INDIA: The Bobber

In New Delhi last week Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was being hit by friend and foe alike, and his reflexes seemed those of a fighter who has taken too much punishment. At issue was the McMahon Line, the 800-mile border between India and Tibet (see map) drawn 45 years ago at the Simla Conference by Britain’s Sir Arthur Henry McMahon in company with representatives of Tibet and China.

The first blow came from the exiled Dalai Lama, who charged that if the McMahon Line were valid, it must mean that India recognized Tibet as an independent nation, since a Tibetan delegate had signed the agreement. If so, implied the God-King, India had no business trying to block his efforts to get the U.N. to debate Peking’s brutal suppression of the Tibetan revolt.

The second blow came from Red China’s Premier Chou Enlai, who wrote a letter to Nehru flatly declaring the McMahon Line invalid because it was never formally ratified by any Chinese government. Blandly claiming as Chinese some 35,000 square miles of India’s North-East Frontier Agency, including the strongpoint of Longju that has already been captured by Red troops, Chou followed up with the Alice-in-Wonderland charge that India was trying to force Chinese acceptance of the McMahon Line by “military strength.”

The God Brahma. Predictably enough, Nehru took a firm line with the Dalai Lama, scolded him for his assertion of Tibetan independence, and snapped: “No good can come by going to the United Nations . . . Then the Tibetan question immediately becomes even more a part of the cold war than it already is—and everything that becomes part of the cold war becomes more insoluble than ever.”

Far less predictably, Nehru also started out taking a strong line with Chou. He was weary, he said, of forever hearing the Reds accuse others of “imperialism.”

“The Chinese state,” he gibed, “is a great, colossal state. Was it born from the head of Brahma? How did it grow through the ages? By the ability of its people and the conquests of its warriors, of course. In other words, by Chinese imperialism.”

No Time for Bombs. But as always, Nehru found excuses for Red China’s behavior (“Perhaps they have reacted strongly to the asylum we gave the Dalai Lama”). India, he said, was ready to arbitrate certain parts of the McMahon Line “in a spirit of friendship.” When an angry M.P. urged that if the Reds would not get out of Longju they be bombed out, Nehru indignantly rejected the idea, plumped again for “peaceful coexistence.” He was willing, he said, to make Longju a temporary “no man’s land,” if only the Chinese would withdraw.

Even in a nation where pacifism is close to being the state religion, these equivocations were hard to swallow. Coldly, the Times of India warned Nehru: “In the Chinese vocabulary, restraint is considered the equivalent of political weakness”; in Parliament, opposition members cried “Appeasement!” In far-off Manhattan the New York Daily News spoke for more Indians than it knew in a headline:

NEHRU BOBS, WEAVES. BUT WON’T FIGHT.