LONDON, June 6—Imagine the entire population of New Jersey, seven million people, fleeing the state and taking refuge in New York City and the counties nearby. That thought gives some idea of the dimensions of what is happening now in East Pakistan—except that the refugees are much poorer and the area of India into which they are fleeing is infinitely more desperate than New York.

British sources estimate that be tween four and five million East Pakistanis have crossed into India and that 100,000 more are leaving every day. Before long the total could be seven or eight million.

The refugees are in a country that already has difficulty feeding itself, one afflicted by overpopulation and unemployment. There are no jobs for the refugees, and there is no farm land. They are starting to filter into Calcutta, a city where one million people regularly sleep on the pavement and more millions have no running water or sewage systems.

Public opinion in the West has certainly been slow to react; only now one beginning to feel a sense of urgency in the calls for action from relief agencies and charities. Yet the root elements in the tragedy, the death and destruction in East Pakistan, have been known for many weeks.

Civil and communal war has killed many thousands of civilians. No one will ever know exactly how many, but disinterested observers have put the figure as high as several hundred thousand.

People have killed each other be cause of animosities of race, politics and religion; no community is entirely free of guilt. But the principal agent, of death and hatred has been the Pakistani Army. And its killing has been selective: according to reliable reports from inside East Pakistan, the army's particular targets have been intellectuals and leaders of opinion— doctors, professors, students, writers.

The economy of East Pakistan has been hard hit. The planting cycle for food grains is disturbed. The transportation system, already badly hurt by the flood disaster last fall, has been crippled. Many boats are sunk. The main railway line will take six months to repair, assuming uninterrupted peace.

The human and economic dislocation now threatens to lead to a terrible famine. The Financial Times of Lon don, which is not given to exaggeration, has published an estimate that up to four million people in East Pakistan mast die in the coming months unless emergency relief and reconstruction measures are undertaken.

What can Western countries do to help East Pakistan out of this disaster? As has so often been the case, notoriously in the Nigerian civil war, humanitarian instincts are complicated by politics.

Western governments must naturally want to give assistance in a politically helpful way—one that will hope fully calm the hatreds in East Pakistan, restore the society, open the way for refugees to return. But that surely means an external presence in the area, the handling of relief by some one other than the Pakistani Army— a program not likely to please President Yahya Khan.

The United States and other concerned countries have riot put pressure on Yahya Khan publicly. But there are indications that they have been using privately their leverage as his main sources of central economic aid. Re ports suggest that Yahya Khan will accept some kind of United Nations presence in East Pakistan.

But the West may find that its greater task, its greater responsibility, lies in the long run in India. For in a sense this may become more an Indian than a Pakistani crisis.

The immediate challenge to India is to feed the refugees, protect them from the coming monsoon and prevent epidemics such as the cholera now spreading in the refugee camps. The huge economic cost of these needs can be met in part from outside, but the social and political costs will be borne by India.

Even without the refugees, Calcutta and that whole area of India has been politically troubled, riven by left‐wing factions and violence. The refugees must add appalling strains to an impoverished and tense society. Mrs. Indira Gandhi, who at best faced a pro found task in giving India any hope of progress in the next few years, must now divert much of her energy and her Government's to the refugee problem. She must worry also about an extremist‐led guerrilla movement developing across the border in East Pakistan if the military occupation continues.

In these circumstances, not only con science but political wisdom commends Western help and support for Mrs. Gandhi. The Indians may often be trying to the West, but Mrs. Gandhi's Government is the best hope for stability in Sixth Asia.