During a long procedural wrangle at a week‐end session of the United Nations Security Council on the India‐Pakistan war, an African delegate abruptly pierced some consciences. While the Council debated procedure, he reminded his colleagues, people were dying on the Indian subcontinent. They are dying in greater numbers now; and still the Council is blocked, by great‐power rivalry, ideological conflict, hypocrisy and indifference, from taking even a modest first step to end the bloodshed.

Before large‐scale fighting had begun it was difficult enough to grasp the dimensions of the tragedy represented in India by nine million hungry refugees from East Pakistan. If the bombing and shelling and consequent dislocation continue, the fate of most of the nine million will be speedily sealed—and that of other millions of innocents along with them.

Yet the Security Council finds itself immobilized by Soviet vetoes, procedural arguments and vicious invective between China and Russia, India and Pakistan. Russia's Yakov Malik announced in advance of Sunday's voting that he would veto any resolution except his own, a one‐sided blast at Pakistan supported only by Poland But China's contribution to the debate was equally sterile and irrelevant.

The United States sponsored one pertinent resolution—it called for an immediate cease‐fire and mutual troop withdrawals behind the respective borders—and later backed a similar effort by eight other countries. But the standing of the United States had been damaged by a posture almost universally regarded as blatantly pro‐Pakistan.

Behind all the verbal cannonading at the United Nations and elsewhere lie two basic facts. The first that the crisis of the subcontinent was provoked by the Pakistan Government's decision to use force in East Pakistan to abrogate the results of a free election. The second is that India—with a legitimate grievance against Pakistan deriving from the unmanageable flood of refugees—has damaged its case and forfeited much of the goodwill it had enjoyed by deliberately choosing exploit the crisis by an aggressive war in order dismember Pakistan.

If the Security Council had given up the name‐calling and a futile effort to apportion blame and started from the sure knowledge that both parties are major offenders against the peace in Asia, it might have headed off what could become one of the great human tragedies of tragic century. Shunting the problem to the floor of the General Assembly is a lamentable and probably useless resignation of responsibility.