Pride & Reality
(See Cover)
The ashes of Jawaharlal Nehru have long since disappeared into the silt of the Ganges, carrying with them the faint shadow of the rose he always wore in his lapel. Gone with the Pandit is the image of India as a moral bulwark of the "nonaligned" world, a pious mediator between the great powers. Gone with the jaunty jodhpurs and preachy pronouncements is the hope that India might soon be an economic success. Gone, too, are the pride and the confidence that inspired India in its formative years. India without Nehru stands dispirited and disillusioned, a land without elan where a rose in the lapel is somehow out of place.
The death of Nehru last year was only one of the shocks that have forced the world's largest democracy to face reality. Before that came the Red Chinese attack in October 1962, which discredited India's foreign policy and exposed Delhi as a military powder puff. Then last year the country was struck by its worst food crisis since independence, as riots erupted from Bangalore to Bombay. The shortages of grain called into question Nehru's economic policies, which stressed industry and paid little attention to the more basic problem of agriculture. And looming in the background was the seemingly insoluble deadlock with Pakistan, typified not only by the Kashmir question but also by the threat to India's borders in the desolate Rann of Kutch.
Fruit of Humility. Yet despite the tumult and the tremors, India continues to function with a stability rare in Asia. Part of the reason stems from India's diminutive Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, whose modest manner is the very antithesis of the hubris of Nehru. Tiny and turkey-necked, shy as a schoolboy in his rumpled dhoti and brown loafers, Shastri both matches the diminished stature of India and reflects its inchoate strength. By merely surviving for 14 months in a situation that many thought might end in anarchy, Shastri has shown that India has a chance. His weaknesses alone--concilia tory, hesitant, dilatory as they are--have been magical in their muddling. He was firm only in the Kutch incident, when he sent two divisions of Indian troops to within 300 yards of Pakistan's fortified positions, and that won him support at home. His trips abroad--to Cairo, Moscow, Ottawa, London and Belgrade--earned headlines at home for a man who was at least patrolling the old capitals if not storming them, as Nehru had done, to India's delight. Even when Lyndon Johnson scrubbed Shastri's June trip to Washington under the press of Viet Nam business, Shastri's cool unconcern paid off with Indian audiences, proving to their satisfaction that humility pays. Last week Shastri tackled a micro cosm of the problems that plague his nation. He wrapped up his four-day visit to Yugoslavia by attempting once again to re-establish India's image as a crisis mediator, signed a communique that neither damned the U.S. nor praised the Viet Cong. Back in New Delhi, he called in the bosses of India's 16 states and wrung from them approval for a long overdue food rationing plan. He also huddled with his Cabinet ministers, garnering their ideas for India's next Five-Year Plan. In his off hours, he courted Uganda's visiting Prime Minister Milton Apollo Obote, seeking to rekindle the Afro-Indian cooperation that Nehru had sparked. Through each meeting ran the thread of Shastri's approach: a concern with consensus that has marked his rule from the outset.
Kaleidoscope of Contrast. Shastri's India is less a nation than a notion, possessed of a fragile unity that barely transcends its geographical boundaries. Into a triangular wedge of the world only a third as big as the U.S., India packs 480 million people and more than 200 million cows. From the mirage-like ice peaks of the Himalayas, down the vast and sinuous Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers (which most Indians regard as holy), through the crammed chawls and boiling bustees of Bombay and Calcutta, to the humid tip of the subcontinent at Cape Comorin, India is a kaleidoscope of contrast (see color pages). Within its embattled boundaries it embraces six distinct ethnic groups, seven major religions, 845 languages and dialects, and two ancient and antagonistic cultures: the Indo-Aryan (primarily Hindi-speaking) in the north, the Dravidian (speaking mainly Telugu and Tamil) in the south. Its peoples range from sultry Sikhs in silken turbans to naked Nagas armed with crossbows; from country dwellers who are seared black by a cruel sun to pale and perfumed maharanees who ride to the beaches of Bombay in air-conditioned Rolls-Royces.
