Coming of Age

In familiar Communist fashion, the delegate of the U.S.S.R. resolutely insulted his fellow delegates at a meeting of a U.N. economic commission gathered in Bandung, Indonesia. Asia is being fooled, said Russia's chunky S. S. Nemchina; the U.S. is helping Asian lands only to enslave and "rob" them, and sinister strings are attached to U.S. offers. The Asians responded in unfamiliar fashion. Nemchina's words had stung their pride: instead of trying to prove their neutralism, the delegates of India, Burma and Pakistan sprang to the defense of the U.S.:

P: Said Burma's U Kyaw Myint: "We have received considerable aid from America . . . Receipt of this involved no slavery. No political, economic or military concessions were asked for or given in this connection, and our gratitude for this aid is therefore all the greater."

P: Said India's D. P. Karmarker: "We appreciate what's been done by ... progressive states like the U.S.A. . . The U.S.S.R. has done practically nothing to help the region and has attributed malicious motives to other countries that have helped . . . The Soviet Union is talking about things which no longer exist."

P: Said Pakistan's Abbas Khaleeli: ". . . We are today free and independent nations, capable of looking after ourselves . . . We have accepted foreign aid on conditions and terms that have been freely negotiated and are fully to our advantage . . . We of Asia have come of age and . . . bogeymen do not frighten us so easily."

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