Observer (London)

New Delhi, 20 November. Imagine a perplexed and ungainly elephant, tormented by an agitated cloud of shrill middle-class gentlemen. They are trying to prod her down a shadowy track sign-posted ‘war’. But her mahout, firmly astride her neck, says ‘No, not yet.’ The elephant is India today. The prodders are certain Indian politicians and intellectuals in Delhi. The mahout, we may all have cause to be thankful, is Mrs. Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister.

I drove this week from Lahore in West Pakistan to Delhi in India through two armies of 250,000 men each, standing eyeball to eyeball. At the border, Pakistanis in police uniforms stood pacifically beside Indian border guards. A flirtatious Indian lady customs officer flipped through my suitcase and said: ‘Have you brought any Pakistani newspapers?’ She flashed her eyebrows like Groucho Marx making a proposition. I assured her I hadn’t any such papers and drove into India. Along the road were Sikh troops with khaki turban. And beyond them was an unforgettable village scene. Crowds of peasants shuffled and barged, soft-eyed sacred cows lay about in awkward places, old men with probing sticks picked their way through the dust, bundles of human bones in rags stirred in the dirt.

Suddenly two Indian Air Force MiGs flew over with a shattering roar. The scene froze. Some peasants ducked, some older people fell to their knees with their arms over their heads for protection. The driver of a buffalo cart rolled up his eyes and dived among his bales. The poor of India crouched down like chickens under the shadow of a hawk. Even two roaring aircraft seem a monstrous intrusion into those peasant lives. Yet, Mrs. Gandhi notably apart, there are some here who can contemplate, relatively unruffled, unleashing squadrons and divisions on millions of peasants.

It is lucky that Mrs. Gandhi is in control in Delhi. It is not that the Indian masses, or even students, are swarming in the streets shouting ‘War, war.’ Even in Bengali Calcutta, next door to East Pakistan, nothing like that is happening. Mrs. Gandhi can concentrate on the one real problem she must act on and be seen to act on : 10 million helpless people in West Bengal camps, fugitives from the appalling violence in East Pakistan. Mrs. Gandhi is disturbed by the expense of keeping these refugees. She is understandably much more disturbed by the social and political problems they could eventually generate.

Already, the poor of Assam and West Bengal, on the starvation line since independence in 1947, are beginning to object to the special treatment the newcomers are getting. There have been one or two physical clashes. Given time, there might be serious communal troubles. But the refugees cannot go back to East Pakistan until the shooting stops. The root question therefore is how to stop the shooting. Ideally, the Indians would like the West Pakistanis out of East Pakistan without any fuss. They want President Yahya Khan to negotiate right away with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Awami League leader now in jail in West Pakistan. They are discouraging Mujib’s colleagues in Calcutta from talking with Yahya because they are afraid the Awami men there might accept less than Mujib would insist on. The Indians, given a marvelous chance to whack them, don’t want to let the Pakistanis off lightly.

But another trouble is Indian impatience. Mrs. Gandhi presumably understands, but other Indians pretend not to, that Yahya does not operate in a political vacuum in West Pakistan. He has strong pressure groups to contend with and placate. Some are desperately opposed to talks with ‘the traitor’ Mujib. Meanwhile, I understand Yahya has said privately that if all efforts at reconciliation with East Pakistan in a National Assembly fail, he will order a straight referendum for East Bengalis : ‘Do you want to remain inside Pakistan or not?’ That may well prove the only way out of this catastrophic impasse. But a referendum cannot be arrived at immediately, and Yahya is not going to be pushed by anyone in Delhi. Will, then, the Indian Government give him time? It seems reasonable to prevent mass death and destruction. Yet it is alarming to see how confidently even happily - clever Indians in Delhi salons dismiss the notion that Yahya might reach a peaceful settlement with East Pakistan. Even notably liberal- minded Indian intellectuals are emotionally welcoming all-out war with Pakistan. Some think it should have come months back.