Historically, the crosscurrents are just as diverse. Invaders have swept across India's deserts and hacked through its stifling jungles since time immemorial, riding everything from elephants to armored personnel carriers, swinging everything from stone hammers to 120-mm. mortars. But under the two centuries of the British raj, a structure of government and administration was slowly imposed on this subcontinent of chaos. What threatens it today is bureaucracy--an Indian nightmare more overwhelming than anything dreamed of by Kafka. District officials, who are nominally responsible for the "community development" of India's 567,000 villages, must file 280 reports to New Delhi a month. Development Minister S. K. Dey ruefully admits that none of the reports are read but brightly points out that all are dutifully filed away for future reference. New Delhi is being strangled in paper.
A Day Behind the Bullocks. Economically, India is still an agricultural nation, despite Nehru's brave plans for industrialization. Typical of India's peasantry is "Ramoo" Sivaram, a 33-year-old farmer who lives near Hyderabad in the province of Andhra Pradesh. His wife Lakshmi is named for the Hindu goddess of prosperity, but in her 27 years she has prospered only by pregnancy: married at 13, she is today the mother of six. Each morning at 5:30, Ramoo rises and trots off to the village well to bathe himself with buckets of lukewarm, silty water, then returns to his clay-walled hut and squats on the cow-dung floor for breakfast: a thick chapatty (wheat pancake) and a brass tumbler of scalding black tea. Ramoo owns only two bullocks, and with them he plods across his barren acres, dragging a steel-slivered plow designed in prehistory by some Indian prototype who faced the same harsh, crumbling earth. In a year, he raises scarcely enough to feed his bullocks. For lunch Ramoo eats another chapatty covered with watery gruel, and perhaps a slice of mango chutney hoarded by his wife to give the food some flavor. Then back to the plow.
At night, Ramoo shuffles down to the village's sole radio receiver, listens to the state-owned All-India Radio, which helps him to forget his debt to the village moneylender. Now and then he attends one of the thousand torchlit religious fairs that dominate the Indian calendar. There he delights in the wit of storytellers reciting one or another of the ageless, adventurous Hindu myths.
"Just Craze for Foreign." Against rural resignation stands the excitement of India's great metropolises. Each of the country's major cities--Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi and Madras--has its own similarities and its own distinctions. Calcutta and Bombay are linked in their visual splendor and their vicious slums; wealth and poverty exist cool cheek by grizzled jowl. Madras, with its burgeoning Hindu evangelism (backed by Shastri's strongman, Congress Party President Kumaraswami Kamaraj), is less metropolitan but more leisurely. Where Bombay is sparked by its Parsi businessmen (descended from 8th century Persian fire worshipers), Madras is tempered by Tamil intellectualism. New Delhi--founded in 1911 by the British --is the youngest of the nation's great cities, and its least distinctive. Dust swirls through its broad, beige streets; beggars sleep on its sidewalks beneath gaudy murals; and pallid politicians occupy center stage.
In all four cities, the upper classes scurry for status. Top status symbol: a foreign automobile. In one fantastic series of deals, a year-old Chevrolet Impala imported by a diplomat for $1,680 was ultimately bought by a Bombay movie star for $16,800. Import restrictions have made any foreign item desirable, including electric mixers, irons, refrigerators, hair dryers and record players. West Indian Author V. S. Naipaul, visiting India for the first time, records in his book Area of Darkness the xenophile plaint of a Delhi housewife: "I am just craze for foreign, just craze for foreign."
"Stale Experiment." The cry reflects the changing nature of India's upper middle class, a social role that demands the best of two contradictory worlds.
