The Shade of the Big Banyan

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Astride shaggy ponies, a file of 24 Indian border police moved carefully along a mountain valley high in the Himalayas. Late in the afternoon, at a spot 45 miles from the Tibetan frontier, one of the policemen pointed out several wood and dirt bunkers built into the hillside 500 ft. above them. Suddenly, the thin, cold mountain air crackled with the discharge of rifles, hand grenades and 2-in. mortars. Scrambling from their rearing ponies, the Indians unslung their .303 rifles and returned the fire. But they were hopelessly trapped: the barren terrain lacked trees or boulders to give them cover, and they were being raked by crossfire. Only five Indians escaped. Nine were killed and ten wounded by the Red Chinese troops who had staged the ambush.

This murderous skirmish last October in the windswept wastes of Ladakh province may have done more than anything else to bring Asia to what Jawaharlal Nehru calls "one of those peak events in history when a plunge has to be taken in some direction." The gunfire in Ladakh echoed through India. Instead of shouts of "Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai!" (India and China are brothers). New Delhi's streets resounded with the clamor, "Give us arms! We will go to Ladakh!" The Red Chinese embassy was stoned, the All-India Students' Congress called for a "Throw Back the Aggressors Day," and India's Defense Minister made a radio appeal for volunteers for the Territorial Army. Even the normally pro-Communist weekly Blitz headlined: GIVE THE CHINESE A BLOODY NOSE.

India felt both angry and alone. The ruthlessness of Red China's behavior made a wreckage of some cherished convictions. There was no longer confidence that 1) Asian solidarity, created at the Bandung Conference, would outlaw the use of force, 2) Indian neutrality and nonalignment with "military blocs" would gradually lead the Communist and non-Communist worlds to mutual understanding, 3) the repeated pledges of "peaceful coexistence" by Peking meant that Red China was worthy of joining the U.N. The national disillusionment was so great that even Prime Minister Nehru took off his rose-colored glasses, looked hard at his giant neighbor to the north, and told the Indian Parliament: "I doubt if there is any country in the world that cares less for peace than China today."

Threatened by a war it was not prepared for, India this week looked forward eagerly to the arrival of touring President Dwight Eisenhower. Indians appreciated the fact that of the eleven countries Ike is visiting, he will spend more time in India--four days--than in any of the others.

Reconciliation. No longer do Americans in India find themselves subjected to the special brand of Indian inquisition that used to feature a series of needling questions: Why does the U.S. back dictators like Chiang Kai-shek and Franco? Why does the U.S. arm Pakistan, India's obvious enemy? Why are Negroes oppressed in the South? Last month, when quietly competent U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker addressed the first session of the newly formed Indo-American Society in rambunctious, left-wing Calcutta (where Eisenhower was burned in effigy in 1956), he was astonished to find that it had already a thousand dues-paying members. Eleven months ago a poll in Madras, asking which "Europeans" were most preferred by Indians, was won by the British with 80%. A similar poll last month found Britain and the U.S. split fifty-fifty.

India and the U.S., so very different--one with the highest per capita income in the world, the other with very nearly the lowest--so long at odds in foreign policy, now find themselves accenting what they have in common: they are the world's two largest democracies. Both threw off British rule. In Gandhi and in Lincoln, each has a national hero whose qualities of charity, compassion and gentleness both nations revere. U.S. aid to India, once grudgingly given and grudgingly received, has accelerated rapidly of late, is now past the $2 billion mark. As Indians get over their new-nation sensitivity about needing economic help, some even recognize the justice of the U.S. desire to see that the money is prudently spent.

In turn, Americans are outgrowing the compulsion to lecture Indians endlessly and to demand profuse gratitude for favors given. Wrote an Indian editor: "Americans have conducted themselves with an unusual dignity over India's breach with China. They have successfully resisted the temptation of crowing--at least in public--over the fulfillment of their earlier warnings that we were playing with fire in wooing the Chinese. What Americans had not been able to achieve by the expenditure of millions of dollars --seen and unseen--has been accomplished for them at one stroke by Chinese folly."

In this atmosphere of unparalleled good will, Dwight Eisenhower will this week get his first look at India. What manner of country is it?