Everyone I talk to here, from Cabinet rank to newspaper reporters, assumes without question that very soon now Pakistan will break up, that Bangladesh will be independent, and that India must speed up the process. Indian officials are still doggedly denying the universally known fact that their Army is backing up the Mukti Bahini guerrillas of East Pakistan with artillery fire and arms, at the very least. A diplomat here said : ‘One senior Indian official actually assured me that Mukti Bahini were getting their arms from friends in Bradford.’ Still, Indian aid is going to the Mukti Bahini, and the Indian Government’s close connections (the Russians have them too) with the Bangladesh ‘Government in exile’ in West Bengal is obvious and even understandable - the Indians want to keep a controlling hand on the situation and an eye on the political character of the Bengali nationalist movement. Tajuddin Ahmed, the Bangladesh ‘Prime Minister,’ comes to Delhi from time to time from his movable hideaway in the East. He has accepted an Indian and Russian idea to include non-Awami League representatives in a ‘consultative committee’ as an adjunct to his Government.

Mrs. Gandhi has already had to sidestep crafty attempts by some Delhi hawks to force the pressure on Yahya while she was away on her recent tour of Western Europe and America. Rumours spread round Delhi that she would come back to announce at least a state of emergency and recognition for the Bangladesh Government - in fact, take a short cut to war. The rumours were started partly be hawks among her own Ministers. She has so far disappointed them and up to today still repeats the mild formula that the problem of East Pakistan is not a problem between India and West Pakistan, but between East and West Pakistan.

She probably has personal doubts to dispel before going blithely to war. Surprisingly, India’s generals are thought to be less warlike than the civilian armchair warriors, perhaps because they knew how difficult it is to predict the course of a war once it has begun. Besides, their experiences in 1962 and 1965 were not laced with glory. Another factor is that - despite widespread assumptions to the contrary - the Russians did not undertake to intervene against Pakistan when they signed the recent defence agreement with India. The Russians were so cagey, I understand, that it took three days to work out the final communique, to the satisfaction of both sides.

There is still a real danger today that the present brinkmanship Indians are playing out in the east will provoke the Pakistanis too far. There is a hint of an overconfident cat’s attitude in Delhi Government offices, and the Pakistanis are not mice. For Example, senior Indians told me that recognition of Bangladesh would come only if Pakistan attacked India - or, significantly, if the Mukti Bahini took over a big enough chunk of East Pakistan on which to set up a national Government. That would mean immediate war. Yet the Indians are behind the current increase in Mukti Bahini activity designed presumably to achieve that desirable slab of territory. Is that a sign that the Indians are actually hoping to provoke an attack? No one can be sure. Again, an Indian official says happily, ‘The Pakistan Army’s morale is cracking in the east.’ But is he sure that desperation will not drive the Pakistanis not to give up, but to attack?

One other danger - a remoter one - is that as time goes on Mrs. Gandhi will give way to her more hawkish advisers. They are quite formidable. To meet one of them, Mr. Jagjivan Ram, the Minister of Defence, is to believe in bogeymen. He sat comfortably behind his desk in the vast rose-red palace Sir Edward Lutyens built for the Raja’s new capital years ago. He is a heavy man with a little white Congress cap on grey straggling hair and gold rings on his fingers. He looks every inch the powerful and cynical politician. He seemed to think, quite casually, that war is inevitable. I asked him, if a war would not increase and spread the misery beyond even the existing misery of those 10 million refugees. And who would look after the desperate East Bengalis when they had finally been returned to their own, by then perhaps totally shattered state?

Suffering there would be, said Mr. Ram impassively. But he had only one concern: to put those 10 million people back into East Bengal and out of India. Afterwards? That’s other people’s concern. Indian responsibility would be at an end. These are hardly remarks to comfort those wretched peasants I saw this week crouching in terror of their own Government’s expensively bought MiGs.