An Indian gentleman must be able to mix a very dry martini and in the next, very dry breath interpret the intricacies of a raga (a traditional Hindu melody) played on a sitar (like a guitar). His wife must not only be pretty, but be able to frug in a sari while folding her hands in the traditional greeting of namaste. His home must be decorated in the best Western decor, but carry at least one careful Indian touch--perhaps a Mogul miniature or a divan with a brightly colored, hand-loomed bolster from the Punjab. Clubs are one British social heritage that upper-class Indians will not revolt against, perhaps because they were excluded in the days of the British raj. Today high-caste Indians are just as cutting to members of lesser castes as the Englishman was to "wogs." Indian intellectual life has fared a bit better. Today, 45 million children are in school, v. 14 million at independence, and though the nation is still only 24% literate, it is reading more, and from broader sources. When a group of young Indians educated abroad get together, the talk is less likely to be nostalgia about Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh than about memories of Columbia, Michigan or U.C.L.A. Even Indians who do not go abroad are reading more about the West than they did before. Yesterday's intellectual demigods were G. B. Shaw, Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot; today's are Mary McCarthy and James Baldwin. Where once the coffee tables in Indian upper-class homes carried outdated copies of Punch and The Taller, they now carry fresh issues of American magazines. Indian art is selling better than ever--and although their work is often merely decorative, painters argue they are at least not bogged down in "stale experimentation."
The key to Indian art, letters and entertainments is escape. India today produces more movies than the U.S. Last year the nation's 4,500 movie theaters drew more than $100 million in box office receipts. Indians crowd the theaters, happily sitting through costume epics of three or more hours in length. Indian films are frankly escapist, and are divided into twelve categories ranging from "socials" that deal with city-country or caste themes to "myth-ologicals" that treat of Hindu legend in full color and dubbed voices (since the actors can't sing and the singers can't act). Sample lyric: "You are the Ganges of my heart, and I am the Jumna of your heart. Where, oh where, is the confluence?" During intermissions audiences devour fried field peas or sherbet, drink Cokes, then exit to buy copies of the movie's songs.
Cars & Cow Dung. Compared with the nation's potential, India's economic progress during 18 years of independence is modest enough. Before independence, India had three steel mills; today there are six, producing 4.3 million metric tons of finished steel last year (v. 39.7 million metric tons for Japan). Where there was one oil refinery before 1947, there are now five. At plants in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, India produces three makes of automobiles, all small but expensive (prices range from $2,186 to $2,347; delivery guaranteed within two to eight years). Bicycles are far more popular --and purchasable--hence India's 21 bike plants produce more than a million two-wheelers a year, and every bullock path has its flock of speedsters, carrying everything from milk to millet.
Growth on even so small a scale has begun to alter India's ancient ways of life. The change is best symbolized by the Punjabi capital of Chandigarh, which rises from the sere plains of the northwest in concrete convolutions designed by the famed French architect Le Corbusier. Homemade ghee (clarified butter), which villagers not long ago insisted was the only nourishing cooking medium, is giving way to sealed tins of vegetable oil; kerosene-burning hurricane lanterns are supplanting the traditional Aladdin-like mud diva in peasant huts, and well-to-do farmers often buy a second lantern to hang outside as a sign of affluence. Though most villagers still prefer cooking fires of cow dung, some huts now boast $2 oil stoves. Rural electrification is also spreading, but slowly, with an estimated 80% of India's power requirements still supplied by animal and human effort. The current Five-Year Plan calls for less than 10% of India's villages to be electrified.
Social change has even managed to shiver--if not shatter--India's long-frozen caste system. Low-caste village scavengers--who under Hindu tradition skinned dead livestock to sell the hides --now find less messy jobs. Hide merchants from the cities are forced to send out trucks with their own men to do the dirty work. Higher up the caste ladder, India faces a servant problem even more perplexing than that in the West (TIME, July 9). The punkah wallahs of the past are no longer willing to turn the fans in stifling offices; they have been replaced by air conditioning. Most lower-caste Indians prefer jobs as office boys or chauffeurs.
The face of the land is also changing through vast engineering projects like the 425-mile Rajasthan Canal and the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, both being built largely by hand labor. By contrast, Bombay boasts a modern, $55 million atomic power plant. Indian nuclear physicists could easily build an atomic bomb in a year to 18 months, but India has no real military use for it. Still, India may well be forced to develop nuclear weapons if only to recapture international prestige, particularly since Red China has begun exploding atomic devices.
