Liberation War of Bangladesh in Time Magazine PDF

Liberation War of Bangladesh
In
Time Magazine
Contents :
April 04, 1969: The army takes over Pakistan
December 6, 1970: East Pakistan: The Politics of Catastrophe
April 05, 1971 : Pakistan: Toppling Over the Brink
April 05, 1971 : "Raise Your Hands and Join Me"
April 12, 1971: Pakistan: Round 1 to the West
April 26, 1971: Pakistan: The Push toward the Borders
May 3, 1971 : Dacca – The city of the dead
June 21, 1971: The Bengali Refugees: A Surfeit of Woe
July 5, 1971: The most fearful consequence
August 2, 1971: A letter from the publisher
August 2, 1971: Pakistan: The Ravaging of Golden Bengal
August 2, 1971: Good soldier Yahya Khan
August 23, 1971: Mujib’s secret trial
October 25, 1971: East Pakistan: Even the Skies Weep
December 6, 1971: A letter from the publisher
December 6, 1971: India and Pakistan: Poised for War

December 6, 1971: Hindu and Moslem: The Gospel of Hate
December 13, 1971: India and Pakistan: Over the Edge
December 20, 1971: Out Of War, a Nation is Born
December 20, 1971: The U.S.: A Policy in Shambles
December 27, 1971: India: Easy victory, Uneasy Peace
December 27, 1971: “We Know How the Parisains Felt”
January 3, 1972: Ali Bhutto Begins to Pick Up the Pieces
January 3, 1972: Vengeance in Victory
January 10, 1972: Painful adjustment.
January 17, 1972: Mujib’s Road from Prison to Power
January 17, 1972: The Kissinger Tilt
January 17, 1972: Great man or Rabble-Rouser?
January 24, 1972: A hero returns home
February 14, 1972: Recognizing reality
February 28, 1972: Bleak Future
April 3, 1972: Not yet a country
January 1, 1973: Not Yet Shonar Bangla
September 17, 1973: Wrapping Up the War

THE ARMY TAKES OVER PAKISTAN
Friday, Apr. 04, 1969
Authority forgets a dying king.— Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Passing of Arthur
PAKISTAN'S President Mohammed Ayub Khan might well embrace

that melancholy observation as his political epitaph. He had promised to
renounce power on the expiration of his presidential term next year, and
meanwhile to restore parliamentary democracy to his disturbed land. Far
from calming the civil disorders racking Pakistan, his renunciation
intensified the dissensions threatening to tear apart the fragile unity of
East and West Pakistan, and led to still more bloody rioting. Last week,
with the disruption beyond his control, Ayub abruptly departed, turning
over to the army the world's fifth most populous nation. His voice
breaking with emotion, Ayub took to Radio Pakistan "for the last time"
to explain why Pakistan had once again fallen under military rule. "I
cannot," he declared in a phrase with Churchillian echoes, "preside over
the destruction of my country."
Ayub added: "The country's economic system is paralyzed. Every

problem is now being solved in the streets. Mobs surround any place
they like and force acceptance of whatever they like. There is nobody left
to raise a righteous voice." Accordingly, the President declared, there
was no alternative but for the army's chief of staff, General Agha
Mohammed Yahya Khan, to assume all the powers of government.
Cats by the Tail.
Why did Ayub step down? The President sounded particularly bitter
toward his political opponents, whom he blamed for bringing on the
nation's paralysis. He had halfway acceded to their demands by agreeing
to make way for a British-style parliamentary government to be elected
by universal suffrage around the turn of the year. Having won that much,
both East and West Pakistani politicians, though still as divided among
themselves as when Ayub once dismissed them as "five cats tied by their
tails," were emboldened to press on. Not wanting to wait for the
promised elections, they demanded satisfaction of other grievances
immediately. So did the mobs in the streets: in East Pakistan, two weeks
of vigilante murders, mostly of lower officials in the Ayub regime, cost
more than 200 lives, and in the West hundreds of factories were
strikebound by workers demanding better wages.
What forced Ayub to hasten his departure more than anything else was a
challenge from East Pakistan's popular Sheik Mujibur Rahman. The
impatient "Mujib" threatened to carry to the National Assembly his
demands for purbodesh, a kind of associate statehood, for East Pakistan's
Bengalis, which would seriously weaken the central government in
Rawalpindi. If Mujib's East Pakistanis had their way, Ayub feared, what
would prevent similar demands in West Pakistan that the province be
carved up into four separate states? Aware for the first time that he might
lose control of his once rubber-stamp National Assembly, Ayub wrote a
letter to Yahya inviting the army to move in.
Read the remaining part of the article at:

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East Pakistan: The Politics of Catastrophe
Monday, Dec. 07, 1970
THE face of the Pakistani official was ashen. Fresh from an inspection of
the cyclone-ravaged coastline of the Bay of Bengal, he described the
scene: "No vulture, no dog, and even no insects were to be found
anywhere. Just heaps of human bodies and carcasses." More than two
weeks after the storm had shrieked across the low-lying Ganges River
Delta, the enormity of the havoc wrought by its 120-m.p.h. winds and
20-ft. waves could still only be sensed, not measured. Toward week's
end, some 6,000 Ansar militiamen and volunteers trudged into the
flatlands to begin burying, for $2 a corpse, the rapidly decomposing
bodies claimed by what Pakistanis have already begun to call "the second
Hiroshima."
The official toll of dead and missing stood at 200,000 by week's end, and
there were predictions that it would eventually triple or even quintuple.
The cyclone was thus guaranteed its place as the 20th century's worst
natural disaster. In all, the storm devastated a densely populated, 3,000-
sq. mi. area, destroying 90% of the buildings and 90% of the rice crop. In
some areas, TIME's Ghulam Malik reported last week, "it was like the
beginning of life after Doomsday. People were wandering naked, wailing
the names of kin who never responded. At Hatia, survivors wore rags
that they found in ponds and ditches. And if they could find no rags, they
wore leaves."
A medical team in the Noakhali district told of coming upon a tumble of
"eight corpses and hundreds of carcasses. Suddenly, in this grotesque
heap, a naked woman's broken body shuddered slightly." The team
removed the woman, and managed to restore her to consciousness. Many
of the living were almost crazed. At one point, an American helicopter
bearing U.S. Ambassador Joseph S. Farland and 10-lb. sacks of rice,
molasses and salt was nearly torn apart when it landed among starving
Bengalis, who rushed the Ambassador and grabbed at the sacks. As the
pilot swung into the air again, the tail rotor cut down three of the mob,
seriously injuring them.
Big Danger. Why had the delta's 3,000,000 Bengalis been so

unprepared? A U.S. weather satellite's photo of severe weather in the
Bay of Bengal had been received in the East Pakistani capital of Dacca
more than ten hours before the cyclone struck. A warning —moha bipod
shonket (big danger coming)—was broadcast, but someone forgot to
include a code number indicating the force of the expected storm.
The worldwide response to the catastrophe was unprecedentedly swift

and generous. Less than four days after the cyclone struck, Red Cross
supplies were arriving at Dacca airport. Soon the delta skies began to fill
with an international fleet of 29 choppers (U.S., British, French, West
German and Saudi Arabian), which are the only means of moving
supplies rapidly in an area with many canals, few roads and hardly any
airstrips. A four-ship British task force anchored in the bay and began
choppering food, clothing, medicine and water purification pills to the
remote coastal areas. Pledges of aid from 40 countries, ranging from
Communist China ($1,200,000) to Monaco ($950), flooded into Red
Cross headquarters in Geneva.
Read the rest of the article at :
Pakistan: Toppling Over the Brink

Monday, Apr. 05, 1971
WITH the awesome fury of a cyclone off the Bay of Bengal, civil war
swept across East Pakistan last week. In city after crowded, dusty city the
army turned its guns on mobs of rioting civilians. Casualties mounted
into the thousands. Though the full toll remained uncertain because of
censorship and disorganization in the world's most densely populated
corner (1,400 people per sq. mi.), at week's end some estimates had
2,000 dead. Even if President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan is prepared
to accept casualties of a geometrically greater magnitude, the outcome is
likely to be the final breakup of East and West Pakistan and the painful
birth of a new nation named Bangla Desh (Bengal State).
The indistinct battle lines reflected the ethnic and cultural divisions that
have beset Pakistan since its creation as a Moslem homeland when
British India was partitioned in 1947. Two predominantly Moslem areas
that used to be part of India became a new country, the two parts
separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Thus, though 80,000 West
Pakistani soldiers were on hand to keep order in East Pakistan last week,
their supply bases were 1,000 miles away and most food and ammunition
had to be carried 3,000 miles around the coast of India. The troops —
mostly tall, fierce Punjabis and Pa-thans—were surrounded in East
Pakistan by a hostile population of 78 million Bengalis. The civil war—
and it could be called no less—promised to be long and bloody. The
Bengalis, armed with a few looted guns, spears and often just bamboo
staves, were ill-trained for a guerrilla war. But a resistance movement,
once organized, might eventually force the West Pakistanis to depart. In
a way, the struggle evoked haunting memories of the Nigerian civil war
of 1967-70, when the federal regime sought justification in the name of
national unity and the Biafrans in the name of self-determination.
First Shot.
Until last week, Pakistan's political leaders seemed on the verge of
settling their differences. Then, in rapid order, three events carried the
nation over the brink of violence. In Chittagong, a mob surrounded West
Pakistani troops unloading supply ships. Where the first shots came from
is unclear, but when the troops opened fire, 35 Bengalis were killed.
Their political leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, called a general strike to
protest. Then, Yahya Khan outlawed Mujib and his Awami League Party
as "enemies of Pakistan" and ordered the armed forces to "do their duty."
In Dacca, army tanks and truckloads of troops with fixed bayonets came
clattering out of their suburban base, shouting "Victory to Allah," and
"Victory to Pakistan." TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin, who, along
with other newsmen, was subsequently expelled from Pakistan, reported:
"Before long, howitzer, tank artillery and rocket blasts rocked half a
dozen scattered sections of Dacca. Tracers arced over the darkened city.
The staccato chatter of automatic weapons was punctuated with grenade
explosions, and tall columns of black smoke towered over the city. In the
night came the occasional cry of 'Joi Bangla [Victory to Bengal],'
followed by a burst of machine-gun fire."
The army ordered a strict 24-hour curfew in Dacca, with violators shot
on sight. But soon the Free Bengal Revolutionary Radio Center, probably
somewhere in Chittagong, crackled into life. Over the clandestine station.
Mujib proclaimed the creation of the "sovereign independent Bengali
nation," and called on its people to "resist the enemy forces at all costs in
every corner of Bangla Desh." The defiant words, however, lacked
military substance. At 1:30 a.m. the following day, soldiers seized the
sheik in his home. Meanwhile, scattered rioting broke out in West
Pakistan to protest the prospect of prolonged military rule.
The rupture in Pakistan stemmed from the country's first experiment with
true democracy. After it was founded in 1947, Pakistan was ruled on the
basis of a hand-picked electorate; martial law was imposed after an
outbreak of rioting in 1969. During those years, Pakistan was divided by
more than geography. Physically and psychologically, the 58 million tall,
light-skinned people of the west identified with the Islamic peoples who
inhabit the arc of land stretching as far as Turkey. The smaller, darker
East Pakistanis seemed to belong more to the world of South and
Southeast Asia. More divisive yet was the fact that the westerners
monopolized the government and the army and dominated the nation's
commercial life. The East Pakistanis have, over the years, earned the
bulk of the country's foreign exchange with their jute exports, yet the
majority of schools, roads, new factories and modern government
buildings went up in the west.
Eager to relinquish power and return the country to civilian rule, Yahya
called elections last December for a National Assembly to write a new
constitution. East Pakistanis gave Sheik Mujib's Awami League 167 of
the region's 169 seats—and an overall majority in the combined nation's
313-seat assembly chamber. Mujib's platform called for a virtual
dismantling of the central government, leaving it in charge of defense
and diplomacy and giving the provinces total control of taxes, trade and
foreign aid.
Determined to hold the country together, Yahya resisted Mujib's

demands for autonomy. Postponing the Constitutional Assembly, he flew
to Dacca and in eleven days of meetings with Mujib came almost within
sight of a compromise agreement. Yahya, however, demanded that the
leader of West Pakistan's majority party, ex-Foreign Minister Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, also be a party to the agreement. Bhutto insisted on heading
the foreign ministry while Mujib maintained that, with an overall
majority, he had the right to form a government without Bhutto.
Mendicant Among Nations.

If East Pakistan eventually takes its place in the world community as
Bangla Desh, it will have the world's eighth largest population and
lowest per capita income ($50 a year). It will, inevitably, become a
mendicant among nations, and the U.S. will face the need to increase the
$250 million a year in foreign aid that it now gives to the combined
wings of the country. East Pakistan has little industry to speak of, and the
world demand for jute is gradually dropping. West Pakistan will also be
left smaller and poorer, though it now has the beginnings of an industrial
base, consisting primarily of textile mills.
Read the remaining part of this article at:

"Raise Your Hands and Join Me"
WHEN West Pakistani soldiers arrested Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib")

Rahman last week, they gave him a chance to add to an unenviable
record. Mujib has already spent more time in prison than any other major
Pakistani politician: nine years and eight months.
What makes the Sheik so unpopular with West Pakistanis is the fact that
for more than 23 years he has been the leading advocate of purbodesh
(regional autonomy) for East Pakistan. In last December's elections,
purbodesh was Mujib's chief issue. After visiting the cyclone-devastated
Ganges Delta region just before the general elections, he declared: "If the
polls bring us frustration, we will owe it to the million who have died in
the cyclone to make the supreme sacrifice of another million lives, if
need be, so that we can live as free people." -
Gray-haired, stocky and tall for a Bengali (6 ft.), the bespectacled Mujib
always wears a loose white shirt with a black, sleeveless, vestlike jacket.
A moody man, he tends to scold Bengalis like so many children. He was
born in the East Bengal village of Tongipara 51 years ago to a middle-
class landowner (his landlord status accounts for the title of sheik). Mujib
studied liberal arts at Calcutta's Islamia College and law at Dacca
University. He lives with his wife Fazil-itunessa, three sons and two
daughters in a modest two-story house in Dacca's well-to-do Dhanmandi
section. Except for a brief stint as an insurance salesman, he has devoted
most of his time to politics. First he opposed British rule in India. After
the subcontinent's partition in 1947, he denounced West Pakistan's
dominance of East Pakistan with every bit as much vehemence.
"Brothers," he would say to his Bengali followers, "do you know that the
streets of Karachi are lined with gold? Do you want to take back that
gold? Then raise your hands and join me." He was first jailed in 1948,
when he demonstrated against Pakistan Founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah
for proclaiming Urdu the new nation's lingua franca.
Yet he has remained, in many respects, a political moderate. He is a

social democrat who favors nationalizing major industries, banks and
insurance companies. In foreign policy too he follows a middle course.
Where West Pakistan's Zulfikar Ali Bhutto favors closer ties with China
and the Soviet Union and is stridently anti-Indian, Mujib would like to
trade with India and is regarded as moderately pro-Western.
Pakistan:Round 1 to the West
April 12, 1971; pp. 23-24
THERE is Do doubt,” said a foreign diplomat in East Pakistan last

week,” ‘that the word massacre applies to the situation.” Said another
Western official: “It’s a veritable bloodbath. The troops have been utterly
merciless.”
As Round 1 of Pakistan’s bitter civil war ended last week, the winner-
predictably-was the tough West Pakistan army, which has a powerful
force of 80,000 Punjabi and Pathan soldiers on duty in rebellious East
Pakistan. Reports coming out of the East (via diplomats, frightened
refugees and clandestine broadcasts) varied wildly. Estimates of the total
dead ran as high as 300,000. A figure of 10,000 to 15,000 is accepted by
several Western governments, but no one can be sure of anything except
that untold thousands perished.
Mass Graves.
Opposed only by bands of Bengali peasants armed with stones and
bamboo sticks, tanks rolled through Dacca, the East’s capital, blowing
houses to bits. At the university, soldiers slaughtered students inside the
British Council building. ..It was like Genghis Khan,’ said a shocked
Western official who witnessed the scene. Near Dacca’s marketplace,
Urdu-speaking government soldiers ordered Bengali-speaking towns-
people to surrender, then gunned them down when they failed to comply.
Bodies lay in mass graves at the university, in the Old City, and near the
municipal dump.
During rebel attacks on Chittagong, Pakistani naval vessels shelled the

port, setting fire to harbor installations. At Jessore, in the southwest,
angry Bengalis were said to have hacked alleged government spies to
death with staves and spears. Journalists at the Petrapole checkpoint on
the Indian border found five bodies and a human head near the frontier
post-the remains, apparently, of a group of West Pakistanis who had tried
to escape. At week’s end there were reports that East Bengali rebels were
maintaining a precarious hold on Jessore and perhaps Chittagong. But in
Dacca and most other cities, the rebels had been routed.
The army’s quick victory, however, did not mean that the 58 million
West Pakistanis could go on dominating the 78 million Bengalis of East
Pakistan indefinitely. The second round may well be a different story. It
could be fought out In paddies and jungles and along river banks for
months or even years.
Completing the Rupture.

The civil war erupted as a result of a victory that was too sweeping, a
mandate that was too strong. Four months ago, Pakistan’s President,
Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, held elections for a constituent assembly
to end twelve years of martial law. Though he is a Pathan from the West.
Yahya was determined to be fair to the Bengalis. He assigned a majority
of the assembly seats to Pakistan’s more populous eastern wing, which
has been separated from the West by 1,000 miles of India since the
partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947.
To everyone’s astonishment, Sheik Mujibur Rahmari and his Awami

League won 167 of the 169 seats assigned to the Bengalis, a clear
majority in the 313 seat assembly. “I do not want to break Pakistan,”
Mujib told TIME shortly before the final rupture two weeks ago. “But
we Bengalis must have autonomy so that we are not treated like a colony
of the western wing.” Yahya resisted Mujib’s demands for regional
autonomy and a withdrawal of troops. Mujib responded by insisting on
an immediate end to martial law. Soon the break was complete.
Reportedly seized in his Dacca residence at the outset of fighting and
flown to West Pakistan, Mujib will probably be tried for treason.
All Normal.
West Pakistanis have been told little about the fighting. ALL NORMAL
IN EAST was a typical newspaper headline in Karachi last week. Still,
they seemed solidly behind Yahya’s tough stand. “We can’t have our
flag defiled, our soldiers spat at, our nationality brought into disrepute,”
said Pakistan Government Information Chief Khalid Ali. “Mujib in the
end had no love of Pakistan.”
Aware that many foreigners were sympathetic to the Bengalis, Yahya

permitted the official news agency to indulge in an orgy of paranoia.
“Western press reports prove that a deep conspiracy has been hatched by
the Indo-Israeli axis against the integrity of Pakistan and the Islamic
basis of her ideology,” said the agency.
The Indian government did in fact contribute to the Pakistanis’ anxiety.

Although New Delhi denied that India was supplying arms to the Bengali
rebels, the Indian Parliament passed a unanimous resolution denouncing
the “carnage” in East Pakistan. India’s enthusiasm is hardly surprising, in
view of its longstanding feud with the West Pakistanis and the brief but
bloody war of 1965 over Kashmir. But Western governments urged New
Delhi to restrain itself so as not to provoke West pakistan into making an
impulsive response.
Hit and Run.

For the time being, West Pakistan’s army can probably maintain its hold
on Dacca and the other cities of the East. But it can hardly hope to
control 55,000 sq. mi. of countryside and a hostile population
indefinitely. The kind of Bengali terrorism that forced the British raj to
move the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 may well manifest itself
again in a growing war of hit-and-run sabotage and arson. In modern
times, the East Bengalis have been best known to foreigners as mild-
mannered peasants, clerks and shopkeepers, perhaps the least martial
people on the subcontinent. But in their support of Bangla Desh (Bengal
State), they have displayed a fighting spirit that could spell lasting
turmoil for those who want Pakistan to remain united. As Mujib often
asked his followers rhetorically: “Can bullets suppress 78 million
people?”
Pakistan:The Push toward the Borders
April 26, 1971; pp. 39-40
Radio Pakistan announced last week that Pakistan International Airlines

has resumed its internal flight between the East Pakistan capital of Dacca
and the town of Jessore, formerly a stronghold of rebel resistance. The
broadcast failed to note that the PIA prop jets were carrying only
soldiers, and that they were escorted into Jessore airport by air force
Sabre jets.
It was true, however, that the army has taken the offensive in Pakistan’s
savage civil war. In the early days of fighting, the troops had prudently
preferred to remain in their garrison areas, for the most part, until
additional men and supplies arrived. Last week they began to push
toward the Indian border, hoping to secure the hardtop roads by the time
the monsoon rains begin in late May. If they succeed, they will he able to
block any sizable imports of arms and other equipment for the Bangla
Desh (Bengal State) resistance fighters.
Naxalite Sympathizers.
Despite the heavy cost of the operation (estimated at $1.3 million per
day) and widespread international criticism, the government of President
Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan seems determined to press for a decisive
victory. The U.S. and most other Western countries have thus far
maintained a careful neutrality. Washington announced that it has
furnished no arms to Pakistan since the fighting began March 25.
Communist China, on the other hand, has strongly supported the Pakistan
government, while India, Pakistan’s traditional adversary, has quietly
sympathized with the rebels.
The Indians most deeply involved are the West Bengali insurgents. But
West Bengali sympathy is tempered by a fear that a civil war in East
Bengal will prove costly to themselves as well. For a generation, West
Bengal has received a steady flow of refugees from across the border.
Now the flow has greatly increased, with an added burden to the state’s
economy. Among West Bengalis, the most enthusiastic supporters of the
East Pakistani cause are Calcutta’s urban terrorists, the Maoist Naxalites.
Some are said to have slipped across the border with homemade guns
and bombs to help the rebels.
Strong Words.
Officially, India has tried to maintain calm. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
declared earlier that India could hardly remain a “silent observer to the
carnage in East Pakistan. But last week, when asked if she would
describe the fighting as an “imperial war’. she replied sternly. .’the use of
strong words will not help.”
From East Pakistan came reports that the destruction was continuing.
Estimates of the number of dead ranged to 200,000 or more. In the port
city of Chittagong, hundreds of bodies were dumped into the river to be
carried away by the tide. Some observers reported a virtual pogrom
against East Pakistan’s educated leadership, raising the specter of a
region reduced to peasant serfdom. Even the modern jute mills, owned
by West Pakistani businessmen, were reported destroyed.
Provisional Government.
There was also savagery on the Bengali side. Rebels were reported to be
paying off old scores against non-Bengali Moslems who settled in East
Pakistan after the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan.
At the town of Dinajpur, most male members of this group were killed
and the women taken to makeshift internment camps.
Despite the continued absence of their political leader, Sheikh Mlljibur

(“Mujib”) Rahman who is thought to be in prison in West Pakistan. the
rebels announced the formation of a Bangla Desh provisional
government last week. They named Mlljib President. One of his
colleagues, Tajuddin Ahmad, who is at large in East Pakistan, became
Prime Minister. As their provisional capital, the rebels prudently chose
the town of Meherpur, which lies a mere four miles from the Indian
border.
The Bangla Desh forces are critically short of gasoline and diesel fuel
and lack the field-communication equipment necessary for organized
military activity. They have avoided any full-scale engagements, in
which they would undoubtedly sustain heavy losses. Some observers
believe, in fact, that the long guerrilla phase of the civil war has already
begun, with the army holding most of the towns and the rebels
controlling much of the countryside. Despite the apparent determination
of the Pakistan government to maintain its hold on East Bengal, the sheer
human arithmetic of the situation seemed to indicate that the Bengalis
would ultimately win freedom or at least some form of regional
autonomy. At the present time, the East Bengalis outnumber the West
Pakistani soldiers in their midst by about 1,000 to 1.
PAKISTAN: Dacca, City of the Dead
Monday, May. 03, 1971
Within hours after launching a tank-led offensive in Dacca and other

