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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.