SOUTHEAST ASIA: Five Easy Steps

While eight nations met in Manila and signed a mutual defense pact, while Attlee and his band of traveling Laborites padded about Communist China, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sat in the wings, grumbling softly. But last week the Asian stage was clear of intruders at last, and Pandit Nehru stepped forth to tout his own magical formula for getting peace in our time.

First volunteer to step up from the audience was Indonesia’s Premier Sastroamidjojo, currently Nehru’s favorite Asian friend because Indonesia was the only nation at the Colombo meeting last April to agree that the tired old wolf, Colonialism, was more terrifying than the bumptious new tiger, Communism.

Nehru himself went to the New Delhi airfield one day last week to meet Premier Sastroamidjojo, treated him to a bigger welcoming crowd than Chou En-lai had rated, and weighed him down with garlands and praise. Proudly, Nehru expounded his “Five Principles” for Asian peace, terms he had insisted on incorporating in the Tibet treaty concluded with

Red China: 1) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; 2) mutual nonaggression; 3) noninterference in each other’s internal affairs; 4) equality and mutual benefit; 5) peaceful coexistence. Did not Premier Sastroamidjojo think these were far better than Manila-type alliances with white men? Sastroamidjojo certainly did. “Peace in our part of the world cannot be assured by military pacts, such as that recently concluded at Manila,” he told the Indian Parliament. “There is a better way to preserve peace—by cooperation and coexistence.”

Nehru’s plan is a series of bilateral non-aggression pacts between Red China and other Asian countries, seemingly a harmless notion. But such pacts would exclude from Asia the protective power of the West, because membership in Nehru’s system involved a commitment not to join in other alliances. It would prevent China’s more nervous neighbors from joining together in self-protection, leave the Communists free to pick off, one by one, in the classic totalitarian manner, each nonaggressive neighbor.

Such a prospect did not bother Nehru. The pledge of good will was the thing, he insisted. “Even though there may be some evil behind it, saying the right thing and trying to act up to it will gradually do away with that evil in the mind,” explained the Prime Minister. To push his Five Principles, Nehru will soon take off for Peking to see Mao Tse-tung. On his way, he will display his nonaggression samples to Burma’s Prime Minister U Nu in Rangoon, also stop in Hanoi (the Communist Viet Minh will be installed there by that time) in the hope of seeing Ho Chi Minh.