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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.