As most Indians saw it, there was really 110 other choice. With the bills for refugee care soring astronomically, officials in New Delhi were convinced that a fullscale war would be far cheaper than being stuck with the refugees problem for even one more year. And they even produced the figures to prove it. By next March, according to official estimates, the refugees will have cost the Indian government $900 million-or more than thirteen limes cost of the entire 1965 war with Pakistan. In short, if the current crisis dragged on, the financial drain on the Indian budget might well become unbearable. Indeed, what the Indians seemed to fear most was a Palestinian-style denouement-in which the government would have to contend with both the refugees and a continuing and costly standoff with hostile Pakistani forces in East Bengal. “We have accepted the risk of war,” said one Indian official, “because we believed the risks to India of letting go on as they have been are far greater than the risks of war."
[[Thai kind of attitude has confronted Pakistan's Mohammed Yahya Khan with a painful dilemma: whether to accept defeat and proceed with a humiliating withdrawal from East Pakistan or to risk initiating a devastating war himself. Given the dismal alternatives. Yahya has understandably tried to carve out a more favorable position somewhere in between. Under pressure from Pakistan's so-called “22 families” (the nation's most powerful business leaders, who originally favored the crackdown on the Bengali rebellion to preserve their investments in the cast but who now fcar losses at home due to protracted war). Yahya has even begun to talk of compromise-privately suggesting the possibility of a plebiscite in the east. As one U.S. diplomat explained it: “It's obvious that Yahya is beginning to understand some things he missed a few months ago."
On Trial For Treason
But it may already be too late for Yahya Khan to salvage an acceptable compromise. For despite his apparent willingness to haggle, he remains unwilling to make the only concessions that would seem to appeal to New Delhi: the release of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and negotiations for an independent Bangladesh. Still on trial for treason. Mujib remains in jail in the Punjab town of Layallpur. And Yahya is by no means ready to accept the humiliation of Bengali independence just yet. As the Indian pressure has escalated, in fact, Yahya has stiffened too-talking very much like a man who knows a fight is coming. “If she (Mrs. Gandhi) wants war,” he declared last week, “then I will give it to her. If that woman thinks she is going to cow me. I refuse to take it."
If all-out war comes, most people expect the Pakistanis to trigger it with a strike into Kashmir or across India's western plains. An escalation of the conflict by that degree, the Pakistanis were said to believe, might be enough to force the U.N. Security Council to take up the crisis and perhaps even to implement a U. N. supervised cease-fire along the Indo-Pakistani border. But that ploy seemed doomed from the beginning. For one thing, great power rivalrics over the sub-continent appeared significant enough to forestall any U.N. action at the moment. For another, a Pakistani attack would give the more powerful Indian Army the excuse it has been waiting for to deal Yahya's forces a decisive defeat.
No matter what short-term tactics Yahya chose, in other words. Pakistan ultimately seemed on the way out of the castern zone. Nonetheless, no one was suggesting that India