East Pakistani cities on the night of March 25, the Pakistan army
imposed a virtual blackout on the brutal civil war in Bangla Desh
(Bengal State) by expelling foreign newsmen. TIME Correspondent Dan
Coggin, who was among them, recently trekked back from India by
Honda, truck, bus and bicycle to become the first American journalist to
visit Dacca since the fighting started. His report:
Dacca was always a fairly dreary city, offering slim pleasures beyond the
Hotel Intercontinental and a dozen Chinese restaurants ^ that few of its
1,500,000 people could afford. Now, IP in many ways, it has become a
city of the dead. A month after the army struck, unleashing tank guns and
automatic weapons against largely unarmed civilians in 34 hours of
wanton slaughter, Dacca is still shocked and shuttered, its remaining
inhabitants living in terror under the grip of army control. The exact toll
will never be known, but probably more than 10,000 were killed in
Dacca alone.
Perhaps half the city's population has fled to outlying villages. With the
lifting of army blockades at road and river ferry exits, the exodus is
resuming. Those who remain venture outdoors only for urgent food
shopping. Rice prices have risen 50% since the army reportedly started
burning grain silos in some areas. In any case, 14 of the city's 18 food
bazaars were destroyed. The usually jammed streets are practically
empty, and no civil government is functioning.
"Kill the Bastards!"
On every rooftop, Pakistan's green-and-white flags hang limply in the
steamy stillness. "We all know that Pakistan is finished," said one
Bengali, "but we hope the flags will keep the soldiers away." As another
form of insurance, portraits of Pakistan's late founder Mohammed Ali
Jinnah, and even the current President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan,
were displayed prominently. But there was no mistaking the fact that the
East Pakistanis viewed the army's occupation of Dacca as a setback and
not a surrender. "We will neither forgive nor forget," said one Bengali.
On learning that I was a sangbadik (journalist), various townspeople led
me to mass graves, to a stairwell where two professors were shot to
death, and to scenes of other atrocities.
The most savage killing occurred in the Old City, where several sections
were burned to the ground. Soldiers poured gasoline around entire
blocks, igniting them with flamethrowers, then mowed down people
trying to escape the cordons of fire. "They're coming out!" a Westerner
heard soldiers cry. "Kill the bastards!"
One Bengali businessman told of losing his son, daughter-in-law and

four grandchildren in the fire. Few apparently survived in the destroyed
sections—25 square blocks—of the Old City. If they escaped the flames,
they ran into gunfire. To frighten survivors, soldiers refused to allow the
removal of decomposing bodies for three days, despite the Moslem belief
in prompt burial, preferably within 24 hours, to free the soul.
The dead of Dacca included some of East Pakistan's most prominent

educators and businessmen, as well as some 500 students. Among at
least seven University of Dacca professors who were executed without
apparent reason was the head of the philosophy department, Govinda
Chandra Dev, 65, a gentle Hindu who believed in unity in diversity.
Another victim was Jo-gesh Chandra Ghosh, 86, the invalid millionaire
chemist. Ghosh, who did not believe in banks, was dragged from his bed
and shot to death by soldiers who looted more than $1 million in rupees
from his home.
Looting was also the motive for the slaying of Ranada Prasad Saha, 80,
one of East Pakistan's leading jute exporters and one of its few
philanthropists; he had built a modern hospital offering free medical care
at Mirzapur, 40 miles north of Dacca. Dev, Ghosh and Saha were all
Hindus.
"Where are the maloun [cursed ones]?" rampaging soldiers often asked
as they searched for Hindus. But the Hindus were by no means the only
victims. Many soldiers arriving in East Pakistan were reportedly told the
absurdity that it was all right to kill Bengali Moslems because they were
Hindus in disguise. "We can kill anyone for anything," a Punjabi captain
told a relative. "We are accountable to no one."
Next Prime Minister.

The tales of brutality are seemingly endless. A young man whose house
was being searched begged the soldiers to do anything, but to leave his
17-year-old sister alone; they spared him so he could watch them murder
her with a bayonet. Colonel Abudl Hai, a Bengali physician attached to
the East Bengal Regiment, was allowed to make a last phone call to his
family; an hour later his body was delivered to his home. An old man
who decided that Friday prayers were more important than the curfew
was shot to death as he walked into a mosque.
About 1:30 on the morning of the attack, two armored personnel carriers
arrived at the Dhanmandi home of Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman, 51,
the political leader behind the campaign for Bengali independence.
Mujib first took refuge beneath a bed when the Special Security Group
commandos began to spray his house with small-arms fire. Then, during
a lull, he went to the downstairs veranda, raised his hands in surrender
and shouted, "There is no need for shooting. Here I am. Take me."
Mujib was flown to West Pakistan, where he is reported held in Attock

Fort near Peshawar. As an activist who had already spent nine years and
eight months in jail, he may have reasoned at the time of his arrest that
his political goals would be served by the martyrdom of further
imprisonment. But he obviously did not expect to face a treason charge
and possible execution. Only two months earlier, after all, President
Yahya had referred to him as "the next Prime Minister of Pakistan."
No Choice.
In Mujib's absence, the resistance movement is sorely lacking leadership,
as well as arms, ammunition and communications gear. In late March,
the mukti fauj (liberation forces) overwhelmed several company-size
elements, as at Kushtia and Pabna, but bolt-action rifles cannot stop
Sabre jets, artillery and army troops operating in battalion strength.
Still, everywhere I visited on the journey to Dacca, I found astonishing

unanimity on the Bengali desire for independence and a determination to
resist the Pakistan army with whatever means available. "We will not be
slaves," said one resistance officer, "so there is no choice but to fight
until we win." The oncoming monsoon rains and the Islamabad
government's financial problems will also work in favor of Bangla Desh.
As the months pass and such hardships increase, Islamabad may have to
face the fact that unity by force of arms is not exactly the Pakistan that
Jinnah had in mind.
The Bengali Refugees: A Surfeit of Woe
Monday, Jun. 21, 1971
A CYCLONE that killed as many as 500,000 people. A civil war that

claimed perhaps 200,000 more. An exodus that already totals 5,000,000
and is still growing. A cholera epidemic that has barely begun, yet has
already taken some 5,000 lives. It is an almost biblical catalogue of woe,
rivaling if not surpassing the plagues visited upon the Egyptians of
Mosaic days. And yet it is virtually certain that the list will grow even
longer for the bedeviled people of East Pakistan. Last week, as fresh
waves of refugees poured across the Indian border at the rate of 100,000
a day, they brought tales of pogrom against Hindus by the predominantly
Moslem Pakistanis. And over the stinking, teeming refugee camps that
scar the border areas of five Indian states hovered the growing threat of
famine and pestilence.
The first onrush of refugees followed the outburst of civil war in March,
when West Pakistan decided to crush East Pakistan's drive for Bangla
Desh (an independent Bengali State). Immediately after fighting broke
out between the fierce Pathans and Punjabis of the Pakistani army and
the Bengali liberation forces, 1,500,000 terrified East Pakistanis—
Moslems and Hindus alike —crossed into the Indian states of West
Bengal, Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya and Bihar. Now the escapees are
mostly Hindu, and they bring tales of torture, rape and massacre.
According to the new arrivals, the Pakistani government is blaming the
10 million Hindus of East Pakistan (population 78 million) for being the
principal supporters of the now-outlawed Awami League of Sheik
Mujibur Rahman. The Hindus did in fact overwhelmingly support
"Mujib," who at last word was under house arrest in Karachi, the
principal city of West Pakistan. But so did the Moslems, for the Awami
League won 167 of the 169 seats at stake in East Pakistan during last
December's elections. But the Hindus, because they are a minority, are an
easier target.
Battered to Death.
A Hindu building contractor told of how Pakistani troops at a tea estate
asked people whom they voted for in the election. "They shot 200 who
admitted voting for the Awami League." In a hospital in Agartala, Indian
doctors reported that a number of the refugees came in badly burned. The
doctors explained that the refugees were shoved into huts by Pak army
men, who then set the huts on fire. The hospital has also treated 370 men,
women and children for bullet wounds, 27 of whom died.
In the refugee camp at Patrapole on the West Bengal-East Pakistan

border, a 16-year-old Bengali girl recalled how she and her parents were
in bed "when we heard the tread of feet outside. The door burst open and
several soldiers entered. They pointed their bayonets at the three of us
and before my eyes killed my mother and father—battering them to
death with the butts of their rifles. They flung me on the floor, and three
of them raped me." Another teen-age girl in a Tripura camp told how she
was raped by 13 West Pakistani soldiers before escaping. Other girls
have reportedly been taken from fleeing families to be sold as prostitutes
to the soldiers, particularly if their fathers could not pay a ransom for
them.
According to an official who has toured the border, Pakistani troops and
their anti-Hindu supporters are demanding $140 a person before letting
family members leave East Pakistan. Lacking only $25 of the ransom for
his wife, one man pleaded: "Beat me for the rest." They let his wife go
after he was beaten on the temple with a bamboo stick until he lost an
eye.
Those who manage to escape could be models for Goya's Disasters of

War. The lucky ones get into already overfilled tent camps that reek of
caustic soda disinfectant and human excrement, and are ankle deep in
filthy water from the first monsoons. Most huddle under trees or bushes
trying to avoid the heavy rains. Some find cramped quarters on the
verandas of now closed schoolhouses. Others near Calcutta have found
large open drainpipes to live in. Around them is always the stench of
garbage, polluted water, sickness and death.
Token Cremation.
The polluted drinking water, the lack of sanitation and the officials'
inability to inoculate the millions of refugees have contributed to the
spread of cholera, particularly in West Bengal. A bacterial disease
common to India and Pakistan, cholera causes severe vomiting and
diarrhea, which bring dehydration and death. Those afflicted can usually
be saved by replenishing the bodily fluids through intravenous injections
or drinking large doses of a solution of salts, baking soda and glucose.
But the flood of refugees is just too great to be handled by beleaguered
medical teams.
The roads the refugees travel are littered not only with clothes and
discarded household goods, but with bodies of cholera victims left by
those too frightened of the disease to bury their own dead. Although
Hindus practice cremation, many of the bodies are merely singed with
two burning sticks and then left for the hovering vultures or wild dogs to
pick apart. Even when the corpses are buried, they are often dug up by
carrion eaters. Police have their hands full trying to prevent refugees
from tossing corpses into the rivers. In the overcrowded hospitals, the
sick and dying are jammed together on the floor, and the dead continue
to lie among the living for hours before the overworked hospital staffs
can cart the bodies off.
At one of West Bengal's overflowing health centers, a 45-year-old rice

farmer watched his infant son continue to suckle after his mother had
died of cholera. "My wife is dead," the man said numbly. "Three of my
children are dead. What else can happen?" With the refugees spreading
through the Indian states, carrying the disease with them, the epidemic
could rapidly afflict hundreds of thousands of Indians. For this reason,
Indian authorities are trying to prevent the East Pakistanis from entering
Calcutta, where uncounted millions already live on the streets in squalid
conditions that guarantee an annual cholera epidemic there.
Unbalanced Exchange.
While India has temporarily accepted the refugees and is doing its best to
help them, the government of Indira Gandhi sees only economic and
political disaster in the massive influx of impoverished peoples. The
refugee problem has chronically troubled India since the August 1947
partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. In northern India
there was a fairly balanced exchange, with 6,000,000 Moslems fleeing to
Pakistan and 6,500,000 Hindus and Sikhs entering India. But since
partition, 4,300,000 Hindus from East Pakistan have fled to India, for the
most part into West Bengal. There has been no comparable flight of
Moslems. This imbalance has created the social, political and economic
problems that have plagued the state and turned its capital, Calcutta, into
a sinkhole of human misery.
The cost of feeding and attempting to house the refugees is currently
$1,330,000 a day—an expense that Mrs. Gandhi's government can ill
afford if it is going to fulfill the campaign promise of garibi hatao
(eradicate poverty) made last March. The food required by the refugees
is rapidly depleting existing food stockpiles, and threatens to create a
famine for the Indians themselves. The refugees are also taking work
away from the Indians; in West Bengal, refugee peasants are hiring out
as agricultural labor for a quarter of the wages local labor is paid.
No Room.
Faced with these problems, the Indian government calls the refugees
"evacuees" or "escapees" and hopes for their return to their homeland.
"Being a poor country ourselves," Mrs. Gandhi told refugees at a camp in
eastern India, "we cannot afford to keep you here forever, even if we
wished to do so." Their return to their homeland is not likely in the
foreseeable future, with the pogrom under way in East Pakistan and the
probability of a protracted guerrilla war there. Moreover, because of the
war and the exodus, the planting of crops in East Pakistan was at a
disastrously low level before the rains began. Famine is almost certain to
strike, and when it does, millions more will pack their modest belongings
and seek refuge in a country that has no room for them.
INDIA: The Most Fearful Consequence
Monday, July 05, 1971
When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her New Congress Party were
returned to power last March with a two-thirds majority in Parliament,
she promised an ambitious development program that would change the
lives of India's almost 600 million people. By last week, however, it was
clear that the country's economy, never robust, was bogging down for
reasons that are not of Mrs. Gandhi's making. More than 6,000,000
refugees have fled to India since the Pakistani government, based in
West Pakistan, began a savage campaign of repression and terror in East
Pakistan last March. The cost of feeding and sheltering the refugees—
and caring for thousands of cholera victims—will total at least $400
million in the first six months.
About 80% of the refugees from predominantly Moslem East Pakistan

are Hindus seeking sanctuary in West Bengal and other eastern Indian
states, where their co-religionists are in the vast majority. What
particularly worries India is that their chances of ever returning home are
diminishing. Last week New Delhi said that the Pakistanis were
destroying the title deeds of property owned by Hindus in East Pakistan.
So «u the Indians may have to accept, on a permanent basis, a Pakistani
refugee population that could eventually reach 10 million.
Little Success.
The Indians are angry that they have received so little support on the
refugee problem from either East or West. "The international community
cannot run away from its responsibilities," Mrs. Gandhi declared two
weeks ago. "It will suffer from the consequences of whatever happens in
this part of the world."
The most fearful consequence could be war. Reckless as it may seem,
many Indians are seriously arguing that the only solution to the refugee
problem is for the Indian army to drive the West Pakistan army out of
East Pakistan so that the refugees could return home.
Mrs. Gandhi has rejected such talk, but it is growing in volume, even
among Members of Parliament. " to persuade other countries to provide
emergency aid and put pressure on the Pakistani government to ease its
repression in East Pakistan, the Prime Minister has sent several of her
colleagues abroad to explain India's predicament—so far with little
success.
What the Indians really want is a political settlement between West and
East Pakistan. This would amount to an acceptance by West Pakistan of
last December's overwhelming victory by Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib")
Rahman and his Awami League. In balloting for a constitutional
congress, Mujib won 167 of the 169 seats allotted to
East Pakistan.
Since this showing would have given Mujib an absolute majority in the
313-seat constituent assembly, it could have led to his designation as
Prime Minister of all Pakistan. India was greatly pleased by Mujib's
victory, since he has been conciliatory toward the Indians. This in turn
would have enabled India to cut down on the heavy cost of defending its
borders with Pakistan.
Read the rest of this article at:

Time Magazine: Aug. 02, 1971 Issue Cover
A Letter From The Publisher, Aug. 2, 1971
Monday, Aug. 02, 1971
DAN COGGIN has spent most of the past seven years observing turmoil
in Asia—grim but invaluable experience for his latest assignment, this
week's cover story on Pakistan. A former Marine, Coggin witnessed the
Indonesian crisis of the mid-'60s, went next to South Viet Nam and then
served as New Delhi bureau chief. Assigned to the Beirut bureau last fall,
he continues to contribute his expertise on Pakistan. He was one of the
35 newsmen expelled from Dacca on March 26, but in April he trekked
from India by oxcart, rowboat, motorcycle, bicycle and bus to become
the first American journalist to get back to the Eastern capital. He
returned again for this week's story and, despite his having seen much
war in the past, found that "this one has special horrors."
The two other correspondents contributing to the cover story are also
veteran observers of Asian fighting. James Shepherd, an Indian national,
joined TIME'S New Delhi bureau in 1958. His assignments have
included India's border clashes with China and the Indo-Pakistani war
waged over Kashmir. Recently Shepherd toured the refugee camps that
line the Indo-East Pakistani border. David Greenway, whose most recent
beat was the United Nations, formerly served in the Saigon and Bangkok
bureaus. Last week he visited the insurgent forces. "The countryside," he
says, "looks quite like Viet Nam, and with all the airpower, armor and
artillery the rebels face, it must have been like visiting the Viet Cong in
the early days of that other war."
Our essay this week deals with imaginary numbers, those intriguing but
often inadequately supported figures that festoon our data-happy society.
Like other publications, TIME sometimes finds it impossible to avoid
using such numbers. They are accurate as far as anyone knows, but
inevitably they represent estimates rather than precise measurements. In
the current issue, the cover story quantifies East Pakistan's essentially
unmeasurable agony in several ways (more than 7,000,000 refugees fled
to India, for example). Elsewhere we note that U.S. crops are annually
dusted with "about 1 billion pounds of pesticide" (ENVIRONMENT),
and that microorganisms once killed 100 million pounds of fish in
Florida (THE NATION), confident that these figures represent at least
reliable approximations. As a result of the Essay, continued watchfulness
about imaginary figures will be pledged by nearly 200 TIME editors,
writers, reporter-researchers and correspondents. At least that is our
estimate.
Pakistan: The Ravaging of Golden Bengal
OVER the rivers and down the highways and along countless jungle
paths, the population of East Pakistan continues to hemorrhage into
India: an endless unorganized flow of refugees with a few tin kettles,
cardboard boxes and ragged clothes piled on their heads, carrying their
sick children and their old. They pad along barefooted, with the mud
sucking at their heels in the wet parts. They are silent, except for a child
whimpering now and then, but their faces tell the story. Many are sick
and covered with sores. Others have cholera, and when they die by the
roadside there is no one to bury them. The Hindus, when they can, put a
hot coal in the mouths of their dead or singe the body in lieu of
cremation. The dogs, the vultures and the crows do the rest. As the
refugees pass the rotting corpses, some put pieces of cloth over their
noses.
The column pushing into India never ends, day or night. It has been four
months since civil war broke out between East and West Pakistan, and
the refugees still pour in. No one can count them precisely, but Indian
officials, by projecting camp registrations, calculate that they come at the
rate of 50,000 a day. Last week the estimated total passed the 7,500,000
mark. Should widespread famine hit East Pakistan, as now seems likely,
India fears that the number may double before the exodus ends.
Hundreds of thousands of these are still wandering about the countryside

without food and shelter. Near the border, some have taken over schools
to sleep in; others stay with villagers or sleep out in the fields and under
the trees. Most are shepherded into refugee camps where they are given
ration cards for food and housed in makeshift sheds of bamboo covered
with thatched or plastic roofing. Though no one is actually starving in the
camps, food is in short supply, particularly powdered milk and baby
food.
No More Tears
Life has been made even more miserable for the refugees by the
monsoon rains, that have turned many camps into muddy lagoons.
Reports Dr. Mathis Bromberger, a German physician working at a camp
outside Calcutta: "There were thousands of people standing out in the
open here all night in the rain. Women with babies in their arms. They
could not lie down because the water came up to their knees in places.
There was not enough shelter, and in the morning there were always
many sick and dying of pneumonia. We could not get our serious cholera
cases to the hospital. And there was no one to take away the dead. They
just lay around on the ground or in the water." High-pressure syringes
have speeded vaccination and reduced the cholera threat, but camp health
officials have already counted about 5,000 dead, and an estimated 35,000
have been stricken by the convulsive vomiting and diarrhea that
accompany the disease. Now officials fear that pneumonia, diphtheria
and tuberculosis will also begin to exact a toll among the weakened ref
ugees. Says one doctor: "The people are not even crying any more."
Perhaps because what they flee from is even worse. Each has his own
horror story of rape, murder or other atrocity committed by the Pakistani
army in its effort to crush the Bengali independence movement. One
couple tells how soldiers took their two grown sons outside the house,
bayoneted them in the stomach and refused to allow anyone to go near
the bleeding boys, who died hours later. Another woman says that when
the soldiers came to her door, she hid her children in her bed; but seeing
them beneath the blanket, the soldiers opened fire, killing two and
wounding another. According to one report from the Press Trust of India
(P.T.I.), 50 refugees recently fled into a jute field near the Indian border
when they heard a Pakistani army patrol approaching. "Suddenly a six-
month-old child in its mother's lap started crying," said the P.T.I, report.
"Failing to make the child silent and apprehending that the refugees
might be attacked, the woman throttled the infant to death."
Cordon of Fire
The evidence of the bloodbath is all over East Pakistan. Whole sections
of cities lie in ruins from shelling and aerial attacks. In Khalishpur, the
northern suburb of Khulna, naked children and haggard women scavenge
the rubble where their homes and shops once stood. Stretches of
Chittagong's Hizari Lane and Maulana Sowkat Ali Road have been
wiped out. The central bazaar in Jessore is reduced to twisted masses of
corrugated tin and shattered walls. Kushtia, a city of 40,000, now looks,
as a World Bank team reported, "like the morning after a nuclear attack."
In Dacca, where soldiers set sections of the Old City ablaze with
flamethrowers and then machine-gunned thousands as they tried to
escape the cordon of fire, nearly 25 blocks have been bulldozed clear,
leaving open areas set incongruously amid jam-packed slums. For the
benefit of foreign visitors, the army has patched up many shell holes in
the walls of Dacca University, where hundreds of students were killed.
But many signs remain. The tank-blasted Rajabagh Police Barracks,
where nearly 1,000 surrounded Bengali cops fought to the last, is still in
ruins.
Millions of acres have been abandoned. Much of the vital jute export
crop, due for harvest now, lies rotting in the fields; little of that already
harvested is able to reach the mills. Only a small part of this year's tea
crop is salvageable. More than 300,000 tons of imported grain sits in the
clogged ports of Chittagong and Chalna. Food markets are still operating
in Dacca and other cities, but rice prices have risen 20% in four months.
Fear and deep sullen hatred are everywhere evident among Bengalis.
Few will talk to reporters in public, but letters telling of atrocities and
destroyed villages are stuck in journalists' mailboxes at Dacca's Hotel
Intercontinental. In the privacy of his home one night, a senior Bengali
bureaucrat declared: "This will be a bitter, protracted struggle, maybe
worse than Viet Nam. But we will win in the end."
Estimates of the death toll in the army crackdown range from 200,000
all the way up to a million. The lower figure is more widely accepted, but
the number may never be known. For one thing, countless corpses have
been dumped in rivers, wells and mass graves. For another, statistics
from East Pakistan are even more unreliable than statistics from most
other places (see TIME Essay). That is inevitable in a place where,
before the refugee exodus began, 78 million people, 80% of them
illiterate, were packed into an area no larger than Florida.
Harsh Reprisals
The Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority
of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Moslem military's hatred. Even
now, Moslem soldiers in East Pakistan will snatch away a man's lungi
(sarong) to see if he is circumcised, obligatory for Moslems; if he is not,
it usually means death. Others are simply rounded up and shot.
Commented one high U.S. official last week: "It is the most incredible,
calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland."
In recent weeks, resistance has steadily mounted. The army response has
been a pattern of harsh reprisals for guerrilla hit-and-run forays, sabotage
and assassination of collaborators. But the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali
liberation forces, have blasted hundreds of bridges and culverts,
paralyzing road and rail traffic. The main thrust of the guerrilla
movement is coming from across the Indian border, where the Bangla
Desh (Bengal Nation) provisional government has undertaken a massive
recruitment and training program. Pakistani President Agha Mohammed
Yahya Khan last week charged that there were 24 such camps within
India, and Indians no longer even bother to deny the fact that locals and
some border units are giving assistance to the rebels.
Half of the Mukti Bahini's reported 50,000 fighters come from the East
Bengal Regiment, the paramilitary East Bengal Rifles, and the Bengali
police, who defected in the early days of the fighting. Young recruits,
many of them students, are being trained to blend in with the peasants,
who feed them, and serve as lookouts, scouts and hit-and-run saboteurs.
Twice the guerrillas have knocked out power in Dacca, and they have
kept the Dacca-Chittagong railway line severed for weeks. Wherever
possible they raise the green, red and gold Bangla Desh flag. They claim
to have killed 25,000 Pakistani troops, though the figure may well be
closer to 2,500 plus 10,000 wounded (according to a reliable Western
estimate). Resistance fighters already control the countryside at night and
much of it in the daytime.
Only time and the test of fire will show whether or not the Mukti Bahini's
leaders can forge them into a disciplined guerrilla force. The present
commander in chief is a retired colonel named A.G. Osmani, a member
of the East Pakistani Awami League. But many feel that before the
conflict is over, the present moderate leadership will give way to more
radical men. So far the conflict is nonideological. But that could change.
"If the democracies do not put pressure on the Pakistanis to resolve this
question in the near future," says a Bangla Desh official, "I fear for the
consequences. If the fight for liberation is prolonged too long, the
democratic elements will be eliminated and the Communists will prevail.
Up till now the Communists do not have a strong position. But if we fail
to deliver the goods to our people, they will sweep us away."
By no means have all the reprisals been the work of the army. Bengalis
also massacred some 500 suspected collaborators, such as members of
the right-wing religious Jammat-e-Islami and other minor parties. The
Biharis, non-Bengali Moslems who fled from India to Pakistan after
partition in 1947, were favorite—and sometimes innocent—targets.
Suspected sympathizers have been hacked to death in their beds or even
beheaded by guerrillas as a warning to other villagers. More ominous is
the growing confrontation along the porous 1,300-mile border, where
many of the Pakistani army's 70,000 troops are trying to seal off raids by
rebels based in India. With Indian jawans facing them on the other side, a
stray shot could start a new Indo-Pakistani war—and one on a much
more devastating scale than their 17-day clash over Kashmir in 1965.
Embroiled in a developing if still disorganized guerrilla war, Pakistan

