clothe, house and provide vital medicine for the Bengalis, a financial drain that is crippling to the already marginal Indian economy. Worse yet, lack of available funds has meant a shortage of virtually everything in the refugee camps-and the inevitable result has been suffering, disease and death. To Luthra, the only conceivable resolution of the tragedy is for the world to put the utmost pressure on Pakistan to stop the carnage so the Bengalis will feel safe in going, home.
Yet for all their suffering, the Bengalis themselves maintain their stoicism. It is the monsoon season in India, but the monsoon here is not like the great monsoons of Hollywood. Instead of roaring and thundering, the rain falls softly and steadily, dribbling through the canvas tents to soak the refugees, turn earth floors to mud and flood inadequate drains. But the refugees stand patiently calf deep in stagnant water, eager to tell me their stories so I can tell others. I collect a notebook of horror-rape and murder and kidnapping. They tell me how they saw their children stabbed, their husbands or brothers executed, their wives collapse with fatigue or sickness. The stories are all new, and all the same. And I remember Luthra's plaintive question. “How can we think the human race is evolving to a higher level when it lets this go On?”
As the military repression and the guerrilla sabotage goes on. it poses ever-increasing threat to the future of Pakistan itself. Already, experts say, the country's economy is a shambles. Since the fighting began, exports have plummeted, the vital jute crops that are Pakistan's biggest foreign exchange earner rot unharvested, and the vast consumer market of the eastern region on which West Pakistan's factories lived has vanished along with the refugees and rebels. “In short, Yahya's government faces the genuine danger of bankruptcy,” warns a Western economist in Dacca. Equally genuine is the danger of mass starvation. “Unless something is done soon,” the same economist adds, “there is going to be a faming here that will make all the prior suffering look like nothing.” “But in the end, the greatest threat to Pakistan is the flaring hatred that Yahya's army has spawned, “Pakistan died in March” says a Karachi editor. “The only way this land can be held together is by the bayonet and the torch. But that is not unity that is slavery. There can never be one nation in the future, only two enemies."
Threat Of War
The area already has enemies enough. In recent weeks, Islamabad and New Delhi have traded insults and accusations at a dizzying rate and there is a real possibility that angry words may escalate into war. Indeed, some Indians even claim to see an economic motive for going to war; according to the Institute for Studies in New Delhi, it would be cheaper for India to fight Pakistan than to continue to care for millions of Bengali refugees. “It had not come to that yet” sighed one U.S. official last week. “But India has considered a military thrust apparently very seriously.” And Pakistan, too, has weighed the use of force against its neighbor in retaliation for India's support of the Mukti Bahini.
The gravest danger from any such hostilities is the possibility that Communist China and Russia would become involved, Chinese Premier, Chou-En Lai has
