Correspondents' Correspondence

...A recent conference of Spanish bishops-who are still, on the whole, pro-government-agreed on the "urgent necessity" for labor legislation that would satisfy the "legitimate aspirations of the workers...

...GREEN REVOLUTION New Delhi-to return to India after six years is to be faced with one pleasant surprise after another...

...The budget for fiscal 1971 provides only trifling sums?10 million in grant aid for 10 new communities, less than $4 million in guarantees-but hud officials believe the seed will grow...

...it is now down to 14 per thousand and, since 1964, life expectancy has risen from 47 years to 50...

...While there are riots somewhere in the country almost every day and incipient rebellions in several of the border regions like Nagaland, it is pointed out that India has never had to call a full Army division into a city to restore law and order, nor has an Indian leader ever been so unpopular that he could not visit any major city in the country...

...It also explains why the apparently savage starvation or siege strategy of General Yakubu Gowon (an eminently traditional means of warfare) brought victory in the end...

...An air of extremely busy entre-preneurship...

...But the Soviets, State Department officials say, have made it clear they are only willing to take the diplomatic steps necessary to prevent a "fourth round"-In other words, a U.S.-Soviet confrontation -In the Middle East, thus dooming the talks...

...The sentimental version of this argument ran: Biafra is the first African state to be run by Africans for Africans, and thus, the first truly liberated African state...

...In all probability the new towns will have a double function: They will serve as a laboratory for new ideas, and as a way of draining off some of the future urban growth...

...Woodrow Wyatt, mp, was moved to a slashing attack on the editorial policies of the bbc and the Times (both are run by Catholics...

...What about the population explosion...

...the Chinese may have wanted to counter Russian influence in Nigeria as a whole...

...Biafra will be remembered, first of all, for the horrors and cruelty it has generated (and the Vatican, I fear, cannot so easily shrug off its share of guilt for prolonging this hideous war...

...Congress put it on a progressive dollar-convertible basis...

...The government has built up almost a billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves, including special drawing rights on the International Monetary Fund...

...The how and why of America's involvement in Vietnam is pretty well understood-however one may judge it...

...What they do not point out is that it took the present Administration more than six months to fill some of the key housing positions...

...It appears the bullock cart has been jolted out of its accustomed rut...

...Yet it is well over a year since the Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud) was empowered to insure mortgages on private new town developments and to make planning grants to local governments, and nothing has happened...

...Indeed, most foreign demographers here contend India's population may go as high as 1.3 billion by the year 2000, and that there is no hope whatsoever of keeping it under 1 billion by then...

...That brings us to the secona conundrum: If white intervention under Dr...

...And one can see why...

...And the liberal Catholic monthly Cuadernos para el Didlogo comments, in an unusually outspoken editorial: "Rarely has there been so clear and conclusive a consensus among us...

...As in previous strikes, the workers are demanding better pay and conditions, the reinstatement of victimized leaders, and representative unions...

...I was recently given an entertaining sidelight on them in a letter from southeast England...

...their example stirred up a wave of labor disputes that swept the nation...

...And the Vatican, too, is in hot water: The Pope has appealed to the world to prevent a genocide that never was (was he hoping, perhaps, to redeem the sins of omission of a predecessor, so ruthlessly exposed by Herr Hochhuth...

...most of the rest have been taken over by a state-controlled combine, Hunosa...

...Self-sufficiency" is the goal for the 1973-74 crop year, Patel asserts, and India expects to stop importing U.S...

...The whole question of birth control is now being rethought in India...

...Though strikes are still illegal in Spain, the press is now allowed to report them...

...France has always envied the giant state of Nigeria (greater in population and resources than the whole of French Black Africa...

...The authorties claim to be doing all they can to help miners find other jobs...

...Few people expect the same thing to happen in the immediate future, but as the number of Asturian strikers grows, the banned Socialist unions and workers' commissions (loose alliances of Socialist, Catholic, Communist, and uncommitted workers) tend to become more militant in other areas...

...After 30 years in action, family planning in India is a going concern-the crude birth rate has dropped from 41 to 39 per thousand...

...he anticipates this year's crop will be 105 million tons...

...In the last nine years a third of Asturia's miners have lost their jobs...