faces ever bleaker prospects as the conflict spreads. By now, in fact,
chances of ever recovering voluntary national unity seem nil. But to
Yahya Khan and the other tough West Pakistani generals who rule the
world's fifth largest nation, an East-West parting is out of the question.
For the sake of Pakistan's unity, Yahya declared last month, "no sacrifice
is too great." The unity he envisions, however, might well leave East
Pakistan a cringing colony. In an effort to stamp out Bengali culture,
even street names are being changed. Shankari Bazar Road in Dacca is
now called Tikka Khan Road after the hard-as-nails commander who
now rules East Pakistan under martial law.
Honeyed Smile
The proud Bengalis are unlikely to give in. A warm and friendly but
volatile people whose twin passions are politics and poetry, they have
nurtured a gentle and distinctive culture of their own. Conversation—
adda—is the favorite pastime, and it is carried on endlessly under the
banyan trees in the villages or in the coffeehouses of Dacca.
Typically, Bangla Desh chose as its national anthem not a revolutionary

song but a poem by the Nobel-prizewinning Bengali Poet Rabindranath
Tagore, "Golden Bengal":
. . . come Spring, O mother mine!
Your mango groves are heady with fragrance, The air intoxicates like
wine.
Come autumn, O mother mine!
I see the honeyed smile of your harvest-laden fields.
It is indeed a land of unexpectedly lush and verdant beauty, whose

emerald rice and jute fields stretching over the Ganges Delta as far as the
eye can see belie the savage misfortunes that have befallen its people.
The soil is so rich it sprouts vegetation at the drop of a seed, yet that has
not prevented Bengal from becoming a festering wound of poverty.
Nature can be as brutal as it is bountiful, lashing the land with vicious
cyclones and flooding it annually with the spillover from the Ganges and
the Brahmaputra rivers.
Improbable Wedding
Even in less troubled times, Pakistanis were prone to observe that the
only bonds between the diverse and distant wings of their Moslem nation
were the Islamic faith and Pakistan International Airlines. Sharing
neither borders nor cultures, separated by 1,100 miles of Indian territory
(see map), Pakistan is an improbable wedding of the Middle East and
Southeast Asia. The tall, light-skinned Punjabis, Pathans, Baluchis and
Sindhis of West Pakistan are descendants of the Aryans who swept into
the subcontinent in the second millennium B.C. East Pakistan's slight,
dark Bengalis are more closely related to the Dravidian people they
subjugated. The Westerners, who eat wheat and meat, speak Urdu, which
is written in Arabic but is a synthesis of Persian and Hindi. The
Easterners eat rice and fish, and speak Bengali, a singsong language of
Indo-Aryan origin.
The East also has a much larger Hindu minority than the West: 10
million out of a population of 78 million, compared with 800,000 Hindus
out of a population of 58 million in the West. In Brit ish India days, the
western reaches of what is now West Pakistan formed the frontier of the
empire, and the British trained the energetic Punjabis and Pathans as
soldiers. They scorn the lungi, a Southeast Asian-style sarong worn by
the Bengalis. "In the East," a West Pakistani saying has it, "the men wear
the skirts and the women the pants. In the West, things are as they should
be."
Twenty Families
The West Pakistanis were also determined to "wear the pants" as far as
running the country was concerned. Once, the Bengalis were proud to be
long to Pakistan (an Urdu word meaning "land of the pure"). Like the
Moslems from the West, they had been resentful of the dominance of the
more numerous Hindus in India before partition. In 1940, Pakistan's
founding fa ther, Mohammed AH Jinnah, called for a separate Islamic
state. India hoped to prevent the split, but in self-determination elections
in 1947, five predominantly Moslem provinces, including East Bengal,
voted to break away. The result was a geographical curiosity and, as it
sadly proved, a political absurdity.
Instead of bringing peace, independence and partition brought horrible

massacres, with Hindus killing Moslems and Moslems killing Hindus.
Shortly be fore his assassination in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi undertook
what proved to be his last fast to halt the bloodshed. "All the quarrels of
the Hindus and the Mohammedans," he said, "have arisen from each
wanting to force the other to his view."
From the beginning, the East got the short end of the bargain in
Pakistan. Though it has only one-sixth of the country's total land area, the
East contains well over half the population (about 136 million), and in
early years contributed as much as 70% of the foreign-exchange
earnings. But West Pakistan regularly devours three-quarters of all
foreign aid and 60% of export earnings. With the Punjabi-Pathan power
elite in control for two decades, East Pakistan has been left a deprived
agricultural backwater. Before the civil war, Bengalis held only 15% of
government jobs and accounted for only 5% of the 275,000-man army.
Twenty multimillionaire families, nearly all from the West, still control a
shockingly disproportionate amount of the country's wealth (by an
official study, two-thirds of the nation's industry and four-fifths of its
banking and insurance assets). Per capita income is miserably low
throughout Pakistan, but in the West ($48) it is more than half again that
in the East ($30).
To cap this long line of grievances came the devastating cyclone that
roared in off the Bay of Bengal last November, claiming some 500,000
lives. The callousness of West toward East was never more shockingly
apparent. Yahya waited 13 days before visiting the disaster scene, which
some observers described as "a second Hiroshima." The Pakistani navy
never bothered to search for victims. Aid distribution was lethargic
where it existed at all; tons of grain remained stockpiled in warehouses
while Pakistani army helicopters sat on their pads in the West.
Supreme Sacrifice
Three weeks later, Pakistan held its first national elections since
becoming a nation 23 years before; the object was to choose a
constitutional assembly that would draft a new charter for the nation, and
then would continue to sit as a na tional assembly. The East Pakistanis
thronged the polls and gave an over whelming endorsement to Sheik
Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman, 51, the fiery head of the party known as the
Awami League and a longtime spokesman for Eastern autonomy (he
spent nearly ten years in jail for urging that Bengalis be given greater
control of their destiny). Mujib's Awami (People's) League captured 167
out of the 169 seats allotted the East in the 313-member national
assembly, giving it a clear majority. The victory meant that Mujib, as the
leader of the majority party, would be Prime Minister of all Pakistan.
It was something that Yahya had simply not anticipated. He and his
fellow generals expected that Mujib would capture no more than 60% of
the East Pakistani seats, and that smaller parties in the East would form a
coalition with West Pakistani parties, leaving the real power in
Islamabad. Mujib feared some sort of doublecross: "If the polls are
frustrated," he declared in a statement that proved horribly prophetic,
"the people of East Pakistan will owe it to the million who have died in
the cyclone to make the supreme sacrifice of another million lives, if
need be, so that we can live as a free people."
With the constitutional assembly scheduled to convene in March, Yahya

began a covert troop buildup, flying soldiers dressed in civilian clothes to
the East at night. Then he postponed the assembly, explaining that it
could not meet until he could determine precisely how much power and
autonomy Mujib wanted for the East. Mujib had not espoused full
independence, but a loosened semblance of national unity under which
each wing would control its own taxation, trade and foreign aid. To
Yahya and the generals, that was unacceptable. On March 25, Yahya
broke off the meetings he had been holding and flew back to Islamabad.
Five hours later, soldiers using howitzers, tanks and rockets launched
troop attacks in half a dozen sections of Dacca. The war was on. Swiftly,
Yahya outlawed the Awami League and ordered the armed forces "to do
their duty." Scores of Awami politicians were seized, including Mujib,
who now awaits trial in remote Sahiwal, 125 miles southwest of
Islamabad, on charges of treason; the trial, expected to begin in August,
could lead to the death penalty.
Out of Touch
In the months since open conflict erupted, nothing has softened Yahya's
stand. In fact, in the face of talk about protracted guerrilla fighting,
mounting dangers of war with India, and an already enormous cost in
human suffering, the general has only stiffened. Should India step up its
aid to the guerrillas, he warned last week, "I shall declare a general
war—and let the world take note of it." Should the countries that have
been funneling $450 million a year in economic aid into Pakistan put on
too much pressure, he also warned, he will do without it.
He has already lost some. After touring East Pakistan last month, a
special World Bank mission recommended to its eleven-nation
consortium that further aid be withheld pending a "political
accommodation." World Bank President Robert McNamara classified the
report on the grounds that it might worsen an already difficult diplomatic
situation. The report spoke bluntly of widespread fear of the Pakistani
army and devastation on a scale reminiscent of World War II. It
described Kushtia, which was 90% destroyed, as "the My Lai of the
West Pakistani army." A middle-level World Bank official leaked the
study, and last week McNamara sent Yahya an apology; in his letter he
reportedly said that he found the report "biased and provocative." Yet
one Bank official insisted that though it was later revised and modified
somewhat, its thrust remained the same. "We just had to put it on a less
passionate basis," he said. "But it did not reduce its impact."
U.S. policy has been murky, to say the least. The Nixon Administration
continues to oppose a complete cutoff of U.S. aid to Pakistan. The White
House has asked Congress for $118 million in economic assistance for
Pakistan for fiscal 1971-72, which it says will be held in abeyance.
Despite intense pressure from within his official family, as well as from
Congress. Nixon argues that a total cutoff might drive Pakistan closer to
China, which has been one of its principal suppliers of military aid since
1965, and also destroy whatever leverage the U.S. has in the situation. In
the light of Henry Kissinger's trip to China, however, it now seems clear
that there may have been another motive for the Administration's soft-
pedaling. Pakistan, of course, was Kissinger's secret bridge to China.
Nonetheless, criticism has been mounting, particularly in the Senate,

with its abundance of Democratic presidential aspirants. Senator Edward
M. Kennedy charged that the World Bank report, together with a State
Department survey predicting a famine of appalling proportions, "made a
mockery of the Administration's policy." Two weeks ago, the House
Foreign Affairs Committee recommended cutting off both military and
economic aid to Pakistan. The bill still must clear the House and the
Senate, but its chances of passage are considered good.
Since 1952, when massive aid began, Pakistan has received $4.3 billion
from the U.S. in economic assistance. In addition, the U.S. equipped and
maintained the Pakistani armed forces up until 1965. Then, because of
the Pakistani-Indian war, arms sales were dropped. Last October the
Administration resumed military aid on a "onetime basis." After the East
Pakistan conflict erupted, it was announced that arms shipments would
be suspended; but when three ships were discovered to be carrying U.S.
military equipment to Pakistan anyway, the State Department explained
that it intended only to honor licenses already issued. Over the years, it is
estimated that close to $1 billion has been provided for military
assistance alone.
The U.S. may well have to do some rethinking of its Pakistan policy. In a
recent interview with TIME, former French Culture Minister Andre
Malraux warned that before long, "you in the United States will have a
big new problem in Asia: Bengal. It will be like Viet Nam, except that
there are 78 million Bengalese [in Pakistan]. The Bengalese are
nationalists, not Maoists. But the present serene attitude of the U.S. will
have to change."
Condoning Genocide
India is particularly incensed over the present U.S. policy, and Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi strongly protested to Henry Kissinger about U.S.
military shipments when he visited New Delhi this month. The supply of
arms by any country to Pakistan, Foreign Minister Swaran Singh charged
last week, "amounts to condonation of genocide." Mrs. Gandhi is faced
both with mounting pressure for military action, and an awesome cost
that could set her own economy back years. India is feeding the refugees
for a mere 1.10 rupees (150) per person per day, but even that amounts to
more than $1,000,000 a day. The first six months alone, Indian officials
say, will cost $400 million. Contributions pledged by other countries (the
U.S. leads with $73 million) equal barely one-third of that—and much of
that money has not yet actually been paid.
Still, it would hardly be cheaper to launch a war and get it over with, as
some high-level Indians openly suggest. Hours after Indian troops
marched into East Pakistan, Pakistani tanks and troops could be expected
to roll over India's western borders. Moreover, fighting could spread over
the entire subcontinent. For all of India's commitment "to Bangla Desh
democracy and those who are fighting for their rights," in the words of
Mrs. Gandhi, New Delhi is not at all interested in taking on the burden of
East Bengal's economic problems. The only answer, as New Delhi sees
it, is a political solution that would enable refugees to return to their
homes.
The impetus for that could conceivably come from West Pakistanis. It is
still far from certain that they are really determined to go the distance in
a prolonged war. Thus far, the war has been officially misrepresented to
the people of the West as a mere "operation" against "miscreants." Tight
censorship allows no foreign publications containing stories about the
conflict to enter the country. Even so, as more and more soldiers return
home badly maimed, and as young officers are brought back in coffins
(enlisted men are buried in the East), opposition could mount. The pinch
is already being felt economically, and there have been massive layoffs
in industries unable to obtain raw materials for lack of foreign exchange.
Immense Suffering
Meanwhile, the food supply in East Pakistan dwindles, and there is no

prospect that enough will be harvested or imported to avert mass
starvation. August is normally a big harvest month, but untold acres went
unplanted in April, when the fighting was at its height. Already, peasants
along the rainswept roads show the gaunt faces, vacant stares, pencil
limbs and distended stomachs of malnutrition. Millions of Bengalis have
begun roaming the countryside in quest of food. In some hard-hit locales,
people have been seen eating roots and dogs. The threat of starvation will
drive many more into India. Unless a relief program of heroic
proportions is quickly launched, countless millions may die in the next
few months. Yahya's regime is not about to sponsor such an effort. His
latest federal budget, adopted last week, allocates $6 out of every $10 to
the West, not the East; in fact, the level of funds for Bengal is the lowest
in five years. The U.S., still fretful about driving Yahya deeper into
Peking's embrace, seems unlikely to provide the impetus for such a
program.
Tagore once wrote:
Man's body is so small, His strength of suffering so immense.
But in golden Bengal how much strength can man summon before the
small body is crushed?
Good Soldier Yahya Khan
PAKISTAN'S General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan had been settled

in President's House in Rawalpindi for a full year before he finally
agreed to hold a press conference for foreign newsmen. When he entered
the packed drawing room where the first conference was held 14 months
ago, he immediately let loose a few choice expletives about the hot TV
lights. A trembling technician quickly switched them off. Then Yahya
started in on the journalists. "Don't play politics with me," he snapped in
his characteristically gruff bass, "because I'll play politics with you."
Yahya, 54, runs his country pretty much the same way—with
impatience, ill-disguised contempt for bungling civilians, and a
cultivated air of resentment about having let himself get involved in the
whole messy business in the first place When Ayub Khan yielded the
presidency to him two years ago, Yahya switched from khaki to dark
business suits, which he still wears with obvious discomfort. As if to
emphasize his longing for the barracks, he occasionally carries a swagger
stick and misses no chance to play the simple, straight-talking soldier.
ON THE SLOW FLOW OF CYCLONE AID TO EAST PAKISTAN

LAST WINTER: "My government is not made up of angels."
ON PAKISTAN'S FISCAL PROBLEMS: "I inherited a bad economy

and I'm going to pass it on."
ON HIS MISSION: "I'll be damned if I'll see Pakistan divided."
ON HIS MANDATE: "The people did not bring me to power. I came

myself."
Few Pakistanis knew anything about Yahya Khan when he was vaulted
into the presidency two years ago. The stocky, bushy-browed Pathan had
been army chief of staff since 1966. Half a dozen high-ranking generals
were deeply disturbed about the avuncular Ayub Khan's willingness to
permit a return of parliamentary democracy, despite his own comment
that politicians behaved like "five cats tied by their tails." When a weary
Ayub stepped aside in March 1969 in the wake of strikes and student
riots that focused on wages, educational reform and a host of other
issues, the generals eagerly imposed martial law. In his first speech as
President, Yahya delighted his military sponsors by declaring that the
country was at "the edge of an abyss." What really bothered the generals
was that the country might be on the verge of a return to genuine civilian
rule, posing grave dangers to the army's power and perks.
Yahya raised the minimum industrial wage by 30%, to $26 a month,

brought in several civilian ministers when soldiers proved unfit for the
jobs, and sought to reduce official venality. He had no intention of
allowing a sudden return to full civilian rule, yet he did not seem to
hanker for power—despite the Pakistani saying that "a general galloping
upon a stallion is slow to dismount." Eventually, he decided to press
ahead not only with an election but a new constitution, even though, as
he later said, "some of my countrymen don't like the idea. They say,
'What the hell's going on? This will lead to chaos.' "
Yahya, however, had misread the political tempers. When East Pakistan's
charismatic Sheik Mujibur Rahman won his stunning majority in the
December election, the hard-liners began telling Yahya, "I told you so."
Six leading generals—including General Abdul Hamid Khan, an old
chum of Yahya's who is the current army chief of staff, and Tikka ("Red
Hot") Khan, the coldblooded commander in East Pakistan —helped
persuade Yahya to deal harshly with the East's "treachery."
Yahya (pronounced Ya-hee-uh) Khan claims direct descent from warrior

nobles who fought in the elite armies of Nadir Shah, the Persian
adventurer who conquered Delhi in the 18th century. With his pukka
sahib manner, Yahya seems strictly Sandhurst, though he learned his
trade not in England but at the British-run Indian Military Academy at
Dehra Dun. During World War II, he fought in the British Indian army in
North Africa and Italy. After partition, like most of the subcontinent's
best soldiers, he opted to become a Pakistani (India, the saying goes, got
all the bureaucrats). He was an Ayub protege from the start, and his star
rose swiftly.
Following Moslem practice, Yahya keeps his family—a wife, Fakhra,

and two married children—well out of the public eye. His only known
interest, outside of the military, is birds—all varieties. He keeps
Australian parrots around President's House, and, in a specially built
pool, a number of cranes and swans. He remains fussy as ever about his
wavy expanse of thick, white-streaked black hair ("My strength lies in
it—like Samson's").
Westerners who know him well describe Yahya as a reasonable man but
stubborn, proud and discipline-minded, He began a drive on corruption
last year by summoning senior civil servants and telling them that they
were all "a bunch of thieves." The bureaucracy ground to a halt in
protest, and Yahya soon gave up the effort. But he shows no sign of
yielding with the Bengalis, whom he reportedly calls macchar —Urdu
for mosquitoes.
"Yahya is not a brutal man," says an American acquaintance. "He is a
good soldier. But he has been blinded by his intense nationalism, and his
belief that the honor and security of his country have been betrayed."
There is a case for Yahya's Lincolnesque attempt to hold the Pakistani
house together; there is none for his methods. He might have succeeded
had he tried to accommodate the East's justifiable demands for greater
autonomy. But his tough crackdown virtually guarantees that the
country's two halves, which have precious little in common, will never
be successfully reunited.
PAKISTAN: Mujib's Secret Trial
"Our people will react violently to this," a member of the Bengali

liberation underground whispered to TIME Correspondent David
Greenway in Dacca last week. The warning proved all too true. Sheik
Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman, 51, fiery leader of East Pakistan and the man
who may hold the key to ending the bloody five-month-old civil war, had
just gone on trial for his life before a secret military court in West
Pakistan, more than 1,500 miles away. Late that same afternoon, a bomb
exploded in the lobby of Dacca's Intercontinental Hotel.
Flash and Roar.

Correspondent Greenway, who suffered a concussion in the blast, cabled:
"I was standing in front of the cigar store in the lobby when, with a flash
and a roar, the wall a few feet in front of me seemed to buckle and
dissolve. I was flung to the floor. That was fortunate, because great
chunks of bricks and concrete flew over me, crashing through the lobby
and blowing men and furniture through the plate-glass windows onto the
sidewalk.
"Part of an air duct came down on my head and I could not move. There
was thick, choking smoke and water spewing from broken pipes. Soon
the smoke began to clear. People milled about the crumpled, crying
victims lying bleeding on the lawn. None, luckily, was dead. One girl, an
employee of the hotel, had been completely buried under three feet of
rubble. When they dug her out, all she could say was: 'I knew I should
not have come to work today.' "
The timing of the bombing tends to confirm that Mujib's trial will further
stiffen Bengali resistance to the occupying West Pakistani army. If there
are any chances of a political settlement —and they seem almost
nonexistent—imposition of the death penalty could dash them.
Strict Secrecy.
Mujib's political role and his astonishing popularity in East Pakistan in a
sense precipitated the civil war (TIME cover, Aug. 2). In last December's
elections for a constitutional assembly, his Awami League won an
overwhelming 167 of 169 seats in the East. That was enough to
guarantee Mujib a majority in the 313-seat national assembly, and
ensured that he would have become Prime Minister of Pakistan. It was
also enough to alarm President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and the
West Pakistani establishment, which has run the geographically divided
country since its partition from India in 1947.
Yahya and Co. feared that Mujib's ascendancy would mean far greater
autonomy for the long-exploited East Pakistanis, and the Pakistani army
ruthlessly moved to crush the Bengali movement.
There is little doubt that Mujib will be convicted of the undefined

charges of "waging war against Pakistan and other offenses." When he
was arrested last March 26, hours after the army crackdown, Yahya
publicly branded him a traitor and hinted that he "might not live."
Observed one Western diplomat last week: "You know how hot the
Punjabi plains are this time of year. You might say Mujib has a
snowball's chance of acquittal."
Though everything about the trial is shrouded in secrecy, it was learned
last week that the proceedings are being held in a new, one-story red-
brick jail in the textile city of Lyallpur, 150 miles south of Rawalpindi.
Islamabad sources claim that the strict secrecy is necessary to prevent
Bengali rebels from trying to rescue Mujib. More likely it is because
Yahya is unwilling to give
Mujib a public platform.

