India

on the World Today

THERE years after the departure of the British, where does India stand? Despite partition, it remains the largest of the states around an ocean which was once a British lake. India might be a keystone to that arch from Singapore to Suez it it were not split, weakening the underside of Asia. Politicians in the new states, after the first intoxication of getting what they wanted, are disillusioned. They find that reins are not synonymous with power. Few states have peace at home and food in the larder.

India may still he likened to a man with his nose only a hair’s breadth above water. A ripple is enough to drown him. Waves of economic distress threaten Indian life at a time when the strength of Sardar Patel is no longer at hand. Pakistan’s high rate of exchange for exports of wheat, rice, cotton, and jute, upon which the peninsula founded its economy, operates to make chronic the adverse trade balance of India. The cost of living is thereby three or four limes what il was in 1939.

As a consequence, urban labor is restless, Industrialists are nervous and financiers are again burying their gold. In the countryside, under the pressure of population, the land produces crops of trouble. Added to this are cleavages of caste and regional divergencies which predispose India to fall apart.

The British administration gave India something it had not known before—unity. This has not been maintained, and historians may finally decide that independence came to India less by reason of the Congress Party’s campaign and more by the decline of British power to a point where it could no longer withstand the natural disruptive forces of the peninsula. Little unifying power can be seen in the Congress Party, which has continued to split until it is scarcely recognizable as the organization it was when the great triumvirate, Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel, controlled it.

The sad thing for the Congress Party is that it found no policy so unifying to sectional opinions as their opposition to the British administration. Later events suggest that this opposition may have been directed not so much against the British as against the whole principle of unification. Fanatic Hindus, Indian industrialists, the trade-unionists, the bureaucrats, the intelligentsia, the landlords, the peasants, the socialists, and the reactionaries have proved uneasy bedfellows, and a host, of new parties has appeared.

Nearly all arguments and policies used by the Congress against the British have acted as boomerangs. Manned now by Western-trained Indians of high caliber, the administration is still aloof. People* say the bureaucracy has changed in color, not in kind. It continues to be entreached behind thousands of poorly paid and corrupt clerks. The peasant sees no change. The “old guard still preys upon him in his isolation and he seems as far as ever from the promised land.

Landlords, alarmed by the rural unrest, deplore the failure of Congress to support them as they supported it in its struggle for independence. Industrialists discover rising wages and costs are in danger of making their products unsalable at home and abroad. Trade-unionists, spearhead of Congress tactics against the British, find themselves suppressed in the scare about Communism.

Nehru under pressure

This is the situation Nehru faces at home. He has lost Patel, who brought to Indian political life something of the tough hardheadedness more common in New England and the Brilish Midlands. Nehru has little of the common touch which Gandhi had, though he rushes about the country to secure some of that personal popularity which comes in Asia by being accessible.

Unlike Gandhi, who had the “otherworldly” aura of an Indian sndhu and by it drew to himself the Indian masses, Nehru is no mystic. Rejected by most Indian left-wingers, his outlook is socialist, though he does not escape the reproach of being Brahmin-proud.

Indian internal problems are most easily understood in connection with Bombay and Calcutta, where the tension between capital and labor and the pull between producer and consumer take forms like those of Western industrial areas. Unemployment increased when less steel, less cloth, and less hessian were produced as a result of continued disputes with Pakistan. Gaps in employment were once met by a return of laborers to the countryside whence they had come. Today those districts are already clogged with hundreds of thousands of Hindus displaced from Pakistan and not yet absorbed.

THE food problem

Troubles in the villages are less easily understood by anyone not at home in Asia. They have become a nightmare for Indian politicians, townees for the most part, who have had little more than an academic interest in agrarian questions. Fundamentally the rural problem is that of securing mere subsistence for 250 million farming people who have only 80 million acres of land in rice and wheat, which they cultivate with medieval methods. They have had a food deficit for years. Prior to partition it was regional. It has become national and is complicated by currency difficulties.

