INDIA: The Life of the Communist

For sheer hand-wringing distress at Red China’s aggression in the Himalayas, no other group in India can match the Communist Party. Muzzled by their political faith and unable to utter a wholehearted denunciation of Peking’s violations of their own nation’s frontier, the Communists have been publicly rebuked by Prime Minister Nehru, roundly blasted by a clutch of other politicians, including Nehru’s daughter Indira, who has labeled Indian Communists “these parrots whose masters live abroad.” Worse yet, India’s public has become aroused against the Reds. By last week, this combination of pressures had given Indian Communist leadership a clear case of the jitters.

In the steamy southern state of Kerala, Communist Boss E.M.S. Namboodiripad saw his hopes of recapturing the state government go glimmering, admitted that his party’s “refusal to denounce China” would strengthen the hand of his democratic opponents in Kerala’s coming elections. In Bombay state, as the price of a local alliance with their old foes, the Praja Socialists, Red leaders signed a resolution expressing support for “the Prime Minister and the government of India, in defense of the territorial integrity of our great country,” then muttered complex explanations to angry party diehards. Unappeased, Puran Joshi, editor of the party weekly, New Age, refused even to print the resolution to which the Bombay comrades had subscribed.

Would-be moderator in this intraparty fight is India’s No. 1Communist, Ajoy Ghosh, 50, who was in Moscow when

Nehru first announced the Chinese border incursions. After hustling back to India for a top-level party meeting, Ghosh flew off to Peking to beg Mao Tse-tung to be less brutal. Unsuccessful in Peking, Ghosh went back to Moscow to plead for help there, and last week completed his circle tour by scurrying home to New Delhi to try to hold the party together. Best measure of his success so far: postponement of a party central-committee meeting scheduled for this week, presumably to allow time for tempers to cool.

To many Indians, the sight of Communists floundering is a source of malicious merriment. Parodying Nikita Khrushchev’s rasping answer to a question about Hungary during his U.S. visit, a columnist for the Indian Express wondered what the Reds were going to do about “the rat Comrade Mao has thrust down the throat of the Communist Party, and which it can neither spit out nor swallow.” With evident cheerfulness, he added: “There is, at present, great danger that the rat will suffocate the Communist Party of India.”