...Success has spread rapidly across the Gangetic Plain (roughly following Kim's old Grand Trunk Road), reaching into Raja-sthan, the Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh, and then jumping across much of Bihar to pick up once again near West Bengal, where wheat production has increased tenfold this year...

...This time around, we had the ever-ready O'Brien in the opposite corner-that is, agin the government, like the true son of Erin he is...

...The concern here is that the longer the present no-war, no-peace condition prevails, the easier it will be for extremists such as Fatah leader Yasir Arafat to exert pressure on moderate elements in the Arab world and force their trigger fingers.-b.S.J...

...But the peasants of the poor, bone-dry states on central India's Deccan Plateau are still mired in subsistence farming...

...But the India of the year 2000 probably won't be a very pleasant place to live, even eliminating the tremendous ecological problems from consideration...

...Indeed, one of the terrible ironies of the war is that, had there been such intervention, the fighting would have been over long ago with millions of lives spared...

...Moreover, its chief supplier-through Gabon and the Ivory Coast -was France...

...But with the impending resolution of the White House debate on a formal urban policy and Administration hints of looser monetary controls, the new town programs may be belatedly ready for take-off.-walter R. Gordon...

...It will be remembered, secondly, for the strange bedfellows it made...

...And more than 1 thousand collective labor contracts, covering 3 million workers, are due to be renegotiated before this summer...

...no trace of the old sahibji subservience...

...That, one would think, should have turned him into a Federalist-as it has the great majority of Labor members of Parliament...

...Officials are beginning to concede that their films and propaganda are no match for the pressures on a young girl arriving as a bride in a new village, having to validate her own position by bearing many sons, and as soon as possible...

...This is a strange argument indeed: For the Federals run their show (with British and Soviet material support, but not manpower), and Biafra relied for its foreign support on South Africa, Rhodesia, Portugal, Israel and possibly (through Tanzania) on China...

...Its interest is truly Gaullist-having carved up French Africa into scarcely self-supporting states...

...But more and more supporters of the regime are coming to realize that the sindicatos are an unnecessary source of of strife...

...O'Brien, however, is also a Leftwinger, and Bia-fra found much Leftwing support both in Britain and on the Continent...

...But O'Brien is not only an Irishman and a Catholic, he is a prominent Friend of Africa as well...

...White House aides are putting together the first draft of a broad urban policy, something Daniel P. Moynihan...

...Right-wing Catholics and Left-wing antiracialists have lain down together, and His Holiness the Pope and the Dutch Reformed Church and who knows else joined forces to bless their union...

...Skyscrapers rising in Bombay and Delhi...

...France wishes to make sure that the same happens to British-constructed and British-oriented Nigeria...

...For the first time, thinking people in India apparently have convinced themselves their country will soon be independent, in every sense of the word...

...The unrepresentative and bureaucratic nature of the sindicatos is a constant irritant...

...Despite Moscow's repeated calls for new initiatives, these officials see no chance of the talks being meaningfully revived...

...Now the government is more ready to admit the power of rural India's Kali cult, an animistic version of Hinduism with a heavy emphasis on fertility and procreation...

...In 1950, two-thirds the energy consumed in Spain came from coal...

...hud's shopping list is headed by expanded opportunity to use eminent domain and to extend mortgage guarantees to public as well as private bodies developing new communities...

...And exports rose 13 per cent this year, contributing to the general sense of economic buoyancy...

...A Spaniard who now works there as a translator wrote to tell me that he had received a letter from Spain (forwarded by friends) informing him that he had been "elected" to represent his fellow workers in the tourist industry of the town in which he used to live-five years ago...

...Vice President Agnew made it evident at the time that he approved this approach, though not necessarily the specific proposals...

...This prognosis is predicated upon a continuation of the present 2.5 per cent demographic growth rate, which means the 5 per cent agricultural growth rate would keep well ahead, giving the next generation more than the present subnutritious average intake of 2,100 calories per day per person...

...This is a point that certainly can be argued (as David Ro-bison has in "The Price of One Nigeria," NL, February 2), though it seems to me unquestionable that a Biafran secession would have been disastrous for Africa...

...It was the Asturians who, in 1962, first defied the Franco regime's anti-strike legislation on a massive scale...

