INDIA: Anchor for Asia

INDIAAnchor for Asia

When India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru needs to relax, he stands on his head. This is not the exotic mysticism of the fabulous East but a practical way to drive off fatigue and make up for lack of sleep. Last week, as Nehru left New Delhi for Washington on one of the century’s most important visits of state, his secretary discussed head-standing with U.S. newsmen: “Perhaps the Prime Minister will demonstrate this for your President Truman.”

America had a lot of other things to learn about Asia’s key man. Nehru has been a somewhat nebulous figure, graceful and great, “a jewel among men” as his master Mahatma Gandhi said, but vaguely seen and known. Now, after two years as Prime Minister of free India, he is emerging in sharp and colorful detail. The cultured patriot with the Cambridge accent, luminous eyes and magnetic smile who spent 13 of his 60 years in British jails has become the Orient’s unoriental, supercharged public executive.

Nehru has a lot to learn about America, too. “Most of my impression of America,” he says, “has come from reading.” A culling of his voluminous written words indicates that he has simply never given the subject much thought. As a British university man, he has perhaps looked down snobbishly at American deficiency in culture. As a sentimental socialist, he has ticked off the U.S. as unrivaled in technology but predatory in its capitalism.

Now, events in Asia and the world over are making him reconsider. India’s leader could use some U.S. help to lift up his nation. “I am not going to that great and powerful country with a message to teach,” he told Bombay officials last week. “I wish to learn what I think will be beneficial to India.”

Said a Delhi wag: “Two powerful personalities who know very little about each other are now colliding. The impact, on America and on Nehru, should be terrific.”

A Farewell. Nehru’s leave-taking from Bombay was such a scene as only an Eastern country in transition could stage. A harsh afternoon sun beat down on the airfield as the Prime Minister arrived, perspiring in his brown achkan (neck-high jacket) and white salwars (jodhpur-like pants). A small array of dignitaries, students and plain curious citizens waited near the runway.

Nehru had ten minutes before the London-bound airliner took off. Flanked by an admiral and a general, he approvingly reviewed an honor guard of the Indian navy. Only the day before, dedicating a new national defense academy at Poona, the Prime Minister, as a former believer in passive resistance, had pronounced it “odd” that “we who for generations have talked about . . . and practiced nonviolence should now be glorifying our Army, Navy and Air Force. Though it is odd, yet it simply reflects the oddness of life. Though life is logical, we have to face all contingencies, and unless we are prepared to face them, we will go under.”

As he strode toward the plane’s ramp after the review, the Prime Minister was halted by a shaggy sadhu (holy man), black-bearded and maned, who thrust a bouquet of chrysanthemums into his hand. Graciously, Nehru took the gift. On the ramp’s top, he turned and clasped hands in a farewell namasthe. “Goodbye and good luck,” he called.

The crowd clapped enthusiastically for the man who has no peer in popularity through all of India. As the plane winged away, a student voiced the national confidence: “America is a capitalist country, but Nehru will be careful to keep us out of entanglements.”

A Looksee. No one in the U.S. wanted to entangle Jawaharlal Nehru and his 355,000,000 countrymen. There was, however, a strong impulse to disentangle him and his intellectual fellows from some of their clinging suspicions of the U.S. and its motives.

With China lost to Communism, the free world needed a new anchor in Asia. Whether India could play that role depended largely on the chance of much closer understanding and cooperation between India and the U.S., a land almost unknown to nine-tenths of Nehru’s countrymen. Washington was taking careful account of the Prime Minister’s longstanding prejudice and his people’s instinctive suspicion of the “imperialist West.”

Unless the distinguished guest so requested, there would be no conferences of high state, no thought of pressure or promises, no hint of alliances or pacts, no talk of loans or investments. In a packed 3½weeks’ schedule, Nehru would speed from Washington to San Francisco, look in at New York and other cities, speak at the universities of Chicago, California and Wisconsin, inspect farms and factories, Mount Vernon, Hyde Park, the National Gallery of Art, TVA and White Sulphur Springs. The big emphasis would be on getting him acquainted with the productive panorama of U.S. life.

People’s Father. This is Nehru’s first trip to the U.S., although he has traveled much and is no stranger to Western ways. A man who likes to wear a Homburg, Nehru has preferred Western dress since his British schooldays (Harrow as well as Cambridge). This preference is one of the contradictions which once made him write of himself: “I have become a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.”

In Delhi or touring his India, Nehru sticks to salwars, a homespun shirt and a white Gandhi cap for his high bald crown. He is Panditji—literally, Mister Scholar —to his people. To most of them his Cambridge speech is unintelligible, nor is he himself quite at ease in the Hindu vernaculars. The mass of Indians cannot read his prolific English writings. Nonetheless, he has followed in Gandhi’s footsteps as a popular national hero.

