PAKISTAN: 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.