Haze of Heat. The land is vast and cruel, running some 2,000 miles from the icy peaks of the Himalayas, in the heart of central Asia, down to the steaming jungles of Cape Comorin, on the Indian Ocean. In summer, wrote Rudyard Kipling, there is "neither sky, sun, nor horizon. Nothing but a brown-purple haze of heat. It is as though the earth were dying of apoplexy." During this furnace season, millions of Indian villagers lie gasping in their mud huts; wells dry up and fields blow away. When the monsoon rains come in the fall, the torrential downpours drown the arid land in surging floods. Only in the winter months does India appear comfortably livable and nature kind.

India is a land where yesterday is more visible than tomorrow, where millions still follow the style of dress, architecture and behavior to be seen in the ruins and sculptures of Mohenjo-daro, a city of the Indus Valley that nourished and died 4,000 years ago. Yet next door to the oxcart and the primitive wooden plow lies an India as modern as Pittsburgh, with belching smoke by day and glaring fire by night.

In this land of paradox, Indian civil airline pilots fly more than 25 million domestic miles a year and jet fighters are being built in Indian factories by Indian workmen. Yet not long ago, when a plane landed for the first time in a district of northern India, peasants tried to feed it hay. The old ways die hard: recently a Westernized and highly educated dean of an Indian law school kept postponing his flight to the U.S. until an auspicious date was selected for him by his astrologer.

On his four-day India visit, Dwight Eisenhower will go to Agra to see the moonlit mirage of the 17th century Taj Mahal; in New Delhi, he will sleep in another reminder of India's past--the gigantic pink sandstone President's House, which used to be the palace of the British Viceroy. Today's India prefers different monuments: bustling factories that turn out locomotives and toothbrushes, diesel engines and radio sets. For all its look of the past, the ambitious young republic is forging ahead in atomic energy, quadrupling its steel capacity in a few years' time, rushing to completion a vast network of irrigation canals and hydroelectric plants.

India's future hopes and fears both center on the immensity of its population--415 million people. India's population, second only to Red China's, is greater than all of South America, Africa and Australia put together. Indians speak more than 700 languages or dialects and belong to at least seven distinct racial types, from the tall, leathery, light-eyed Punjabi of the north to the frail, black-skinned Tamil of the south. Most of India's millions are underfed, badly housed and racked by disease. The average life expectancy of an Indian at birth is 32 years and five months. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, and live, make love, sleep and die on city sidewalks, or in and around railway stations. Food that might sustain them is casually devoured by more than 50 million monkeys and some 50 million cattle roaming unchecked through the land. In the midst of poverty, there are polo-playing maharajahs who are among the world's richest men. And there are Indian millionaires who religiously feed ants to show their reverence for life, and lavish their charity not on hospitals or schools but on retirement farms for aging sacred cows. An estimated 7,000,000 Indians are unemployed; many millions more get work only sporadically. India's food production is at last gaining, but it has a hard time keeping up with the Indian birth rate, which is also increasing. Every day 28,400 new Indians are born.

There are other brakes on progress: the rigidly entrenched caste system, the antipathy of the educated toward manual labor, the 8,000,000 wandering sadhus or holy men (80% reputed to be frauds) who live in idleness. These and the leaden weight of superstition and ignorance make of Indian life, in Nehru's despairing words, "a sluggish stream, living in the past, moving slowly through the accumulations of dead centuries."

Fourteen Hours. Faced with these problems, most Indians beg for time that may not be available. India has been independent only twelve years, they say, and already the inequities of the caste system have been abolished--at least by law if not in practice. The sacredness of cows and the dark night of ignorance will give way, too, they insist, if slowly. But help must come from abroad, and ways and means of rechanneling the stream of Indian life will certainly be discussed this week by Eisenhower and Prime Minister Nehru.

The two men know, like and respect each other. They first met in 1949 when Ike, as president of Columbia University, awarded an honorary degree to Nehru, who was making his first visit to the U.S. After Eisenhower moved on to the presidency of the U.S., Nehru's private comments about him were not always flattering. Though recognizing Ike's inherent goodness, Nehru nevertheless thought him a weak leader, dominated by the "negative" foreign policy of John Foster Dulles.