"The Syndicate." Such decisions rest with India's well-entrenched Congress Party, which under Mahatma Gandhi carried the country to independence, and has held power ever since. The Congress holds 370 of the 510 seats in Parliament, and despite an array of eight opposition parties ranging from the Communists to the free-enterprise Swatantra (Freedom) Party, stands in no danger of losing control. The Congress itself embraces a broad spectrum of political coloration, from the virtual Communism of former Defense Minis ter Krishna Menon through the proAmericanism of Railways Minister S. K. Patil to the Hindu mysticism of the party's reactionary wing. But basically it retains much of the socialist stamp given it by Nehru. A small circle of Congress politicians known as "the Syndicate" currently dominates the party, and it is to this group that Lai Bahadur Shastri must remain responsible. Key members of the Syndicate:
> Kumaraswami Kamaraj Nadar, 63, barrel-chested boss of Madras, who as president of the Congress Party dreamed up the consensus scheme as a means of installing Shastri after Nehru's death. But Kamaraj speaks only Tamil, and even if Shastri were to vanish, would be content to remain only a kingmaker and cash collector for the party. Last week Kamaraj was touring his home state, preceded by an elephant with bells on its toes, to celebrate his birthday. In lieu of gifts he collected $350,000 for the party coffers.
> S. K. Patil, 63, outspoken leader of the party's right wing and the man in control of wealthy Bombay, which supplies two-thirds of the party's finances. -- Atulya Ghosh, 59, cigar-chomping boss of eastern India.
> Sanjiva Reddy, 52, a bespectacled, brush-browed anti-Communist who serves as Shastri's Minister of Steel and Mines and is one of the few Cabinet members with a dual political base. He has supporters in both Madras and Andhra Pradesh thanks to the fact that those two states were created in 1949.
Return to the Raj? The strength of the Syndicate was best demonstrated at the recent meeting of the Congress's All-India Committee in Bangalore (TIME, Aug. 6). There Shastri carefully coaxed his fellow Congressmen into reappointing Kamaraj as party president, thus perpetuating the chance for consensus in the 1967 elections. But the Congress--led by Gandhi strictly as a revolutionary movement--is perverting the purpose for which it was conceived. Gandhi had urged the party to dissolve itself after independence was gained.
India's elder statesman, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, 86, who quit the Congress to found the Swatantra Party, fears that one day the Congress and the government might merge into a one-party state. Local Congress leaders who have held power since 1947 own too much land and urban property to permit the reforms that are needed if India is to reach economic equity. The zamindars of West Bengal, for example, have become (through Congress Party consent) the equivalent of the English gentry of the raj.
Still, under Congress, Indian voters have largely been able so far at least to steer their way between Communist promises of a Marxist Utopia and the reactionary vision of a return to the "golden days" of Hinduism. And last year, when the pro-Peking wing of India's 120,000-strong Communist Party won the most seats in the state of Kerala, Delhi coolly jailed the Reds and appointed its own governor.
Caution & Competence. To these men and to the nation, Shastri serves as mediator, moderator and compromiser. Just such a role has long been the hallmark of Shastri's caste, the Kayasth, which is scorned by many other Hindus because the Kayasthi served India's Moslem rulers during the Mogul period (1526-1707) as clerks and officials. Lai Bahadur Shastri, whose name means "Graduate Brave Jewel" was born in 1904, the son of a minor tax collector in the Uttar Pradesh village of Mughal Sarai, near the sacred city of Banaras. As a schoolboy, he made his commitment to Gandhism, was arrested eight times by the British and spent nine years in jail during the early revolutionary days. A typical infraction: flag raising. In 1932, the British refused to let the Indian nationalists fly their flag on the Allahabad clock tower, but Shastri--disguised as a veiled Moslem woman--swished past the British guards and raised it anyway.
After independence, Shastri served Nehru in a series of positions, beginning as parliamentary secretary in Uttar Pradesh, then vaulting to Delhi as Railways Minister. In 1956, after a series of bloody railroad accidents, he resigned the portfolio voluntarily, taking the moral blame in a fashion that won him admiration from the nation. A year later, as chief strategist for the Congress Party, he masterminded the 1957 elections with great success. Soon he was back in Delhi's hierarchy, this time as Home Minister, second only to Nehru himself. Always unobtrusive, Shastri was nonetheless always present, and with the Pandit's death, the Syndicate naturally turned to him as a cautious but competent choice for the premiership. Shastri's major opponent for the job, Nehru's fiery Finance Minister Morarji Desai, 69, appeared to Kama-raj & Co. to be too uncontrollable. Shastri has not disappointed his backers.
