India

on the World Today

AGAINST formidable odds, the dominions of India and Pakistan have made solid progress toward stability this spring, though it is still too early to cross them off the list of areas that might threaten world peace.

In the new, diminished India, Premier Jawaharlal Nehru’s government has patched many of the administrative holes left by the departure of British civil servants and by the transfer to Pakistan of Moslem employees of all grades. Police units are functioning again, even in the Punjab areas that were worst affected by riots. The fractured Indian Army is beginning to achieve its reorganization despite the pressing requirements of fighting in Kashmir.

New Delhi offices have turned back to routine work after weeks of total preoccupation with problems of sheer survival. A constitution has been drafted and a legislature is functioning. The nationwide grief and revulsion that followed Gandhi’s assassination have given Nehru the opportunity he needed to crack down on Hindu extremists who had forcefully injected their religion into politics.

Pakistan, which geographically is one of the most bizarre nations in history, has survived even greater birth shocks. Initially Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s government lacked everything from staff and plans for organization to desks, typewriters, and even paper. It started absolutely from scratch. On the second day of its existence, furthermore, this shaky regime was overtaken by calamity of proportions seldom weathered by any government.

The intercommunity warfare last fall in the Punjab, where the dead numbered hundreds of thousands, shattered Pakistan’s richest province. Among the roughly four million Hindus and Sikhs squeezed out of northwestern Pakistan by attack and fright were the majority of the region’s doctors, lawyers, banking employees, grain and cotton traders, shopkeepers, and moneylenders. The somewhat larger number of Moslem refugees fleeing to Pakistan from similar terror on the Indian side of the new border did not replace these necessary cogs of society.

With tax collections disordered and the cost of refugee care at astronomical levels, the deficit Sind and North-West Frontier Provinces lost all hope of support from the west Punjab. Despite these critical difficulties, however, Pakistan has established departmental organization, sent its envoys to possibly helpful countries, and hung out its “Open for Business” sign.

Moslem versus Hindu

In the months of crisis the root difficulty has been communalism —impassioned loyalty to one’s religious community ahead of one’s state. It is not just religious faith, even in a country where a man’s creed is shown by his name and by the clothes he wears, the food he eats and the company he keeps. Its complex origins include the era when Hindus who came into early contact. with Western invaders jumped on the bandwagon of European culture and business methods, while Moslem ruling classes in the interior forbade their youths to turn away from Persian culture enough to learn the English language.

Descendants of the Moslem die-hards found their community’s middle and professional classes far less developed than those of the Hindus, and, partly for that reason, feared being overwhelmed by the more numerous, more advanced Hindus. Out of such convictions grew the Moslem separatist demand when the British raj prepared to depart.

In retaliation for the cleavage of their motherland, militant Hindus flocked to the Hindu Mahasabha (Great Association) and its armed ally, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (National Voluntary Service Association). “Make our country Hindu India. Insulate the 35 million Moslems in our midst to prevent a fifth column,” they urged. Some argued for war to reabsorb Pakistan, and quoted Abraham Lincoln as scripture.

Nehru assumes command

Gandhi resisted the communalistic force to the end. Now Nehru leads the struggle. “An alliance of religion and politics in the shape of communalism is a most dangerous alliance,” he told the Indian legislature in April. Arguing that such an alliance must be destroyed, he declared that “the only alternative is civil conflict.”

In the void left by Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s growing stature is daily more prominent. The forces that effected the Mahatma’s slaying were equally opposed to Nehru. Yet the sensitive, patrician-born Premier—one of the few Indian leaders whose idealistic minds range to sympathetic perception of what’s going on in the rest of the world — has proved himself a vigorous, driving administrator.

Sometimes his explosive impatience erupts all over the lot. He lacks the steady, ironhanded control over the Congress Party and government machines that is Deputy Premier Vallabhai Patel’s great strength. He fails to ride a political storm with Patel’s unshakable calm. Yet it was Nehru’s dynamic leadership, even more than Patel’s prodding or British Governor-General Mount batten’s helpful greasing, that started the ponderous Government of India wheels turning again after they had threatened to freeze in the Punjab crisis.

When Nehru and Patel stand together, as they have done since Gandhi’s assassination, the leadership factor in India is strong. When they or their followers clash over economic, party, or communal differences, the government mechanism grates. On Nehru falls the main burden in pulling the country through this transition.

Grain or machinery?

Even while struggling to restore elemental law and order, Nehru and his team of revolulionariesturned-officials faced other worries. Truncated India is drastically short of food and must spend precious foreign exchange to buy grain instead of industrial plant. Slumping production graphs reflect economic disorganization and unrest. Import controls, deficit budgets, and especially the heritage of a reluctant war effort that was largely financed by printing-press money mean severe inflationary pressures.

The threefold inflation, undercompensated on the average by mere doubling of wages, has stirred enough unrest to build up leftist opposition to the present relatively conservative regime. On the one hand, Java Prakash Narayan, the Americantrained Marxist, is gathering industrial and rural support for his Congress Socialist Party. On the other, the small but lusty Communist Party of India captured control of the All-India Trades Union Congress and claimed 100,000 members before Deputy Premier Patel’s policemen rounded up its leaders in the spring. Patel, who himself spent years in British jails, knows that no movement with popular support can be broken by arrests. It goes underground. He is playing for time to strengthen his own regime for a more vigorous light against the Communists, whom he delests.

