Run-In on the Rann

Through an accident of onomatopoeia, the Rann of Kutch* looks just like it sounds. A reeking reach of black tidal mudflats bounded with sand dunes and etched by dead streams of salt and scum, it was until recently of interest only to hardy naturalists in search of the lesser flamingo and herds of wild asses. But the Rann separates India and Pakistan, and that fact alone was sufficient last week to make it another of the world's dangerous little flash points.

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 for war.

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 in 1906.

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 own American-supplied Patton tanks in the Rann, as Indian reconnaissance photographs showed last week.

Fortunately for all concerned, the monsoon begins in three weeks. Then the whole area will be under water--driving Indians, Pakistanis and wild asses alike to higher, safer ground.

* Rhymes with clammy touch.

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