The Disenchanted

The lofty tone and the customary appeal to moderation were both still there, but beneath the bland surface last week the voice of India seemed almost stern.

At the U.N., India's V. K. Krishna Menon declared that while his government would be only too happy to negotiate its border dispute with Red China, it would do so only after Communist troops had been withdrawn from Indian territory. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Nehru spent the week consulting other nations that are also at odds with Peking. The ambassadors from Yugoslavia, a country with an old grudge against Red China, and from the United Arab Republic, whose grudge is new, both called on Nehru. Finally, Burma's Prime Minister Ne Win flew in. "General Ne Win's call," said the Hindustan Times, "signifies more than a courtesy visit. Burma, no less than India, is menaced by Chinese aggression along its border."

Fresh from a trip to Cairo and Karachi, Ne Win was able to fill Nehru in on some of the latest developments within the widening circle of the disenchanted: the U.A.R.'s Nasser was furious over Communist China's support of the Syrian Communist Party and its vocal admiration for Iraq's Premier Kassem; Pakistan was fuming over a set of Chinese maps showing some 6,000 square miles of Pakistani territory as part of China. As for Burma, only three years ago Peking had piously assured the Burmese government that there would never be any question about the Burma-China border. But Chinese maps still claimed huge chunks of northern Burma, and Chinese squatters were beginning to settle there.

On his own behalf, Nehru had already sent off an indignant letter to Peking accusing the Communists of stationing their troops inside India from Shipki Pass on the Tibetan border to the North-East Frontier Agency (see map). Last week he got back a blandly conciliatory note from Red Chinese Premier Chou En-lai saying that the two countries' differences were nothing more than "an episode in our age-old friendship." But this time Nehru refused to be mollified. Most courteous, said he of the note, but any further Chinese aggression against India "will certainly be fully resisted." Added the Hindustan Times: "If another Bandung Conference were held today, it would be a conference of Asian and African countries to consider common action against Han [Chinese] expansionism."

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