The Tiger Rider

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was getting just about the worst press he had ever received in India. What made everyone mad last week was his threat to resign his office, and then his tame turnabout when Congress Party politicians begged him to stay on (TIME, May 12). New Delhi columnist B. G. Verghese felt that Nehru had come close to "tearing off the mask of complacency and compromise that has been the bane of the Congress Party and the country," only to falter at the last minute: "He compromised without any gain. He threw away the opportunity that he himself had created."

Even more telling was a sharp letter to the Times of India from Nehru's brother-in-law, wealthy businessman Raja Hutheesingh, who held the Prime Minister more responsible than the Congress Party for the nation's "corruption, nepotism, jobbery and unseemly haste to amass wealth by crooked gains and avoidance of taxation. All these sores of the body politic grow larger and larger every day." He went on: "Our present degradation is leading the country to the same morass in which Chiang Kai-shek's China found itself. There was no rescue in China from the jaws of Communism. But in India we had one hope. If a man like Mr. Nehru could shed the glamour of office, he could, perhaps--it is a small chance--bring back the only organized party in the country to a righteous path of service and sacrifice." But instead, "Mr. Nehru, by his decision, has taken away that little glimmer and left us in the darkness of a totalitarian future. Oh! Weep for Adonis!"

Raja Hutheesingh might have been dismissed as just an embittered inlaw, for the Nehru family feuding (his wife, Krishna, is Nehru's youngest sister) is an old story. But many newspapers throughout India, usually so deferential to Nehru, echoed Hutheesingh's charges, and the Times of India lamented: "An opportunity has been lost. The crisis is over, and Mr. Nehru, by remaining, emerges a smaller man."

If the chorus of complaints sounded familiar to Pandit Nehru, it was only natural. Back in 1937, writing of himself in the third person, he said: "In spite of his brave talk, Jawaharlal is obviously tired and stale, and will progressively deteriorate if he continues as president of the Congress Party. He cannot rest, for he who rides a tiger cannot dismount."

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