...Here, if you like, is the primary ethical problem: White intervention (on either side, provided the other side did not reply in kind) would almost certainly have been more merciful than "leaving the Africans to sort it out...

...the housing shortage splits families whose wage-earner is forced to move to another industrial area...

...And more have died as a result of it, we ought to remember...

...the President's urban adviser, has been urging for several years...

...They blame part of the trouble on tight money, part on the various inadequacies of the more than 30 applications filed by private developers...

...It was therefore felt that the Four Powers must serve as the catalyst for moving the parties in conflict toward a settlement they would ultimately have to work out...

...Except for the egregious Count von Rosen, a Swede, and the Egyptian pilots who flew the Russian migs (who presumably count as Africans), there was no white combatant intervention in the war...

...Nigeria, after all, is a sovereign state, a member of the United Nations, and General Gow-on's favorite bedside reading turns out to be-can you guess?-abraham Lincoln...

...Only six have met hud criteria, and three or four of these are expected to receive aid in the next five months...

...The Biafran cause was, in one sense, very much an Irish cause...

...An intangible sense of a new dynamism, of hope and confidence...

...But British troops were never involved in Nigeria, even as mercenaries, any more than were Soviet troops or, on the opposing side, South African, French, Rho-desian or Portuguese troops...

...And it seems that as long as food production continues to outpace population growth, the lot of the average citizen here is likely to improve...

...Yet even now, when all is over, it is hard to properly fix responsibility...

...It is this factor, of course, that explains the "quick kill" strategy favored by the British, which failed time and again...

...BIG FOUR FAILURE Washington-although Ambassador Charles W. Yost continues to participate in the periodic Big Four talks on the Middle East in Uew York, top State Department officials in Washington now concede that they have been a failure...

...There are 125,000 new entrants into the labor market every week, and the social dislocation threatened by massive unemployment has replaced the threat of famine as India's number one problem...

...The government may have changed, but the regime is essentially the same-and it dare not concede the reforms that really interest the workers: democratic trade-unionism...

...Precisely what part is in doubt, but the alternatives have been narrowed...

...When I first visited India in the fall of 1959, its population was just nearing the 400 million mark...

...Developing new towns, clearly, is a part of the larger plan...

...But one of the miners' big worries this time is the increase in pit closures, and the resulting unemployment...

...What happened to the torpid, complacent, fatalistic, ennervating, familiar India...

...Administration officials grow defensive when pressed about why no large plan has yet been put into effect...

...Previously, the government's main emphasis had been on developing an effective contraceptive delivery system through its health services...

...They may be right, too...

...The cruelty of the Biafran war lay, not in the varieties of its sophistication (as in Vietnam), but rather in its barbarous incompetence and simplicity...

...The most optimistic official projection for the year 2000 is 870 million people, and the official high projection is 1.1 billion...

...Nixon officials also contend that the 1968 Johnson legislation did not give them the proper tools to work with...

...Bipin Patel, Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, told me he believed actual food grain production last year was 5 million tons more than the official estimate of 94.5 million...

...A "new" law governing the sindicatos has been inherited by the present Spanish government from Solis Ruiz, the ambitious Falangist demagogue who was ousted from the Cabinet last fall...

...The upper classes more polite and less friendly...

...PL 480 wheat in 1971 (too expensive, anyway, since 1966, when the U.S...

...Last spring the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy urged that one-fifth this number be housed in 100 new cities of 100,000 each, and 10 new cities of 1 million each...

...Since January 6, the number of As-turians absent from work has fluctuated between 5,000-25,000, and strikes and lockouts have by now occurred in Barcelona, Bilbao, Cadiz, Leon, Madrid, Pamplona, and Seville...

...When I left, following the death of Jawaharlal Nehru in May 1964, it was around 465 million...

...An exhaustive evaluation of the Middle East situation begun under the Johnson Administration and completed last year, they explain, concluded that the Arabs and Israelis could never achieve any sort of peace if left to themselves...

...The present official estimate is 543 million, but India's top demographers privately put the population at closer to 565 million...

...Communications, transportation and increased prosperity in the countryside also mean more drug salesmen reaching the hinterlands, where two or three years ago ddt and antibiotics were unknown...

