By Pride Possessed

Swarming up to Communist China's embassy in New Delhi last week, 3,000 Indian students thunderously shouted, "Death to the Red Devil!" and "Give us arms! We will go to Ladakh!" In Bombay, even the normally pro-Communist weekly Blitz headlined its lead editorial, GIVE THE CHINESE A BLOODY NOSE.

Outraged by Red China's recent ambush of an Indian police patrol 45 miles inside Kashmir's Ladakh district (TIME, Nov. 2), Indian public opinion was crying for action. The influential Indian Express called for a mutual-defense treaty with Pakistan, long India's bitterest enemy. General K. M. Cariappa, retired commander in chief of the Indian army, demanded immediate military action to dislodge the Chinese invaders and to establish control, at whatever cost, of all strategic passes leading into Indian territory.

But as this chorus of national indignation mounted, a familiar, Cambridge-accented voice rang out reprovingly. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was still in a mood to dismiss Peking's threat to his country with what one Indian editor contemptuously termed "a Niagara of words counseling patience."

In the ten weeks since news of the Chinese border violations first broke, Nehru had periodically assured his countrymen that India was prepared to defend its territory but was not going to lose its temper. But last week, at his monthly press conference--an art form that in Nehru's hands frequently becomes a schoolmasterish soliloquy--Nehru loftily dismissed the anti-Chinese student demonstration in New Delhi as "vulgar in the extreme" and added, "vulgarity never strengthens the country or an individual." He reminded younger newsmen (Nehru will be 70 this week) that he belonged to the nonviolent "Gandhi generation," and had seen "my own countrymen behaving in the streets of Delhi, after the partition [of India], in an inhuman and barbarous way. Once you get them up to a certain pitch, in their excitement they lose all control."

Since "real war today is something that none of us can envisage," he ruled out a security treaty with Pakistan and dismissed General Cariappa as "completely off the track, mentally and otherwise." When a reporter suggested that India's government was taking the Chinese aggression lying down, Nehru exploded. "What exactly do you want me to do?" he roared. "Dance in Connaught Square?* or what? What do you expect me to do, or India to do, get excited, stand on its head, run about, write leading articles, morning and evening? What do you expect me to do, really, really?"

What most Indian editors clearly wanted Nehru to do was to end the atmosphere of temporizing that can scarcely fail to encourage the expansionist Chinese to press India even harder. Nehru's critics thought too little was being done to defend India's rugged and remote frontier territories; they hoped that Nehru would recognize that his own past policies of international "nonalignment" and soft-pedaling Communist incursions had proved a failure. A spirit of nationalism was rising in India last week, and though Prime Minister Nehru might be properly concerned over the emotional excesses his countrymen are capable of, he had not yet found a policy that answered India's current needs, its jeopardy, its belated discovery of its peril.

*Heart of New Delhi's business district.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.