They became better acquainted in 1956 on Nehru's second trip to the U.S., soon after Hungary and Suez had erupted into the headlines. Spending a day at Ike's Gettysburg farm, the two began talking at breakfast, continued through the morning until lunch. Then after a short nap, the talks went on through the late afternoon, dinner and evening--a total of 14 hours. It was, said Nehru, the longest sustained conversation he has ever had with anyone, and it touched on subjects ranging from the painting of Grandma Moses to the personality of Nikita Khrushchev.

Flat & Stale. Nehru as a man is as contradictory as India as a nation. Still slender, handsome and energetic at 70, he looks taller than his 5 ft. 8 in., works 17 hours a day year in and year out, and has had only a six-week vacation from his job since 1947. Personally fastidious, from the fresh rosebud in his buttonhole each morning to the silken handkerchief tucked into his right sleeve, he is most at home with India's teeming, untidy millions. An agnostic who "is not interested in religion," he is leader of one of the world's most religious peoples; he is a socialist with a built-in antipathy to capitalism, but most of his governing colleagues are conservative businessmen; often so irritable that he will explode with anger at a misplaced teacup, Nehru endured more than ten years of imprisonment by the British with equanimity and aplomb.

Under Nehru, India has had generally sound government, a stable currency and a working democracy through its years of independence. The press is free, the restraints of free speech and assembly are minimal. Forty million Indians attend school and college, and the number is to be doubled in five years. If any one man can claim the credit, it is Nehru, and all Indians know it. Scarcely anyone now remembers the 1947 warning of Sir Winston Churchill that "we are turning over India to men of straw, like the caste Hindu, Mr, Nehru, of whom, in a few years, no trace will remain."

Churchill was wrong, and Nehru remains today what he was twelve years ago: the biggest man in India. But at a considerable cost to the nation and himself. Last year Nehru told newsmen that he was feeling "flat and stale," and wanted to retire as Prime Minister. He was ravaged by the ceaseless struggle to get things done in the timeless, bottomless morass of India. Food production is still at the mercy of the nation's cycles of flood and drought. Huge, multipurpose economic projects start out magnificently and then gradually fall farther and farther behind schedule. The second five-year plan had to be abruptly cut back because it was creating a profitless drain on foreign exchange. "We are riding the tiger of industrialization and can't get off," said Finance Minister T. T. Krishnamachari. Severe restrictions on imports, and new taxes on wealth and expenditures wrung outraged cries from the business community. There were strikes and food riots from Calcutta to Madras.

Some of India's difficulties can be laid at Nehru's door. He has tried, on occasion, to translate into action his vague and intensely personal theories about socialism, e.g., his plan to spread farm cooperatives across the land. Snapped the Indian Express: "This is not economic realism; this is economic rubbish." Even socialist leaders such as Asoka Mehta complain that for ten years India has been plagued by socialist slogans, "and what have we got? Nothing." Seemingly, the only purpose the slogans and all the patronizing remarks about "the private sector" have served is to frighten away foreign investors.

The Asset. As a result of these and other troubles, Nehru's petulance and quick temper flared more and more frequently. He railed against the ingrained Indian habits of inefficiency, tardiness and cheerful anarchy. He stormed at the prevalence of holidays, cows and fraudulent holy men, yet did nothing about them. He pleaded with his colleagues in the governing Congress Party to abandon red tape, corruption and nepotism; they listened, and went back to their old ways.

Nehru grew increasingly waspish to reporters and his own subordinates, and could not stand being contradicted. He angrily insisted that he had to do everything himself or it would not be done, and he spent as much time on unimportant household details as on national problems. He suddenly began to look older.

Worriedly, Indians began asking themselves: After Nehru, who? It was and is the favorite New Delhi dinner topic. Food Minister S. K. Patil put the matter bluntly: "Nehru is the greatest asset we have because he is just like a banyan tree under whose shade millions take shelter." He added that Nehru is also a liability, "because in the shade of that banyan tree, biologically, nothing grows."

The two likeliest candidates to succeed Nehru are Patil himself, a tough, able administrator who is India's closest approximation of an anything-goes U.S. politician, and Finance Minister Morarji Desai, 63, an eccentric but capable mixture of far-out ideas on sex and alcohol (he is against both). Gandhian attitudes, and administrative talent. Both .men are strongly pro-Western, anti-Communist and holders of pragmatic economic views. But when Nehru last year announced that he wanted to step down as Prime Minister, Congress Party stalwarts, swept by panic, cried: "Pandit ji, you are leaving us orphans!"

