Both India and Pakistan have been untiringly pressing their cause against each other in the capitals of the world's more powerful countries ever since Kashmir brought them to blows. International concern has not always matched their passion or their fears. Yet such is the present tension over East Pakistan that both sides have been trying once more to see what international cards they can play. Mrs Gandhi has been covering western Europe and America; Mr Bhutto has been sounding out the Chinese.

Certainly the arguments have been almost all on Mrs Gandhi’s side; and one of her strongest arguments for tired ears has been that the issue is not simply the old quarrel under a new guise. She has maintained that the crisis which India faces, with an insupportable number of refugees crossing into West Bengal, not to mention the still continuing brutality of Pakistan's repression in East Pakistan, does not allow of any balancing of one country against the other. Pakistan, she says. is the country at fault and international pressure must make it plain.

For all the sympathy she has been able to collect, she has not succeeded in lining up a united front of countries ready to refuse supplies as a way of scotching Pakistan’s fighting capacity. In Washington she has failed to extract any kind of commitment from President Nixon.

Where Mrs Gandhi may find more comfort is in Mr Bhutto's mission to Peking. That Peking should be the only capital to which a Pakistan mission was sent is a sign of how weak Pakistan's case is. That Mr Bhutto should now have left Peking without a communique in his briefcase suggests that the Chinese are still unwilling to commit themselves.

In the speech made by Mr Chi Peng-fei, the acting Foreign Minister, there were indeed some phrases which Mr Bhutto will be able to brandish. But for the most part, China’s reading of the crisis is a very different one, from China’s calculations in the brief war of 1965, and not only because China has notably shifted her international stance since that time. It is probable that Mr Bhutto has been given advice about how peace should be restored in East Pakistan not so far removed from Mrs Gandhi's demands for real political concessions to Bengali feelings.

It might not be too optimistic for Mrs Gandhi to imagine that with Mr Bhutto’s visit to Peking, and her own visits to the four other permanent members' of the United Nations Security Council now being completed in Paris, there is something not so far from a consensus on the part of all five of these powers on the rights and wrongs of the events of the past eight months in East Pakistan. But that will be no comfort while the Pakistan Government labours over political concessions that are pitifully short of what is needed.