Blessed Contact

Faced with a rising tide of criticism, Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri decided that he needed to get away from his desk for some hard political barn storming. Last week he flew to Calcutta to make his first public appearance outside New Delhi since he took office.

No city needed his attention more than Calcutta (pop. 3,000,000), the steaming factory and port of eastern India. The city's labor force was in an ugly mood: some 3,000 civil servants had been on strike for higher bonus payments, and the leftist labor unions were hotly agitating for a general work stoppage.

Bare Feet. Shastri, who had spent most of the 2 1/2-hour flight with his bare feet propped up on a metal dispatch case as he perused official papers, landed almost on the run. After brief airport ceremonies, he dashed off to a locomotive factory to ask the workers to ignore the general strike and keep the factory open, "whatever happens." Their loudly chorused reply: "It will be kept open."

Then, over crowd-lined streets, he headed downtown for conferences with local Congress Party leaders, after which he appeared on the Maidan, a big, grassy plain in the heart of Calcutta, to give a crowd of 350,000 an opportunity for darshana -- a sort of blessed contact through sight -- and, more important, a major political speech plugging his own new brand of neutralism for India.

In his flat, reedy voice, the little Premier told the cheering crowd that this month's harvest and massive new U.S. grain shipments would end the worst part of the food crisis within four weeks. Aware that accepting such increased aid from the U.S. had exposed him to leftist criticism, Shastri hotly insisted that he was remaining on the path of the late beloved Jawaharlal Nehru -- whose "nonaligned" posture did not prevent him from taking healthy doses of help from the West. As for his Communist attackers, he said they think "in terms of destruction and not construction" and have to "wait for instructions from outside. They do not think for themselves."

Arms Deal. To prove the government's continued dedication to neutralism, Defense Minister Y. B. Chavan stood up in Parliament last week to announce details of a new $210 million arms deal with Moscow for three squadrons of MIG-21 supersonic jet fighters, plus an assortment of other military hardware and help in building a complete MIG assembly plant. And Shastri himself was preparing to leave the Indian subcontinent for the first time in his life, to fly to Cairo for next week's meeting of the nonaligned bloc in which Nehru had been such a towering figure.

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