Four weeks ago, as the Yugoslav Army poured into Kosovo to attack rebel forces, NATO warplanes began a series of air attacks designed to cripple the Yugoslav war machine. This was justified by pointing to President Milosevic's record of supporting the murder and ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Given Milosevic's history of perpetrating mass slaughter, it wasn't difficult to imagine what lay in store for Kosovo's civilians.

And what was India's reaction? Prime Minister Vajpayee declared that no country had the right to be the world's policeman and deplored the attackssaying "such actions....violate the independence and sovereignty of a nation". He suggested that the UN was the appropriate forum to resolve the Kosovo issue and the major opposition parties agreed.

The irony of this stand is obvious. While India in 1971 believed that ending the mass murder of Bengali civilians was more important than preserving Pakistan's sovereignty, India now implies that the ethnic cleansing of unarmed Kosovars is less important than maintaining Yugoslavia's sovereignty.

Try another analogy. In December 1978, the Vietnamese army stormed across Cambodia (then called Kampuchea) and evicted the murderous Khmer Rouge from power. The attack was aimed primarily at eliminating Cambodia as a military threat to Vietnam, but it also helped end the genocide of more than a million Cambodians. Driven by the Cold War, the United States, China and other Asian countries condemned the Vietnamese invasion and supplied military aid to the Khmer Rouge and its noncommunist allies. The idea was to pin downthe Vietnamese army in its own Vietnam, so to speak.

India's response? Though the Janata government remained neutral through the episode, the Congress government in July 1980 recognised the new Cambodian government of Heng Samrin. In theory, this was a transgression of Cambodia's sovereign rights since the Heng Samrin regime had been installed by a foreign invasion force. Yet India took a stand opposed to the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

In spite of widespread opposition from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the We-st, India argued that the Heng Samrin was the de facto ruler of Cambodia and that the poor humanitarian record of the Khmer Rouge precluded any other decision.

No doubt India was also looking out for its strategic interests, since the Khmer Rouge was allied with India's rival China. But the main point is that the Vietnamese violation of Cambodian sovereignty was acceptable on humanitarian grounds. This is comparable to the military campaign against Yugoslavia.

None of thisis to suggest that NATO's interests are as pure as driven snow, or that the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army is populated by angels. Croatia's President Tudjman is at least as accomplished an ethnic cleanser as is Milosevic, yet the United States helped train his army to retake the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995 and to cleanse it of Serbs.

The Kosovo Liberation Army in turn consists of militants who actively strove to ignite the standoff with Milosevic and to provoke a harsh Yugoslav crackdown. But the point is that the armoured assault on Kosovo on March 21 was initiated by Milosevic, and that NATO's attacks have widespread Kosovar support. NATO's imperfections pale in significance before Milosevic's record of aiding ethnic cleansing.

So why is the Indian government outraged at the NATO air campaign? We know that the prime minister has spoken of preserving Yugo-slavia's sovereignty. But we also know that India has in the past overlooked the principles of sovereignty for humanitarian reasons. India do-esnot always abhor the violation of state sovereignty. What India fears is American power.

The United States today is the world's sole superpower, and acts like one. It bullies, cajoles, bribes and bombs with impunity. The death of the Soviet Union has eliminated the one force that could have kept the US in check. Time and again, the sole superpower has launched air attacks and cruise missiles at targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Bosnia and, now, Yugoslavia. If these actions are legitimised, might not the United States intervene in Kashmir some day?

A related concern involves the selective nature of American humanitarian intervention. The United States did nothing when Hutu fanatics exterminated close to a million Tutsi and Hutu Rwandans in 1994. Yet the murder of a few hundred Kosovars sparks NATO's largest air operation ever. Although the ethnic cleansing the Yugoslav security forces are currently engaged in -- defined as the use of murder and other forms of violence to force members of a particularethnicity out of a territory -- is unpleasant and barbaric, this pales in comparison with the slaughter in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.

These are both legitimate questions, but they elide the main point. First, the linkage between Kosovo and Kashmir is not automatic. The Balkan conflict is of immediate concern to America's NATO allies. Media images of genocide and of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans have profoundly shaped Western public opinion, and support for military action is considerable. Kashmir, on the other hand, is important neither for the United States nor for the Western public. The scale of human rights violations in Kashmir has been much smaller and India, unlike Yugoslavia, is a democracy where minority rights are protected. The United States did little to intervene when violence in Kashmir was peaking in the early 1990s, and it is unlikely to do much today.

Second, whether or not the West intervened in other genocides is not germane to the primary aim of stopping Milosevic. Theslaughter in Bosnia may not fit the strict definition of genocide, but the death toll there of about 200,000 brings it awfully close. Milosevic's Bosnian allies participated enthusiastically in much of the killing. Given his record, we could not have expected anything but the worst from Milosevic in Kosovo. Whether NATO's members are saints or sinners, we must judge their actions by their consequences for Kosovo's civilians. That, at least, was India's stand concerning Bangladesh and Cambodia.

The writer is a research scholar in Columbia University