When the sheik was tried in 1968, also on charges of treason stemming
from his demands for East Pakistan's autonomy, the trial was aborted
amid widespread antigovernment protests. But not before Mujib's British
lawyer managed to make the government "look utterly silly," as one
diplomat recalled.
Second Home.
A man of vitality and vehemence, Mujib became the political Gandhi of
the Bengalis, symbolizing their hopes and voicing their grievances. Not
even Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, drew the million-strong
throngs that Mujib has twice attracted in Dacca. Nor, for that matter, has
any subcontinent politician since Gandhi's day spent so much time
behind bars for his political beliefs—a little over ten years. "Prison is my
other home," he once said.
If Mujib's courage and bluntness got him into trouble frequently in the
past, at least his family was spared. Now that is not so sure. Last week
Mujib's brother, a businessman named Sheik Abu Nasser, turned up in
New Delhi with only the tattered clothes on his back. Nasser told how
Mujib's aged parents (his father is 95, his mother 80) were driven from
their home by Pakistani troops. Their house was burned, their servants
shot and they have not been heard from since. Nasser did not know
whether his wife and six children were dead or alive. He had hoped, he
said, that Senator Edward Kennedy, who last week visited India's refugee
camps on a fact-finding mission as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee
on Refugees, might be able to learn their whereabouts. But the Pakistani
government refused Kennedy permission to visit either East or West
Pakistan. Kennedy, who trudged through mud and drenching rains, was
greeted by refugees carrying hand-painted placards,
KENNEDY, THANK YOU FOR COMING.
He and an M.I.T. nutrition expert with him noted the appalling effects of
malnutrition on the children, many already blind from vitamin A
deficiencies, others irrevocably mentally retarded.
Though Mujib is accused of advocating secession for East Pakistan, the

fact is that he did not want a total split-up of Pakistan and never declared
independence until it was done in his name after the bloodbath began. To
keep his young militants in line, he spoke of "emancipation" and
"freedom." "But there is no question of secession," Mujib often said.
"We only want our due share. Besides, East Pakistanis are in a majority,
and it is ridiculous to think that the majority would secede from the
minority."
Yahya recently told a visitor, "My generals want a trial and execution."
Still, there is a feeling that Pakistan's President might spare Mujib's life.
With hopes for a united Pakistan all but ended by the civil war, keeping
Mujib alive would leave open one last option —negotiating the divorce
of East and West in peace rather than war.
East Pakistan: Even the Skies Weep
Monday, Oct. 25, 1971
IN New Delhi last week, one member of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's
Cabinet was heard to remark: "War is inevitable." In Islamabad,
President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan spent the better part of a 40-
minute television speech railing against the Indians, whom he accused of
"whipping up a war frenzy." Along their borders, east and west, both
India and Pakistan massed troops. Both defended the action as
precautionary, but there was a real danger that a minor border incident
could suddenly engulf the subcontinent in all-out war.
Several factors are at work to reduce the likelihood of such an explosion.

The Indian-Soviet friendship treaty, signed early in August, deters India
from waging war without consulting the Soviets. At the same time, rising
discontent and political and economic pressures within West Pakistan
have also placed restraints on Strongman Yahya Khan and his military
regime. Nonetheless, war remains a distinct possibility. As Mrs. Gandhi
said last week at a public meeting in South India: "We must be prepared
for any eventuality."
Intolerable Strain.
The current dispute has grown out of the Pakistani army's harsh
repression of a Bengali movement demanding greater autonomy for the
much-exploited eastern sector of the divided nation. The resulting flood
of impoverished East Pakistani refugees has placed an intolerable strain
on India's already overburdened economy. New Delhi has insisted from
the first that the refugees, who now number well over 9,000,000 by
official estimates, must be allowed to return safely to their homes in East
Pakistan.
Before that is possible, however, a political solution must be found that

would end the Pakistani army's reign of terror, wanton destruction and
pogroms aimed particularly at the 10 million members of the Hindu
minority in predominantly Moslem East Pakistan (pop. 78 million at the
start of the civil war).
Once, Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman, leader of the Awami League,

the East's majority party, might have held the key to that solution. As the
overwhelming winner of the country's first national elections last
December Mujib stood to become Prime Minister of Pakistan; now he is
on trial for his life before a secret military tribunal in the West on
charges of treason.
Though Islamabad has ordered the military command to ease off on its
repressive tactics, refugees are still trekking into India at the rate of about
30,000 a day, telling of villages burned, residents shot, and prominent
figures carried off and never heard from again. One of the more horrible
revelations concerns 563 young Bengali women, some only 18, who
have been held captive inside Dacca's dingy military cantonment since
the first days of the fighting. Seized from Dacca University and private
homes and forced into military brothels, the girls are all three to five
months pregnant. The army is reported to have enlisted Bengali
gynecologists to abort girls held at military installations. But for those at
the Dacca cantonment it is too late for abortion. The military has begun
freeing the girls a few at a time, still carrying the babies of Pakistani
soldiers.
A Million Dead.
No one knows how many have died in the seven-month-old civil war.
But in Karachi, a source with close connections to Yahya's military
regime concedes: "The generals say the figure is at least 1,000,000."
Punitive raids by the Pakistani army against villages near sites sabotaged
by the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali liberation army, are an everyday
occurrence.
The fighting is expected to increase sharply in the next few weeks, with
the end of the monsoon rains. Both the Pakistani army, most of whose
80,000 troops are bunkered down along the Indian border, and the Mukti
Bahini, with as many as 60,000 guerrilla fighters, have said that they will
soon open major new military offensives.
Plentiful Arms.
On a recent trip deep into Mukti Bahini territory, TIME Correspondent
Dan Coggin found an almost surreal scene. He cabled:
"Leaving the road behind, I entered a strange world where water is

seasonal king and the only transport is a large, cane-covered canoe
known as the country boat. For seven hours we plied deeper into
Gopalganj subdivision in southern Faridpur district. The two wiry
oarsmen found their way by taking note of such landmarks as a forlornly
decaying maharajah's palace and giant butterfly nets hovering like
outsized flamingos on stilt legs at water's edge.
"As darkness approached, we were able to visit two neighboring villages,

with about 25 guerrillas living among the local folk in each. The
guerrillas were mostly men in their 20s, some ex-college students, others
former soldiers, militiamen and police. Their arms were various but
plentiful, and they had ammunition, mines and grenades.
"A Mukti Bahini captain told me that the Bengali rebels are following
the three-stage guerrilla warfare strategy of the Viet Cong, and are now
in the first phase of organization and staging hit-and-run attacks. So far
the guerrillas in the captain's area of operations have lost about 50 men,
and larger army attacks are expected. But the Mukti Bahini plan to
mount ambushes and avoid meeting army firepower headon.
"On my way back to Dacca next day, I came upon a convoy trucker who
had been waiting for five days for his turn to board a ferry and cross the
miles-wide junction of the great Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. As we
huddled under the tailgate to keep dry, a shopkeeper joined us. Gazing at
the puddle forming beneath us, he said: 'Even the skies are weeping for
this land.' "
Always Hungry.
As conditions within East Pakistan have worsened, so have those of the
refugees in India. The stench from poor sanitation facilities hangs heavy
in the air. Rajinder Kumar, 32, formerly a clerk in Dacca, says he is
"always hungry" on his daily grain ration of 300 grams (about 1½ cups).
His three children each get half that much. "They cry for more," he says,
"but there isn't any more."
Malnutrition has reached desperate proportions among the children. Dr.

John Seamon, a British doctor with the Save the Children Fund who has
traveled extensively among the 1,000 or so scattered refugee camps
estimates that 150,000 children between the ages of one and eight have
died, and that 500,000 more are suffering from serious malnutrition and
related diseases.
It is now officially estimated that refugees will swell to 12 million by the

end of the year. The cost to the Indian government for the fiscal year
ending next March 31 may run as high as $830 million. The U.S. so far
has supplied $83.2 million for the refugees, and $137 million in
"humanitarian" relief inside East Pakistan. Two weeks ago, the Nixon
Administration asked Congress to grant an additional $250 million.
Senator Edward Kennedy charges that the U.S. is sending another sort of
aid to the subcontinent as well. In spite of a State Department freeze on
new military aid shipments to Pakistan, says Kennedy, the Pentagon has
signed new defense contracts totaling nearly $10 million with the
Pakistan government within the past five months. Kennedy's
investigation also revealed that U.S. firms have received State
Department licenses to ship to Pakistan arms and ammunition purchased
from the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe.
Catalyst for Violence.

Observers doubt that the situation would ease even if Yahya were to
release Mujib and lift a ban on the Awami League. Where the Bengalis
once were merely demanding greater autonomy, they now seem
determined to fight for outright independence.
In his speech last week, Yahya also announced that the National
Assembly would be convened in December, immediately following by-
elections in the East to fill the Assembly seats vacated by disqualified
Awami Leaguers. With the main party banned from participation,
however, the election is likely to provoke more violence. Already the
Mukti Bahini have vowed to treat candidates as dalals ("collaborators").
Nonetheless, Yahya may find himself compelled to put his government

at least partly in civilian hands. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of West
Pakistan's majority Pakistan People's Party and Yahya's most probable
choice for Prime Minister, has become more and more outspoken about
"the rule of the generals." Recently he said: "The long night of terror
must end. The people of Pakistan must take their destiny in their own
hands." Formerly that sort of talk would have landed him in jail. Now
even Yahya seems to have recognized that unless the military allows
some sort of civilian rule it may face trouble in the West as well as in the
ravaged East.
Time Magazine: December 6, 1971 Issue Cover
A Letter From The Publisher, Dec. 6, 1971
WE first heard the news of the fighting between India and Pakistan when
both capitals began issuing a series of sharply conflicting claims. Radio
Pakistan announced that India "has launched an all-out offensive against
East Pakistan," while India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said this was
"Pakistani propaganda" and "wholly untrue."
To sort out all the contradictory reports, TIME immediately assigned six
correspondents to the story. Bill Stewart and Jim Shepherd covered the
Indian side from their base in New Delhi. Two former New Delhi
correspondents, Dan Coggin and Lou Kraar, flew into Pakistan from
their regular posts in Beirut and Singapore. Bill Mader and Friedel
Ungeheuer provided back-up coverage from the State Department and
the United Nations. In the combat zone, however, most local officials did
their best to confine foreign correspondents to the rear areas and to
harass them with red tape. The results were sometimes frustrating.
"I came to Pakistan prepared to see the kind of tank battles I had
witnessed during the war over Kashmir in 1965," Correspondent Kraar
cabled from Rawalpindi, "but I found this town completely quiet. It made
me feel like that correspondent in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, who cabled his
home office, ADEN UN-WARWISE, while a competitor reported,
ADEN WARWISE. The main event that evening was a dinner that
President Yahya Khan was giving for the Chinese Communist First
Minister of Machine Building,
Li Shui-ching, who was here to dedicate a factory. President Yahya

talked informally with reporters and expressed some unusually tough
warnings to India. But the only evidence of war that night was the
blackout which was quite unnecessary."
From the correspondents' files, and from background research assembled

by Reporter-Researcher Susan Altchek, Contributing Editor Marguerite
Johnson wrote the cover story. A veteran of TIME'S Art section,
Marguerite shifted to World last winter after taking a five-month-long
excursion around the globe by freighter, jetliner and Trans-Siberian
Railroad. Upon her return, she was assigned to what seemed at the time a
relatively tranquil part of the world: India. This is her second cover story
since then on the tragic subcontinent. "The conflict," she says, "is so
suffused with ancient religious, cultural and racial hatreds that it is
difficult for any Western journalist to comprehend it fully. There are
times when the Indians and Pakistanis do not seem to understand it
either."
India and Pakistan: Poised for War
THE first warning that a serious clash had occurred came in an

announcement over Radio Pakistan. India, it said, "has launched an all-
out offensive against East Pakistan without a formal declaration of war."
That charge proved to be false; it was not a full-fledged war —yet. On
the other hand, it was certainly not a trifling skirmish, as Indian
spokesmen at first euphemistically described it.
For months, border battles had broken out almost daily between troops of
the two nations. The conflict that finally erupted last week along the
1,300-mile frontier was plainly big enough to raise the specter of a major
conflagration on the subcontinent. The presence of Indian troops on
Pakistan's soil escalated the dispute between the two nations to the point
where full-scale war could erupt at any moment—a war that could also
cause an uncomfortable confrontation of the major powers.
Rigid restrictions on news coverage by both governments made the exact

shape of the conflict murky, but it was clear that battles had occurred at
roughly half a dozen sites along the border (see map, page 31). At week's
end, a combination of Indian regulars and Bengali Mukti Bahini (the East
Pakistani liberation forces, which oppose West Pakistan's rule over the
East) had captured portions of five areas, totaling perhaps 60 sq. mi. of
real estate. All along the border, artillery exchanges and firefights kept
the situation tense and dangerous through the week. Scene of the biggest
battle was a slender salient of India that points sharply into East Pakistan
some 20 miles west of the Pakistani city of Jessore, an important railhead
that leads to key ports on the Bay of Bengal. Early last week, according
to a Pakistani general, one battalion of Indian regulars operating
alongside a battalion of Mukti Bahini crossed the Indian border point of
Boyra. From there, camouflaged with netting and supported by tanks and
heavy artillery, they thrust northeastward along a U-shaped front into
East Pakistan.
After the Indians and guerrillas had moved about six miles inland and
seized the village of Chaugacha, Pakistani resistance halted the advance.
In the counterattacks that followed, the first tank battle of the war broke
out. In ten hours of fighting, Pakistani forces said, they destroyed eight
Indian tanks and damaged ten others; they admitted losing seven tanks.
Next day, Pakistani forces called up an air strike, sending four Sabre jets
on Indian positions. Indian Gnats, lightweight jet fighters, intercepted the
planes within Indian territory, and shot down three of them. Two of the
Pakistani pilots who bailed out were captured by Indian forces.
TIME Correspondent William Stewart paid a visit to Boyra last week.

"Refugee camps are scattered along the road, but there are no soldiers in
sight," he cabled. "In fact, not until we reach the small city is there any
sign of fighting. We sit down in a semicircle in front of the briefer—
Lieut. Colonel C.L. Proudfoot. In a blazing Bengal sun are three
Pakistani tanks (U.S.-made Chaffees) and an odd assortment of captured
materiel: American machine guns and Chinese ammunition. Proudfoot
explains that Pakistani tanks have been probing the border near Boyra
since Nov. 17. On the night of Nov. 20-21, he said, a number of tanks
were heard approaching Boyra. The tanks reached and began firing on
Indian positions. A squadron of 14 Indian tanks (Soviet-made PT 76s)
crossed into East Pakistan to outflank the Pakistani squadron. The battle
raged four or five miles into East Pakistan. When the smoke cleared,
three Pakistani tanks had been trapped in India, and another eight were
reported destroyed. The Indians claimed a loss of only one tank."
The Indian and Pakistani accounts differed in a number of details.
Initially, Pakistani spokesmen in Islamabad told of 100,000 and then of
200,000 Indian troops pouring across the border at half a dozen points.
Those figures were considerably exaggerated. Major General M.H.
Ansari, Pakistan commander in the Jessore sector, told newsmen that the
Indian guerrilla forces had lost 200 to 300 dead and twice as many
wounded, but that they had managed to recover all the bodies; that would
be quite a feat under any circumstances. Ansari showed journalists a
letter stamped "14th Punjab Regiment" and an Indian soldier's diary
picked up in the course of the fighting.
There was no disagreement over the essentials of the battle and its
dangerous significance. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi went before
Parliament in New Delhi and acknowledged that Indian troops had
entered East Pakistan "to repulse a Pakistani attack" near the border. She
also corroborated the report that India had shot down three Pakistani
Sabre jets. Mrs. Gandhi added that she would not emulate Pakistani
President Agha Mohammed Yahya
Khan by declaring a national emergency —a move that was more

symbolic than substantive for West Pakistanis since their country had
been under martial law since March 1969. But later that day Indian
defense officials announced a significant change in policy: henceforth
Indian troops would be allowed to enter the East "in self-defense."
Diplomatic Flurries
The elements of this supercharged situation have become all too familiar
to the rest of the world:
1) a swiftly growing independence movement in the much exploited
eastern wing of Pakistan;
2) the ruthless crackdown by Ya+hya's tough West Pakistani troops last

March and a resulting exodus that sent nearly 10 million Bengali
refugees flooding into India;
3) a flourishing guerrilla movement that now numbers as many as

100,000 adherents, fervently committed to the creation of a free Bangla
Desh (Bengal Nation) in East Pakistan, and all but openly aided by New
Delhi.
Last week's intensified fighting sent alarms through the world's capitals,
and there was a flurry of activity in Washington, Moscow and United
Nations Headquarters in Manhattan as the big powers sought some way
to defuse the explosive confrontation. On Thanksgiving Day, Richard
Nixon phoned Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath. The President
discussed the Indian-Pakistani situation with the British leader, as well as
their decision to meet in Bermuda in December. U.S. Ambassador to
Moscow Jacob Beam visited the Soviet Foreign Ministry twice during
the week to urge the Russians, who had become India's chief sponsors, to
help stop the fighting.
Washington clearly did not wish to assume the role of mediator as

Moscow did at Tashkent in 1966 to settle the Indian-Pakistani conflict
over Kashmir.
For one thing, the U.S. felt that it did not have sufficient leverage with
India. Beyond that, the White House calculated that if it became deeply
involved, there would be serious repercussions from Congress, especially
in view of the nation's profound distrust of foreign entanglements in the
wake of Viet Nam.
Moreover, Washington has no blueprint for specific points of settlement.

It believes that any solution must be worked out by the Pakistanis and the
rebels, and that if mediation is necessary, it should come from a neutral
entity like the U.N. Nor does the Administration have any intention of
getting militarily embroiled, even though Pakistan has bilateral and
multilateral (SEATO and CENTO) alliances with the U.S. The defense
treaties, officials emphasized, are directed only against Communist
aggression.
For their part, the Russians sent a stern note to President Yahya urging
him to seek a political solution that would end the bitter civil war in East
Pakistan and halt the influx of refugees into India. The Soviets have also
used their influence with New Delhi to call for restraints on India. Under
the terms of a 20-year "friendship treaty" signed in August, Moscow and
New Delhi are obliged to consult when either is threatened with attack.
Since the Russians are known to want no part of a conflict that could
bring China in on Pakistan's side, they have thus suggested that India
move with care.
China is believed to be no more anxious for a confrontation with its

socialist sister. Despite their pledge of support for the Pakistani regime in
the event of an attack, the Chinese have told Pakistan's generals that a
political solution would be preferred. Though they made a stinging attack
against India in the U.N. two weeks ago, accusing it of "subversion and
aggression" in East Pakistan, Peking and New Delhi were quietly
negotiating behind the scenes to re-establish high-level diplomatic
exchanges.
Today, Not Tomorrow
The solution, in the view of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mike

Mansfield, is to bring the U.N. into the picture. "This is the time, now,
today, not tomorrow, for the Security Council to act," he said. But the
fact is that, even though all the big powers are anxious to avert a conflict
on the subcontinent, none are rushing to place the issue before the U.N.
Security Council for fear that they might prove to be unable to agree.
Lying in his hospital bed in New York City, U.N. Secretary-General U
Thant confided to one of his aides last week: "If I am suffering from a
bleeding ulcer, it is at least in part due to my frustrating efforts over the
past eight months to do something about the terrible situation in East
Pakistan." Even Pakistan's U.N. delegate, Agha Shahi, who was ready to
bring the matter before the Security Council early in the week, quickly
changed his mind. Consultations with the Chinese delegation and
soundings of Soviet intentions persuaded him that the two Communist
powers might not agree on a cease-fire resolution. The Japanese,
however, are working on a resolution that they will introduce if the
fighting continues.
The protagonists in this conflict are two extraordinarily strongwilled,

even stubborn leaders. At 54, Yahya is a tough-talking professional
soldier who rarely shows any inclination for compromise and exhibits his
impatience at the drop of an epithet. "Stop reminding me every day," he
once snarled at Pakistani journalists when they asked about his repeated
promises of a return to democracy for his country. "The people did not
bring me to power. I came myself." The stocky former army chief of
staff, a Pathan who came to power in 1 969 when widespread strikes and
dis orders forced President Ayub Khan to step down, showed his quick
temper last week during an impromptu speech at a late-night dinner in
Islamabad. Lash ing out at Indira Gandhi, he said at one point: "If that
woman thinks she will cow me, I refuse to take it. If she wants a war, I'll
fight it."
Child of the Nation The remark was not only ungallant, it was imprudent.
For when it comes to tough-mindedness, Mrs. Gandhi is at least a match
for Yahya Khan. As the only daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, she was
carefully groomed for leadership and grew up an adored and beloved
"child of the nation." From her father she inherited a sense of grace under
pressure, but where he was the idealist, she is much more the pragmatist.
As one political commentator observed: "Her father was a dreamer who
did not act decisively. The people loved Nehru, but ihey are impressed
by Indira's ability to make decisions and make them firmly and fast." In
elections last March, Indians gave Indira, who like Yahya is 54 years old,
an overwhelming two-thirds majority in Parliament.
Hostility to Hatred
Rome and Carthage in ancient times, Israel and the Arab countries in
today's world—such are the parallels to the national enmity between
India and Pakistan that come naturally to mind. Behind their hostility lies
a legacy of Hindu-Moslem religious enmity that is as old as Islam (see
box). There are many who believe that if India had held out a little longer
for independence from Britain without partition, it would have had its
way and today there would be one country on the subcontinent, not two.
But as Nehru confessed much later, "The truth is that we were tired men,
and we were getting on in years too. We expected that partition would be
temporary, that Pakistan was bound to come back to us. None of us
guessed how much the killings and the crisis in Kashmir would embitter
relations."
But partition came, and what had been Hindu-Moslem hostility was soon
converted into Indian-Pakistani hatred. The very next year, the two new
countries were at war with each other in the Vale of Kashmir. Even
today, Kashmir lies a festering wound between India and Pakistan.
Should all-out war come, there is no doubt that the conflict in East
Pakistan would quickly be dwarfed by far bigger and bloodier battles in
the west largely aimed at control of the fabled valley.
The issue stems from Britain's failure to make provision for India's 601
princely states when self-determination elections were held on the
subcontinent in 1947. As it happened, Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu
Maharajah, but its population was predominantly Moslem. When
Pakistan invaded in the autumn of 1948, the Maharajah promptly placed
the province under Indian rule. Once again, in 1965, it became the
battlefield for the rival powers.
Though both Pakistan and India began as parliamentary democracies,

they soon drifted along divergent political paths. Jawaharlal Nehru lived
to guide India into a role as the world's largest democracy (pop. 547
million), but Pakistan's founding leaders, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and
Liaquat Ali Khan, died soon after independence and eventually the
country fell" under military control. Since the military was dominated by
the Pathans, Punjabis and Baluchis of the West, it became established
policy to short-change the poorer, more densely populated eastern wing,
which before the refugee exodus began last March had a population of 78
million v. 58 million for the West.
"Mischievous and Wicked"
The differences have also shaped both countries' foreign policies. As

Nehru created a policy of neutrality and sought to establish India as the
leader of the nonaligned bloc of Third World countries, Pakistan became
a firm ally of the West. Then the U.S., in what former Ambassador to
India John Kenneth Galbraith calls the most "categorically mischievous
and wicked" action it has ever taken, began to build up Pakistan as a
military power. With India pursuing a policy of calculated coolness
toward the U.S., Washington turned to Pakistan as a potential ally against
Communism: in return Pakistan provided special facilities, including a
base that was used for U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union (Francis Gary
Powers took off from this airfield).
Pakistan, however, viewed the connection as insurance against India, not

Communism. After 1965, when the U.S. cut off military aid to both
countries, India turned to the Soviet Union and Pakistan to China. With
Russia's help, India has built itself into a military power far superior to
Pakistan. Its forces (980,000) outnumber Pakistan's (392,000) by more
than 2 to 1; its air and naval capacity is also rated superior. If India were
to fight Pakistan alone, there is little doubt which would win.
Sharing neither borders nor cultures, Pakistan's divided parts, separated

by a thousand miles of Indian territory, make it a political anomaly, at
odds not only with India but with itself as well. As Jinnah put it shortly
after independence, there was little to hold the country's two divergent
wings together except "faith." It was not enough. Last December, when
the nation went to the polls in the first free elections in its history, East
Pakistanis gave an overwhelming endorsement to the Awami League and
its leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, 51, who had pledged to bring the
exploited wing greater autonomy.
The prospect of the political balance of power moving from West

