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Reckless Perfidy. The next morning, Prime Minister Gandhi went before the Indian Parliament. "This morning the government of Pakistan has declared a war upon us, a war we did not seek and did our utmost to prevent," she said. "The avoidable has happened. West Pakistan has struck with reckless perfidy." In a broadcast at noon the same day, Pakistani President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan accused India of starting a full-scale war and declared that it was time "to give a crushing reply to the enemy." He made no mention of a formal declaration of war, but a proclamation in the government gazette in Islamabad declared: "A state of war exists between Pakistan on one hand and India on the other." Mrs. Gandhi did not issue a formal declaration of war, but Foreign Secretary T.N. Kaul told newsmen: "India reserves the right to take any action to preserve her security and integrity."
The conflict had its genesis last March when the Pakistani President and his tough military regime 1) moved to crush the East Pakistani movement for greater autonomy, 2) outlawed the Awami League, which had just won a majority in the nation's first free election, 3) arrested its leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, and 4) launched a repressive campaign that turned into a civil war with East Pakistan's Bengalis fighting to set up an independent Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation). Nearly 1,000,000 people were killed and 10 million refugees streamed into India. "We have borne the heaviest of burdens," Mrs. Gandhi said last week, "and withstood the greatest of pressure in a tremendous effort to urge the world to help in bringing about a peaceful solution and preventing the annihilation of an entire people whose only crime was to vote democratically. But the world ignored the basic causes and concerned itself only with certain repercussions. Today the war in Bangla Desh has become a war on India."
Self-Determination. It soon became clear that India would make an all-out effort to ensure self-determination for Bangla Desh. India's desire to bring about an independent nation there as soon as possible stems from two factors. First is the tremendous economic and social burden of the refugees who have sought sanctuary in India. Second is that in a prolonged guerrilla war the moderate leadership of the Awami League would probably give way to more radical political forces, perhaps leading to a Peking-oriented government on India's border. A third factor, of course, is India's unspoken desire to weaken its neighbor by detaching a sizable chunk of its territory.
For several months, Indian troops and Pakistani forces have been engaged in almost daily border skirmishes. In the past two weeks, Indian forces, working with the Bengali guerrillas, have stepped up pressures against Pakistan's troops in the east; in retaliation the West Pakistanis have been rampaging through Bengali villages in kill-and-burn raids, slaughtering some 2,000 people in the vicinity of Dacca alone.