Very Patient Nehru

Eighteen months have passed since Red Chinese troops occupied 12,000 square miles of northern Indian soil. The troops are still there. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru has been heard to complain, but has done little else. Last week, as the Indian Parliament's new session got under way, pent-up tempers exploded. "Have we grown so soft?" demanded Asoka Mehta, leader of the Praja Socialist Party. "Surely the brave soldiers of India have never said they would not march." Cries of "cold feet" rang out, and one M.P. demanded that Nehru "apologize" to the nation.

What set the M.P.s off anew was a 567-page government report on India's protracted negotiations with the Chinese. The report exhaustively proved India's historic title to the disputed chunk of mountainous Kashmir borderlands, as even the Indian Communist Party was forced to concede. But Peking's only answer was a new map of the area--claiming 2,000 more square miles.

As if to give added insult, Red China has been elaborately conciliatory to its other neighbors, while treating the Indians with scorn. In January, Premier Chou En-lai ratified a border treaty with Burma, impudently drawing a line that gave Burma a small slice of northeastern India as part of the deal. Except for disputed Mount Everest, the Chinese have about reached a border pact with Nepal (Red China naturally wants the world's highest peak). Now Pakistan President Mohammed Ayub Khan says he plans to get together with the Chinese and draw a northern border for the Pakistan-held sector of Kashmir.

Nehru did little to calm the chamber. "Broadly speaking," he said, the Chinese had at least not advanced any farther, though "I cannot guarantee some little curve in a wasteland." He was pessimistic about new negotiations. But he had no plans to try to drive the Chinese out. "While I admire the patriotism, and emotional upsurge of honorable members who tell us to go and push the aggressor out ... it is not an easy matter to indulge in a policy of action that leads almost inevitably, step by step, to war." Nehru admitted that he had not even bothered to reoccupy the border post of Longju in northeastern India, abandoned by the Chinese several months ago. Reason: he had heard that "a rather bad epidemic" had hit Longju, and "we have to take care to prevent that epidemic coming down through the Himalayan passes to India."

Though he is known to be privately bitterly disillusioned by China's aggressiveness, Nehru's official tolerance for Red China seems unshakable. When one angry M.P. asked for at least "an assurance that we are no longer going to sponsor [Red China's] application in the United Nations," Nehru retorted: "I can give an assurance that we will."

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