Pakistan to the East was not acceptable to the generals. On March 25,
Yahya outlawed the Awami League, arrested Mujib, who is now being
tried for treason, and launched a ruthless repression that by one estimate
has claimed a million lives and has sent nearly 10 million refugees
flooding into India, most of them into the state of West Bengal. Awami
League leaders who escaped to India promptly set up the Bangla Desh
government in exile with headquarters in Calcutta, and some 130 Bengali
diplomats subsequently defected from Pakistani missions around the
world. The rebels immediately began raising and training a guerrilla
force that, by some estimates, now numbers 100,000 men.
Today India's worst fear is that many of the refugees will refuse to go
back to East Pakistan under any conditions. Nearly 8,000,000 of them are
Hindus, who were singled out by the Moslem military for persecution.
Pakistan, moreover, claims that only 2,000,000 Pakistani refugees are in
India—a figure that corresponds to the number of Moslems who have
fled. This coincidence may suggest that even if there were a settlement,
the Pakistanis would refuse to permit the Hindus to return.
Swarm of Locusts
A confidential report recently submitted to Mrs. Gandhi's Cabinet

concluded: "The most alarming prognosis is that not even 10% of the
Hindu evacuees may choose to go back. If this becomes a reality, it
might be disastrous for West Bengal's economy, and this economic
disaster is bound to bring in its train serious sociopolitical problems of
perhaps unmanageable dimensions."
The dire forecasts are confirmed by a World Bank report released in

September. India's economic development, the report said, could be
seriously stunted by the cost of the refugees. That cost, expected to reach
$830 million by the end of the fiscal year in March, exceeds all of India's
1971-72 foreign aid for development.
The setback came at a time when the country was just beginning to show
some economic headway. With a $50 billion gross national product,
India has begun producing all manner of sophisticated materials, from
complex computers to nuclear reactors and jet aircraft. But the distance it
has come is only measurable by the distance left to go. Some 200 million
people still subsist on 150 a day; more than half of the 10 million
government workers earn less than $25 a month. As a Calcutta
industrialist put it: "The refugees have descended on our hopes like a
swarm of locusts on a good crop."
Economic pressures are also building in West Pakistan. So far, the

Islamabad regime has been able to muddle through fairly well. The real
crunch will come in a few months. Pakistan is spending almost 55% of
its fiscal outlay on defense, and the cost of military operations in the East
alone runs to $60 million a month. One observer estimates that the 3,000-
mile route around India that Pakistani planes must take to supply forces
in the East is the equivalent of a supply line from Karachi to Rome.
In light of all this, some West Pakistanis are privately beginning to

concede that it may finally be necessary to do what the generals spilled
so much blood to avoid: give up East Pakistan. A high Pakistan
government official admits that there is no more than "a 50-50 chance of
Pakistan holding together."
There were also indications last week that Yahya is beginning to feel
threatened by political opposition in the West. Charging that "some of its
leaders are in collaboration with the enemy and are trying to foment
revolt in West Pakistan," he suddenly outlawed the National Awami
Party, a labor-oriented leftist group that emerged as the dominant
provincial party in elections last December. The Pakistani President has
promised to convene the National Assembly later this month. But with
both the East's Awami League and the West's National Awami League
disenfranchised, the Assembly is beginning to appear about as
representative as President Ayub Khan's "basic democracy," a scheme by
which the former President's rule was sustained through a hand-picked
electoral college of 120,000 educated Pakistanis.
Secret Proposal
Many Pakistanis fear that in the event of war, the odds will be
overwhelmingly in India's favor; even Yahya has called war with India
"military lunacy." Thus, Pakistan's blustery charges of invasion last week
were widely read as a last-ditch attempt by the Islamabad military regime
to bring about international intervention. Should a U.N. peace-keeping
mission be sent in, for example, pressures from the Indian side of the
border would be greatly alleviated, allowing the Pakistani troops to
concentrate on subduing the Bengali rebels. For precisely the same
reasons, India is seeking to avoid intervention—on the theory that such
relief would enable Yahya to avoid a political settlement and thus
prolong the refugee burden.
The worst fear of diplomatic observers was that India and the Bengali
guerrillas, confident that they would win easily, were attempting to
provoke Yahya into a declaration of war. According to this theory, which
is held by a number of U.S. State Department officials, Mrs. Gandhi's
Western jaunt was designed mostly to gain time while India's military
buildup progressed. When Pakistan's chief ally, Peking, indicated that it
really wanted no part of a war on the subcontinent, the Indians decided to
move. With snow falling in the foothills of the Himalayas, making
Chinese intervention even more unlikely, they sprang. Their aim was
twofold: to draw West Pakistani troops to the border regions, making it
easy for the guerrillas to gain control of the interior; and to goad
Islamabad into declaring war so as to enable India to attack in the west as
well as the east, and thus settle the issue of Kashmir once and for all.
Another theory holds that India's militant moves may in fact be designed
to force Yahya to reconsider an aborted peace proposal. TIME'S Dan
Coggin learned that the secret proposal was made by President Nixon to
Mrs. Gandhi on her visit to Washington last month. The President
reportedly told the Prime Minister that Yahya Khan appeared to be
accepting the idea of negotiations with Mujib. If she would remain
"moderate" for the time being, Washington promised, it would use its
influence to persuade Yahya to sit down with the imprisoned Bengali
leader and work out a solution.
There were two chief possibilities under consideration by Yahya, both

posing the prospect of a referendum for East Pakistanis to decide their
status after a two-or three-year cooling-off time. One proposal suggested
that Mujib be released and that he and his Awarni League be at least
partly reinstated during the waiting period. The other involved keeping
Mujib under house arrest in West Pakistan and making no substantial
political changes in the interim.
Danger of Escalation
Indira agreed to adopt a wait-and-see course. Only the week before,

Yahya had made a mildly hopeful remark that "if the nation demands his
[Mujib's] release, I will do it." Simultaneously, four appeals for Mujib's
release, all of suspiciously obscure origin, appeared in the government-
supervised press in West Pakistan. On her return to New Delhi. Mrs.
Gandhi appealed for restraint and patience.
In the meantime, however, several hard-lining West Pakistani generals

got wind of the proposal and informed Yahya that they were opposed to
any sort of negotiations with Mujib. They argued that Pakistan's unity
depended upon maintaining the current policy—in effect to outlast the
guerrillas. The generals, moreover, also tried to convince Yahya that
Mujib should be executed after his treason trial is completed. Yahya has
apparently not yet made up his mind about the Bengali leader, but
observers have grown markedly more pessimistic about his fate. "Mujib
may well never get back to Bengal alive," says one Western diplomat. In
any case, India's new militancy posed grave risks of dangerous new
escalations that could get out of hand.
Late last week, Yahya took time out to attend the dedication ceremonies
of a new heavy-machinery factory outside Islamabad. The President was
in an ebullient mood. The factory had been built with Chinese aid, and it
seemed a good moment to underscore Peking's support.
Yahya thanked China "for renewing the assurance that should Pakistan
be subjected to foreign aggression, the Chinese government and people
will, as always, resolutely support the Pakistan government and people."
Then it was China's turn. Peking's own special emissary, Li Shui-ching
of the First Ministry of Machine Building, spoke glowingly of Chinese-
Pakistani friendship, but he carefully avoided any mention of the tension
with India or of specific aid from Peking. Then, in a surprising and
symbolic gesture, he released a boxful of doves.
The message was clear—peace, not war—but whether the subcontinent's

bitter antagonists would heed it was very much in question.
Hindu and Moslem: The Gospel of Hate
AS Britain prepared to strike its colors in New Delhi, Mohandas Gandhi,

India's great apostle of nonviolence, appealed to his followers to "go out
among your districts and spread the message of the Hindu-Moslem
unity." But when independence came in 1947, it was the gospel of hate
that swept the two new nations on the vast Indian subcontinent.
Overnight, families that had lived as friendly neighbors for decades in

British India became mindless enemies in Hindu India and Moslem
Pakistan. Within nine months after partition, some 16 million refugees
had fled crazed mobs in both countries. Perhaps 600,000 were
slaughtered. "If they were children," wrote British Historian Leonard
Mosley, describing the carnage, "they were picked up by their feet and
their heads smashed against the wall. If they were girls they were raped
and their breasts were chopped off. And if they were pregnant, they were
disemboweled."
That was 24 years ago. Today, the religious animosities that have already
warped the past and present of one-fifth of humanity seem to have
become permanent. Not only do Hindu and Moslem troops of the two
countries clash at the borders, but Hindu and Moslem civilians also
frequently tear at one another in cities and towns. In West Pakistan,
communal troubles are rare only because very few Hindus hung on after
partition. But in East Pakistan, Moslem oppression had caused a steady
Hindu migration to India even before the current troubles began. Now
that light-skinned Pathan and Punjabi troops from the West rule by the
gun, dark-skinned Bengali Moslems try to survive by informing on their
equally dark-skinned Bengali Hindu neighbors. In India, meanwhile, the
sight of a Hindu mob seeking vengeance for some Moslem insult is all
too familiar. Such incidents have grown fairly frequent since 1964, when
the theft of what was purported to be a sacred hair of Mohammed from a
mosque in Kashmir sparked three months of turmoil throughout India
and East Pakistan. Two years ago, 1,000 Indians were dead and 30,000
homeless after a week of rioting that followed an incident in the modern
industrial city of Ahmedabad. The provocation: a procession of Moslems
had collided with a herd of sacred cows being led through the streets by a
group of Indian sadhus (holy men).
The 468 million Hindus and 181 million Moslems who share the teeming
subcontinent are divided by social and cultural differences that go far
deeper than the economic and religious prejudices that divide, say, the
Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland. The Hindu inhabits a
world peopled by deities, in which material things and the individual are
fundamentally unimportant. He lives a life carefully circumscribed by a
whole host of social, cultural and religious taboos. All outsiders are
suspect, but beef-eating Moslems are particularly "unclean." (Moslems,
for their part, regard Hindus and other nonbelievers as infidels.) Almost
all of the subcontinent's Moslems—89%, by one authoritative estimate—
are descendants of low-caste Hindus who converted to Islam, which
emphasizes individuality and equality under a single deity. They did so
primarily to escape the inexorably rigid social and religious restrictions
imposed on them as "Untouchables" by the Hindu caste system.
The Hindu-Moslem struggles go back centuries. Some 1,500 years

before Christ, tall, fair-skinned Aryans invaded the subcontinent,
subjugated the dark-skinned Dravidians who inhabited it and imposed on
them the caste system. But during the millenniums after Christ,
plunderers from Central Asia—Turks, Persians and Afghans—brought
with them the flaming sword of Mohammedanism. By the mid-17th
century, when the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, the
subcontinent was firmly under Moslem rule, and its Hindus were a
subjugated majority.
By the 18th century, the Mogul Empire was in decline, and rebellious
armies under Hindu and, later, Sikh leadership had begun to pull it apart.
The British finished the job, and as they began to annex great swatches
of the old Mogul Empire, England's soldiers and administrators
unwittingly opened the way for a dramatic Hindu renaissance. The first
British conquest was the vast state of Bengal, or what is now India's
West Bengal state and East Pakistan. As shrewd and energetic traders,
Bengal's Hindus had close ties with the British, and they naturally found
positions in the new civil service. As British rule spread, so did the new
Hindu elite. They became not only civil servants but also teachers,
doctors, lawyers and engineers, landowners and financiers, writers,
poets, philosophers and reformers.
The proud Moslems, warriors and horsemen rather than merchants and
intellectuals, turned inward and all but "abandoned the field to the
Hindus. As Historian Arnold Toynbee described it, "A British arbiter had
decreed that the pen should be substituted for the sword as the instrument
with which the competition was conducted." As independence
approached, the Moslems understandably grew uneasy about the pros-
pects of life under a vengeful Hindu majority. Moslem Leader
Mohammed Ali Jinnah demanded the creation of a separate Islamic
nation, Pakistan. Among the five provinces that opted to join the new
nation was East Bengal, whose Moslem majority had no desire to live
under a Hindu-controlled government in New Delhi. Despite the
ravaging that East Bengal has taken at the hands of the West Pakistani
troops, the attitude persists. Says an Indian official: "If an Indian army
marched into East Pakistan and drove the West Pakistanis out, it would
for ten days be the Indian army of liberation and on the eleventh day
become the Hindu army of occupation."
But why have the divided Hindu and Moslem states not been able to
maintain a separate peace? Gandhi always thought that a common thread
of Indian-ness would somehow hold the two together. But the explosion
of Hindu-Moslem hatred after partition was enough to poison a whole
generation of Indians and Pakistanis. In the meantime, a new generation
has grown up on both sides—one that does not even remember the days
not so long ago when all thought of themselves as Indians.
India and Pakistan: Over the Edge
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 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 briefing team arrived, newsmen 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 on India."
Embroiled Again
Who attacked whom was still open to question at week's end, and
probably will be for some time. 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 the 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 newsmen from the battlefronts. 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 value as much as their strategic
importance: Agra, site of the Taj Mahal; Srinagar, the beautiful capital of
Kashmir; Amritsar, holy city of the Sikhs, India's bearded warriors.
Forty-five minutes after the air 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 defense 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 opposite 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 military movements at Sialkot, about eight miles from the
Indian border. Kraar saw commandeered civilian trucks 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
Sialkot, 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 as a fabrication to justify the air
strike. "No sensible general staff attacks first on the ground," said
Defense Secretary 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
tangled 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 Indian airfields.
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 avoidable has happened. West Pakistan has struck with
reckless perfidy." In a broadcast at noon the same day, Pakistani
President Agha 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 as soon as possible stems from two factors.
First is the tremendous economic and social burden of the refugees who
have sought sanctuary in India. Second is that in a prolonged guerrilla
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 neighbor 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 the Bengali guerrillas, 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 2,000 people in the vicinity of Dacca alone.
Even while Mrs. Gandhi was speaking to Parliament, India was

launching an invasion of East Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, former Foreign
Minister Zulfikar AH Bhutto, who is slated to be deputy premier in a
civilian government that 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, the Pakistanis are outnumbered
by more than 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 matériel, India also has the edge: of its 1,450 tanks, about 450 are
Russian medium tanks, and about 300 Indian-made Vijayanta 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, 225
Chinese T-59s, and numerous old American Shermans and Chaffees of
limited utility. Pakistan's 285 combat aircraft include two squadrons of
Mirage 111 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 Defense
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 for a quick knockout 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 near Kashmir; India
admitted losing "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 the 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 were declared, would enable
West Pakistan to extricate its troops as part of a ceasefire. At U.N.
headquarters in Manhattan, however, the big powers seemed paralyzed.
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 canceled 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 ceasefire, 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

ceasefire, 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 (the
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 pre serve 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 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 even 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 the refugees have fled; the presence on
Indian soil of large numbers of guerrillas 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 than 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."
Times Magazine: December 20, 1971 Issue Cover
Bangladesh: Out of War, a Nation Is Born
JAI Bangla! Jai Bangla!" From the banks of the great Ganges and the
broad Brahmaputra, from the emerald rice fields and mustard-colored
hills of the countryside, from the countless squares of countless villages
came the cry. "Victory to Bengal! Victory to Bengal!" They danced on
the roofs of buses and marched down city streets singing their anthem
Golden Bengal. They brought the green, red and gold banner of Bengal
out of secret hiding places to flutter freely from buildings, while huge
pictures of their imprisoned leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, sprang up
overnight on trucks, houses and signposts. As Indian troops advanced
first to Jessore, then to Comilla, then to the outskirts of the capital of
Dacca, small children clambered over their trucks and Bengalis
everywhere cheered and greeted the soldiers as liberators.
Thus last week, amid a war that still raged on, the new nation of
Bangladesh was born. So far only India and Bhutan have formally
recognized it, but it ranks eighth among the world's 148 nations in terms
of population (78 million), behind China, India, the Soviet Union, the
U.S., Indonesia, Japan and Brazil. Its birth, moreover, may be followed
by grave complications. In West Pakistan, a political upheaval is a
foregone conclusion in the wake of defeat and dismemberment. In India,
the creation of a Bengali state next door to its own impoverished West
Bengal state could very well strengthen the centrifugal forces that have
tugged at the country since independence in 1947.
The breakaway of Pakistan's eastern wing became a virtual certainty

when the Islamabad government launched air strikes against at least eight
Indian airfields two weeks ago. Responding in force, the Indian air force
managed to wipe out the Pakistani air force in the East within two days,
giving India control of the skies. In the Bay of Bengal and the Ganges
delta region as well, the Indian navy was in unchallenged command. Its
blockade of Chittagong and Chalna harbors cut off all reinforcements,
supplies and chances of evacuation for the Pakistani forces, who found
themselves far outnumbered (80,000 v. India's 200,000) and trapped in
an enclave more than 1,000 miles from their home bases in the West.
There were even heavier and bloodier battles, including tank clashes on
the Punjabi plain and in the deserts to the south, along the 1,400-mile
border between India and the western wing of Pakistan, where the two
armies have deployed about 250,000 men. Civilians were fleeing from
the border areas, and residents of Karachi, Rawalpindi and Islamabad
were in a virtual state of siege and panic over day and night harassment
raids by buzzing Indian planes.
The U.N. did its best to stop the war, but its best was not nearly good
enough. After three days of procedural wrangles and futile resolutions,
the Security Council gave up; stymied by the Soviet nyets, the council
passed the buck to the even wordier and less effectual General Assembly.
There, a resolution calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal of Indian and
Pakistan forces behind their own borders swiftly passed by an
overwhelming vote of 104 to 11.
The Pakistanis, with their armies in retreat, said they would honor the
ceasefire provided India did. The Indians, with victory in view, said they
"were considering" the ceasefire, which meant they would stall until they
had achieved their objective of dismembering Pakistan. There was
nothing the assembly could do to enforce its will. There was considerable
irony in India's reluctance to obey the U.N. resolution in view of New
Delhi's irritating penchant in the past for lecturing other nations on their
moral duty to do the bidding of the world organization. Similarly the
Soviet Union, which is encouraging India in its defiance, has never
hesitated to lecture Israel on its obligation to heed U.N. resolutions
calling for withdrawal from Arab territories.
Hopeless Task
In any case, a cease-fire is not now likely to alter the military situation in
the East. As Indian infantrymen advanced to within 25 miles of Dacca
late last week and as reports circulated that 5,000 Indian paratroopers
were landing on the edges of the beleaguered eastern capital, thousands
fled for fear that the Pakistani army might decide to make a pitched
stand. Daily, and often hourly, Indian planes strafed airports in Dacca,
Karachi and Islamabad. Some 300 children were said to have died in a
Dacca orphanage when a piston-engine plane dropped three 750-lb.
bombs on the Rahmat-e-Alam Islamic Mission near the airport while 400
children slept inside. Earlier in the week, two large bombs fell on
workers' shanties near a jute mill in nearby Narayan-ganj, killing 275
people.
Forty workers died and more than 100 others were injured when they
were caught by air strikes as they attempted to repair huge bomb craters
in the Dacca airport runway. India declared a temporary moratorium on
air strikes late last week so that the runway could be repaired and 400
U.N. relief personnel and other foreigners could be flown out. It was
repaired, but the Pakistanis changed their mind and refused to allow the
U.N.'s evacuation aircraft to land at Dacca, leaving U.N. personnel
trapped as potential hostages. The International Red Cross declared
Dacca's Intercontinental Hotel and nearby Holy Family Hospital "neutral
zones" to receive wounded and provide a haven for foreigners.
For its part, the Pakistani army was said to have killed some Bengalis
who they believed informed or aided the Indian forces. But the reprisals
apparently were not on a wide scale. Both civilian and military casualties
were considered relatively light in East Bengal, largely because the
Indian army skirted big cities and populated areas in an effort to avoid
standoff battles with the retreating Pakistani troops.
The first major city to fall was Jessore. TIME'S William Stewart, who
rode into the key railroad junction with the Indian troops, cabled:
"Jessore, India's first strategic prize, fell as easily as a mango ripened by
a long Bengal summer. It shows no damage from fighting. In fact, the
Pakistani 9th Division headquarters had quit Jessore days before the
Indian advance, and only four battalions were left to face the onslaught.
"Nevertheless, two Pakistani battalions slipped away, while the other two
were badly cut up. The Indian army was everywhere wildly cheered by
the Bengalis, who shouted: 'Jai Bangla!' and 'Indira Gandhi Zindabad!
[Long Live Indira Gandhi!].' In Jhingergacha, a half-deserted city of
about 5,000 nearby, people gather to tell of their ordeal. The Pakistanis
shot us when we didn't understand,' said one old man. 'But they spoke
Urdu and we speak Bengali.' "
Death Awaits
By no means all of East Bengal was freed of Pakistani rule last week.
Pakistani troops were said to be retreating to two river ports,
Narayanganj and Barisal, where it was speculated they might make a
stand or alternatively seek some route of escape. They were also putting
up a strong defense in battalion-plus strength in three garrison towns
where Indian forces reportedly had encircled them. The Indians have yet
to capture the major cities of Chittagong and Dinajpur. Neither army
permitted newsmen unreserved access to the contested areas, but on
several occasions the Indian military command did allow reporters to
accompany its forces. The three pronged Indian pincer movement,
however, moved much more rapidly than was earlier believed possible.
Its success was largely attributed to decisive air and naval support.
Demoralized and in disarray, the Pakistani troops were urged to obey the
"soldier to soldier" radio call to surrender, repeatedly broadcast by Indian
Army Chief of Staff General Sam Manekshaw. "Should you not heed my
advice to surrender to my army and endeavour to escape," he warned, "I
assure you certain death awaits you." He also assured the Pakistanis that
if they surrendered they would be treated as prisoners of war according
to the Geneva convention. To insure that the Mukti Bahini would also
adhere to the Geneva code, India officially put the liberation forces under
its military command.
Pakistani prisoners were reported surrendering in fair numbers. But many

others seemed to be fleeing into the countryside, perhaps in hopes of
finding escape routes disguised as civilians. "In some garrison towns
stout resistance is being offered," said an Indian spokesman, "and though
the troops themselves wish to surrender, they are being instructed by the
generals: 'Gain time. Something big may happen. Hold on.' " He added
sarcastically that the only big thing that could happen was that the
commanders of the military regime in East Pakistan might pull a
vanishing act.
All week long, meanwhile, the Pakistani regime kept up a running
drumfire about Pakistan's jihad, or holy war, with India. An army colonel
insisted there were no Pakistani losses whatsoever on the battlefield. His
reasoning: "In the pursuit of jihad, nobody dies. He lives forever."
Pakistan radio and television blared forth patriotic songs such as All of
Pakistan Is Wide Awake and The Martyr's Blood Will Not Go Wasted.
The propaganda was accompanied by a totally unrealistic picture of the
war. At one point, government spokesmen claimed that Pakistan had
knocked out 123 Indian aircraft to a loss of seven of their own, a most
unlikely kill ratio of nearly 18 to l. Islamabad insisted that Pakistani
forces were still holding on to the city of Jessore even though newsmen
rode into the city only hours after its liberation.
Late last week, however. President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's gov
ernment appeared to be getting ready to prepare its people for the truth:
the East is lost. An official spokesman admitted for the first time that the
Pakistani air force was no longer operating in the East. Pakistani forces
were "handicapped in the face of a superior enemy war machine," he
said, and were outnumbered six to one by the Indians in terms of men
and materiel—a superiority that seemed slightly exaggerated.
Sikhs and Gurkhas
As the fate of Bangladesh, and of Pakistan itself, was being decided in

the East, Indian and Pakistani forces were making painful stabs at one
another along the 1,400-mile border that reaches from the icy heights of
Kashmir through the flat plains of the Punjab down to the desert of
western India. There the battle was being waged by bearded Sikhs
wearing khaki turbans, tough, flat-faced Gurkhas, who carry a curved
knife known as a kukri in their belts, and many other ethnic strains.
Mostly, the action was confined to border thrusts by both sides to
straighten out salients that are difficult to defend.
The battles have pitted planes, tanks, artillery against each other, and in
fact both materiel losses and casualties appear to have run far higher than
in the east. Most of the sites were the very places where the two armies
slugged it out in their last war in 1965. Yet there were no all-out
offensives. The Indian army's tactic was to maintain a defensive posture,
launching no attacks except where they assisted its defenses.
Old Boy Attitude
The bloodiest action was at Chhamb, a flat plateau about six miles from
the cease-fire line that since 1949 has divided the disputed Kashmir
region almost equally between Pakistan and India. The Pakistanis were
putting up "a most determined attack," according to an Indian
spokesman, who admitted that Indian casualties had been heavy. But he
added that Pakistani casualties were heavier. The Pakistanis' aim was to
strike for the Indian city of Jammu and the 200-mile-long Jammu-
Srinagar highway, which links India with the Vale of Kashmir. The
Indians were forced to retreat from the west bank of the Munnawar Tawi
River, where they had tried desperately to hold on.
Except for Chhamb and other isolated battles, both sides seemed to be
going about the war with an "old boy" attitude: "If you don't really hit
my important bases, I won't bomb yours." Behind all this, of course, is
the fact that many Indian and Pakistani officers, including the two
countries' commanding generals, went to school with one another at
Sandhurst or Dehra Dun. India's commanding general in the east, Lieut.
General Jagjit Singh Aurora, was a classmate of Pakistan's President
Yahya. "We went to school together to learn how best to kill each other,"
said one Indian officer.
"To an outsider," TIME'S Marsh Clark cabled after a tour of the western
front, "the Indian army seemed precise, old-fashioned and sane. The
closer you get to the front, the more tea and cookies you get,' one
American correspondent complained. But things get done. Convoys
move up rapidly, artillery officers direct their fire with dispatch. Morale
is extremely high, and Indian officers always refer to the Pakistanis,
though rather condescendingly, as 'those chaps.' "
Abandoned Britches
On a visit to Sehjra, a key town in a Pakistani salient that pokes into