The Kisan. Nehru agreed to stay on, and apparently can hold the job as long as he wants it. Nehru keeps in trim physically through a half-hour of yoga exercises each morning, including a spell of standing on his head. Whenever he feels drained intellectually, one unfailing source of energy remains to him--the Indian people. Nehru's long romance with the millions on millions of kisans, or peasants, began when he was 31. Brahman-born and British-bred, Nehru had returned home to provincial Allahabad with his sense of innate superiority re-enforced by seven years of upper-class education at Harrow, Cambridge and London's Inner Temple, where he qualified for the bar. Already a romantic dabbler in the independence movement, Nehru agreed to accompany some oppressed peasants to their primitive village. What he saw there filled him "with shame and sorrow --shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India." He saw his homeland as "naked, starving, crushed and utterly miserable."

In speeches to the peasants, Nehru displays none of the perfervid oratory of the demagogue, and could not if he wanted to, since he speaks only one Indian language, Urdu, with any proficiency. Ordinarily he gives long, rambling, extemporaneous talks in English, full of digressions and schoolmasterly asides, that are translated into the local dialect by interpreters. Vast crowds of up to a million assemble to hear him, but the contact is more emotional than verbal. What happens is called by Indians darshan, communion. The multitude is somehow comforted and reassured not by the words but by the presence of Nehru. And Nehru himself seems to lose every trace of fatigue, becomes more alive, uninhibited and relaxed, and he returns to his job with his spiritual batteries recharged.

This year, rectifying past mistakes of overplanning, India has had a better time of it economically. The sterling balance has risen about 8%, and the government recently liberalized its laws concerning foreign investment, tempting some U.S. and British firms to get in on the ground floor of a nation where there is only one watch for every 40 people, one bicycle for every 125, and one camera for every 50,000. The recovery was fortuitous, for the nation was about to be put to its severest test since independence.

The China Crisis. The crisis with China displayed all of Nehru's weaknesses. It was a threat that Nehru, typically, first tried not to see, then ignored and then tried to argue away. This spring he dismissed news stories of Tibet's revolt against the Red Chinese as "mere bazaar talk." When Tibet's religious leader, the young Dalai Lama, and 13,000 Tibetan refugees came pouring across India's border, Nehru seemed acutely uncomfortable. To Red China's hysterical charges that Indian "expansionists" were behind the revolt and that the "command center" of the rebels was in the Indian border town of Kalimpong, Nehru entered a soft denial, and said Kalimpong was indeed a nest of spies--"spies who are Communist, antiCommunist, red, yellow, pink and white." To urgent suggestions that India join with Pakistan for the united defense of the subcontinent, Nehru asked ingenuously: "Against whom?"

From angry words thrown at India, the Chinese Reds moved to actions against it: the frontier post of Longju in India's North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) was seized; Indian patrols were taken prisoner; Nehru made the shamefaced admission that he had kept secret from Parliament the fact that the Chinese two years before had built a road through Indian territory linking Tibet and the Chinese province of Sinkiang.

Finance Minister Morarji Desai angrily set out to get the facts about the Red road. Cross-questioning India's Army Chief of Staff. Lieut. General K. S. Thimayya, he asked when he first knew about the road. In 1957, said the general, and he had offered proposals to safeguard the security of India, but they were turned down by the Defense Minister, lean, rancorous V. K. Krishna Menon. "Why?" asked Desai. "Because," replied Thimayya, "he said that the enemy was on the other side [i.e., Pakistan], not on this side."

While the Chinese were boldly occupying Indian territory, Krishna Menon was rising in the U.N. to champion the admission of Peking and to lead the fight against debating the Tibet tragedy. The Hindustan Times fumed about Menon's "immoral and degrading performances." Indian students paraded in New Delhi, shouting "Menon resign! Menon resign!" General Thimayya quarreled with Menon and threatened to leave the army. Nehru talked him out of it. With his hesitant response to China's calculated attack on the Indian patrol in Ladakh, Nehru lost his once unshakable hold on the nation's intellectuals, business leaders and press. With almost one voice, Indians demanded that Nehru defend India's integrity, fire Defense Minister Krishna Menon and, above all, send troops to drive the Chinese invaders from Indian soil.