Partly this is because Gandhi blessed him. Partly it has to do with a tradition of Indian life since Buddha—the imaginative appeal of a highborn Brahman, such as Nehru, giving up a life of ease to join a popular cause such as liberation from British rule. Finally, the largely illiterate masses of India, not yet beyond a feudal horizon, still look up to their ruler as a child looks to its parent.

The Western intellectual in Nehru grows impatient and often irritable over dependence. The East in him responds intuitively. Emotionally, he plays to the hilt the role of father to his people.

Ordinary folk have overwhelming faith that their Prime Minister will solve not only national but also personal problems. They collect on his lawn every morning, and usually get to hand him their petitions. Once, after he spoke in a village near Delhi, a woman rushed up with a note informing him that her husband had treated her shabbily and intended to marry again. Would the Prime Minister, from the speaker’s platform, ask her husband to cancel his marriage and mend his ways? Regretfully, Nehru refused.

People’s Good. He is stern as well as loving. His face looks down from posters, exhorting the people to put a stop to bribery: “Cast aside these vile practices. The giver is just as guilty as the receiver.” Once he berated some refugees who gathered on his lawn in an unruly plea for relief; then he let them encamp under his window. Next morning, after a sleepless night, Nehru contritely promised to explore their grievances. In 1947, after appealing to Delhi’s citizens to open their doors to homeless Hindus from Pakistan, he put up more than a dozen families in his official residence. They stayed nine months.

On a tour through the villages not long ago, Nehru was supoosed to unfurl the national tricolor at a public meeting. Something went wrong with the pulley, and the flag would not unfurl. The Prime Minister tugged hard, waxing more & more furious. He summoned the organizer of the meeting, a sheepish-looking yokel. “Can’t this village even fly the nation’s flag efficiently?” Nehru railed. “I will wait here until I am able to unfurl the flag on that mast.” He did, and missed lunch in the process. But at last the pulley was repaired and the flag unfurled. Nehru departed growling: “I must suffer for your inefficiency.”

People’s Example. No Nehru characteristic is more striking than his determination to set a personal example for his people, to teach them face to face, to guide every detail of their new national life.

The Prime Minister is up at dawn, uses three offices (in the Constituent Assembly building, at the Foreign Ministry, in his home), will stick to desk work all day, then go through a barrage of social engagements, including dinner, then stay up until the small hours dictating to stenographers and lying in his charpoy (Indian string bed) to scan a day’s bundle of news clippings. He drives himself equally hard, and much more spectacularly, when he gets away from offices and desks.

During the communal riots in Delhi, a Moslem restaurateur saw a fellow Moslem slaughtered in front of the shop. He went to the phone and got Nehru directly. “Wait ten minutes!” cried the Prime Minister. “I’ll be right down.” In ten minutes, Nehru was on the scene with truckfuls of police. From the middle of the street, bent over a map of the district, he directed the cleanup of looters.

During the Asian Relations Conference of 1947, when the audience became noisy and unruly, Nehru descended from the speaker’s stand, shoved down people in the front rows until the crowd calmed down. Then he got back on the platform and listened to Gandhi make a speech on nonviolence.

The drive to do everything^ himself has become almost a nervous habit. At public meetings the Prime Minister will fussily arrange tables, adjust lamps, lower microphones. It led him last winter, at the wedding of his niece Tara Pandit, impulsively to pick up a knife to cut the wedding cake. The bride’s startled mother cried: “Brother, what are you doing? You aren’t the bride?” While the guests tittered, the abashed Nehru retreated to another room.

On his recent Kashmir trip (TIME, Oct. 10), Nehru jammed this schedule into a half day: 1) a ceremonial river procession; 2) an address to the University of Jammu & Kashmir; 3) a one-hour speech at a mass meeting; 4) an appearance at a physical-culture display; 5) the judging of a baby show; 6) the refereeing of a poetry contest.

Nehru, a widower since 1936, is essentially a lonely man. His only child, daughter Indira, acts as his hostess as well as companion on many trips. She must, however, divide her loyalties: her Parsi husband Feroze Gandhi runs Luck-now’s daily National Herald, which Nehru founded, but which now lambasts his government and frequently follows the Communist line. Indira’s two children are a true comfort to their grandfather, who relaxes by romping with them and taking them along on trips.