Inevitably this pressure on the land gets transposed into a struggle between peasant and landlord. The cold fact is that even if the remedy of redistributing farmlands could be applied overnight, it could not solve the food problem. No cure is at hand. Fertility of the present land has declined by robber economy and erosion. India has no virgin areas to act as safety valve. Neither mechanical nor political solutions offer anything except long-term hope, and in the meanwhile unrest continues, population increases, and malnutrition takes its toll.

The Indian government approaches its land problem on Fabian lines, aiming to finance the buying-out of landlords and the resale of small holders. Unfortunately this threntens to deprive it of a large revenue, while committing it to heavy disbursements. The small holders expect to revert to self-contained subsistence farming and thereby raise their standard of living. By taking to their traditional moneyless form of life, they move beyond the reach of revenue officers.

Gandhi sold this philosophy of “Back to the land” and “Make your own cloth” to the Indian masses as part of his obstruction of the British; its success promises economic anemia to the Indian administration. Misty though his economic ideas appeared to be, in his plea that the Indian farmer reduce his needs to the limits of his own hands, Gandhi was in practice correctly appraising the maximum that can for the near future be expected in his congested country.

Social need versus religion

The conflict between the peasant, the administrator, and the landlord only partly centers on the land question. Social disintegration has been set going by a ferment introduced into Hinduism by the Westernized aspects of Congress policy .

Congress movements to improve the position of outcastes and to liquidate great estates attack the basis of Hinduism. Thus social development in India confronts established religion. Questions of land and labor, castes, rural economics, and religion are inextricably tied together in the Indian setting. Profound significance for this reason attaches to the assassination of Gandhi, the reformer, by an organization of high; caste Hindus which, while enthusiastic for a transfer of power from side to side, could not tolerate its transfer from top to bottom.

Current unrest in South India, increasingly ascribed to Indian Communism. reflects this tangle of social, economic, and religious threads. In the famine-harassed Deccan country, the ferment works the faster because hundreds of thousands of men have returned there from overseas, either from military service during World War II or from East Africa, Burma, and Malaya, those El Dorados where so many pioneering South Indians learned a different life.

In rhis respect we must see that it is their contact with the democratic West which underlies the current peasant revolt of South Indians. It denies us a powerful argument to call them Marx-inspired. In their own way they are continuing the process of liberalization which they picked up by cultural contact with the British.

India’s shifting neutrality

Thus torn at home, India is profoundly affected in its foreign policy. It cannot risk any external strain likely to widen its domestic fissures.

On the other hand, the Western world sees in India a possible source of manpower large enough to counterbalance the hordes of China. Nehru likes to bonst that India has no heritage of foreign policy, but he cannot escape the implications of his country’s new status or the fact that he holds office when, for the first time in his generation of politicians, a new imperialism poises on India s northern borders.

Indian industrialists and urban workers each in their own way profited substantially during the two World Wars, with ihe result that the type of policy evolved for external use has every precedent for taking the mercenary form of trying to benefit from both worlds. India s conception of a shifting neutrality to aehieve balance by moving from one side to another in world affairs may be called Orienlal subtlety, though it savors more of business acumen.

India does not follow the classic neutrality principle of strict nonparticipation and impartiality. In a period of gray wars, il moves one way or the other to maintain an even grayness.

Nehru’s hope that India would be the leader of Asia has faded. There are more tensions than ties between India and Pakistan, Burma, East Africa, and those other Indian Ocean countries where the Indian merchant and laborer set up a number of disturbing problems. China has rebuffed Nehru in no uncertain terms.

People in the United States cannot, for all the urgency of their own international interests, afford to indulge in misconceptions and wishful thinking about Asia. We anxiously look for signs that India will move within the Western orbil. The U. S. is therefore in danger of repeating the mistake it made in China by listening to voices that speak without a majority behind them. At this time, the accessibility of some Indian personalities makes it perilously easy to strengthen the wrong prop.

We must accept the hard fact that India is continuing the social ferment initiated by its contact with the West. Indians, especially the underdogs, desperately need such help as the better-off nations can give, but we have to remember that India is not so much a nation as an aspiration.