New Statesman

News hawking in London became very urgent on Monday. Posters appeared in the morning: ‘Indian Tanks in Battle’. By the evening a commentator on the BBC was discussing whether war had actually broken out, and the Pakistani story that it had was the lead item in many broadcasts and newspapers on Tuesday morning. Fleet Street’s reaction exceeded the provocation. The extensive - and, by and large, sympathetic - news coverage brought sharply into focus by Mrs. Gandhi’s visit to London has convinced Britain that India must be earnest because the situation requires this. That is why the larger scale of the clashes is taken to be the beginnings of war. A confirmation that India has decided not to wait any longer for international pressure to work upon Pakistan.

The deduction is not unreasonable but it is false. India has clearly come round to the view that foreign pressure will not produce in 1972 the miracle it did not produce in 1971, that other countries will not discover in the next few months any reason for intervention which they have not discovered in the 10 months since the massacre began in East Bengal. Therefore, it is up to India herself to see that conditions in East Bengal are seen to be stable enough for the 10 million refugees to be willing to go back to their homes. And that can only happen when the elected representatives of the East Bengalis are in power there, not the West Pakistan army through its puppet regime.

Time is of the essence in this. If nothing happens in the next few months to convince the refugees that they can go back, they will remain in their tattered camps in India not only this winter but until death takes them away. If anything were allowed to inhibit a vigorous Indian initiative in the coming weeks, it would inhibit her in the coming years as well, spell out an accumulation of the burden of refugees so enormous that India cannot contemplate it, let alone endure it.

But the limited action by Indian troops that has been admitted by Mrs. Gandhi does not mean India is planning a full-scale offensive. The appalling dilemma which confronts Delhi was overlooked in some of the intimations of war which cover the front pages of Britain’s newspapers. The Indians must act now to cope with the refugees; but if they intervene openly and officially to stop the brutality in East Bengal, to staunch the source of the refugee flood and to prepare the way for the refugees to go back to their homes, China might intervene on the side of Pakistan. The chances of China doing so are certainly not greater than during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, when Peking did no more than issue paper threats to India instead of repeating the invasion it staged in 1962. However, a Chinese intervention cannot be ruled out, and the Indians can counter it only by invoking a matching Soviet intervention under the Indo-Soviet Treaty, although it would make them heavily dependent upon the Soviet Union. If a bilateral war between India and Pakistan became triangular through Chinese intervention, it would quickly become quadrilateral when the Soviets intervened. That would make the Indo-Pakistan frontier an integral part of the Sino-Soviet frontier and straight away India and Pakistan would become subordinate allies in a clash between powers each of whom is bigger than both of them together.

India - and Mrs. Gandhi in particular - would find this most unwelcome. Hence her sedulous cultivation of China while she simultaneously broadened relations with Russia. The move was little known at the time it was made and little noticed when she revealed it earlier this month. Well before signing the treaty with Russia she proposed to China not only unconditional exchange of ambassadors but also unconditional talks for a border agreement, thus abandoning a 10-year-old policy that negotiations could begin only when China withdrew from territory it had forcibly occupied along the Indian border since 1959. India’s readiness to waive this claim indicates the strength of her anxiety that the East Bengal crisis should not develop in a way which would compromise India’s position vis-a-vis Russia. This anxiety is quite possibly shared by Russia. Too, though perhaps for the different reason that it may not wish to get entangled with China more than it has to in its own interests.

This constraints upon India is accentuated by Mrs. Gandhi’s temperamental preferences. On the one hand, she is imperious enough not to wish to be dependent upon anyone, not even Moscow, more than circumstances compel her to be. On the other hand she is cautious enough not to be more drastic than is necessary. Whenever the option has been open, she has chosen the moderate course. In the present crisis she is willing to bide her time, and this is what she has been doing up to now. For as long as it was possible she went on hoping that the moral pressure of world opinion and the less moral but more potent one of suspension of aid would make Pakistan accommodate the sub-nationalism of East Bengal instead of trying to crush it. That hope has vanished. But even now she does not see large-scale military action by Indian armed forces as the only alternative to total inaction.

Caught between the opposing requirements for action and for caution, policy makers in New Delhi have adopted the tactics of the indirect approach and stepped up assistance for the Mukti Bahini. This was always feasible : no guerrilla movement, not even the Vietcong’s, was so well placed by geography for receiving assistance, no army of occupation so badly placed for stopping the aid. But up till now the feasible was not accepted as Indian policy because of the risk of war. At long last the risk has been accepted; the larger scale of the border clashes is evidence of this, as also the Mukti Bahini’s attacks on shipping off Chittagong and Chalna.

Together they are a most ominous warning for the four to five divisions of the Pakistan army which are in East Bengal. Sent in to crush the movement for autonomy for East Bengal, these forces may find in retrospect that they have become hostages to an independent Bangladesh. Their hope of a quick and decisive victory has been frustrated already. They now face a period of attrition which can only bring the worst to them, and to India the hope that the refugees can go back to their homes without India going to war with Pakistan. Indian interests coincide so closely with the Mukti Bahini’s at this point that West Pakistan understandably mistakes, as on Monday, the intentions of the one for the actions of the other.

Whether Pakistan will attack India, with or without the excuse of an Indian- inspired attack, is a riddle the key to which is not held by New Delhi or Islamabad or even by Moscow. It is held by Peking. India may not believe that China will intervene. But, if Peking allows Islamabad to believe that it will, then the military minds now in control in Pakistan may decide that it would be better to have an all-out war with India than to suffer defeat by attrition in East Bengal. They could reckon that a successful revolution in that part of their country could breed dangerous ambitions in the Western wing also.

A pre-emptive attack by Pakistan, whatever the desperation which inspires it, would be poor return for the patience shown by India and the sacrifices made by East Bengal. For the sake of avoiding the risks of war, India decided to wait while other countries tried to persuade Pakistan; in the meantime India suffered the serious burden of the refugee influx and Bangladesh paid the terrible price of the largest massacre of a freedom movement in recorded history. India also suffered some loss of credibility : all her ‘warnings’ and ‘ultimatums’ were taken to lie only verbal postures struck for the sake of defusing domestic pressure, not for proclaiming a serious intention. Yet if the Pakistanis do strike, the very war the Indians avoided at such cost will still be on their hands. This will have to be put down as a costly error but one which was both understandable and honourable in the circumstances.