Once Nehru’s father, the redoubtable lawyer Pandit Motilal Nehru, was a pillar on which he leaned. So, too, were the Congress Party elders, from Gandhi down, who favored him as the Mahatma’s heir apparent. His father and most of the Congress elders have passed away, leaving Nehru bereft, as his younger sister, Mrs. Krishna Hutheesingh observes, of the psychological comfort of “someone to look up to.” He has turned more & more to his old ties with Britain.

His closest friends now are in Delhi’s foreign colony. Last winter he inaugurated the capital’s Cambridge Association. It is said in the capital that it is more desirable now, in high government circles, to have a British university degree than ever it was during the time of the British Raj.

Behind Nehru and his people lies a hard climb—the long and bitter struggle up from colonial status to independence. Before them rises a still harder climb—the complex, often confusing, always uncertain path toward the strength that will keep India free.

Nehru describes himself as a democrat and a socialist. His socialism seems more an emotion than a doctrine, springing from his hatred of capitalist imperialism. One of Nehru’s younger ex-comrades. Jai Prakash Narain. who has left Congress to help build up India’s weak but willing Socialist Party, has said: “I have never been able to find out just what Nehru’s socialism means.”

Yet in the early days of India’s independence. Socialists found no cause to quarrel with Nehru’s position. The Prime Minister was a staunch supporter of nationalization of industry. His government loudly proclaimed, in effect, that the new India would never let foreign capital, however needed, get a stranglehold on Indian production. Its policy would be one of cautious scrutiny of every proposed foreign investment. Meanwhile, boldly and belligerently, the Indian government itself “must play a progressively active role in industrial development.”

The threat of nationalization had a quick and distressing effect; it dried up new investments by India’s own capable private enterprisers. Industrialists like J.R.D. Tata, whose family founded Asia’s greatest steel plant at Jamshedpur. no longer had an incentive to promote new enterprise. And American capital, which some Indians mistakenlv believed was greedily hovering to exploit them, just didn’t care to risk its money under hostile restrictions.

Indian production, which must expand if India is to be strong and if her people are to live better, stood relatively still. Nehru’s dream of big projects—huge dams, vast hydroelectric stations, etc.—began to fade. Last April the Prime Minister redefined his government’s attitude. He was much less doctrinaire. Foreign capital, he said, would get “national treatment,” that is, equal consideration with Indian capital. A conference in an attempt to draft a U.S.-India commercial treaty is still dragging along.

Credit Side. In spite of such disappointments Nehru and his Congress Party can point to substantial achievements in two years of independence.

Most impressive has been the halt of communal violence which ravaged the country in 1947. During the hectic riot months Nehru toured the bloody areas in a jeep, sometimes riding with Liaquat Ali Khan, minister of Pakistan. At considerable risk, Nehru strode into murderous mobs and quieted them. In one town Moslems told him that Sikhs were plotting a massacre. Nehru went to the Sikh quarter, rounded up the leaders, warned them. “If you harm one single hair on the head of one Moslem. I will send in a tank and blast you to bits.”

The shock of Gandhi’s assassination sharply checked the communal killing. Last week Moslems celebrated the festival of Bakr-‘id without molestation from Hindu fanatics. In tactfully concealed places, some even practiced korbanji (sacrifice of cows), which used to inflame Hindus more than anything else. Ironically, however, relations with Pakistan have worsened, especially over the question of Kashmir, which is Nehru’s ancestral home and which he intends to hold by force against Pakistan if need be.

After communal harmony came other gains—elimination of the princely states, and legal abolition of untouchability (still a gesture on paper since untouchability is deeply rooted in social and religious mores). There are plans for land reform. Gandhi, who differed profoundly from Nehru in this respect, distrusted the West’s machine culture. He wanted India to stay with a cottage handcraft economy, and his symbol was the anachronistic spinning wheel. Nehru has indefatigably encouraged scientific schools, persistently planned a big industrial future. He is a lover of mechanical gadgets: the one he delights in most is a transparent plastic phone, revealing the works inside, on his Delhi desk. Of cottage industry. Nehru says: “Alter all you can’t build a locomotive in a cottage.” Locomotives are very much a part of the India of Nehru’s dreams. Debit Side. The biggest failure since independence has been the decline of the Congress Party. With its historic mission of liberation achieved, the party has lost its revolutionary elan. Its members, once dedicated to a national crusade, now scramble for place and patronage, squabble for favors and perquisites.

Throughout India there is widespread administrative corruption and bumbling, especially in the provinces. Nepotism, an ancient Oriental custom, reaches everywhere ; as an example in the highest place, the Prime Minister’s critics point to the elevation of his elder sister, Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, first to the ambassadorship in Moscow, then in Washington.