Indian territory east of Lahore where Indian troops have been advancing,
Clark found turbaned men working in the fields while jets flew overhead
and artillery sounded in the distance. "There are free tea stalls along the
road," he reported, "and teenagers throw bags of nuts, plus oranges and
bananas, into the Jeeps carrying troops to the front, and shout
encouragement. When our Jeep stops, kids surround it and yell at us,
demanding that we write a story saying their village is still free and not
captured, as claimed by Pakistani radio.
"As we come up on the border, the Indian commander receives us. He

recounts how his Gurkha soldiers kicked off the operation at 9 o'clock at
night and hit the well-entrenched Pakistanis at midnight. I think we took
them by surprise,' he says, and an inspection of the hooch of the
Pakistani area commanding officer confirms it. On his bed is a suitcase,
its confusion indicating it was hastily packed. There are several shirts,
some socks. And his trousers. Nice trousers of gray flannel made,
according to the label, by Mr. Abass, a tailor in Rawalpindi. The colonel,
it is clear, has departed town and left his britches behind."
South of Sehjra, Indian armored units have been plowing through sand
across the West Pakistan border, taking hundreds of square miles of
desert and announcing the advance of their troops to places that
apparently consist of two palm trees and a shallow pool of brackish
water. Among the enemy equipment reported captured: several camels.
The reason behind this rather ridiculous adventure is the fear that
Pakistan will try to seize large tracts of Indian territory to hold as ransom
for the return of East Bengal. That now seems an impossibility with
Bangladesh an independent nation, but India wants to have land in the
west to bargain with.
The western part of India is on full wartime alert. All cities are
completely blacked out at night, fulfilling, as it were, Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi's warning that it would be a "long, dark December." Air
raid sirens wail almost continuously. During one 15-hour period in the
Punjab, there were eleven airraid alerts. One all-clear was sounded by the
jittery control room before the warning blast was given. The
nervousness, though, was justified: two towns in the area had been
bombed with a large loss of life as Pakistani air force planes zipped
repeatedly across the border. Included in their attacks was the city of
Amritsar, whose Golden Temple is the holiest of holies to all Sikhs. At
Agra, which was bombed in the Pakistanis' first blitz, the Taj Mahal was
camouflaged with a forest of twigs and leaves and draped with burlap
because its marble glowed like a white beacon in the moonlight.
The fact that India is not launching any major offensives in the western
sector suggests that New Delhi wants to keep the war there as
uncomplicated as possible. Though the two nations have tangled twice
before in what is officially called the state of Jammu and Kashmir,
neither country has gained any territory since the original cease fire line
was drawn in 1949. There are several reasons why New Delhi is not
likely to try to press now for control of the disputed area.
The first is a doubt that the people of Azad Kashmir, as the Pakistani
portion is called, would welcome control by India; in that case, India
could be confronted with an embarrassing uprising.
The second reason is that in 1963, shortly after India's brief but bloody
war with China, Pakistan worked out a provisional border agreement
with Peking ceding some 1,300 sq. mi. of Kashmir to China. Peking has
since linked up the old "silk route" highway from Sinkiang province to
the city of Gilgit in Pakistani Kashmir with an all-weather macadam
motor highway running down to the northern region of Ladakh near the
cease-fire line. Should Indian troops get anywhere near China's highway
or try to grasp its portion of Kashmir, New Delhi could expect to have a
has sle with Peking on its hands.
Constant Harassment Pakistan, on the other hand, has much to gain if it

can wrest the disputed province, particularly the lush and fabled Vale,
from Indian control. Strategically, the region is extremely important, bor
dering on both China and Afghanistan as well as India and Pakistan.
More over, Kashmir's population is predominantly Moslem.
Still, the war was also beginning to take its toll on the people of West
Pakistan. " The almost constant air raids over Islamabad, Karachi and
other cities have brought deep apprehension, even panic," TIME'S Louis
Kraar cabled from Rawalpindi. "It is not massive bombing, just constant
harassment — though there have been several hundred civilian
casualties. Thus when the planes roar overhead, life completely halts in
the capital and people scurry into trenches or stand in doorways with
woolen shawls over their heads, ostrichlike. Be cause of the Kashmir
mountains, the radar in the area does not pick up Indian planes until they
are about 15 miles away.
"Pakistanis have taken to caking mud all over their autos in the belief
that it camouflages them from Indian planes. In nightly blackouts, the
road traffic moves along with absolutely no lights, and fear has prevailed
so com pletely over common sense that there has probably been more
bloodshed in traffic accidents than in the air raids. The government has
begun urging motorists only to shield their lights, but peasants throw
stones at any car that keeps them on. In this uneasy atmosphere,
Pakistani antiaircraft gunners opened up on their own high-flying Sabre
jets one evening last week. At one point, the military stationed an
antiaircraft ma chine gun atop the Rawalpindi Inter continental Hotel, but
guests convinced them it was dangerous."
Soviet Airlift In New Delhi, the mood was not so much jingoism as
jubilation that India's main goal — the establishment of a government in
East Bengal that would en sure the return of the refugees — was ac
complished so quickly. There was little surprise when Prime Minister
Gandhi announced to both houses of Parliament early last week that
India would become the first government to recognize Bangladesh. Still,
members thumped their desks, cheered loudly and jumped in the aisles to
express their delight. "The valiant struggle of the people of Bangladesh
in the face of tremendous odds has opened a new chapter of heroism in
the history of freedom movements," Mrs. Gandhi said. "The whole world
is now aware that [Bangladesh] reflects the will of an overwhelming
majority of the people, which not many governments can claim to
represent."
There was little joy in New Delhi, however, over the Nixon
Administration's hasty declaration blaming India for the war in the
subcontinent, or over U.N. Ambassador George Bush's remark that India
was guilty of "aggression" (see box). Indian officials were also reported
shocked by the General Assembly's unusually swift and one-sided vote
calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal of troops.
Call for Armaments
Meanwhile, there was still the danger that other nations could get
involved. Pakistan was reported putting pressure on Turkey, itself
afflicted with internal problems, to provide ships, tanks, bazookas, and
small arms and ammunition. Since Turkey obtains heavy arms from the
U.S., it would be necessary to have American approval to give them to
Pakistan. There was also a report that the Soviet Union was using Cairo's
military airbase Almaza as a refueling stop in flying reinforcements to
India. Some 30 giant Antonov-12 transports, each capable of carrying
two dismantled MIGs or two SAM batteries, reportedly touched down
last week. The airlift was said to have displeased the Egyptians, who are
disturbed over India's role in the war. For its part, Washington stressed
that its SEATO and CENTO treaties with Pakistan in no way bind it to
come to its aid.
If the Bangladesh government was not yet ensconced in the capital of

Dacca by week's end, it did appear that its foundations had been firmly
laid. As Mrs. Gandhi said in her speech to Parliament, the leaders of the
People's Republic of Bangladesh—as the new nation will be officially
known —"have proclaimed their basic principles of state policy to be
democracy, socialism, secularism and establishment of an egalitarian
society in which there would be no discrimination on the basis of race,
religion, sex or creed. In regard to foreign relations, the Bangladesh
government have expressed their determination to follow a policy of
nonalignment, peaceful coexistence and opposition to colonialism,
racialism and imperialism."
Bangladesh was born of a dream twice deferred. Twenty-four years ago,

Bengalis voted to join the new nation of Pakistan, which had been carved
out of British India as a Moslem homeland. Before long, religious unity
disintegrated into racial and regional bigotry as the autocratic Moslems
of West Pakistan systematically exploited their Bengali brethren in the
East. One year ago last week, the Bengalis thronged the polls in
Pakistan's first free nationwide election, only to see their overwhelming
mandate to Mujib brutally reversed by West Pakistani soldiers. That
crackdown took a terrible toll: perhaps 1,000,000 dead, 10 million
refugees, untold thousands homeless, hungry and sick.
The memories are still fresh of those who died of cholera on the muddy
paths to India, or suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the
Pakistani military. And there are children, blind and brain-damaged, who
will carry the scars of malnutrition for the rest of their lives. As a
Bangladesh official put it at the opening of the new nation's first
diplomatic mission in New Delhi last week: "It is a dream come true, but
you must also remember that we went through a nightmare."
Economic Prospects
How stable is the new nation? Economically, Bangladesh has nowhere to

go but up. As Pakistan's eastern wing, it contributed between 50% and
70% of that country's foreign exchange earnings but received only a
small percentage in return. The danger to East Bengal's economy lies
mainly in the fact that it is heavily based on jute and burlap, and
synthetic substitutes are gradually replacing both. But if it can keep all of
its own foreign exchange, as it now will, it should be able to develop
other industries. It will also open up trade with India's West Bengal, and
instead of competing with India, may frame joint marketing policies with
New Delhi. India also intends to help with Bangladesh's food problems
in the next year.
One of the main conditions of India's support is that Bangladesh organize

the expeditious return of the refugees and restore their lands and
belongings to them. The Bangladesh government is also intent on
seeking war reparations from Pakistan if possible.
What of West Pakistan? The loss of East Pakistan will no doubt be a

tremendous blow to its spirit and a destabilizing factor in its politics. But
the Islamabad regime, shorn of a region that was politically, logistically
and militarily difficult to manage and stripped down to a population of
58 million, may prove a much more homogeneous unit. In that sense, the
breakup could prove to be a blessing in disguise. Both nations, moreover,
might be expected to get considerable foreign aid to help them back onto
their feet.
Leadership Vacuum
Last week Yahya announced the appointment of a 77-year-old Bengali

named Nurul Amin as the Prime Minister-designate for a future civilian
government, to which he has promised to turn over some of his military
regime's power. Amin figured in last December's elections, which
precipitated the whole tragedy. In those elections Mujib's Awami League
won 167 of the 169 Assembly seats at stake; Amin, an independent who
enjoyed prestige as an elder statesman, won one of the two others. But he
is essentially a figurehead, and former Foreign Minister Zulfikar All
Bhutto was appointed his deputy, which means that he will probably
have the lion's share of the power. That may come sooner than expected.
There were reports last week that Yahya's fall from power may be
imminent. Bhutto is a contentious, pro-Chinese politician who was
instrumental in persuading Yahya in effect to set aside the results of the
election and to keep Mujib from becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Bangladesh's main difficulty is apt to come from a leadership vacuum

should Yahya refuse to release Mujib, the spellbinding leader who has
led the fight for Bengali civil liberties since partition. All of the Awami
Leaguers who formed the provisional government of Bangladesh in exile
last April are old colleagues of Mujib's and have grown accustomed to
handling responsibilities since he went to prison. But running a volatile
war-weakened new nation is considerably more difficult than managing a
political party. The trouble is that none of them have the tremendous
charisma that attracted million-strong throngs to hear Mujib. The top
leaders, all of whom won seats in the aborted National Assembly last
December by overwhelming margins, are: — Syed Nazrul Islam, 46,
acting President in the absence of Mujib, a lawyer who frequently served
as the Sheik's deputy in the past. He was active in the struggle against
former President Ayub Khan, and when Mujib was thrown in jail, he led
the party through the crisis.
Tajuddin Ahmed, 46. Prime Minister, a lawyer who has been a chief
organizer in the Awami League since its founding in 1949. He is an
expert in economics and is considered one of the party's leading
intellectuals. — Khandakar Moshtaque Ahmed, 53, Foreign Minister, a
lawyer who was active in the Indian independence movement and helped
found the Awami League.
The most immediate problem is to prevent a bloodbath in Bangladesh

against non-Bengalis accused of collaborating with the Pakistani
military. Toward this end. East Bengal government officials who chose
to remain in Bangladesh through the fighting are being inducted into the
new administration and taking over as soon as areas are liberated.
Actually, India's recognition came earlier than planned. One reason was
to circumvent a charge reportedly budding in the U.N. that India had
joined the battle to annex the province to India. Another was to enable
the Bangladesh government to assume charge as soon as large chunks of
territory were liberated by the army. Since New Delhi does not want to
be accused of having exchanged West Pakistani colonialism for Indian
colonialism, it is expected to lean over backward to let the Bangladesh
government do things its way.
The Walk Back
Is there any chance that the Pakistanis may yet engineer a startling turn
of the tide, rout the Indians from the East and destroy the new nation in
its infancy? Virtually none. As Correspondent Clark cabled: "Touts who
are betting on the outcome between India and Pakistan might ponder the
fact that two of the TIME correspondents who were visiting Pakistan this
week [Clark in the West, Stewart deep in the East] were there with
Indian forces."
And so at week's end the streams of refugees who walked so long and so
far to get to India began making the long journey back home to pick up
the threads of their lives. For some, there were happy reunions with
relatives and friends, for others tears and the bitter sense of loss for those
who will never return. But there were new homes to be raised, new
shrines to be built, and a new nation to be formed. The land was there
too, lush and green.
"Man's history is waiting in patience for the triumph of the insulted

man," Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel-prizewinning Bengali poet, once
wrote. Triumph he had, but at a terrible price. With the subcontinent at
war, and the newborn land still wracked by bone-shattering poverty, the
joy in Bangladesh was necessarily tempered by sorrow.
*Pakistan claimed the plane was India's. Some Bengalis and foreign observers believed it was Pakistani, but
other observers pointed out that the only forces known to be flying piston-engined aircraft were the Mukti
Bahini, the Bengali liberation forces.

The U.S.: A Policy in Shambles
THE Nixon Administration drew a fusillade of criticism last week for its
policy on India and Pakistan. Two weeks ago, when war broke out
between the two traditional enemies, a State Department spokesman
issued an unusually blunt statement, placing the burden of blame on
India. Soon after that, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations George
Bush branded the Indian action as "aggression"—a word that
Washington subsequently but lamely explained had not been
"authorized."
Senator Edward Kennedy declared that the Administration had turned a

deaf ear for eight months to "the brutal and systematic repression of East
Bengal by the Pakistani army," and now was condemning "the response
of India toward an increasingly desperate situation on its eastern
borders." Senators Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey echoed
Kennedy's charges.
The critics were by no means limited to ambitious politicians. In the New

York Times, John P. Lewis, onetime U.S. A.I.D. director in India (1964-
69) and now dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton, wrote: "We have managed to align
ourselves with the wrong side of about as big and simple a moral issue as
the world has seen lately; and we have sided with a minor military
dictatorship against the world's second largest nation." In Britain, the
conservative London Daily Telegraph accused Washington of "a
blundering diplomatic performance which can have few parallels."
Since March, when the Pakistani army staged a bloody crackdown in
East Bengal, murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians and
prompting 10 million Bengalis to flee across the Indian border, the U.S.
has been ostentatiously mild in its public criticism of the atrocities and of
Pakistan's military ruler, President Yahya Khan—a man whom President
Nixon likes. Washington wanted to retain whatever leverage it had with
the Pakistanis. Moreover the Administration was grateful for Islamabad's
help in arranging Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger's first, secret trip
to China last July. India was shaken by Washington's sudden gesture
toward its traditional enemies, the Chinese, with whom it had fought a
brief war in 1962. Behind the scenes, many State Department officials
urged in vain that the Government take a harder line toward Yahya, for
humanitarian as well as practical political reasons.
In the past five years, China has displaced the U.S. as Pakistan's chief
sponsor. India, increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union for military
aid, finally signed an important treaty of friendship with Moscow last
summer. The U.S. was not solely responsible for driving the Indians into
the Soviet camp; but its policy of not being beastly to Yahya convinced
the Indians that they could not count on the U.S. for moral support. The
result of the treaty: U.S. influence in India was virtually neutralized.
The Administration's current anger, however, stems from a more recent

incident. During her trip to Washington last month, India's Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi led President Nixon to believe that her country
had no intention of going to war. Later, when the Indian army made what
appeared to be a well-planned attack on East Pakistan, Washington
officials concluded that Mrs. Gandhi's trip had been a smokescreen for
massive war preparations. Richard Nixon was furious, and was behind
the initial Government statements branding India the aggressor. -
Last week, in an attempt to justify U.S. policy, Presidential Adviser
Kissinger held a press briefing. (The remarks were supposed to be for
"background use" only until Senator Barry Goldwater blew Kissinger's
cover by printing a transcript of the briefing in the Congressional
Record.) Kissinger insisted that the U.S. had not really sided with
Pakistan, but had been working quietly and intensively to bring about a
peaceful political solution. Indeed, at the time of the Indian attack, he
claimed, U.S. diplomats had almost persuaded Yahya Khan and the
Calcutta-based Bangladesh leadership to enter into negotiations. New
Delhi had precipitated the fighting in East Pakistan, Washington
believed, and refused to accept a ceasefire because it was determined to
drive the Pakistani army out of East Bengal.
It can be argued, however, that Washington was guilty of an unfortunate

naivete by believing that a political solution was possible after the
passions of the Indians and Pakistanis had become so aroused. Given the
continued existence of a power vacuum in East Bengal, it may have been
as unrealistic to expect the Indians to refrain indefinitely from dealing
their archenemy a crippling and permanent blow as to have expected the
Israelis to halt their 1967 advance in the middle of the Sinai.
It is true that the new U.S. policy toward China has further restricted
Washington's room for maneuver with the Indians, but this hardly
explains or excuses the Administration's handling of recent affairs on the
Indian subcontinent. Because of blunders in both substance and tone, the
U.S. has, 1) destroyed whatever chance it had to be neutral in the East
Asian conflict; 2) tended to reinforce the Russia-India, China-Pakistan
lineup; 3) seemingly placed itself morally and politically on the side of a
particularly brutal regime, which, moreover, is an almost certain loser;
and 4) made a shambles of its position on the subcontinent.
India: Easy Victory, Uneasy Peace
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 the
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 into 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 crowd 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 the Pakistani commander was
driven away in a Jeep, Aurora was lifted onto 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 Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan reluctantly
accepted India's cease-fire on the western border. It was a complete and
humiliating defeat. The war 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 Indira Gandhi declared: "Dacca is now the free capital 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 well 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 redrawing 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 Tashkent
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 ceasefire, 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
population as well as the 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 Indians
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 some time. 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
the 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 the
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 an 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 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 development program, estimates that it will take nearly
$900 million for essential reconstruction work in Bangladesh and for the
refugees' rehabilitation. Bridges, buildings, roads and almost the entire
communications network must be restored.
The State Department 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.
* The first, from October 1947 to Jan. 1, 1949, took place in Kashmir and resulted in the almost equal
division of the disputed state. The second was the Rann of Kutch affair on India's southwestern border from
April to June 1965. The third, in the fall of 1965, occurred in Kashmir and lasted 22 days.
We Know How the Parisians Felt
TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin, who covered the war from the
Pakistani side, was in Dacca when that city surrendered. His report:
FOR twelve tense days, Dacca felt the war draw steadily closer, with
nightly curfews and blackouts and up to a dozen air raids a day. It was a
siege of sorts, but one of liberation. Until the last few days, when it
appeared that Pakistani troops would make a final stand in the city, the
Indian army was awaited calmly and without fear. Most people went
about their usual business — offices were open, rickshas running and
pushcarts plying. The sweet tea of the street stalls drew the same gabby
old fellows with white beards. The mood of the overwhelming majority
of Bengalis was less one of apprehension than pent-up anticipation. Said
one Bengali journalist: "Now we know how the Parisians felt when the
Allies were approaching."
The Indian air force had knocked out the Pakistanis' runways and, out
side of the limited range of ack-ack guns, Indian planes could fly as
freely as if they were at an air show. I was surprised at the extent to
which India could do no wrong in the eyes of the Bengalis. They showed
me through rocketed houses where about 15 people had died. Several
Bengalis whispered that it must have been a mistake, and I heard no one
cursing the Indians.
In the final two days of fighting, the Indians put rockets on the governor's
house, starting a small fire and bringing about the prompt resignation of
the Islamabad-appointed governor and his cabinet of so-called dalals, or
"collaborators." They fled to the eleven-story Hotel Intercontinental, a
Red Cross neutral zone that became a haven for foreigners, minorities
and other likely targets. Thanks to three gutsy British C-130 pilots who
made pinpoint landings on the heavily damaged airfield, all who wanted
to go went, including two mynah birds and a gray toy poodle named
"Baby" that had been on tranquilizers for a week.
Also at the hotel were all of ex-Governor A.M. Malik's cabinet members,
who were mostly hand-picked opportunists from minor parties. They are
expected to face trial as war criminals. Their wives and other Pakistani
women lived in fear, and the frequent moaning from their rooms at the
Intercontinental contrasted eerily with the noisy candlelight poker and
chess games of the correspondents who were not standing four-hour
guard duty to keep out intruders. The hotel roof could hardly have been a
better place for TV crews to grind away at air strikes. During the raids,
shrapnel was occasionally fished out of the swimming pool, and a large
time bomb planted in the hotel was disarmed and replanted in a trench on
the nearby lawns. Beer soon ran out, but there was always fish or
something else tasty for those cured of curry.
Outside the city, reporters had to go looking for the war, and for the first
few days they found the countryside, more often than not, as peaceful as
North Carolina during military maneuvers. "We'll give those buggers a
good hammering" had been a favorite boast of Pakistani officers. But
once the serious fighting began, only a few of the outnumbered and
outgunned Pakistani units fought it out in pitched battles.
One of the bloodiest was at Jamalpur, north of Dacca where the Pakistani
battalion commander was sent a surrender offer by one of three Indian
battalions surrounding him. The Pakistani colonel replied with a note ("I
suggest you come with a Sten gun instead of a pen over which you have
such mastery") and enclosed a 7.62mm bullet. Apparently thinking the
Indians were bluffing and that he was confronted by a company or so, the
Pakistani colonel attacked that night, with five waves of about 100 men
each charging head-on at a dug-in Indian battalion. The Indians claimed
to have killed nearly 300 and captured 400 others. The top Indian
commander at Jamalpur, Brigadier General Hardev Singh Kler, 47, said
later that the battle "broke the Pakistanis' backs" and enabled his troops
to reach Dacca first. A Pakistani officer waving a white flag went to a
Mirpur bridge two miles west of the city to make the first surrender
contact.
"It's a great day for a soldier," beamed the Indian field commander, bush-
hatted Major General Gandharv Nagra, who led the first red-bereted
troops in. "For us, it's like going to Berlin," The scene at the Dacca
garrison's cantonment seemed bizarre to an outsider, although it was
obviously perfectly natural for professional soldiers of the subcontinent.
Senior officers were warmly embracing old friends from the other side,
amid snatches of overhead conversation about times 25 years ago. Top
generals lunched together in the mess, and around general headquarters it
was like an old home week at the war college.
After the surrender of Dacca, death was mixed with delight. Small
pockets of Pakistani soldiers switched to civilian clothes and ran through
the city of celebrants shooting at Bengalis and Mukti Bahini at random.
By midday Friday most of them had been hunted down and either
arrested or killed. I saw one summarily executed by three Mukti outside
the U.S. Consulate General that morning and few minutes later the head
of another Pakistani was laid on the corpse's chest. Civilians and soldiers
were killed in nervous shoot outs and accidents. Five died in front of
Hotel Intercontinental, as South Asia's greatest convulsion since the
partition of India and Pakistan neared its bloody finale.
Ali Bhutto Begins to Pick Up the Pieces
Monday, Jan. 03, 1972
ANGER over its humiliating defeat by India boiled into street

