INDIA: You Want to Bet?

Signs of trouble flapped in the breeze when 4,000 students gathered in the textile town of Ahmedabad last week to hear Prime Minister Nehru make a speech. They carried black flags—a traditional advance warning that the audience was not going to like the speech, whatever it said. The Gujarati-speaking students were sparkplugs of the movement opposing merger with the more numerous Marathas in the new bilingual state of Bombay.

“We want a Gujarat state!” they chanted as Nehru prepared to begin. The Prime Minister tried to banter with them. “I detect a sort of mild fever here.” The chant persisted, so Nehru dug in. “The bilingual state of Bombay will come into being on November 1, and there is no power on earth which can flout the decision of Parliament,” said he. From the audience came the roar: “It will not happen!” “You want to bet?” shouted Nehru, his face taut.

That did it. The students waved their flags and cried in unison: “We want Greater Gujarat!” Some rushed the platform, only to be repelled by police wielding lathis. “This is the law of the jungle!” Nehru shouted above the melee. “You are monkeys!”

Sweat pouring down his face, Nehru tried again and again to get back to his speech. The well-organized students hooted him down. The Prime Minister abandoned his text. “You have no guts. This is fascism! Communism is its brother. Before all this, Gujarat is a small problem. This tendency is suicidal.” The booing persisted. Nehru shouted: “You know what would happen if you did this in China? You know what happened in Poland recently? You want India to shape the way you have behaved? Juvenile delinquents!” Eighty-two minutes after he had started talking, Nehru gave up. It was the worst heckling he had met in nine years as leader of independent India. But there was consolation for Nehru and his Congress Party in the fact that in the new state of Bombay, the Marathas stand solidly for Congress, giving Nehru a statewide majority. What the demonstration underlined for Nehru, however. was the real challenge of India’s thousands of high-school and university students. Frustrated, their future inhibited, by India’s mounting unemployment, they dabble in politics for lack of other preoccupations, are easy prey for anyone who wants to exploit their eagerness to participate in a new India in which they have yet to find their place.

Nehru and his party fared better last week in another of India’s new states. In the northwest prairie state of Punjab, Tara Singh, 71, the white-bearded leader of India’s 6,000,000 Sikhs, abandoned his fight for a state of Sikhistan, and ordered his 36-year-old Akali Party of bearded, sword-wearing zealots to join the Congress Party. Henceforth, said Masterji Singh, Akali will stick to religious, economic and cultural matters only. His admonition to his Sikhs, traditionally the great warriors of India: “Girdle your loins. Buckle your sword-hilted belts. Shave no more. Visit our temples regularly, and be virile Sikhs again.”