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With Russia lined up behind India, China supporting Pakistan and the U.S. also leaning sharply toward Pakistan, no one wanted to risk a session that would dissolve into a sulfurous shouting match. Nonetheless, at week's end, the 15-member Security Council met to take up the problem.
Preserving Leverage. In Washington, Secretary of State William Rogers canceled a scheduled trip to Iceland. After huddling with State Department advisers and conferring by telephone with Richard Nixon at the President's Key Biscayne retreat in Florida, Rogers announced his decision late last week to take the issue to the U.N. "The U.S. hopes that the Council can take prompt action on steps which could bring about a ceasefire, withdrawal of forces and an amelioration of the present threat to international peace and security," he said. But no one was optimistic about its outcome—and rightly so.
U.S. Ambassador George Bush introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire, an immediate withdrawal of armed personnel by both sides, and the placement of observers along the borders. The proposal won eleven votes, with two abstentions (Britain and France) and two nays (the Soviet Union and Poland). It was the veto by the Soviet Union's Yakov Malik, who blamed "Pakistan's inhuman repression" for the conflict, that killed the measure.
In any event, the Administration's decision to get involved in the situation was belated at best. Seeking to pre serve its leverage with Yahya in hopes of inducing him to restrain his troops, the U.S. managed only to outrage India, which felt among other things that it had become the pawn in the Administration's move to use Pakistan as the bridge for Nixon's detente with Peking.
Two Sides. At week's end, the U.S. seemed determined to alienate New Delhi even further with a harsh State Department declaration that in effect officially blamed India for the war on the subcontinent and failed even to mention the brutal policies pursued by the Pakistani military regime. "We believe," the statement said, "that since the beginning of the crisis, Indian policy in a systematic way has led to perpetuation of the crisis, a deepening of the crisis, and that India bears the major responsibility for the broader hostilities which have ensued." The statement was cleared with the President, one high official stressed.
Clearly, there were at least two sides to the conflict, and the U.S.'s blatant partiality toward Pakistan seemed both unreasonable and unwise. India has legitimate grievances: the cost of caring for 10 million refugees, $830 million by the end of March; the threat of large-scale communal turmoil in the politically volatile and hard-pressed state of West Bengal, where the bulk of the refugees have fled; the presence on Indian soil of large numbers of guerrillas who could become a militant force stirring up trouble among India's own dissatisfied masses; and finally, the prospect of a continued inflow of refugees so long as the civil war continues.