Word: rann
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Russia's fence-straddling new bosses, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, provided no public backing for India against Pakistan in the bitter Rann of Kutch controversy; not a word of support against the Chinese Communists, who for years have been nibbling at India's Himalayan borders; not even a clear-cut promise of more aid and trade. In fact, the Russians chided India for failing to use fully the aid already pledged-$1 billion, or roughly one-fifth of what the U.S. has given-and for not developing full capacity at the woefully inefficient Ranchi heavy-machine plant...
...they stop. Pakistan, backed by Red China, passed out leaflets accusing India of imperialist aggression in the Rann of Kutch. A flood of Indonesian papers described Malaysia as a stooge of British imperialism. One Angolan exile movement accused another Angolan exile movement of being "imperialist-supported." And, to top it all off, Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Member Liao Cheng-chih accused Russia of "collaborating with the United States to dominate the world." The fact that most of the 50 delegations present also managed to get in some licks against Washington did nothing at all for the cause of solidarity...
Sweeping over a sandy escarpment called "God's Dyke" on the Rann's northern lip, a brigade of Pakistani infantry crushed an Indian army outpost at Biar Bet, also occupied a ruined mud-walled fort called Kanjarkot in what India insists is its own territory. India and Pakistan each claimed to have inflicted at least 300 casualties on the other, and Indian Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, looking far tougher than his frail figure indicates, threatened to invade the Pakistani side of the Rann. Both nations began talking of general mobilization...
Pakistan calls the 8,000-sq.-mi. area an inland sea (and indeed during the monsoon season most of it is blanketed with four feet of water from the Arabian Sea), hence feels the boundary should be drawn halfway through the Rann. Shastri last week invoked etymology to prove that the Rann is not a sea but a swamp, deriving as it does from the Sanskrit irinam, meaning "salty marsh." Therefore, the Indian Prime Minister argued, the boundary must remain as drawn by the British way back...
Swamp or inland sea, it was hard for outside observers to figure what India and Pakistan had to gain in the Rann-other than a prolongation of their long-standing feud. Some Western diplomats think Pakistani President Mohammed Ayub Khan planned the action before his trip to Washington was "postponed" last month by Lyndon Johnson. In Washington, Ayub could have argued that India, armed with American weapons since its border fight with Red China in 1962, had become dangerously aggressive and should receive no more U.S. military aid. But Ayub's forces did not hesitate to use their...