THE DAILY MIRROR, LONDON, DECEMBER 4, 1971
THE WAR THAT THREATENS THE WORLD
The one salient truth on the Indian sub-continent today has not, it seems, reached Britain. The truth is that Pakistan, not India, has forced all of West Asia to the point of war.
This is not meant to over-simplify a confused situation, nor is it meant to condone all of India’s recent actions.
But a culpably ignorant and dangerous view appears to be forming in Britain that says India is the “aggressor”.
The danger in this view, which takes no account of events of the past eight months, is that it will isolate India, leaving her friendless, stripping away what options for peace she has left, and contribute to a war which will involve China, the United States and Russia.
If such a view is allowed to gather strength the United Nations, and perhaps even the British Government, will be coerced into mediation on behalf of a Pakistani junta who have murdered, since March, perhaps 1,000,000 people.
Let us get our recent history correct. In March, Field-Marshal Yahya Khan and his Generals crushed the democratically elected Government of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
Since then, they have conducted a formulated policy of genocide against the 75,000,000 people of East Bengal.
They have worked their way through a list of thousands of elected politicians, teachers, students, doctors and businessmen.
At the same time, they have allowed their mostly Punjabi troops to operate an assembly line of atrocities.
They have drained blood from young people. They have publicly cast rated. They have burned and killed and raped.
So widespread has been their terrorizing that 11,000,000 people fled into India, where most of them are now suffering pain I cannot describe.
For those who cannot escape, they have provided the specter of perhaps food and relief and turn away from recognizing the enormity of this crime.
Arms shipments to West Pakistan have continued, and so has trade.
During this time. Field Marshal Yahya Khan, who would be reminiscent of a mildly amusing Victorian figure in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera if he were not so powerful, has tormented India by ordering the shelling of civilians and refugees in border towns, week after week.
Eleven days ago, India, her exchequer almost drained for caring for the refugees of her neighbor, and her pleas to Western Governments for help at best cynically shelved, decided she could take no more.
She hit back at the Pakistan army in a border action designed to give the Bangladesh guerrillas some chance against the superior Pakistani fire power.
This was not altogether successful, but still India held back. Certainly, no modem leader has shown such restraint as Indira Gandhi.
Since then, the Pakistani shelling has intensified, and on Thursday, three Pakistani jets bombed an airfield in India’s Tripura State, killing” five and wounding forty-five.
At the same time, Pakistan requested a United Nations “cease-fire”, knowing that U.N. intervention would shore up its attempts to maintain a sovereignty over Bangladesh, as well as its hold over the Bengali people.
India, having moved its forces into Bangladesh, would be cast in the role of aggressor.
Mrs. Gandhi has just said: “If any country thinks that by calling us aggressor, it can press us to forget our national interest, then that country is living in its own fool’s paradise.
“The times have passed when any nation sitting three or four thousand miles away could give orders to Indians on the basis of their color superiority to do as they wished, India has changed and is no more a country of natives”.
The choice of war or peace is no longer Mrs. Gandhi’s. It is the choice of those Governments who now support and listen to a desperate group of Generals in Pakistan.
If the wrong choice is made, there may be a war which will involve directly not only Indians and Pakistanis, a war for which no one bargained.