demonstrations throughout Pakistan, rumors of an impending coup d'état
by younger army officers against the government of President
Mohammed Agha Yahya Khan swept the country. As expected, Yahya
last week became the highest-ranking casualty of the war: to forestall
further unrest, he hastily surrendered his powers to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
43, the ambitious leader of West Pakistan's powerful People's Party.
Bhutto, the first civilian to lead his country in 13 years, launched his
presidency with a move calculated to appease the wounded feelings of
his nation: he sacked the entire top echelon of the army, denounced them
as "feudal lords," and pledged that he would lead Pakistan to
democracy—although not. perhaps, right away.
The change of power came none too soon, for Yahya had found himself
the principal target of a terrible national fury. In Peshawar, an angry mob
burned him in effigy and set aflame a house they thought he owned.
Outside President's House in Rawalpindi, a band of sobbing wives and
sisters of captured Pakistani soldiers threw down their gold and silver
bangles in a bitter symbolic gesture: Yahya had taken their men, so now
he could have their jewelry, too.
Game of Drunkards.
The former air force commander in chief, General Mohammed Asghar
Khan, demanded a public trial for Yahya, adding, "If someone had asked
how to destroy Pakistan, there could not have been a more perfect way."
A veteran army officer, with tears in his eyes, told TIME Correspondent
Louis Kraar: "How can men have confidence in Yahya Khan when he is
such a drinker and womanizer? We are being punished by God for
departing from the ways of Islam." Pakistanis who had proudly listened
to the steady din of a patriotic song on the radio (War Is Not a Game
That Woman Can Play) choked with anger when India's radio blared
forth a bitter but pointed parody, War Is Not a Game That Drunkards
Can Play.
Yahya got the message. When Bhutto returned from a trip to the United
Nations, he was immediately invited to President's House. Bhutto later
recounted that at the two-hour meeting, he told Yahya: "You have been
committing one blunder after another. But even now, if you don't listen
to me, I will go into the background and keep quiet." Yahya replied: "I
want to swear you in."
Heart to Heart.
Moments after he took the oath of office, Bhutto accepted the retirement
offers of seven generals, including Yahya himself. (Seven more were
fired later in the week, as well as six top navy officers.) He appointed a
new acting army commander, Lieut. General Gul Hasan, and assured
younger officers that despite the defeat, they had nothing to be ashamed
of: "You are the victims of a system."
That evening Bhutto delivered a 57-minute address on the national radio

network that he described as "a heart-to-heart talk" to his people. "I am
speaking to you today as the authentic voice of the people of Pakistan,"
he declared, conveniently omitting the fact that the Awami League, the
party headed by the East Pakistani political leader, Sheik Mujibur
Rahman, had won more seats than Bhutto's party in the national elections
last March.
Trump Card.
On the one hand, Bhutto insisted that East Pakistan remains "an
inseparable and indissoluble part of Pakistan" and demanded an end to
the Indian occupation in the East. But then, in a notably conciliatory
appeal to the East Bengalis, he asked them "not to forget us, but to
forgive us if they are angry with us. Yes, mistakes have been made, but
that does not mean that a country should be dismembered." Indeed, he
added that he would settle for "a very loose arrangement within the
framework of one Pakistan."
In any future negotiations with the new government of Bangladesh (see

following story), Bhutto has a strong trump card: "Mujib" Rahman has
been imprisoned in West Pakistan since last March. Bhutto may well use
Mujib's release as the price for getting back the 60,000 Pakistani soldiers
who are held captive by the Indian army in Bangladesh. Last week
Bhutto ordered Mujib moved from a prison to house arrest in a more
comfortable bungalow, and said that he was ready to begin talks with
Mujib shortly.
Tea Parties.
In his address to the people, Bhutto also denounced government
nepotism and laziness. "As I work night and day, I will expect the
bureaucracy to work night and day. These tea parties must come to an
end." He promised better conditions for workers, land reform for
peasants and an end to the practice of flogging prisoners. Two days later,
he impounded the passports of all members of Pakistan's "22 families,"
the wealthy aristocrats who—until the secession of East Pakistan—
controlled two-thirds of the country's industrial assets and 80% of its
banking and insurance businesses, and declared that he would break their
stranglehold on the nation's economy. Bhutto also announced that he
would hold the portfolios of defense, foreign affairs, interior and
interprovincial affairs himself.
The inaugural speech was the supreme moment in the career of a cunning
and able politician who seems to inspire either unqualified adulation or
fierce contempt. The scion of a wealthy landowning family and a
graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford
University, Bhutto in recent years has become a convinced socialist who
has vowed to turn his country into a "people's democracy." As Pakistan's
Foreign Minister from 1963 to 1966 under Yahya's predecessor,
Mohammed Ayub Khan, Bhutto was the chief architect of his country's
friendly policy toward China. He resigned after a series of differences
with Ayub, and in 1968-69 spent three months in jail on political
charges.
Rule by Rhetoric. Some diplomats in Pakistan consider Bhutto a

potential Nasser—a populist demagogue who will rule by rhetoric and
charisma. "We have to pick up the pieces, the very small pieces," Bhutto
said last week, clearly welcoming the opportunity to do so. If he cannot,
he too might well end up a scapegoat for the failures of Yahya and the
army in politics and on the battlefield. As a first step, Bhutto must
convince his countrymen that any real chance of salvaging Mohammed
Ali Jinnah's dream of a united Pakistan is about as realistic as the
CRUSH INDIA stickers that can still be seen on car windows in
Rawalpindi and Lahore.
BANGLADESH: Vengeance in Victory
For nearly nine months Pakistani soldiers routinely raped Bengali

women, razed houses and shot unarmed villagers in a campaign of terror
designed to intimidate and pacify East Pakistan. That brutality became
one of India's justifications for attacking in the East, and critics of U.S.
policy pointed it out as a reason why the U.S. should not be associated
with the military regime of Islamabad. Sadly, but perhaps inevitably,
brutal acts of revenge by the other side are following India's military
triumph and the establishment of what is now the People's Republic of
Bangladesh.
In Dacca last week, a rally held to seek the release of the imprisoned
Bangladesh leader Sheik Mujibur Rahman suddenly became a public
execution. Four trussed-up men who had been accused of assaulting
Bengali women were brought to a public park near the Dacca Race
Course, where the rally was being held. As thousands of spectators
cheered, the men were tortured for more than an hour and then bayoneted
to death. Other prisoners, particularly razakars, or members of the army-
backed East Pakistani militia, have been summarily executed since the
war ended. What distinguished the Dacca incident was the fact that
Western newsmen were on hand to record the scene and send out
photographs despite the determined censorship efforts of Indian
authorities.
To deter that kind of visceral revenge all across Bangladesh, Indian

troops were doing their diplomatic best last week to disarm the guerrilla
Mukti Bahini, who now number about 100,000. The Bengalis' desire for
retaliation against their oppressors was intensified by evidence that
Pakistani soldiers had committed atrocities even after it was apparent that
the war had been lost. In Dacca, Indian troops discovered a mass grave
containing the mutilated bodies of 125 of the 400 leading Bengali
intellectuals who had been kidnaped in the last days of the war. They had
apparently been killed a few hours before the Indians took control of the
city. If Bengalis seek revenge for such murders, they may slaughter
many of the estimated 1,500,000 Biharis—or non-Bengali Moslems—
who now constitute an imperiled minority in the new state.
With considerable uncertainty, Bangladesh last week also took the first
steps toward establishing an independent government. Since West
Pakistan's suppression last March of the Awami League, which had
pressed for autonomy in the East, a Bangladesh government in exile has
been working from inside India. Last week its leaders flew home from
Calcutta's Dum Dum Airport in an Indian air force Caribou, one of the
few aircraft that could land on Dacca airport's bombed-out runway.
Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam, Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmed
and Foreign Minister Khandikar Moshtaque were wildly welcomed by
100,000 Daccans who had flocked to the airport to meet them. One of the
incoming government's first acts was to pay a call on the wife of Sheik
Mujib, who is still a captive of West Pakistan.

Painful Adjustment
India, Pakistan and the new war-born nation of Bangladesh last week
began the massive task of adjusting to postwar realities on the
subcontinent. In Dacca, the first batch of 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of
war began their journey to prison camps in India; they were marched
through the streets in predawn darkness to avoid reprisals from the
hostile Bengali population. At the same time, India withdrew 30,000 of
its own troops, about half of its forces in Bangladesh; the rest are
expected to stay on perhaps another three or four months to keep order
and help with reconstruction. Indian and Bangladesh officials laid the
groundwork for an even more massive migration—the return home of the
10 million Bengali refugees who had fled to India to escape roughshod
repression by the Pakistani army.
In Dacca, the fledgling Bangladesh government swore in five new

Cabinet ministers, and announced that it would seek a trade and technical
assistance treaty with the Soviet Union to help with reconstruction.
Poland and Bulgaria have also offered to enter trade pacts with
Bangladesh. A more immediate problem was to prevent a possible
massacre of 30,000 Biharis who were in a virtual state of siege within the
workers' quarters and factory facilities of a jute mill near Dacca. The
non-Bengali Moslems have reaped a whirlwind of anger because many
of them collaborated with the Pakistani army throughout the nine-month
civil war. Indian troops surrounded the mill to protect them, but food
supplies were dwindling and a cholera outbreak was reported. Bengali
anger, moreover, was renewed by fresh evidence of massacres conducted
by Pakistani troops shortly before the surrender. In 70 villages
surrounding Dacca, it was revealed, troops had systematically killed
thousands of civilians, then looted and burned their homes.
Indian troops were still patrolling the streets of the Dacca capital last
week to keep order, while the Bangladesh administration struggled to
organize reconstruction and repatriation. But the man most essential to
getting the new nation onto its feet—Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman—
was under house arrest near Islamabad. He was moved from prison by
Pakistan's new civilian President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (see box). Bhutto
paid a 30-minute call on the Bengali leader, with the avowed aim of
persuading Mujib to accept some form of reconciliation between
Pakistan and its former eastern province that would at least preserve a
facade of national unity. "It can be a very loose arrangement," he
declared, "but it must be within the concept of Pakistan."
Too Dazed. Bhutto meanwhile continued to feed his countrymen's

illusions of reunification. "Pakistan is indivisible," he declared. "National
honor will be vindicated." On one level, it was probably a necessary
fiction, since Pakistanis are still too dazed by their defeat to accept the
reality that the eastern province is gone.
There was also a practical side to Bhutto's statements. He needed time to

consolidate his own political forces. As one Western diplomat put it,
"When you come riding in on a white charger, you have to ride around a
while to stay in the saddle."

BANGLADESH: Mujib's Road from Prison to Power
TO some Western observers, the scene stirred thoughts of Pontius Pilate

deciding the fates of Jesus and Barabbas. "Do you want Mujib freed?"
cried Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at a rally of more than
100,000 supporters in Karachi. The crowd roared its assent, as audiences
often do when subjected to Bhutto's powerful oratory. Bowing his head,
the President answered: "You have relieved me of a great burden."
Thus last week Bhutto publicly announced what he had previously told
TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin: his decision to release his celebrated
prisoner, Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib") Rahman, the undisputed political
leader of what was once East Pakistan, and President of what is now the
independent country of Bangladesh.
Five days later, after two meetings with Mujib, Bhutto lived up to his
promise. He drove to Islamabad Airport to see Mujib off for London
aboard a chartered Pakistani jetliner. To maintain the utmost secrecy, the
flight left at 3 a.m. The secret departure was not announced to newsmen
in Pakistan until ten hours later, just before the arrival of the Shah of Iran
at the same airport for a six-hour visit with Bhutto. By that time Mujib
had reached London—tired but seemingly in good health. "As you can
see, I am very much alive and well," said Mujib, jauntily puffing on a
brier pipe. "At this stage I only want to be seen and not heard."
A few hours later, however, after talking by telephone with India's Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi and with the acting President of
Bangladesh, Syed Nazrul Islam, in Dacca, Mujib held a press conference
in the ballroom of Claridge's Hotel. While scores of jubilant East
Bengalis gathered outside the hotel, Mujib called for world recognition
of Bangladesh, which he described as "an unchallengeable reality," and
asked that it be admitted to the United Nations.
Clearly seething with rage, Mujib described his life "in a condemned cell
in a desert area in the scorching heat," for nine months without news of
his family or the outside world. He was ready to be executed, he said.
"And a man who is ready to die, nobody can kill." He knew of the war,
he said, because "army planes were moving, and there was the blackout."
Only after his first meeting with Bhutto did he know that Bangladesh had
formed its own government. Of the Pakistani army's slaughter of East
Bengalis, Mujib declared: "If Hitler could have been alive today, he
would be ashamed."
Mujib spoke well of Bhutto, however, but emphasized that he had made
no promise that Bangladesh and Pakistan would maintain a link that
Bhutto anxiously wants to have. "I told him I could only answer that
after I returned to my people," said the sheik. Why had he flown to
London instead of to Dacca or some closer neutral point? "Don't you
know I was a prisoner?" Mujib snapped. "It was the Pakistan
government's will, not mine." While in London, he said, he hoped to
meet with British Prime Minister Edward Heath before leaving for a
triumphal return to Bangladesh.
Little Choice.
Although Mujib’s flight to London rather than to Dacca was something
of a surprise, his release from house arrest was not. In truth, Bhutto had
little choice but to set him free. A Mujib imprisoned, Bhutto evidently
decided, was of no real benefit to Pakistan; a Mujib dead and martyred
would only have deepened the East Bengalis’ hatred of their former
countrymen. But a Mujib allowed to return to his rejoicing people might
perhaps be used to coax Bangladesh into forming some sort of loose
association with Pakistan.
In the light of Mujib’s angry words about Pakistan at the London press
conference, Bhutto’s dream of reconciliation with Bangladesh appeared
unreal. Yet some form of association may not be entirely beyond hope of
achievement. For the time being, Bangladesh will be dependent upon
India for financial, military and other aid. Bhutto may well have been
reasoning that sooner or later the Bangladesh leaders will tire of the
presence of Indian troops and civil servants, and be willing to consider a
new relation with their humbled Moslem brothers.
Bangladesh, moreover, may find it profitable and even necessary to

reestablish some of the old trade ties with Pakistan. As Bhutto put it:
“The existing realities do not constitute the permanent realities.”
Stupendous Homecoming.
One existing reality that Bhutto could hardly ignore was Bangladesh’s
euphoric sense of well-being after independence. When the news reached
Bangladesh that Mujib had been freed, Dacca be gan preparing a
stupendous homecoming for its national hero. All week long the capital
had been electric with expectation. In the wake of the first reports that his
arrival was imminent, Bengalis poured into the streets of Dacca,
shouting, dancing, singing, firing rifles into the air and roaring the now-
familiar cry of liberation “Joi Bangla.” Many of the rejoicing citizens
made a pilgrimage to the small bungalow where Mujib’s wife and
children had been held captive by the Pakistani army. The Begum had
spent the day fasting. “When I heard the gun fire in March it was to kill
the people of Bangladesh,” she tearfully told the well-wishers. “Now it is
to demonstrate their joy.”
The people of Bangladesh will need all the joy that they can muster in
the next few months. The world’s newest nation is also one of its
poorest.
In the aftermath of the Pakistani army’s rampage last March, a special

team of inspectors from the World Bank observed that some cities
looked “like the morning after a nuclear at tack.” Since then, the
destruction has only been magnified. An estimated 6,000,000 homes
have been destroyed, and nearly 1,400,000 farm families have been left
without tools or animals to work their lands. Transportation and
communications systems are totally disrupted. Roads are damaged,
bridges out and inland waterways blocked.
The rape of the country continued right up until the Pakistani army
surrendered a month ago. In the last days of the war, West Pakistani-
owned businesses—which included nearly every commercial enterprise
in the country—remitted virtually all their funds to the West. Pakistan
International Airlines left exactly 117 rupees ($16) in its account at the
port city of Chittagong. The army also destroyed bank notes and coins,
so that many areas now suffer from a severe shortage of ready cash.
Private cars were picked up off the streets or confiscated from auto
dealers and shipped to the West before the ports were closed.
The principal source of foreign exchange in Bangladesh—$207 million

in 1969-70—is jute; it cannot be moved from mills to markets until
inland transportation is restored. Repairing vital industrial machinery
smashed by the Pakistanis will not take nearly as long as making
Bangladesh’s ruined tea gardens productive again. Beyond that, the
growers, whose poor-quality, lowland tea was sold almost exclusively to
West Pakistan, must find alternative markets for their product.
Bangladesh must also print its own currency and, more important, find
gold reserves to back it up. “We need foreign exchange, that is, hard
currency,” says one Dacca banker. “That means moving the jute that is
already at the mills. It means selling for cash, not in exchange for Indian
rupees or East European machinery. It means getting foreign aid, food
relief, and fixing the transportation system, all at the same time. It also
means chopping imports.”
The Bangladesh Planning Commission is more precise: it will take $3

billion just to get the country back to its 1969-70 economic level (when
the per capita annual income was still an abysmally inadequate $30). In
the wake of independence, the government of Bangladesh, headed by
Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam and Prime Minister Tajuddin
Ahmed, has instituted stringent measures to control inflation, including a
devaluation of the rupee in terms of the pound sterling (from 15 to 18),
imposing a ceiling of $140 a month on all salaries and limiting the
amount of money that Bengalis can draw from banks. Such measures hit
hardest at the urban, middle-class base of the dominant Awami League,
but there has been little opposition, largely because most Bengalis seem
to approve of the moderately socialist course laid out by the government.
Last week Nazrul Islam announced that the government will soon
nationalize the banking, insurance, foreign trade and basic industries as a
step toward creating an “exploitation-free economy.”
Not the least of the new nation’s problems is the repatriation of the 10
million refugees who fled to India. As of last week, Indian officials said
that more than 1,000,000 had already returned, most of them from the
states of West Bengal and Tripura. To encourage the refugees, camp
officials gave each returning family a small gift consisting of a new set
of aluminum kitchen utensils, some oil, charcoal, a piece of chocolate,
two weeks’ rations of rice and grain and the equivalent of 50¢ in cash.
Within Bangladesh, transit camps have been set up to provide overnight

sleeping facilities. The government acknowledges that it will need
foreign aid and United Nations assistance. Some U.N. supplies are
already stockpiled in the ports, awaiting restoration of distribution
facilities.
The political future of Bangladesh is equally uncertain. For the moment,

there is all but universal devotion to the words and wisdom of Mujib, but
whether he can institute reforms quickly enough to maintain his total
hold on his countrymen is another question. Many of the more radical
young guerrillas who fought with the Mukti Bahini (liberation forces)
may not be content with the moderate course charted by the middle-aged
politicians of the Awami League. Moreover, the present Dacca
government is a very remote power in country villages where the local
cadres of the Mukti Bahini are highly visible.
Already the guerrillas have split into factions, according to India’s

Sunanda Datta-Ray in the Statesman. The elite Mujib Bahini, named
after the sheik, has now begun to call itself the “Mission,” and one of its
commanders, Ali Ashraf Chowdurdy, 22, told Datta-Ray: “We will never
lay down our arms until our social ideals have been realized.” Another
guerrilla put the matter more bluntly: “For us the revolution is not over.
It has only begun.” So far the Mujib Bahini has done a commendable job
of protecting the Biharis, the non-Bengali Moslems who earned Bengali
wrath by siding with the Pakistani army. But the government is anxious
to disarm the Mujib Bahini, and has plans to organize it into a
constabulary that would carry out both police and militia duties.
Front Windshields. Despite its ravaged past and troubled future,
Bangladesh is still a lovely land to behold, according to TIME’S William
Stewart. “There is little direct evidence of the fighting along the main
highway from Calcutta to Dacca,” he cabled from Dacca last week,
“although in some areas there are artillery-shell craters and the blackened
skeletons of houses. Local markets do a brisk business in fruit and staple
goods, but by Bengali standards many of the villages are all but deserted.
“Dacca has all the friendliness of a provincial town, its streets filled with
hundreds of bicycle-driven rickshas, each one painted with flowers and
proudly flying the new flag of Bangladesh. In fact every single car in
Dacca flies the national flag, and many have Mujib’s photo on the front
windshield. The city is dotted with half-completed construction projects,
including the new capital buildings designed by U.S. Architect Louis
Kahn. Some day, when and if they are completed, Dacca will find itself
with a collection of public buildings that might well be the envy of many
a richer and more established capital.
“But whether you arrive at Dacca’s war-damaged airport or travel the

tree-lined main road from Calcutta, it is the relaxed, peaceful atmosphere
that is most noticeable. Even as travel to Bangladesh becomes more
difficult, customs and immigration officials are genuinely friendly and
polite, smiling broadly, cheerily altering your entry forms so that you
conform with the latest regulations. There is no antagonism to individual
Americans. Once it is known that you are an American, however, the
inevitable question is: How could the Nixon Administration have
behaved the way that it did? There is in fact an almost universal belief
that the American people are with them.
“That sentiment was echoed by Tajuddin Ahmed, who told me in an
interview: The Nixon Administration has inflicted a great wound. Time
heals wounds, of course, but there will be a scar. We are grateful to the
American press, intellectual leaders and all those who raised their voices
against injustice. Pakistan turned this country into a hell. We are very
sorry that some administrations of friendly countries were giving support
to killers of the Bengali nation. For the people of Bangladesh, any aid
from Nixon would be disliked. It would be difficult, but we do not bear
any lasting enmity.’”
The Kissinger Tilt
KISSINGER: The President is blaming me, but you fellows are in the
clear. SISCO: That's ideal.
That fleeting moment of levity during the secret deliberations of the elite
Washington Special Action Group enlivened the classified documents
released last week by Columnist Jack Anderson (see THE PRESS).
While providing a rare, fascinating glimpse of uncertainty and candor
among the President's top advisers as India waged its swift war to
dismember Pakistan, the papers revealed nothing new of substance and
fell far short of proving the columnist's assertion that the Administration
had grossly deceived the public about its pro-Pakistani stance. They did
discredit Henry Kissinger's claim during the action that the U.S. was not
"anti-Indian," but the Administration's lack of neutrality had been evident
all along.
While not comparable in scope or substance to the Pentagon papers, the

Anderson revelations similarly constitute more an embarrassment to
Government than a threat to national security. They include the minutes
of three meetings of the Special Action Group, a unit of the National
Security Council, which were attended by up to 19 representatives of
such agencies as the CIA, AID, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State and
Defense departments. The dialogue at the meetings turned out to be
coolly colloquial. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson referred to the
emerging nation of Bangladesh as "an international basket case," while
Henry Kissinger argued that at least it need not be "our basket case."
Pakistanis were always called "Paks," and the two sections of that nation
were the East and West "wings." An impending U.S. decision became
"the next state of play."
Twelve Days. More substantially, even on the second day of fighting the
highest experts seemed to know little more about the action than they
could have read in their newspapers. The minutes note that CIA Director
Richard Helms "indicated that we do not know who started the current
action." Kissinger asked the CIA to prepare a report on "who did what to
whom and when." The military representatives stuck their necks out
when asked how long it would take the Indian army to force a Pakistani
surrender in the East. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval
Operations, estimated one or two weeks; Army Chief of Staff William
Westmoreland said as many as three. It took twelve days.
As reported widely last month, President Nixon was furious at Indian

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi because during her visit to Washington in
November, she gave no indication that India intended to go to war with
Pakistan. The Anderson papers illustrate the intensity of Nixon's anger at
New Delhi: "I am getting hell every half-hour from the President that we
are not being tough enough on India," Kissinger told the meeting on Dec.
3. "He has just called me again. He does not believe we are carrying out
his wishes. He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan. He feels everything we
do comes out otherwise."
Great Man or Rabble-Rouser?
THE history of the Indian subcontinent for the past half-century has been
dominated by leaders who were as controversial as they were
charismatic: Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed AH Jinnah, Jawaharlal
Nehru. Another name now seems likely to join that list: Sheik Mujibur
("Mujib") Rahman, the President of Bangladesh. To his critics, Mujib is
a vituperative, untrustworthy rabble-rouser. To most of the people of his
new nation, he is a patriot-hero whose imprisonment by West Pakistan
has only enhanced his appeal. "He was a great man before," says one
Bangladesh official, "but those bastards have made him even greater."
Even his detractors concede that Mujib has the personal qualifications to
become an extremely effective popular leader. He is gregarious, highly
emotional and remarkably attuned to the needs and moods of his
supporters. He has an uncanny ability to remember names and faces.
Mujib is also a spellbinding orator with a simplistic message and a
pungent, fervent style.
It is not yet clear whether Mujib is more profound than his stirring
rhetoric. His political success so far is due largely to his ability to
marshal public opinion in East Bengal by blaming all of its troubles on
its former rulers in West Pakistan. He has a tendency to make
extravagant promises, and to oversimplify complex economic and
agricultural problems. "My brothers," he once told a gathering of East
Pakistani jute farmers, "do you know that the streets of Karachi are
paved with gold, and that it is done with your money earned from
exporting jute?"
Mujib's supporters insist that he has shown a capacity for growth. He was
born 51 years ago, one of six children of a middle-class family that lived
on a farm in Tongipara, a village about 60 miles southwest of Dacca. At
ten, Mujib displayed the first signs of a social conscience by distributing
rice from the family supplies to tenant farmers who helped work the
property. "They were hungry, and we have all these things," the boy
explained to his irate father, an official of the local district court.
As a youth, Mujib developed a strong antipathy to British rule. While a

seventh-grader, he was jailed for six days for agitating in favor of India's
independence. A long bout with beriberi left his eyes weakened, and
Mujib belatedly finished high school when he was 22.
After earning a B.A. in history and political science at Calcutta's Islamia

College—where he developed a taste for the writings of Bernard Shaw
and Indian Poet Rabindranath Tagore—Mujib enrolled as a law student
at Dacca University. He supported a strike by the university's menial
workers, and quickly found himself in jail once again. He indignantly
rejected an offer to be set free on bail. "I did not come to the university to
bow my head to injustice," he said grandly. When he got out of jail,
Mujib discovered that he had been expelled from the university. He
promptly set out on a turbulent political career and spent 10½ of the next
23 years behind bars. "Prison is my other home," he once shrugged.