Ready Troops. The question that was not often raised was whether India's armed forces could do the job. On paper, India's 500,000 man army is dwarfed by Red China's 2,500,000 troops.

But foreign military observers regard the Indian army as thoroughly professional, and well able to handle almost any task assigned it. The rank and file are northerners and mostly from that cradle of warriors, the Punjab. The Indian army officer sometimes appears to be the very, very model of the British tradition: he has probably attended Sandhurst, speaks with an Oxford accent, plays polo and cricket, wears a mustache and carries a swagger stick. The first-rate Indian air force uses British twin-jet Canberra bombers and French Mystere jet fighters --all obtained by purchase, since Nehru believes that military aid would compromise India's traditional neutrality.

If war comes, China's numbers are not likely to be an overwhelming advantage, for any fighting along the 2,500-mile mountainous border would undoubtedly be limited to units smaller than battalions. Neither the Indians nor Chinese could push any real strength up into or through the Himalayas on the existing roads over the high passes, which are scarcely adequate for yak caravans and cannot handle trucks, much less tanks.

On the Chinese side of the frontier the terrain is equally bad. In fact, the only satisfactory invasion route into India from the north is the one that has been trod since time immemorial by Aryans, Greeks, Huns, Mongols and Persians: from central Asia, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, and down onto the Punjab plain. But that would involve the consent of Russia, as well as war with Pakistan. At the moment the Soviet Union is insisting on its friendship to India and is urging restraint upon Red China.

Vote of Confidence. Just three weeks ago, Prime Minister Nehru stunningly and surprisingly emerged from the cocoon of indecision. With brusque firmness, he sent a note to Peking rejecting Premier Chou En-lai's proposal that both the Indian and Chinese border forces withdraw 12 1/2 miles from their present positions. Nehru's counterproposals were for a "no man's land" in the disputed areas, which would result in getting almost all Chinese troops out of Indian territory. Nehru added sharply that "the cause of the recent troubles is action taken from your side of the border," and bluntly told Chou En-lai that "relations between our two countries are likely to grow worse."

At the opening of Parliament, Nehru further dazzled and delighted Indians by warning that "any aggression" against the small states of the Himalayas would be considered as aggression against India, and won cheers with his pledge that "if war is thrust upon us we shall fight with all our strength!" He even took time out to give support and tribute to Defense Minister Krishna Menon and won for them both an overwhelming voice vote of confidence.

The very newspapers that had been accusing Nehru for months of dereliction of duty cried their "unreserved agreement" with Nehru's policy. The Indian Express, formerly his most savage critic, promised that "in his new, bold and unequivocal stand, Mr. Nehru is assured of the unstinted support of all parties and of the people."

To puzzled observers of this Indian phenomenon it seemed that Nehru had said absolutely nothing but the obvious--that India would defend itself if attacked. And in a sense, Nehru agreed with them. His position had not changed, he insisted. It was an optical illusion that he had formerly been lagging sulkily behind his nation and had now run up to the front rank to lead it. In Nehru's terms he was being completely consistent: by practicing "right actions" against Red China he must necessarily gain "right results"--if not at the moment. It was the same with the cold war, argued Nehru. For years he had been preaching against it and refusing to align India on either side. And now--lo, and behold!--the great leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union had come around to his view.

Last week India appeared to be a harmonious whole, astir with a new sense of its own nationalism. At the west coast city of Ahmedabad, 400,000 people had thronged together to hold darshan with Panditji Nehru and hear him speak. Said Nehru, grandly: "I am trying, and will try, to reciprocate your love." Up in the Himalayas, winter was closing in. As deep snows and raging blizzards block the high passes, there is a widespread feeling in India that there will be no more trouble with China until next spring or summer. Suppose that then the Red Chinese grab off even more of India's northern border regions? No one was ready with an answer, but no one seemed to feel the need of one just now. Having blown off steam, the Indian Parliament, press and public was back in the comforting and protective shade of the big banyan tree.

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