INDIA: Marching Through Kashmir

When Jawaharlal Nehru visits the U.S. next week he will doubtless get the welcome appropriate to a national liberator and the Premier of the world’s second most populous country. Yet no matter how the motorcycles’ sirens scream or the ticker tape flutters, his U.S. reception will not be a patch on the welcome he got two weeks ago in his ancestral home, Srinagar.

The Jhelum River is the main thoroughfare of Srinagar, beautiful capital of Kashmir. For 2½ hours Nehru rode triumphantly on its muddy stream. The city’s carpenters had fashioned for him a 50-ft. barge caparisoned with gold brocade and Persian carpets, and propelled by oarsmen in white uniforms and crimson turbans. Nehru sat on a thronelike platform. At his feet played his two small grandsons, wearing Gandhi caps just like grandpa. Beside him sat quiet Karan Singh, Kashmir’s powerless yuveraja (prince), and tall Sheikh Mohamed Abdullah, Kashmir’s Prime Minister, real boss and Nehru’s agent in the struggle with Pakistan over possession of Kashmir.

Petals & Kisses. As the barge plied upriver, hundreds of shikaras (gondolas) milled around; their jampacked passengers wanted a good look, and they pelted Nehru with flower petals. Police in speedboats dashed back & forth, keeping shikaras at safe distance.

On the Jhelum’s steep banks thousands of Srinagar citizens watched the procession, occasionally set off firecrackers. Carefully coached schoolchildren shouted “Jawaharlal Nehru Zindabad!” (Long live Jawaharlal Nehru) and “Sher-i-Kashmirl” (Long live the Lion of Kashmir—Sheikh Abdullah). Merchants took advantage of a good opportunity, strung their rugs from house windows for all to see and buy; some erected huge banners across the river, with slogans like “Welcome from Ali Mohamed—best Persian and Kashmiri carpets.”

At procession’s end, Nehru stepped from his barge to an automobile and sped off to a guest house. Along the way he was serenaded by a volunteer band which seemed to know only one tune—Marching Through Georgia.

Tents & Portents. Underway in Srinagar was a convention of Sheikh Abdullah’s Kashmir National Conference Political Movement, which has been running the Indian-occupied part of Kashmir ever since New Delhi sent troops into the region two years ago this month. As 650 national conference delegates tented on the maharaja’s once inviolable polo field, a five-man U.N. commission quietly pulled out of the maharaja’s riverside guesthouse and left town. It was bound for Geneva to prepare a report on its failure to win an agreement between India and Pakistan on Kashmir.

The commission’s final gesture, an arbitration proposal backed by the U.S. and Britain, had been accepted by Pakistan, rejected by India. Abdullah’s delegates passed a resolution denouncing the “arbitration offer sponsored by President Truman and Prime Minister Attlee” as “yet another device to deny freedom to the people of Kashmir.” Nehru told them: “My anxiety has always been for a fair and impartial plebiscite.” There was, however, a noticeable lessening of Indian enthusiasm for a plebiscite. Instead, the Indian press trotted out the old charge that Pakistan had entered Kashmir as a military aggressor and ought to be punished as such. Abdullah told the convention: “We want to tell the whole world that Kashmir has decided, whatever difficulties may arise, we will always be with India.”

Privately, he gave foreign newsmen his idea of a fair plebiscite: “The Security Council should give us control of all Kashmir. After that, if you wish, we will have our own referendum.”

All the portents Indicated that India considered that the battle for Kashmir had been won—and that India intended to keep the prize.

Back in New Delhi at week’s end, Nehru said that the U.S.S.R.’s atomic discovery may help prevent war. “The more terrible the dangers of war,” Nehru explained, “the more the people should see the folly of it and avoid it. But people do not always behave logically, of course.

“Personally, I don’t believe there is any chance of a world war in the near future. The only thing I am afraid of is the psychology of blind fear which is gripping people all over the world.”