WE first heard the news of the fighting between India and Pakistan when both capitals began issuing a series of sharply conflicting claims. Radio Pakistan announced that India "has launched an all-out offensive against East Pakistan," while India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said this was "Pakistani propaganda" and "wholly untrue."

To sort out all the contradictory reports, TIME immediately assigned six correspondents to the story. Bill Stewart and Jim Shepherd covered the Indian side from their base in New Delhi. Two former New Delhi correspondents, Dan Coggin and Lou Kraar, flew into Pakistan from their regular posts in Beirut and Singapore. Bill Mader and Friedel Ungeheuer provided back-up coverage from the State Department and the United Nations. In the combat zone, however, most local officials did their best to confine foreign correspondents to the rear areas and to harass them with red tape. The results were sometimes frustrating.

"I came to Pakistan prepared to see the kind of tank battles I had witnessed during the war over Kashmir in 1965," Correspondent Kraar cabled from Rawalpindi, "but I found this town completely quiet. It made me feel like that correspondent in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, who cabled his home office, ADEN UN-WARWISE, while a competitor reported, ADEN WARWISE. The main event that evening was a dinner that President Yahya Khan was giving for the Chinese Communist First Minister of Machine Building,

Li Shui-ching, who was here to dedicate a factory. President Yahya talked informally with reporters and expressed some unusually tough warnings to India. But the only evidence of war that night was the blackout which was quite unnecessary."

From the correspondents' files, and from background research assembled by Reporter-Researcher Susan Altchek, Contributing Editor Marguerite Johnson wrote the cover story. A veteran of TIME'S Art section, Marguerite shifted to World last winter after taking a five-month-long excursion around the globe by freighter, jetliner and Trans-Siberian Railroad. Upon her return, she was assigned to what seemed at the time a relatively tranquil part of the world: India. This is her second cover story since then on the tragic subcontinent. "The conflict," she says, "is so suffused with ancient religious, cultural and racial hatreds that it is difficult for any Western journalist to comprehend it fully. There are times when the Indians and Pakistanis do not seem to understand it either."

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