A Matter of Morals

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India habitually takes a lofty moral tone towards the West. In July, he set out, unbidden, to mediate the Korean war, in effect proposed that the U.S. bribe Moscow into calling off the North Koreans by admitting Red China into U.N. (TIME, July 24). When the U.S. refused, Nehru was indignant. Last week, when U.N. Mediator Sir Owen Dixon suggested that India make a compromise with Pakistan to end a three-year-old dispute over possession of the princely state of Kashmir,

Pandit Nehru was outraged--as always, of course, on purely moral grounds.

The pandit was annoyed at Dixon's proposal that Kashmir be partitioned and announced it was "absolutely impossible" for the government of India to accept the mediator's recommendation that the famed Vale of Kashmir, strategic heart of the state, be placed under U.N. rule for a plebiscite to determine whether its population wished to join India or Pakistan. Nehru felt no qualms over Indian military occupation of parts of a state which has a 75% Moslem population. The presence of Indian troops was justified in the pandit's eyes because in 1947 the now-Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir, since stripped of his power, had called in the Indian army to put down a revolt of his Moslem subjects. Nehru blamed Kashmir's current troubles on the unofficial invasion of Pakistan army units, which had gone in to help the Moslem rebels and which still hold the northern and western sections of the state. As a result, Nehru argued, India would be "appeasing an aggressor" if she accepted Dixon's proposals.

Nehru was prepared to agree to a statewide plebiscite in Kashmir--on terms obviously unacceptable to Pakistan. Among the terms: withdrawal of all Pakistani troops, while Indian troops remained. Furthermore, said Nehru, Pakistan should have "no say in a plebiscite which is a matter between the Indian people of Kashmir and the United Nations, although [Pakistan] might have an interest in the matter."

Only a day after his blast at Pakistan's "aggression," Nehru gracefully accepted Pakistan's gift of 375 tons of rice for relief of the Assam earthquake victims (see

FOREIGN NEWS). Said the pandit: "This spontaneous gesture of friendship by the government and people of Pakistan will, I feel sure . . . help to promote and strengthen the friendly relations between Pakistan and India."

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