The Cobra & the Mongoose

As long as Kashmir remains an issue between them, India and Pakistan will rage at each other with the furious in tensity of a cobra and a mongoose. Three weeks ago, the United Nations Security Council shelved debate on the thorny problem without recommending any action. The debate had hardly ended when a furious volley of gunfire erupted along the troubled Kashmir cease-fire line, leaving 23 Indian policemen dead and missing.

How the fight started depended on whose story you believed. Pakistan claimed that a contingent of Indian troops tried to destroy a forward military outpost on the Pakistani side of the cease-fire line. India maintained that a Pakistani raiding party slipped across the line, ambushed an Indian patrol, and threw the bodies of its victims into a river. In New Delhi, a government official bitterly declared that the Pakistanis probably staged the incident to impress India's other mortal enemy, Red China, whose Premier, Chou Enlai, had been visiting Pakistan. Adding fuel to the flames last week, Chou pledged Red China's support of Pakistan on the Kashmir question.

Each government tried to make propaganda capital out of the perfidy of the other. Hastily assembling a delegation of foreign correspondents, India raced them to relief camps in Assam, where 50,000 Hindus and Christians had fled to escape Moslem persecution, arson, and murder. It was not easy to assess the accuracy of all the atrocity stories being handed the press. One group said that it had been machine-gunned by Pakistani border guards as it tried to cross the frontier; the original claim of 200 refugees killed in the slaughter was later downgraded to two. The Pakistanis could retort indignantly that 35,000 Moslems in West Bengal had been uprooted from their homes by Indian authorities and deported to East Pakistan as treacherous spies. Even in India, that was an awful lot of spies,

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