Bristling, Beset Nation

Pakistan complained to the U.N. last week that it "faces an unparalleled threat--starvation by a process of slow strangulation." The strangler, said Pakistan, is its neighbor, India. The process: "depriving 76 million persons of the waters of the Indus basin, by which they live."

Pakistan's complaint is the latest of a series of bickerings that have kept Hindu and Moslem in a state of near-war ever since the British raj departed in 1947. And like most feuds between India and Pakistan, its roots reached back to partition--to the ingenious, twisting line drawn by Britain's Sir Cyril (later Lord) Radcliffe to divide India (pop. 350 million) from the widely separated halves of the Dominion of Pakistan: East Bengal (pop. 42 million), in the steamy Ganges Delta, and West Pakistan (pop. 33-5 million), a rain-starved country bigger than Texas. The Radcliffe line roughly separated Hindu from Moslem, but in doing so it came close to wrecking the economy of the entire subcontinent. Pakistan got the jute and most of the cotton; India kept the jute mills and most of the coal. Even more important, India and Kashmir control the headstreams of the five great rivers that water Pakistan's granary: the fertile Punjab.

Charge & Countercharge. Pakistan, like Egypt, lives by irrigation: its rivers are its life. When the Punjab's canals yield plentiful water, Pakistani peasants harvest three good crops a year; when the canals run dry, the peasants are apt to starve. Pakistan's complaint is that India has dried up eleven vital canals by diverting water from the Punjabi head-streams to its irrigation schemes.

At the time of partition, Pakistanis were among the few Asians with an assured food supply. Yet today their bread is rationed, and the government has been forced to buy 650,000 tons of wheat from Canada, Russia, India and the U.S. India dismisses the food shortage as the product of bad husbandry, inefficient distribution and a scourge of locusts; the hungry Pakistanis are sure that their richer, more powerful neighbor is intent on starving them out.

The Seeds of War. Cabled TIME Correspondent Joe David Brown from Karachi:

There is danger here. One does not have to see the flame blackened shops looted in last month's rioting to realize it. Whatever the immediate cause of the rioting or the degree of its exploitation by Communists and others, what matters is that the riots are a symptom of the anger and deep uneasiness felt by millions of peasants, most of them underfed, underhoused and underpaid. After five years of hard work to carve out a new homeland, the Pakistanis face alarming economic ills. And rightly or wrongly, they blame India.

The bitterness between India and Pakistan is a frightening thing which grows from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. Newspapers of both sides report minor frontier clashes as major engagements, so that invasion seems imminent. Politicians remind their listeners of those terror-filled days in 1947, when 12 million Hindus and Moslems were uprooted from their homes, and perhaps another million (the exact figure may never be known) were massacred under conditions of unbelievable brutality. In five years since partition, neither country has solved the problems of this mass dislocation: each has millions--perhaps 8,000,000 between them--penned in refugee camps, a serious health problem and a drain on slender resources.

Then there is Kashmir, the coveted Himalayan state which both sides have snarled over ever since independence. Bystanders wonder whether Kashmir (pop. 4,000,000) is worth all the sound and fury, but to Pakistan especially it is the symbol of all other rivalries. In one way or another, Kashmir is probably costing India 50% of its budget. Pakistan may be spending as much as 65% to keep its claim alive.

It is an expense that the Pakistanis can ill afford. Already there are signs that the moderate government of roly-poly Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin may be overwhelmed. In fact, the newborn nation has not yet decided what kind of government it wants to live under.

Starting from Scratch. When the late Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the patron saint of Pakistan, arrived in Karachi in 1947 to set up the Moslem state for which he had labored so long, he started from scratch. In the government buildings there was nothing but bare walls and a few rickety tables--no chairs, no typewriters, no files or filing system. Telephones were luxuries, and at first government orders were passed back and forth on scraps of paper; there were no bookkeepers, stenographers or clerks, for the simple reason that, in British India, Moslems were fighters and farmers but never office workers. That was a job for Hindus.

About the only thing Pakistan did have in good supply was people. Fortunately, among them were a few able men who knew government and how to train administrators. Somehow they put a government together and gave it enough meaning to hold together. They were forced to skip, a few things in those hurried early days--among them, a constitution. Last month Pakistan's five-year-old Constituent Assembly began to debate a "Basic Principles Report" that will be used as a guide for constitution-making. Best bet: a democratic republic with a strong executive, outside the British Commonwealth.

Its two halves separated by 1100 miles, condemned by partition to hold a 4,000-mile frontier against Russia, China, Burma, Afghanistan, Iran and India, Pakistan makes sense as a nation only because it feels itself a nation. Its cocksureness could set a subcontinent on fire. Yet one thing seems certain: now that they have a country of their own, Pakistan's Moslems will defend it to the last gasp.

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