INDIA: A Rise of Voices

Throughout India last week there was an increasingly articulate protest against the leadership—or lack of it—of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

A year ago, when Nehru talked of stepping down from office because he was getting “flat and stale” and querulous, his ruling Congress Party begged him to remain at the helm. Congressmen cried: “Panditji, you are leaving us orphans!” and Nehru had consented to remain in office. Leaving this emotional scene, one Congressman, who had joined in the sycophantic clamor, said to another: “The farce is over. Let’s go home and laugh.”

Cowardly Alibi. But the occasion had left a bad taste all around. Since then, newspapers have taken to criticizing Nehru with a new bluntness; old opponents use stronger language. Seemingly oblivious, Nehru in January rammed through a series of resolutions to socialize Indian agriculture, calling for a limit on land ownership and the formation of cooperatives in India’s 600,000 villages within three years (an impossible timetable that would require the founding of 500 cooperatives a day).

Many of the Congressmen who obediently voted for Nehru’s resolutions insisted privately that they were against them. The Times of India labeled the plan a “distribution of poverty,” and Frank Moraes, well-known editor of the Indian Express, called it “a cowardly alibi for collectivism.” Critics raised the specter of farm collectives and feared India was headed toward the “communes” of Red China. Nehru at first railed at these “phantom fears,” then grew more bitter, finally snapped: “Well, if it comes to Communism, let it.”

Last week Nehru lost more glamour by flying down to the Red-run state of Kerala, staying three days, and flying back to New Delhi without accomplishing much. Kerala’s Red government has been battling a united front of local Socialist, Moslem and Congress parties who are seeking to bring it down with the “direct action” of Gandhi-style nonviolent demonstrations (TIME, June 29). The Reds have fought back by arresting 15,000 people, jamming 4,180 into jails.

Nehru’s visit left the Communists still in the saddle and their opponents, including his own Congress Party, high and dry. As has happened so often in the past, from Korea to Hungary, from the councils of the United Nations to his temporizing about Tibet, Nehru’s indecisive efforts at compromise and peacemaking left his supporters disappointed and dissatisfied.

Restless Diabetic. Like most young nations, India converted its independence movement into a single governing party, though its first great leader, Mohandas Gandhi, had hoped that the Congress Party would wither away. Instead, it stayed intact, and, with Nehru as its great drawing card, lapsed into corruption, inefficiency and apathy. Now for the first time there is a real opposition stirring, led by one of India’s grand old men and only Governor General, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (familiarly known as “C.R.”), who is a frisky 80. Pointing out that Nehru’s formal opposition comes only from the feeble Socialists and the malevolent Communists, C.R. last month founded a conservative political party known as the Freedom Party. Among its supporters: anti-Nehru Bombay Businessman Raja Hutheesingh, who is married to Nehru’s younger sister, Krishna.

C.R. has also won support from a man nearly as prominent, and as much of a brooding Hamlet, as Nehru himself: Jayaprakash Narayan, 56, who spent seven years in the U.S., going to college, waiting on tables, working in the stockyards. A onetime agitator and terrorist for Indian independence who languished ten years in British jails, Narayan formerly led the Socialists and was long considered heir apparent to Nehru. Then restless, diabetic Narayan became entranced with the mission of Vinoba Bhave, the saintly ascetic who tramps about India asking landlords to make a gift of their acres to landless peasants. In 1954, dropping the leadership of the Socialists, Narayan announced that he was giving up politics and making the gift of his life to Bhave’s cause.

But recently he has been making his political influence felt again. In a succession of speeches, Narayan urged Nehru and other top government leaders to quit office and mingle with the masses. He fiercely attacked Nehru’s endless temporizing with the Communists, supported the direct-action groups in Kerala, and demanded that India do something about Red China’s aggression in Tibet. Last week he called on the exiled Dalai Lama, and in the face of Nehru’s indifference, urged the envoys of 14 Afro-Asian countries to unite in protest against Red China’s blood actions in Tibet.

Losing Hold. Narayan appears on the same platforms with Freedom Party leaders but is not, and says he will not become, a party member. His own ideas, in favor of decentralized welfare villages and against gigantism, strike many, including Nehru, as hopelessly unrealistic. But he is a powerful force in India nonetheless. Another of India’s big guns, 74-year-old Rajendra Prasad, India’s figurehead President, recently wrote Nehru a long letter criticizing basic government policies on unemployment, education, food and industrial development.

Although still the idol of India’s millions and an extraordinary crowd-pleaser, Nehru has clearly lost his once unshakable hold on the country’s intellectuals, business leaders and the press. As the Bombay Current put it last week, complaining about Nehru’s trust in Communist promises: “A time has come in India when the free man is not prepared to stake his freedom on Mr. Nehru’s wobbly judgment. The oracle of New Delhi is proving too often wrong in his prophecies.”