KARACHI—East and West Pakistan are separated by nearly 1,000 miles of hostile Indian territory, and it is often said here that the two parts are strung together only by Pakistan's international airline and the Islam faith. Since last March, these seemingly tenuous bonds have been strained to the utmost, and many diplomats have predicted the imminent demise of this bifurcated nation.

A West Pakistani occupation army now in East Pakistan is faced not only by a bloody guerrilla insurgency that is probably backed by a majority of the people of East Pakistan, but also by the possibility of war with India.

The drain in blood and money on the West Pakistani Government grows ever greater, and its critics have consistently predicted that President Yahya Khan will be compelled to relax his rigid grip on the East. By President Yahya's own reckoning, India is militarily five times stronger than West Pakistan, and India's might is enormously enhanced—at least potentially —by her new treaty with the Soviet Union.

Despite these odds, neither West Pakistan nor her rulers seems alarmed; by all accounts, the people of India are thinking and worrying more about war these days than are the Pakistanis.

Actually, President Yahya and his followers have succeeded in many of their policy objectives and, far from facing collapse, seem perfectly prepared to take on India and all other corners. One reason for his confidence has been the probable recent strengthening of Pakistan's religious base.

One of the most potentially dangerous problems in any state founded on religious rather than secular principles is the adverse effect of dilution by alien religions or beliefs. Although Pakistan was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, it has always had a substantial Hindu minority.

In East Pakistan, the Hindu minority, or perhaps about 10 per cent of the province's population of 75 million, was condemned by the Muslims as an economic elite. Hindu coolies did nearly all the back‐breaking work harvesting tea leaves, but Hindus also tended to be plant managers, prosperous shopkeepers, scholars and teachers.

Today, there is scarcely a Hindu shrine left standing in East Pakistan, Hindu villages and urban communities remain charred and deserted; Hindu shops, where they still stand, are under new management, and the tea plantations are desperate for pickers.

The Hindus of East Pakistan fled, by and large, to India, thus posing a staggering relief and political problem for India but easing an enormous load for the Pakistani Government. For one thing, there are millions of fewer mouths to feed in East Pakistan; but more important, at least in Pakistani eyes, the Indian Fifth Column has been expelled.

Furthermore, West Pakistan has made it clear that, although she has called for the refugees to return to East Pakistan, she does not want the Hindus back. Thus, since most of the refugees are Hindus, their future return in large numbers seems unlikely so long as the region is governed by the Muslims of West Pakistan.

This has left India with various options, all more or less disagreeable. One is to absorb the refugees and continue living next to Pakistan—if not in harmony, then at least without the border shellings that reportedly were killing hundreds of people every day last week.

Another option for India is to invade West Pakistan, beat the Islamabad Government to its knees and Then impose terms under which India could rid herself of the refugees while safeguarding them from religious persecution. The third alternative is to hope that the guerrilla war already being waged against the Pakistani Army by both Bengali Hindus and Muslims will increase to a point at which Islamabad will be compelled to grant virtual autonomy to the region.

While invasion by India or West Pakistan and full‐scale conventional war have been and remain possibilities the feeling here is that they are unlikely. A main deterrent, is the fact that the Soviet Union, China and the United States are all involved, and each nation is supposedly using all of its leverage to prevent war.

India presumably does not relish the prospect of fighting West Pakistan's ally, China, nor does West Pakistan like the idea of fighting Russia. In any case, most of the world frowns on outright invasion these days—and both West Pakistan and India care about world opinion, at least to a point.

“There can never be any such thing as peace between West Pakistan and India,” a Karachi tradesman said the other day. “War is inevitable.”