Trouble in the Vale

For four years Jawaharlal Nehru had steadfastly refused to visit the home of his ancestors--the lovely, lake-filled Vale of Kashmir. Last week, as 80,000 Kashmiris pelted him with flowers and delighted schoolchildren piped, "Hooray for Uncle Nehru," India's Prime Minister once again rode through the streets of Srinagar.

To curious Kashmiri newsmen Nehru frankly explained his long avoidance of Kashmir: he had for a long time been "pained and hurt" by the plight of his onetime friend Sheik Abdullah who, with Nehru's reluctant consent, has now spent four years in prison for having flirted with the idea of Kashmiri independence rather than union with India. When it came to explaining why Nehru had ended his boycot--since Sheik Abdullah still sits in jail--Nehru was somewhat less frank. Ostensibly, he had come to look at the receding floodwaters that recently inundated 700 Kashmiri villages. In fact, he had come to bolster India's position in the decade-old quarrel between India and Pakistan over possession of Kashmir.

Soothing Chat. Nehru's first task was to deal with an embarrassing split in the puppet Kashmiri government headed by ironfisted Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed. Seventeen of Kashmir's leading Communist-line politicians last week resigned from Bakshi's National Conference party, making charges of governmental corruption and repression in Indian Kashmir. If they continued to howl, their charges might carry all the way to the U.N., even provoke questions as to why Bakshi had knowingly tolerated such proCommunists in his government for so long. Determined to avoid this if possible, Nehru chatted soothingly with the rebels, quietly advised Bakshi to treat them as old friends.

Sudden Outrage. Kashmir is one of the world's plague spots--like Algeria and Cyprus--which can be expected to erupt with violence, or at least violent language, just before a U.N. session opens. Last month Pakistani Foreign Minister Firoz Khan Noon charged that Russian military aircraft had been allowed to land in Indian Kashmir, and added, "I consider the whole of India to be a Russian air base." India's press countered this attack with the claim that the U.S. Air Force is carrying out a "feverish buildup" in the part of Kashmir held by Pakistan.

Nehru's visit to Kashmir was meant to show that all Kashmir is delighted to be occupied by India. At Srinagar, Nehru set India's tone for the U.N. session: "The problem of Kashmir is: What right has Pakistan to be in this state? The answer to this problem is not a plebiscite." So much for Nehru's onetime promise to let the Kashmiris choose for themselves. Or, as Krishna Menon, seconding the boss, put it last week: "Our country has been invaded, and the invasion has to be vacated." Any talk of a U.N. force in Kashmir, said Menon, is "entirely out of the question," and whoever votes for it in the U.N. will be performing an "unfriendly act" in India's eyes. Thus, all set to play up "Pakistani aggression," Nehru and his colleagues hope to divert U.N. attention from the inconvenient fact that two-thirds of predominantly Moslem Kashmir has been incorporated into the Indian Republic in open defiance of five Security Council resolutions.

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