Mrs. Pandit has a patrician approach. It was a little time, after she arrived in Washington, before she discovered that she did not have full access to the White House and would have to deal with the State Department. Last week, asked by newsmen what her brother’s visit might do for Indo-American relations, she snapped back: “The Prime Minister has not shared his mind with me, nor is it customary for a prime minister who desires to have secret talks to discuss them with his ambassador. And you can quote me on that.

“I sometimes think the American public doesn’t understand very much about diplomacy. These things are not discussed with ambassadors—and they cannot be discussed with the press. And you can quote me on that, too.”

A Vital Force? Nehru has called for a Congress revitalization, but the reaction has been sluggish. Able Sardar Valkbhbhai Patel, Deputy Prime Minister and Nehru’s strong right hand in administration and politics, is too ill and old (74) to beat a new party drum. Some disillusioned Congress followers have turned to the Socialist Party, which has just begun an organizational drive in the villages. Many more, especially from the inflation-harried middle class of clerical workers and small merchants, are turning to the extremists.

The Communists, numerically weak and partially outlawed, are now promoting underground terror and sabotage, agitating even in the jails where Nehru and his Congress comrades once languished. On the far right loom the Hindu chauvinists, the Hindu Mahasabha. Beside them, noisier, more militant and dangerous, are the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—literally, Organization for Service of the Nation). They spawned Gandhi’s assassin; they could still undo the communal peace so painfully won.

Despite such political and ideological unrest, Nehru insists: “People do not believe in ‘isms.’ They believe in their own individual life . . . India is fundamentally stable because its peasants are better off than before. Industrial workers are, in some cases, a little better off and in some cases a little worse off. But, in any case, not discontented. But the middle class is much worse off and that is the danger to our stability.”

Because it is far more to his taste than domestic politics or economics, Nehru has kept the foreign affairs portfolio in his own hands.

He has always cherished a sweeping vision of India in the vanguard of an awakened Asia. He long has been in correspondence with other Asiatic leaders. He met Mohamed Hatta, Indonesia’s Premier, at an anti-imperialist rally in Brussels 20 years ago, has been writing to him ever since. He is a close friend and backer of Burma’s Premier Thakin Nu.

In the somber struggle between world freedom and world Communism, Nehru has professed to see only a big power rivalry from which India should stay aloof. In April 1948 he charted a “Third Force” course:

“We shall take care not to align ourselves with one group or another … remaining neutral on those [questions] not affecting us directly . . . India obviously cannot join either of the two blocs . . . What she desires is an understanding between Russia and the U.S.”

In his autobiography, written during the early ’30s in British jails, Nehru gave unstinted praise to the “great Lenin” and the “great new [Soviet Russian] world.” His sentiments may have changed since then. He has come to deplore Communist methods. As Prime Minister, he has sanctioned stiff police action against India’s Reds, jailing hundreds of them for terror and sabotage. He has (somewhat quaintly) denounced Indian Reds as “the greatest enemy to the cause of Communism.”

Outlook. This is how Nehru views specific areas of conflict in Asia:

China is lost to Communism. “The Nationalist government,” says Nehru, “had some good elements but also some bad ones. Its failure to get rid of the bad elements was its downfall.” Delhi will follow London’s lead in the matter of recognizing the Chinese Communist People’s Republic.

Indo-China does not want the French, with or without former Emperor Bao Dai. Nehru regards Bao Dai as a puppet of the French, and he would rather take a reluctant chance on Communist Ho Chi Minh than back the French. But, under British and American persuasion, Delhi is keeping mum about Indo-China.

Indonesia must have independence.

Burma has shown governmental weakness because its democratic leadership was liquidated. India has done all it can to strengthen Thakin Nu’s government.

Power & Persuasion. The overall answer to Asia’s crisis, in Nehru’s view, is not an Asian alliance against Communism. Ideological and military defense are not enough. The basic battle must be fought on the economic and political front. Communism can be defeated only after colonialism goes, and after the living standards of Asia’s masses are raised. This is where American abundance and generosity could come in. Nehru recognizes the need for U.S. food, capital and technical aid in India and elsewhere. It would not be wise to wait until Communism in Southeast Asia reached the Chinese or Greek stage where it must be fought with guns.

This week the U.S. seemed inclined to go a long way toward the support of nationalism in Southeast Asia—provided it was not of the Red variety. But the U.S. was dubious of Nehru’s Third Force position, his pan-Asiatic leanings, his inclination to see the U.S. and Russia as equally bad imperialist powers. In Washington’s view, the problem was to persuade Jawaharlal Nehru that there was only one aggressive power design in the world—the Communist—and everybody else was in the same non-Communist boat.

“The real nub of this business,” said one Washington hand last week, “is for Nehru to see the country. If we are as good as we think we are, he ought to like us for ourselves.”