Washington Star/Evening Star

In December 1969 the Indian prime minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, told L. K. Jha that she was naming him ambassador to Washington with one idea in mind: he must make relations with the United States as good as India's relations with the Soviet Union.
Jha has been here a year and a half, helplessly watching Indo-American relations deteriorate to what may be the lowest point ever. Meanwhile, the Soviets have won even more prestige and influence with India's government and her 537 million people.
Now the U.S. is on a kick of wooing Communist China with neither the U.S. government nor the public appearing to give two hoots about what happens to the world's second most populous country, India.
Mrs. Gandhi comes to Washington on an official visit this week, and there is a grave question as to whether she and President Nixon together can halt the drift of the two countries toward lasting political hostility.
The threat of warfare between India and Pakistan will surely be uppermost in Mrs. Gandhi's mind. For two decades, conflict with Pakistan has been at the heart of India's troubles with the United States. The U.S. has steadfastly refused to accept the notion that friendship with India meant that India's enemies automatically became Uncle Sam's foes.
But there are dimensions of India's current troubles with Pakistan that deserve the understanding, interest and action of the White House and the rest of the world. Unless Mrs. Gandhi can inspire such understanding and action, a new tragic wave of warfare on the Indian subcontinent seems inevitable.
West Pakistani refugees fleeing the grim oppression of the Pakistan army have put terrible strains, financial, political and social, on India. The Bangla Desh conflict has put India in a position where war seems certain unless the U.S. and other countries pressure Pakistan President Yahya Khan to agree to a settlement. So far Mr. Nixon has not seen fit to pressure Pakistan, and there is doubt that Mrs. Gandhi will be able to prod Nixon into this kind of action.
In the fiscal year ending last March, India spent $800 million caring for what now are 9.5 million West Pakistani refugees. The cost in the current year will be more than $1.2 billion.
No less ominous is the rise in communal tensions. More than 8 million of the 9.5 million Bengalis who have fled Moslem Pakistan are Hindus. Indian extremists are now insisting that India force 8 million of her 60 million Moslem residents into Pakistan and thus create an economic crisis that some economists say would swamp Pakistan and create chaos. Indian leaders swear they would never resort to this kind of tactic.
So the refugees continue to flood into India, many of them eating better than the ordinary Calcutta resident.
Officials here assume that Mrs. Gandhi is too proud to ask President Nixon for more economic help; she will hope that the need is already obvious. But she surely will try to convince Mr. Nixon that world peace requires that he pressure the Pakistanis to resolve the Bangla Desh affair promptly.
However, the U.S.'s chronic trouble with India seems to grow deeper than such matters as U.S. military aid to Pakistan. American leaders, whether Democratic or Republican, seem to become severely irritated by what they consider a "more moral than thou" Indian posture.
Indians point out that for years they were the targets of American anger because they advocated good relations with Communist China and the Soviet Union—a stance the U.S. now has adopted. They say they were ridiculed by Americans year after year for pressing to get Peking into the U.N.—a position. the U.S. now takes. They say they bugged Americans by arguing that U.S. warfare in Vietnam was a mistake—a point on which most Americans now agree.
Indians profess an inability to understand why they arouse ire among Americans just by being right.
"Being right is bad enough, but being superciliously right is irritating as hell," explains one American official.
It is on such attitudes that great matters of state, of war and peace, often turn. We all ought to hope that these kinds of emotional hangups and petty sensitivities will not get in the way when Mrs. Gandhi and Mr. Nixon attempt to put the two countries on a friendship course that they should have been on all along.