The Struggle for Andhra

Jawaharlal Nehru stood upright in his open black Cadillac as it rolled beneath triumphal arches through the villages and towns of southeast India. "WELCOME, JEWEL OF ASIA," the customary placards proclaimed as he journeyed, garlanded, along paths strewn with palm leaves. Yet despite the familiar scenes of adulation, he seemed distant, tired, and ineffectual. Speaking from a platform 15 feet above the crowds of illiterate peasants, he projected his own confusion. He is against "the Communists," but not against "Communism." He does not approve of Communist "methods," but as for Communist objectives, "I like them." "Does Nehru Sahib wish us to vote for the Communists or not?" asked one of the bewildered peasants.

Prophets & Promises. Nehru's confusion was all the more apparent, since he had journeyed south purposely to stump against the Communists in the tight, important campaign for the Andhra state elections. The Communists are driving hard to win in Andhra, an arid land cut by ravines and deep poverty. The Communists are stronger there than anywhere else in India. Andhra is India's first "linguistic state," formed in 1953 among the 21 million Telegu-speaking people. As such, it is only one of 29 Indian states, but India's Communists hope to make it their first conquest; they talk confidently of converting Andhra into an Indian "Yenan," a power base from which they can subvert the rest of India.

Well-organized, the Communists campaign in whatever way suits the situation, exploiting violence, logic or superstition. They beat up Congress workers, intimidate rich men in "Buy a Bicycle for Communism" fund-raising drives; they put on song-and-dance acts every night in gaily lit village stalls. The Communists denounce Nehru's dams and power projects, whispering to the peasants: "Electricity is being taken out of the water to give to the landlords." They disguise themselves as astrologers to predict that "by the stars, there will be a Communist India." The Communists even pose as holy men, rubbed with ashes, to preach that "the gods want Andhra to be India's first Com munist state." The Communist tactics are many-sided, but their theme is consistent and throbbing: "Five acres per peasant . . . We will give you land!" From Gandhi to Dandies. Less than three weeks before the Andhra election, the 25 top leaders of Nehru's Congress Party gathered in nearby Madras, prop ping themselves up against cushions on a great white mattress. The Congressmen's names were big names of the Gandhi days: Govind Ballabh Pant, Abul Kalam Azad, Chakravarti Rajagopalachariar; the setting was Gandhian, in a tenement, and many of the leaders traveled to Madras Gandhi-style, in jampacked third-class carriages. But they were painfully aware that India's Congress officials had since drifted away from the people; the old men on the mattress could detect a mounting outcry against Congress officialdom's growing flabbiness, its fondness for big houses and pomp. The old men were also disturbed by Nehru's disappointing campaign through Andhra.

For four hours the old leaders conferred, while curious crowds gathered in the narrow streets outside. A new party platform was required by "the compulsion of circumstances," the Congressmen concluded. Congress could no longer seek a Gandhian'"cooperative commonwealth" in which cottage-industry workers would "recite couplets from the Upanishads as they wove their cloth." Instead it must set up state factories, "a pattern of society where the means of production are under social control." Nehru assigned responsibility for putting over the new "socialistic pattern" to a tough Congress politician whom he dislikes: S. K. ("Eskay") Patil, 55, an ex-newspaperman jailed nine times by the British, who now runs the Congress machine in Bombay (pop. 36 million), the only Indian state where the Communists are losing ground. Eskay Patil dislikes Nehru's Red China policy ("close to appeasement") and Nehru's autocratic ways.

"Socialism Is Inevitable." Eskay Patil, arriving in Andhra, began by firing corrupt and inefficient Congress ward bosses. "Congress need only fear its own rottenness," said he. Patil delivered a rasping commentary on Nehru's feeble campaign ("too intellectual"), and treated his audience to lurid descriptions of Communist peasant atrocities in Red China. To those voters who felt intimidated by the Communists, Eskay Patil proclaimed: "You'd better be more afraid of me than the Communists, for I'm tougher!"

Laying down the new Congress line, Campaigner Patil concluded: "In a country like India, full of havenots, the choice lies at present only between democratic socialism and Communism. We can only hope that the socialism will be democratic, but under present conditions and given the present temper of the people, socialism anyhow is inevitable. India has no alternative . . . except Communism."

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