...The presence of an Airborne Division in Detroit and the tenor of Lyndon Johnson's last few months in office did not go unobserved here...

...Once democracy asserted itself in this sector, it would soon demand a hearing in politics and the press-and with a powerful ally.-ray Alan BRITAIN'S VIETNAM London-as Vietnam has been, ineluctably, America's war, Biafra has been Britain's-or, perhaps, Europe's...

...Many prominent British Catholics have given succor to the Biafran cause (Peregrine Worsthorne in the Telegraph, Hugh Fraser in the House of Commons...

...The problem is to decide what to put in its place...

...Only two Asturian mines still operate profitably...

...The consensus seems to be that India now has the institutional basis for a relatively easy expansion of food production at 5 per cent a year (excepting the occasional monsoon years...

...When Congress passed the Housing Act of 1968, the Johnson people fairly bubbled about the "major breakthrough...

...Current Administration estimates are that metropolitan areas will have to accommodate an additional 100 million people by the end of the century...

...the old superciliousness, born of a nagging inferiority complex, fast disappearing...

...It is all pretty squalid, but the French case does not lack logic...

...Conor Cruse O'Brien was justifiable in Katanga to prevent "Balkanization" (only the extreme Right opposed it at that time), why should it have been less justifiable in Nigeria...

...Not a single mortgage has been insured or new community begun with Federal aid...

...Even members of the mainly handpicked National Assembly-not the boldest body of men in Spain -have proposed several hundred amendments to Solis Ruiz's sindi-cato law...

...But the 870 million figure is based on a zero growth rate, which almost no one believes to be realistically attainable...

...The Israelis may have wanted to counter Moslem-Egyptian influence in the North...

...Yet this is merely the first of many mysteries associated with a war that can only be called atrocious...

...in 1970 the proportion will be 24 per cent, with oil accounting for 50 per cent and hydro-electric power the remainder...

...On the Continent, anti-British sentiment has been strong-So strong that, for example, a scheduled "British Week" in Basel, Switzerland, had to be canceled because of it...

...Down the two coasts there are enclaves of prosperity, Orissa lagging farthest behind...

...Despite a few minor reforms, this law would keep them as firmly under official rule as ever: The head of the organization sindical would continue to be both a government appointee and a member of the Cabinet...

...It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Britain has reaped much the same harvest in Europe as America has in the world at large...

...India's "green revolution" is for real-high yields, double and triple cropping, and a spectacular rise in farm incomes in the northern wheat belt...

...The motives of the first three suppliers are clear enough: The Balkanization of Africa is certainly in their interest...

...Without loss of face (since most members of General Franco's new Cabinet of "technocrats" have little sympathy for the Falange and its myths), the government could either withdraw Solis' law or allow the Assembly to amend it beyond recognition...

...O'Brien added a further slalom performance to his career-which I have no doubt he will take with his customary grace and agility.-john Mander NEW TOWNS Washington-after a great deal of talk during both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, 1970 may finally be the year the Federal government does something about planning the construction of new towns...

...richard Critchfield LABOR PAINS IN SPAIN Madrid-like Americans watching the Dow Jones and Britons tapping their barometers, Spaniards the last few weeks have been keeping a wary eye on the daily totals of striking Asturian miners...

...and these and other problems are exacerbated by the miners' lack of confidence in the government-controlled sindicatos, the only legal unions...

...And Dr...

...Now, however, there is discussion in the White House and at hud about making new towns "one of the major innovations of the Nixon Administration...

...But the crude death rate continues to fall much faster...

...But retraining facilities are poor...

...The White House has not decided whether to push for the requisite legislation...

...But in India, food is politics...

...Motorscooters and fleets of bicycles in the countryside...

...Seventy-five per cent of Biafran Christians were Catholic, proselytized by the Irish Holy Ghost Fathers...

...The official union law has been totally rejected in every part of Spain...

...The lower classes less polite and more friendly...

...At the same time it was recognized that the interests of the U.S., while not identical with Israel's, were nevertheless parallel, and renewal of full-scale warfare in the region could result in an unwanted U.S.-Soviet confrontation...

...Editorials are even being written forecasting the end (but not too soon) of a need for foreign assistance...

...In the opinion of most of the world, though, such intervention would certainly have appeared unjustifiable...