PRINCETON, N. J.—The Nixon Administration's South Asia policy, which had been edging toward disaster for the last eight months, finally, in cloud of pious inanities, plunged over the brink this last weekend. Presumably for the time being the policy is beyond redemption. What now selfishly concerns me as an American is that India's leaders may exaggerate the degree to which the Administration's present aberrations represent thoughtful and enduring American opinion.

All the evidence suggests that within the Administration the aberrations trace directly and primarily to Mr. Nixon himself. For eight months he has remained officially blind to the most massive calculated savagery that has been visited on a civil population in recent times. He has been faithful to his good friend, the chairman of the savagery, Yahya Khan. Neither his hand‐holding of nor any hidden leverage on the Pakistan regime has had evident effect in advancing a political solution in East Bengal.

To an Indian Government that, in the face of moral and human outrage next door and of an outlandish refugee burden, was showing remarkable restraint until recently, Mr. Nixon offered mainly counsels of restraint. He supplied no moral support. Instead for months he continued to trickle arms to Pakistan like so much gasoline onto smouldering Indian passions. The President has been fully aware both of the explosive domestic political risks the refugees posed in Indian Bengal and of the way they have totally derailed the cause of Indian development at its very moment of greatest opportunity. Yet he has not begun to exercise the leadership, either before the Congress or in the international community, needed to accomplish a quick and adequate sharing of refugee costs.

Such is the footing from which Mr. Nixon, first via his nameless State Department mouthpiece last Saturday, now from the White House itself, has branded India an aggressor. It is on this record that he has turned off, not Just fresh economic assistance (which he had, in any event, been blocking since early in the fiscal year) but the unobligated portions of loans already committed. This last is extraordinarily tough action in terms of past aid practice, and one—lacking any prospect of cramping India's military capability—that can have only punitive intent.

Historians are bound to boggle at the cumulative ineptitude of this performance. In one series of strokes we have managed to align ourselves with the ‘wrong side of about as big and simple a moral issue as the world has seen lately; we have sided with minor military dictatorship against the world's second largest nation which happens also to be the staunchest of all developing countries in its adherence to our own deepest political values; we have joined the sure‐fire loser in a subcontinental confrontation; and we have depleted a once abundant, durable fund of Indo‐American goodwill at a sickening rate.

It certainly would be wrong to claim to our Indian friends that, in all this, the President is swimming against tide of public opinion. There is little American tide of opinion of any kind about the subcontinent, and Its surface flow is considerably influenced by what any President does and says. Moreover, many of our best editorial writers and columnists have such an absolute abhorrence of war—especially when escalated by others—whatever the provocation and whatever the closure of, other options, that they cannot, just now, see much beyond proximate causes of the Bengal border crossings.

I would like to emphasize one point that tends to be skirted, because no one wants to be caught these days suggesting that any good‐‐even relative good, weighed against the alternative—can come of a war. The point, and it is pivotal, is that the only possible basis for a Stable, peaceful. East Bengal to which a large portion of the ten million refugees can return and help rebuild their nation is ari independent East Bengal. Such is the effect of the program of terror since March 25; the scenario cannot be wound backwards. Hence (1) the premise of undivided Pakistan's sovereign integrity upon which American policy has rested, for at least five months, has been a nonstarter, and (2) India's support of the insurgency by the previously elected Bangle Desh regime has not been merely human and understandable; lacking alternatives, it has been the only constructive policy available.

I myself wish the Indians had escalated less, accepted a longer time frame, and kept their support less overt. But if there is any group which, having contributed most to the frustration of restraint, has least cause to fault her ensuing impatience, it is the Nixon Administration. It remains now for India to demonstrate that her objectives are those, and only those, she held but; namely, establishment of a genuinely independent East Bengal to which the refugees can return. There is a heavy obligation on Indian leaders to make sure that war fervor does not spill over into more self‐serving ventures, either to the east or to the west. Meanwhile, as this demonstration is being rendered, there is an obligation on Washington to keep quiet.