Observer (London)

There is something infinitely sad and not quite believable, like an old snapshot of the First World War, in the spectacle of the armies of India and Pakistan rushing into battle while Mrs. Gandhi and President Yahya Khan exhort their peoples with a vocabulary of patriotic fervour, moral self- righteousness and diplomatic cliche of pre-1914 vintage. Even sadder is the state of paralysis, whether caused by complacency, calculation, real helplessness or despair, in which the rest of the world has watched this lunacy develop. The first step on the road to war was the belief of the West Pakistani military leaders that a solution of East Pakistan’s political problems could be achieved by brute force. Now it looks as if India’s leaders may be in danger of making the same mistake. The open involvement of Indian regular armed forces in the fighting inside East Pakistan, admitted and justified in New Delhi, began the transformation of the conflict from a civil war into an international one threatening to engulf the entire subcontinent.

At first, no doubt, the Indian Government hoped to avoid a major war with Pakistan, in the belief that its political objectives in East Pakistan could be achieved by lesser means, such as increased backing for the Bangladesh guerrillas. The onus was left on Pakistan to decide whether to try to counter Indian pressure in the East by an attack on India’s western flank through Kashmir. This has now happened and set in train a rapid escalation towards full-scale war. Unless active-international measures are taken to halt the fighting and to find a military solution for the future of East Pakistan, the prospects in terms of human suffering are appalling. There are perhaps even wider perils to be considered. Other Powers, primarily the Soviet Union and China, and to a lesser degree the United States, are also now in danger of being entangled in the conflict, at least indirectly. They are already partially involved as providers of mutual deterrence, nuclear and otherwise, and as suppliers of arms to either side. As the war is intensified, these commitments could become increasingly serious - can one be sure, for example, that China will remain passive if it looks as if the Indian Army is overrunning East Pakistan, the target its commander has now publicly set himself?

Mrs. Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, argued, not unlike President Sadat of Egypt, that war was forced upon her country because of the failure of international action to provide a peaceful political solution to an intolerable situation. She claimed that the influx of millions of refugees from East Pakistan threatened to undermine India’s political and economic stability.

Therefore it constituted an indirect aggression on the part of the Pakistani authorities, whose ruthless military suppression of the East Pakistani home- rule movement led to the exodus. India’s survival demanded the urgent return of the refugees to their homes, but they would go back only there were a Government in East Pakistan that they could trust. This could come about only if West Pakistani armed forces were withdrawn and General Yahya Khan handed over power to a freely elected East Pakistani Government. In the meantime India supported the Bangladesh Government-in-exile, which claims to speak for an independent East Pakistan. Such, broadly speaking, was the official Indian thesis. And now, believing that international pressures on Pakistan have failed to produce progress towards a political solution. Mrs. Gandhi has decided to back up her thesis with force. Since West Pakistani troops will not withdraw voluntarily they must be driven out.

These very serious developments pose a number of question for the rest of the world. Is the Indian thesis justified and its aims reasonable? Will India’s present methods help or hinder a solution ? What effective action can the international community take to halt a catastrophic war and to produce a political settlement? What, if any, is the particular interest of the West in this situation ? Those who do not take India’s claims entirely at their face value, believe that the numbers and political impact of the refugees in India have been exaggerated. They point out that most of the refugees are Hindus and would not in any case return voluntarily to East Bengal, under a Muslim government, whether independent or run from Rawalpindi. These sceptics suggest that the refugee issue is being used by the ‘hawks’ in New Delhi as an excuse to achieve a huge and lasting shift in the political balance in the subcontinent : the separation of East from West Pakistan would mean a blow to the very idea of Pakistan as a separate Muslim State and homeland and so become the first step to a long- dreamed-of reunification of the subcontinent. For a push in this direction the moment, it might be argued, is also favourable internationally. India’s new treaty with Russia offers some reassurance against Chinese intervention in support of Pakistan and in any case Peking itself seems now to be in a cautious mood.

Hitherto Mrs. Gandhi has been among those Indian leaders who have argued that India can live with Pakistan and does not need to work for the undoing of the 1947 partition. In the circumstances it seems more profitable to look at her aims rather than her motives. India’s call for international recognition of the Bangladesh regime and for the complete withdrawal of West Pakistani forces were war aims rather than peace aims in the sense that they were likely only to be achieved by force. More reasonable was Mrs Gandhi’s former demand that General Yahya Khan must negotiate a political settlement with the recognised East Pakistan leaders, principally Sheikh Mujib, now in prison. The most sensible aim for international action to support would be negotiations which restored the federal halves of Pakistan but on a new basis of real home-rule in the East If this proved impossible, the next best would be an East Pakistan or Bangladesh State genuinely independent of West Pakistan.

Both aims would mean round-table talks between the West and East Pakistani leaders. Such talks would need to be linked with a withdrawal of Indian forces from East Pakistani territory. For while India may feel defiantly justified in taking the law into her own bands; she can hardly expect the international community to endorse her resort to force. Nor can India’s Army hope to achieve her political aims, except by stirring the Great Powers to peace-making action. The first step required is a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss how to stop the fighting and organise political negotiations. Though China’s entry into the Council will make such a discussion more complex, it will also make it more realistic. Second, the international community must make a much bigger contribution than at present to the support of the refugees from East Pakistan now in India.

Such support and also more effective pressures on the military government of West Pakistan to negotiate are two ways in which the Western Powers in particular can play a more constructive role. It would be wrong for the Western Powers to support a mistaken policy in New Delhi simply to avoid unpopularity. It nevertheless remains an important Western interest, while seeking a peaceful settlement, to avoid an angry revulsion which might carry India more definitively into an anti-West and pro-Soviet position. The West shares with the Communist Powers as well as with India and Pakistan an interest in restoring the stability of the Indian sub-continent. That stability has been seriously disturbed by the bloody events in East Pakistan for which the West Pakistani military leaders were almost solely to blame. It is in East Pakistan itself that a solution must still be found if the whole subcontinent is be spared an unprecedented bloodbath.