September 11, 1965
(On September 6, after months of clashes in the Kutch desert, Indian troops penetrated into Pakistan. Karachi calls for help from the “Western allies.” New Delhi orders a general mobilization. On September 16, China will declare its support of Pakistan. On September 19, the Security Council enjoins India and Pakistan to cease fire and the U.S.S.R. proposes a meeting at Tashkent. On September 22, India and Pakistan order a cease-fire. On September 25, China reiterates its claim to 35,000 square miles of Indian territory. This is the second Indo-Pakistani conflict since Independence. There will be a third in 1971 over Bangladesh.)
We are threatened with a blackout.
It has started.
Yes, but so far they have only cut off all the street lights – to help thieves go about their business. But they haven’t said anything yet about lights indoors.
They want to cut those off, too?
Page 238
Yes. Then we’ll only have to go to bed at 7 in the evening (even earlier), till 6 in the morning. We won’t be able to do anything anymore. It’s stupid. All the more so since if there is a bright moon shining, they don’t need any other light to bomb.
How do you expect planes to come here from Pakistan? They wouldn’t have enough fuel to go back.
Not that. They have sent aircraft carriers.
Pakistan?
Yes, they have already bombed several places.
Are you going to let the Indians go right to the end this time? [[Right to the end = Karachi. Sri Aurobindo, it may be recalled, repeatedly said that until the partition of India is abolished, "India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may always remain possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest." It may also be recalled that Pakistan is an artificial creation by the British, in line with the policy of "divide and rule." The Americans and the Chinese have taken up the same policy again. ]]
I myself have nothing to do with that.
Nothing to do with it?… You let things take their course?
No, really … I have been told many things, but among those many things, I have been told that the intention was to reach a conclusion.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? [[Mother is referring to the continual border clashes. ]]
Oh, yes!
We’ll see.
Will they [the Indians] have the courage to hold out against the pressure from the Americans, the British, etc.? That’s the most difficult. The most difficult part isn’t the military part, it’s politically to hold out against the pressures from all those people who say, “You must make peace.”
But they aren’t sincere.
Page 239
That’s the trouble, not one of these nations is sincere. They pretend, they strike a pose, but it’s not true.
They say (they say lots of things, but there is always the distortion of something true), they say that America outwardly preaches peace, but clandestinely offers money to people who declare war on certain governments. I don’t know if it’s true…. There must be something true. The new president of I don’t remember which country (Vietnam, I think) made a public declaration that America had offered him fantastic sums so he would take their side – is it true, is it untrue? We can’t say. Everybody tells lies, but behind all those lies there is something.
I don’t know.
It would be good to be done with it.
There is one thing, it’s that Pakistan is entirely dependent on the help they are given – they make nothing themselves. They have no factories, no industries, nothing. So of course, they are in an inferior situation.
But anyway, all that …
Some people see, and rightly so, an analogy between this war and the war of the Gita in which Arjuna had to fight the members of his own family. They say it’s the members of the same family that are now fighting, and perhaps in fact in order to …
What I felt strongly was that something had to erupt: it was too absurdly tense and devoid of truth.
I don’t know if I told you that the day before it was known that it had really become a sort of war, the night before that, I had an experience that has occurred to me only two or three times in my life, always in similar circumstances. This time, I wasn’t expecting anything, and in the night, there was in the TERRESTRIAL atmosphere, with a concentration on India, a sort of … something I might call a “pressure of the Supreme.” It’s as if the Supreme’s Consciousness were exerting a pressure, and it produces a certain type of stillness with a solidity and a consistency not found anywhere else. You know, it’s even more solid and substantial than the most inert inertia. And it’s the pressure of the Supreme Power. It’s almost intolerable or unbearable for Matter, for material substance. And it goes like this (gesture of massive descent), absolutely impossible to budge, and at the same time you feel it’s the Supreme Power. Well, it lasted for hours that night, and I was extremely attentive in order to know what it meant. And the next
Page 240
day, I was told things had all of a sudden broken out like a war: all that friction that had been there for … years had suddenly taken that form.
So it is clearly a very exceptional intervention that has brought this about.
But while I was having the experience, there was absolutely no awareness of the goal, the motive, the purpose, nothing: it was like this (same massive gesture taking hold of everything), a sort of absolute, without explanation.
I’ve had this two or three times in my life, in the most serious terrestrial circumstances.
That’s why; the next day, they told me what was going on and asked me what I felt; I simply answered, “It’s serious.”
It can only be serious.
Now … “serious,” what we could call serious is when it becomes global.
It seems that so far Pakistan has already called for help from three or four countries, which have refused. But the news … I attach no importance to it because it is always falsified. For instance, when a country like Britain can decide to give her support, officially she will say, “We have nothing to do with your war.” So it doesn’t mean anything.
There.
I still hope we will be allowed to work a little in the evening, otherwise we’ll have to rest…. “To rest” (!) … as soon as I am lying there, on what is called my “bed,” I start working.
Well.
Page 241