BANGLADESH: A Hero Returns Home
All weekend long the people of Bangladesh thronged into Dacca,

preparing to welcome their beloved "Bangabandhu" (friend of Bengal).
By Monday noon, hundreds of thousands of jubilant Bengalis lined the
streets of the capital, waving flags and shouting over and over, "Sheik
Mujib! Sheik Mujib!" Promptly at 1:30 p.m., a blue and silver British
Royal Air Force Comet dropped out of a brilliant sunny sky and ground
to an abrupt halt on the shortened war-damaged runway. Sheik Mujibur
Rahman was home at last.
As the Comet's door opened, the first gun of a 21-gun salute cracked
through the air. Then Mujib, looking thin but surprisingly fit despite his
nine-month ordeal in a Pakistani prison, began a triumphant, two-hour
ride through city streets to the Dacca Race Course. There, as a cheering
crowd of half a million showered him with rose petals, Mujib enjoined
them not to seek revenge for the 3,000,000 Bengalis slain by the
Pakistani army.
"Forgive them!" he cried. "Today I do not want revenge from anybody."

But Mujib also declared his firm opposition to Pakistani President
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's hopes for at least a symbolic reunification of the
nation. "Now I say to you Bengal is independent, and let the people of
Pakistan and the people of Bangladesh live happily. The unity of the
country is ended."
After Bhutto set him free, Mujib flew* first to London—where he stayed
in the same special suite at Claridge's used by former Pakistani President
Yahya Khan—and then to New Delhi. There he was greeted with honors
by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In Dacca, Mujib's first major decision
was that Bangladesh would have a parliamentary democracy on the order
of Britain's, rather than the presidential system set up by the government
in exile. He relinquished the presidency conferred upon him in his
absence last April by the exiled Bengali leaders and assumed the post of
Prime Minister. In addition, Mujib took on the defense, home affairs,
information and Cabinet affairs portfolios, which will give him direct
authority over the police and militia being formed from the Mukti Bahini
liberation forces.
At his first official press conference last week, Mujib said that he
envisioned Bangladesh as the "Switzerland of the East." It would be a
non-aligned socialist state, he said, with a foreign policy of "friendship to
all and malice toward none." He appealed to all nations and international
organizations for help in getting the shattered country back on its feet. As
for the possibility of war crimes trials against former officials of East
Pakistan, Mujib said that he had asked the United Nations to establish a
commission to investigate atrocities committed during the war. But if the
U.N. failed to do so, he warned, "we will follow our own policy."
No Strings.
Bangladesh, whose existence as an independent nation had previously
been acknowledged only by India and Bhutan, was formally recognized
last week by East Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Mongolia and Burma.
Pakistan angrily served notice that it would sever diplomatic relations
with all nations that did so—a policy that will surely prove untenable as
more countries follow suit. Britain, which has already promised aid to
Bangladesh through the U.N., is expected to provide recognition in a few
weeks. Despite the urgings of Senators Edward Kennedy and Hubert
Humphrey that the U.S. recognize Bangladesh, the White House last
week said that it was not considering the move at present. Presumably,
the Administration wants to wait until Indian troops are withdrawn and
the new government has demonstrated its stability. U.S. Consul-General
Herbert Spivack avoided Mujib’s inaugural ceremonies—the only
representative, apart from the Chinese, to do so.
At the press conference, Mujib went out of his way to give special thanks
to the American people who had supported the Bangladesh cause. Later,
in a relaxed and affable private interview with TIME Correspondent
William Stewart, he indicated his desire for friendly relations with the
U.S. Government. “But they must make the first move. I want
recognition; and if relationships are to be improved, then the
Administration must recognize reality. I have nothing against the
American people. I want aid, but there must be no strings attached.”
Mujib added that he found his country worse off than he had expected.
“Very few times have I wept,” he said. “This time I wept. We have
almost 3,000,000 dead. I am sure of that figure because my organization
is in every village; they know who has been killed.” Then, with visible
emotion, he asked: “Why did the United States Government remain
silent?”
BANGLADESH: Recognizing Reality
Monday, Feb. 14, 1972
Bangladesh is gaining recognition. Last week Britain, West Germany

and ten other Western states formally recognized the new nation,
bringing to 29 the number of countries that have established diplomatic
relations with the government of Sheik Mujibur Rahman. Britain's
decision, Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home told the House of
Commons shortly before he left for a visit to India, "recognized the
reality of what has happened in the area over the past month, and will be
the beginning for us of a new era of friendship and cooperation with all
the countries of the subcontinent."
Recognition by Britain, even though it had been expected for some time,
was cause for jubilation in Dacca. Smiling, Mujib told newsmen that his
country would join the Commonwealth. The alliance is expected to serve
as a balance to Bangladesh ties with the Soviet Union, a staunch ally of
the Bengalis in the nine-month civil war with West Pakistan.
Not the Last. An unanswered question is what Washington will do about

Bangladesh. The State Department said last week that recognition "is not
under active consideration," although Administration sources have
suggested that the U.S. "would not be the last" to recognize Bangladesh.
President Nixon is still angry at India for going to war with Pakistan. The
Administration also wants to give Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
time to establish some form of association with Mujib's government—
unlikely as that link now seems.
While Bangladesh approached Commonwealth status, Pakistan was
quitting it. Then Bhutto flew to Peking, where the Chinese agreed to
convert $110 million in loans to Pakistan into grants and to defer
payment of a $200 million loan made last year.
For all its diplomatic conquests, Bangladesh was still coping with
internal turmoil. In two Dacca suburbs bitter fighting broke out between
Bengalis and members of the hated pro-Pakistan Bihari minority. The
incident apparently began when some Pakistani soldiers, who had
escaped capture by hiding among Bihari sympathizers since the
surrender in December, began firing at refugees returning to claim their
homes. Troops of the Bangladesh army were sent in to flush them out. In
the fighting, at least 100 Bengali troops were reported killed or wounded,
as well as an undisclosed number of civilians.
At a huge arms surrender ceremony in Dacca, Mujib pleaded for

tolerance and forgiveness for the Biharis. The Mukti Bahini turned in at
least 20,000 weapons at the ceremony, and government officials were
satisfied that the number of arms yet to be collected from the guerrilla
army was small.
Inevitably, however, Bengali passions were further inflamed by new

discoveries of atrocities committed by the Pakistan army. No one was
safe from the bloodbath; in the last days before the surrender, Pakistani
troops killed Indian army prisoners and even their own wounded. In three
sites near the city of Khulna, great piles of human skulls and skeletons
led observers to estimate that 100,000 people died in that area alone. To
determine the full extent of the carnage, Mujib has ordered a house-to-
house census throughout the country.
BANGLADESH: Bleak Future
Monday, Feb. 28, 1972
The birth of Bangladesh two months ago sent the hopes of 78 million
Bengalis soaring in expectation of a bright future. But now the early
rapture of freedom is fading, and the Bengali mood is growing subdued
in the face of the new country's enormous problems. TIME
Correspondent Dan Coggin covered the nine-month Pakistani civil war
last year and was in Dacca in December to witness the triumphant entry
of Indian troops. Last week he returned to the new capital to assess the
pace of reconstruction. His report:
The nation seems more intent upon recounting past horrors than on
reconstruction. Daily newspaper stories of the Pakistani massacre—
Prime Minister Sheik Mujibur Rahman estimates it claimed 3,000,000
lives—rate bigger headlines than the problem of rebuilding the 150
factories destroyed or disabled. When Indian forces leave on March 25,
violence will threaten the 1,500,000 Biharis who emigrated from India to
East Bengal in 1947, many of whom collaborated openly with the
Pakistani army. Some bitterness and reliving of the past are
understandable at this stage. But time is short if a new disaster is to be
prevented.
Uncertain Hope.
One senses that most Bengalis do not fully grasp the depth of the
country's plight. Less than 25% of Bangladesh's industry is working
because of wrecked and looted machinery and lack of raw materials,
capital, credit and personnel.
Virtually no foreign exchange has been earned in two months, since the
ports of Chittagong and Chalna are almost closed by mines and sunken
ships. Food and other shipments into the interior are slow because of
hundreds of blown railroad and highway bridges and insufficient river
transport.
Hardship pinches all.

Peasants and professional workers alike make their way to distribution
centers for grain rations or form block-long lines to register for
employment. An estimated 20 million Bengalis—more than a quarter of
the total population—are believed to be destitute. Half of these are
refugees returning from India; the other half are internally displaced and
unemployed persons. Most relief is geared toward the returning refugees.
The uncertain hope is that revival of the shattered economy will take care
of the rest.
In Dinjapur district, in the extreme northwest, two-thirds of the

2,300,000 population are classed as destitute. Government grain rations
have been halved to three pounds a week for adults. So have the $18
grants for housing, which many are using to buy food. Some refugees are
building houses of bamboo and thatch, dwellings that will be ruined
when the rains start in May. Others are camped with friends, seemingly
reluctant—or too broke—to start over. In Dacca itself, shantytowns have
sprung up as shelter for 120,000 people.
Read the rest of the article at:

BANGLADESH: Not Yet a Country
At 5:30 a.m. last Sunday, the city of Dacca resounded with the thunder of
a 31-gun salute that marked the beginning of Bangladesh's first
independence day. A year and a day earlier, on March 25, 1971, Pakistan
had launched its military crackdown against rebellious East Bengal,
which led to the brief, bloody war between India and Pakistan, the death
of as many as 3,000,000 Bengalis—and the birth of a new nation.
Today, as TIME Correspondent William Stewart reported last week from

Dacca, the Bengalis have a homeland, but they do not yet have a united
country. "The present government, fearful of opposition, devotes itself to
patronage rather than crisis; the government of reconstruction and
reconciliation has yet to appear. If it does not, then the high
Administration aide in Washington who referred to Bangladesh as 'an
international basket case may yet be proved right."
Across the vast, hot stretches of flat, brown delta, which awaits the life-
giving monsoons in late May, there is a state of unease. Mutual distrust is
pervasive. It is no longer sufficient to be
Bengali; one must be a Bengali with the right inflection in his voice.
"Collaborator" is an easy word to use, and the effects can be devastating.
In Dhanmandi, Dacca's most fashionable quarter, residents are now
accustomed to having groups of armed youths enter their houses in quest
of money and goods. Acts of revenge against the non-Bengali minority
of Biharis have subsided in the capital but have continued sporadically
elsewhere; at the city of Khulna two weeks ago, a Bengali attack on the
Bihari community reportedly left some 2,000 dead. Bitterness against the
Biharis is widespread. "Those bastards," says Altafur Rahman, a Dacca
law student. "Let them go to Pakistan."
During the nine months of struggle in Bangladesh, the real freedom

fighters, the Mukti Bahini, battled as best they could with little outside
aid. The Mukti resent the fact that the government has given them few
jobs and little patronage, and they have retained most of their firearms.
Ranging from ardent patriots to outright thugs, the Mukti are among the
most resentful critics of the ineffectual Dacca government, which has
been accused of consolidating the position of Sheik Mujibur Rahman's
Awami League instead of concentrating on reconstruction.
Moscow Links.
Only Mujib himself, the country's Prime Minister, escapes such criticism.
Despite his undiminished popularity, Mujib has yet to provide the kind of
leadership that Bangladesh needs. Since his triumphant return to Dacca
last January, after spending nine months in prison in Pakistan, he has
visited Calcutta and even Moscow, but has scarcely ventured out into his
own country at all.
Two weeks ago, Mujib welcomed India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
to Dacca—where she was greeted at the airport by a pipe band skirling
Skye Boat Song—and signed with her a treaty of peace and friendship.
Mrs. Gandhi promised that India would hand over to Bangladesh all
Pakistani military prisoners who have been accused of committing war
crimes against Bengalis during the fighting (the list of suspects is said to
total 1,500). The most important effect of the treaty is to link Dacca
closely to India in matters of foreign affairs, and thus make Bangladesh
in effect a member of the Delhi-Moscow entente.
Drop of III Will.
While the U.S. has paid a heavy price in South Asia for backing the loser
of the India-Pakistan war, the Soviet Union has strengthened its position
on the subcontinent. The Soviet mission in Dacca already has a staff of
90, with more to come, and the Russians have undertaken salvage
operations at the ports of Chittagong and Chalna. By contrast, the U.S.
appears to have extracted the last possible drop of ill will out of
Bangladesh. The handful of American officials in Dacca, however, make
no secret that they would like to see U.S. diplomatic recognition at long
last, as well as a small but hardhitting aid program.
Such assistance is urgently needed at the present time, for Bangladesh's

most pressing problem is the threat of hunger. The population of the
capital has been swollen by thousands of famished, unemployed refugees
from rural areas. As Toni Hagen, director of the U.N. relief operation in
Dacca, puts it, the situation is "desperate." "Blankets won't do, baby food
won't do, midwifery kits won't do," says Hagen. "Cash is required for
employment and reconstruction—plain cash." Food is urgently needed,
of course, especially in the next two months, before the arrival of 700,-
000 tons of wheat pledged by India. But vital repairs of roads and bridges
must be made in order for such supplies to be distributed. Factories, too,
lie stagnant for lack of operating capital—a reminder that their former
owners, the majority of whom were Pakistanis, repatriated almost all the
money in the country to West Pakistan.
BANGLADESH: Not Yet Shonar Bangla
THE "Voice of Thunder," as it became known in the pre-independence

days of Free Bangladesh Radio, rolled across the multitude squatting on
the dry yellow grass of the Dacca race course. "If the people of
Bangladesh don't want me to contest the elections, then I don't want to sit
in the National Assembly. Any one of you can go and sit there instead of
me. Shall I contest the election? Should I? If you want me to contest,
then raise your hand. Raise both hands to show you want me." Nearly
half a million pairs of skinny brown arms shot into the air. "Yes, yes,
yes!" shouted the crowd, which had gathered before Sheik Mujibur
("Mujib") Rahman to celebrate the first anniversary of Bangladesh's
liberation from Pakistan. "We want you, Bangabandhu."
As Bangabandhu ("Father of the Nation"), Mujib clearly still possesses

the image and oratory to move the emotions of his people. Largely
because of his personal mystique, his Awami League seems certain to
win the first national elections, slated for March 7. Opposition parties, in
fact, will probably win only about 50 of the Assembly's 300 seats. But in
his reign so far as Prime Minister by acclamation, Mujib has had much
less success in moving his country toward internal peace and prosperity.
Born in bloodshed, Bangladesh continues to bleed, both literally and
metaphorically. Political murders among warring nationalist factions
number in the hundreds, and the new nation, with a population of 75
million—it is the eighth largest in the world—suffers from severe
problems in food, housing, transportation and industry.
Many of the problems are, of course, legacies of the nine-month civil
war, in which West Pakistan tried to smother the independence
movement of Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan). Apart from
costing the lives of an estimated 3,000,000 Bengalis, the repression
ravaged the countryside. According to a United Nations agency report,
more than 4,617,000 houses were completely or partially destroyed in an
area roughly the size of Wisconsin. In addition, the country's primitive
river and rail transportation systems were mangled, and the jute industry,
which had accounted for 90% of East Pakistan's exports, was battered by
damage to crops and sabotage to mills.
The depredations of the war are not the only reasons for Bangladesh's
slow progress. Jute manufacturing, now running at 25% to 30% of
capacity, has been hampered by labor squabbles and by a shortage of
professional managers necessary to run the nationalized industry
efficiently. Tea production, the nation's second most important industry,
is also in trouble because most of the low-grade Bangladesh tea used to
be sold in West Pakistan, and alternative markets have not been found.
Lack of trade with West Pakistan,* which formerly supplied Bangladesh
with many of its manufactured goods, has contributed, along with a
shortage of foreign exchange, to acute inflation. Consumer items, from
detergents to refrigerators to cigarettes, have trebled in price.

Wrapping Up the War
Monday, Sep. 17, 1973
In a mood of restrained jubilation and cautious hope, Indian, Pakistani

and Bangladesh officials settled down last week to tackle the immense
logistical problems posed by a new peace settlement that affects the
whole subcontinent. After 19 days of hard bargaining in Islamabad and
New Delhi, India and Pakistan agreed—with Bangladesh concurrence—
that 1) 90,000 Pakistani military and civilian prisoners of war who have
been held captive in India since the end of the December 1971 Indo-
Pakistani war will be sent home; 2) an estimated 200,000 Bengalis
stranded in Pakistan at war's end will be allowed to return to Bangladesh;
3) "a substantial number" of Biharis (non-Bengali Moslems) in
Bangladesh will be repatriated to Pakistan.
Although the agreement resolves the most important problems left over
from the war, certain key details remain to be ironed out. Under the
terms of the agreement, Islamabad and Dacca—after the simultaneous
repatriation of detainees is completed—will enter into direct negotiations
on the fate of 195 ranking Pakistani P.O.W.s that Bangladesh wants to
try for war crimes. The prisoners will remain in Indian custody until the
question is settled.
It is also uncertain how many Biharis, many of whom were partisans of

the Pakistani forces during the war and as a result face a bleak future in
Bangladesh, will be allowed to go to Pakistan. The initial exchange is
estimated to involve about 80,000, although Bangladesh has said that as
many as 250,000 Biharis have indicated a desire to be repatriated.
Even under the best of circumstances, the mass migration would be no
easy task for the three countries to arrange. Indian transport officials
estimate that nearly 100 trains will be required to empty the 50 P.O.W.
camps.
Complicating the return of the prisoners is the fact that both India and
Pakistan in recent weeks have been ravaged by the worst floods in
decades. Rail traffic has been disrupted, bridges have been washed away
and highways made impassable. Because of the distances involved, the
Bengalis and Biharis will have to be transported by sea and airlifts. The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Prince Sadruddin Aga
Khan, whose office spearheaded the international aid effort for the
10,000,000 Bengali refugees who fled to India during the war, will very
likely oversee the exchange. Substantial funds will be required, however,
and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim is expected to make a world
appeal for aid.
Some diplomatic critics have pointed out that the agreement contained
nothing that could not have been worked out a year ago. But Pakistani
Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who held the weakest cards, felt it
necessary to shore up his own political foundations at home before
risking domestic disfavor by dealing with his country's enemies. In the
end, he acquiesced almost totally to a joint proposal offered last April by
India and Bangladesh.

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Liberation War of Bangladesh

April 04, 1969: The army takes over Pakistan

December 6, 1970: East Pakistan: The Politics of Catastrophe

April 05, 1971 : Pakistan: Toppling Over the Brink

April 05, 1971 : "Raise Your Hands and Join Me"

April 12, 1971: Pakistan: Round 1 to the West

April 26, 1971: Pakistan: The Push toward the Borders

May 3, 1971 : Dacca – The city of the dead

June 21, 1971: The Bengali Refugees: A Surfeit of Woe

July 5, 1971: The most fearful consequence

August 2, 1971: A letter from the publisher

August 2, 1971: Pakistan: The Ravaging of Golden Bengal

August 2, 1971: Good soldier Yahya Khan

August 23, 1971: Mujib’s secret trial

October 25, 1971: East Pakistan: Even the Skies Weep

December 6, 1971: A letter from the publisher

December 6, 1971: India and Pakistan: Poised for War

December 13, 1971: India and Pakistan: Over the Edge

December 20, 1971: Out Of War, a Nation is Born

December 20, 1971: The U.S.: A Policy in Shambles

December 27, 1971: India: Easy victory, Uneasy Peace

December 27, 1971: “We Know How the Parisains Felt”

January 3, 1972: Ali Bhutto Begins to Pick Up the Pieces

January 3, 1972: Vengeance in Victory

January 10, 1972: Painful adjustment.

January 17, 1972: Mujib’s Road from Prison to Power

January 17, 1972: The Kissinger Tilt

January 17, 1972: Great man or Rabble-Rouser?

January 24, 1972: A hero returns home

February 14, 1972: Recognizing reality

February 28, 1972: Bleak Future

April 3, 1972: Not yet a country

January 1, 1973: Not Yet Shonar Bangla

September 17, 1973: Wrapping Up the War

Authority forgets a dying king.— Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Passing of Arthur

PAKISTAN'S President Mohammed Ayub Khan might well embrace

Ayub added: "The country's economic system is paralyzed. Every

Read the remaining part of the article at:

Big Danger. Why had the delta's 3,000,000 Bengalis been so

The worldwide response to the catastrophe was unprecedentedly swift

Pakistan: Toppling Over the Brink

Determined to hold the country together, Yahya resisted Mujib's

Mendicant Among Nations.

Read the remaining part of this article at:

WHEN West Pakistani soldiers arrested Sheik Mujibur ("Mujib")

Yet he has remained, in many respects, a political moderate. He is a

THERE is Do doubt,” said a foreign diplomat in East Pakistan last

During rebel attacks on Chittagong, Pakistani naval vessels shelled the

Completing the Rupture.

To everyone’s astonishment, Sheik Mujibur Rahmari and his Awami

Aware that many foreigners were sympathetic to the Bengalis, Yahya

The Indian government did in fact contribute to the Pakistanis’ anxiety.

Hit and Run.

Radio Pakistan announced last week that Pakistan International Airlines

Despite the continued absence of their political leader, Sheikh Mlljibur

Within hours after launching a tank-led offensive in Dacca and other

One Bengali businessman told of losing his son, daughter-in-law and

The dead of Dacca included some of East Pakistan's most prominent

Next Prime Minister.

Mujib was flown to West Pakistan, where he is reported held in Attock

Still, everywhere I visited on the journey to Dacca, I found astonishing

A CYCLONE that killed as many as 500,000 people. A civil war that