The government felt a contrary pressure when, in trading pits heavily influenced by war-rich financiers. its securities slumped through fear of widespread nationalization of industries. Nehru, whose early pinkish hue has faded as administrative responsibility has fallen on him, reassured businessmen in April. “Care must be taken to see that ihe existing structure is not greatly disturbed,” he said. “The government would rather go ahead with new schemes like the great river valley projects than to waste money in destroying or acquiring existing industries.”

The state, nevertheless, is to be exclusively responsible for new undertakings (“except when the public interest demands the cooperation of private industry”) in coal, iron, steel, aircraft manufacture, shipbuilding, telecommunications except commercial radio receivers, minerals, and oil. Whether the government will find the resources to exploit these industries remains to be seen.

Overseas investment and know-how will be welcomed, Nehru said, with the proviso that “conditions under which foreign capital may be allowed to operate should be carefully regulated in the national interest.” India also expect s that the major interest and effective control will always be in Indian hands, and that suitable Indian personnel will be trained to replace foreign experts. Part of the Indians’ difficulty, however, is suspicion of foreign business intentions, a carry-over from the British period.

Operation Maharaja

In one field the new Indian government has made dizzy progress. People who knew the roles of maharajas and their Princely Slates a year ago would hardly recognize them today. To forestall the absurdity of creating hundreds of minuscule principalities when British rule and treaties lapsed, it was decided that Princely States nol associated with Pakistan should “accede” to the Indian Dominion by turning over powers of defense, foreign affairs, and communications to the central government.

A sweet-tongued but tough-minded crew consisting of handsome Admiral Mountbatten, Deputy Premier Palel, and a skilled conslitutional legman named V. P. Menon brought in all the relevant accessions except from Kashmir (whose case finally went to the UN) and Hyderabad, where the issue was postponed for a year. That was Phase I of Operation Maharaja.

In Phase II, rulers of larger states found themselves turning over powers to elected legislatures, while small states were lumped together or absorbed into surrounding provinces, leaving their potentates unemployed. Mounlbatten, Patel, and Menon are reducing more than five hundred stales to about thirty units which are to take their places as constituent elements of the Indian Dominion.

In another sphere of transition, the truncated Indian Army, which boasted three Indian brigadiers early last year, has “Indianized” all battalion and regimental commands plus all area and division commands and three Army commands, it is reported. Some three hundred British officers remain to assist. Similar Indianization of educational patterns is in progress at university levels. Shortages of teachers and facilities, however, leave mass teaching of India’s bulk of illiterates for the future.

Laud tenure reforms, fertilizer plants, new wells, and intensified agricultural instruction are all scheduled to help the peasant. It nevertheless still appears true that rural production is hardly keeping pace with the leaping population.

The young, uncertain, bul potentially influential country is also hammering out a foreign policy. Nehru is anxious to avoid committing India 1o either main power bloc. India should rather be an independent, working for the world’s dependent peoples, lie believes; many Indians see themselves as the natural leaders of Southeast Asia. But on the world balance, India’s policy-makers are anti-Communist, they recognize their bonds — sometimes forced — with the Most, and they believe that only the West can help solve their immediate needs.

Pakistan poverty

Resources-wise, India emerged from the partition a far richer dominion than Pakistan. In a single geographic mass it retained 80 per cent of the population, three quarters of the area, the bulk of the coal, iron, and , other mineral deposits, most of the plant that made the old India eighth among pre-war industrial nations, and the larger share of the state railways.

By contrast, Pakistan is impoverished. It is chopped into two lumps separated by a thousand miles of what is now foreign territory. East Bengal, the teeming Ganges-Brahmaputra della region that holds a majority of the dominion’s 70 million population, grows rice and jute. It has neither coal to run its railways nor any other immediate source of power for quick factory development. Lacking major cities and any port larger than Chittagong, it is vulnerable to economic pressures from CalI cutta, the largely Hindu metropolis in the Indian Dominion’s part of Bengal. Eastern Pakistan is far more closely tied linguistically, racially, and economically to Indian Bengal than to northwestern Pakistan.

Pakistan’s leaders are confident that the heavily irrigated region can feed its people reasonably well and produce crops for export. They predict, with whet seems optimistic assurance, that they will overcome the scarcity of basic raw materials, [ the limitations of scattered light industry, and the shortage of skilled . manpower in the government, in the Army, and in industry.

Social change

In both dominions, the political revolution which achieved independence is only part of the social change visible everywhere, Cracks in the caste system and challenges to the bondage of untouchables are facets of ferment that touches Moslem society with equal vigor.

In several language areas an element of renaissance is occurring in literature and other arts. More Indian students than ever before are studying abroad, and their orientation is not so exclusively British as , before. At another level, blackmarket corruption and fast-money manipulations are signs that old restraints arc breaking down.

There is no static India or Pakistan today. Thoughtful Indians look on their problems as akin to those of an adolescent, boy. Properly guided and controlled, the changes can bring the dominions into disciplined maturity.