50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the U S has done to several non-socialist systems around the world. Governments have been overthrown. Leaders have been shot. Economies have been taken over. Hapless and hopeless, these societies have been caught in debt-traps. How all this contributes towards the fight against "socialism" is not quite clear. If anything, it has made revolution and socialism inevitable. From China in 1949 to Vietnam in 1975 it has been a story of the resounding defeat of U S strategy and foreign policy. In the words of Raymond Aron, written no doubt unhappily, "in the twenty years since the explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the machine guns of guerrillas have changed the map of the world much more than tanks or atom bombs".2 In short it is not the advanced technological man from the Atlantic area who has determined the fate of the world, but rather the underdeveloped, starving man of Asia and Africa who has. The situation is no different nearly ten years after the war in Vietnam. If the Americans are regarded as enemies in Moscow it would scarcely be a surprise. But that there are large groups of people in Asia and Africa who would and do regard them to be enemies, requires an explanation which goes beyond the propaganda about the "commies". The late prof Aron thought that the guerrillas "won nearly everywhere because the 'imperialists', morally and materially weakened by World War II, no longer believed in their mission and because Empire becomes too costly when it entails economic obligation toward conquered peoples".3 This is how the world looks like from the Atlantic area. The "imperialists" never really gave up their mission. Nor, for that matter, did they feel any obligation towards conquered peoples. Through neo-colonialism they sought to win back the world. In the process they lost some. It is not the purpose of this paper to trace the history of that loss. Nor is it to examine whether and to what extent economic dominance was achieved by "the imperialists" over the past few decades. It is only to took at some developments relating to our subcontinent which is in a sense more than what Toynbee called the "intelligible field" that "makes up a whole civilisation".4 South Asian People as Cannon Fodder When it comes to South Asia it is obvious that it is in terms of the number of nation-states, a very small region. Altogether it consists of just six states: Pakistan^ Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and us. A small world indeed. Yet in its existence as a group of nation-states, it has seen quite a dramatic series of developments. Take for instance the liquidation of political leaders. Working back from Mrs Indira Gandhi's assassination on October 31, 1984, we would see that two leaders in Bangladesh (Sheikh Mujeeb and Zia-ur-Rehman), one in Sri Lanka (Solomon Bandaranayake), two in Pakistan (Liaqat Ali Khan and Zulfiqar All Bhutto) have been liquidated, giving us six assassinations in these six countries. Now, it would be far-fetched to