism." In the long run, India's new found strength
could conceivably lessen rather than enlarge Soviet influence.

ESSENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

Meanwhile the huge task of reconstruction in Bangladesh begins. India
has already set a target date of Jan. 31 as the goal for the return of
all 10 million refugees. Free bus service is being provided, and the
vehicles loaded down with belongings and passengers have begun
rolling back across the borders to Bangladesh. The Indian Planning
Commission, which charts India's overall developed program, estimates
that it will take nearly $900 million for essential reconstruction
work in Bangladesh and for the refuges' rehabilitation. Bridges,
buildings, roads and almost the entire communications network must be
restored.

The State Dept has made it plain that Washington stands ready to
supply Bangladesh with humanitarian aid. At week's end Bangladesh's
Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam and his government were already
settled in Dacca, and Washington was said to be considering
recognition of the new nation.