The point now is not who started the new Indo-Pakistan conflict. (That intelligence remains wrapped in a bewildering patchwork quilt of reports, wild exaggerations, and cold lies.) The point is how to stop it. And after months of apprehension, and days of frank alarm, no World Power seems to have many ideas or much influence. With Russia in one camp, China in another, and America generally despised in both we are beyond even a Tashkent situation. If yesterday’s fighting develops into thrust, counter-thrust, it is very hard to visualize effective intervention until one side is on its knees. Most military observers think that side will be Pakistan. One may shortly expects bloody campaign in East Bengal, leaving more millions homeless, more millions starving, and more hundreds of thousands (the Biharis) prey to more casual slaughter. One may, perhaps, further expect crippling stalemate or the dismemberment and subsequent political disintegration of West Pakistan.

Is this true, what Mrs. Gandhi secretly wants? Surely not. For that matter, would a precisely reversed scenario please Yahya Khan? Yesterday’s tragedy is that an all-out struggle to the death is unlikely to solve anything to anyone’s complete satisfaction. Subcontinental war is the bluntest of blunt instruments. The sole hope of stopping it, even at this near-hopeless stage, is to sketch the outlines of a peace to please New Delhi and keep Islamabad intact. This peace formula exists. The critical difficulty is discovering a way (a UN party, a third world delegation, a big Power entente) to thrust it between the rhetoricians and the growling generals.

India’s professed and just demand is the return of the nine million refugees to East Pakistan - a return feasible only if Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, elected leader of Bangladesh, goes free, a visible symbol of autonomy. Pakistan’s rulers, for their part, may let the East go at last if the shreds of their benighted honour are left to them. Mujib, silent and invisible since March, is the man who can help reconcile all; for he has made no promises, he can make the bargains. Remove him finally from the scene and Bangladesh revolution might turn into desperate factionalism and reviled Indian occupation, an appalling outcome for Mrs. Gandhi. The stark fact at this moment, which India must face, is that one knife silently between the ribs (plotted or haphazard) wrecks the basis of her new case and opens up bottomless vistas of chaos.

No overwhelming victory, then, can guarantee India what she seeks. A single assassin can overturn the weight of all her tanks and all her planes. Similarly, Yahya’s advisers know that East Pakistan is indefensible and Western onslaughts a short-run gamble likely to stumble (as it did in 1965) then crack as the war machine falls apart. If Yahya believed impossible triumph he would have struck long ago. He must realise (as did the high command in 1965) that prolonged war is national suicide. They can settle, then, indeed, over the past few days, a settlement from Islamabad without war has seemed in the wind. But can the steps of mutual logic work fast for either side, while pukka pilots dogfight in the skies and delighted tank commanders weave sweeping patterns: before, in short, the battle gets messily, brutally indiscriminate? Yahya Khan and Mrs. Gandhi must talk sooner or later. How long and how many wasted lives later?