LONDON, December 5.-Suppose that Britain, in the 1930's,
had responded to Hitler's savagery by the early threat
or use of military force instead of appeasement. If the
Nixon Administration had been in power in Washington at
the time it would presumably have sent some official out
to wring his hands in public and charge Britain with
major responsibility for the broader hostilities which
have ensued."

So one must think after the American statement over the
weekend blanking India for the hostilities with
Pakistan. Few things said in the name of the United
States lately have been quite so indecent. The anonymous
state department official who made the comment matched
Uriah Heep in sheer oleaginous cynicism about the facts
of the situation and about our own moral position,
Consider first the immediate origins of this dispute.
They are exceptionally clear as international relations
go.

The military junta that rules Pakistan under President
Yahya Khan held an election, The largest number of seats
was won, democratically, by a Bengali party that favored
effective self-government for East Pakistan. Yahya
thereupon decided to wipe out the result of the election
by force.

Last March West Pakistan troops flew into the East in
large numbers and began a policy of slaughter. They
murdered selected politicians intellectuals and
professionals, then indiscriminate masses. They burned
villages. They held public castrations.

To compare Yahya Khan with Hitler is of course inexact.
Yahya is not a man with a racist mission but a spokesman
for xenophobic forces in West Pakistan. But in terms of
results-in terms of human beings killed, brutalized or
made refugees - Yahya's record compares quite favorably
with Hitler's early years.

The West Pakistanis have killed several hundred thousand
civilians in the East, and an estimated ten million have
fled to India. The oppression has been specifically on
lines of race or religion. The victims are Bengalis or
Hindus, not Czechs or Poles or Jews, and perhaps
therefore less meaningful to us in the West. But to the
victims the crime is the same.

This record has been no secret to the world. First-hand
accounts of the horror inside East Pakistan were
published months ago. The refugees were there in India
to be photographed in all their pitiful misery.

But President Nixon and his foreign policy aides seemed
to close their eyes to what everyone else could see.
Month after month the President said not a word about
the most appalling refugee situation of modern times.
Private diplomacy was doubtless going on, but there was
no visible sign of American pressure of Yahya Khan for
the only step that could conceivably bring the refugees
back-a political accommodation with the Bengalis.

Pakistan's argument was that it was all an internal
affair. Yes, like the Nazi's treatment of German Jews.
But even if one accepts as one must that Pakistan was
bound to defend its territorial integrity, this issue
had spilled beyond its borders. The refugee impact on
India very soon made it clear that the peace of the
whole subcontinent was threatened.

It was as if the entire population of New York City had
suddenly been dumped on New Jersey to feed and clothe-
only infinitely worse in terms of resources available.
Yet when Indira Gandhi went to the capitals of the West
for help in arranging a political solution in East
Pakistan, she got nothing.

The Indians can be sanctimonious. Mrs. Gandhi acts for
political reasons, not out of purity of heart. India has
helped the Bangla Desh guerrillas and, in recent weeks,
put provocative pressure on East Pakistan. Ail true. But
given the extent of her interest and the intolerable
pressure upon her, India has shown great restraint.

After all, India has not intervened in a civil conflict
thousands of miles from her own border. She has not
destroyed one-third of a distant country's forests, or
bombed that land to such a point of saturation that it
is marked by ten million craters. The United States has
done those things and is still doing them: it is in a
poor position to read moral lectures to India.

American policy toward the Indian subcontinent is as
much of a disaster by standards of hard-nosed common
sense as of compassion. India may be annoying and
difficult, but she does happen to be the largest nation
in the world following our notions of political freedom
In position and population she is by far the most
important country of Asia apart from China. To alienate
India-worse yet, to act so as to undermine her political
stability-is a policy that defies rational explanation.