Above the Riot

What makes Prime Minister Nehru a master of compromise is his distaste for simple defeat. But last week it looked as if Nehru would have to admit that his Congress Party scheme for revising India's state boundaries according to language blocs was a dead duck.

The rioting that began in Bombay (TIME, Jan. 30) spread right across India. Mobs squatted on railroad tracks to halt trains, crowded onto airfields to prevent planes from landing, blocked roads with trees, broke into jails and freed convicts, looted stores, ripped down telephone wires. Newspapers that had given Nehru steady support were charging the government with "moral bankruptcy." The prestige of the Congress Party had never been lower.

Risking New Delhi's current yellow jaundice epidemic (50,000 cases), ministers and party leaders hurried to the capital. Counseled Bombay Congress Party Boss S. K. Patil: shelve the entire states-reorganization scheme. Instead, Nehru, looking overstrained, his white hair curling from under his Gandhi cap, proposed an even bolder plan: merge existing states into vastly more populous units which would cut across linguistic lines.

Congress Party leaders dutifully took these proposals home, blandly proposed the merging of Bengal and Bihar (total pop. 65 million), the merging of Bombay state with huge slices of Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad (approx. pop. 43 million), the merging of Madras with Mysore and Travancore-Cochin (approx. pop. 55 million). Gasped the opposition parties: a plot to hold power through creating a group of superstates.

While rioters paused to debate the new issue, Nehru watched an official parade celebrating the sixth anniversary of the Indian republic. Down Ruler's Way came lumbering elephants with blue foreheads and flowers painted on their hindquarters, bearded Sikhs in bright turbans, Madras Regiment soldiers behind their famed fifes and drums, felt-hatted Gurkhas. At Nehru's side was his good friend Lady Mountbatten, wife of the last British Viceroy. Afterwards Nehru told a group of young army trainees: "Redistribution of states is only, after all, for administrative convenience. There is no finality . . . a decision can be changed."

Politically acute Indians had no difficulty in interpreting Nehru's words. What would happen, they now thought, was that Nehru would announce that the big merger plan was too vast for hasty decision, and under cover of this smoke screen would defer indefinitely all plans for the reorganization of states, including those which had set off the riots.

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