Humble Home Life. Shastri's workday begins at the same time as that of the lowliest Indian farmer: 5:30 a.m. Shunning the splendid Prime Minister's house, Shastri lives with his wife Lalita and 19 other members of his family (including six children, six grandchildren, and his 80-year-old mother) in a humble, white bungalow at No. 1 Janpath (People's Way). Dispensing with his dentures for the first hours of the day, Shastri pads through cozy rooms cluttered with bric-a-brac--Japanese dolls, a Soviet rocket model, a toy atom--to take his breakfast of tea and small talk. His bookcases carry such disparate works as the Bhagavad Gita and Automobile Chassis Design.
After breakfast, he strolls out to the wide, flower-fringed lawn for his regular hour of darshan (audience) with the favor seekers and admirers that surround any politician. A chauffeur and a single white-clad bodyguard accompany him in a black, Indian-built Hindustan Ambassador sedan to his office in the circular, sandstone Parliament House. Office routine--sometimes 17 hours a day of it--is interrupted only by a vegetarian lunch of curry, potato cutlet and tea (prepared by his wife) and a half-hour nap. A heart attack in 1959 and another seizure last year, shortly after he assumed the premiership, have done little to slow Shas-tri's dogged pace. He is blessed by an old Nehru tradition that saves him wear and tear: Indian Prime Ministers rarely hold diplomatic receptions.
To the dismay of many associates, Shastri's humility is not put on. He stubbornly refuses to do anything that might build up his personal image, even when it could help the country. During last year's food crisis, Shastri decided to forgo rice as a symbol of self-denial. But out of modesty he refused to let the fact be relayed to the rioting people, and the possible impact was lost. Yet many Indians feel that more than self-abnegation is needed to confront grave problems. Says Editor Frank Moraes of the Indian Express: "Leaders have no business being humble."
The Grain Drain. The crises that confront India are grave indeed. First on the list is the perennial problem of providing enough food for a population that is growing at a rate of 3% a year. The cause of last year's food crisis was simple enough: for three straight years, Indian grain production remained static at 80 million tons. Sharp traders from Bombay to Calcutta capitalized on the underproduction by buying up wheat in the fields, then quietly ordering farmers to hold their crops for future delivery after prices had soared higher. In Shastri's home state, wheat that had been selling for $173.25 per ton doubled in price in a matter of weeks. State bosses then refused to accept Shastri's rationing plan, and India had to double its normal import of grain from abroad --expanding valuable foreign exchange in the process. The U.S. grain supply to India reached 6,650,000 tons -- two shiploads a day -- and saved the country from sheer starvation.
In perhaps his strongest move since assuming power, Shastri ordered a cut back in the grandiose industrial scheme laid out by Nehru, snatched away the styluses from New Delhi's army of blue printing planners, and cranked up a crash program of agricultural aid. Though industrial projects already un der way ($5 billion worth of them) will be allowed to reach completion, the heavier effort for the next few years will go into quick-yielding small projects for farmers -- wells, irrigation and roads. This year's harvest gives him a breather: 87,200,000 tons of grain have been cut and winnowed.
Malthusian Menace. But more improvement in food production must be matched by population control if India is ever to feed herself. Nehru's first Five-Year Plan was meant to make the nation self-sufficient agriculturally, but without a firm program of family planning, it fell sadly short of the mark. Shastri, too, has failed to face up to the Malthusian menace of India's birth rate. Every year the country's crop of new babies exceeds the population of New York City. When pressed about birth control, Shastri smiles: "I hesitate to give advice on this matter because I already have six children." Shastri's female Health Minister, Dr. Shushila Nayar, is little help: she has spent only a third of the funds in last year's budget for birth control.
Even the most optimistic of planned parenthood enthusiasts lose hope at the problems that India's vast illiterate, tradition-bound populace presents. Indian wives feel that they can justify their dowry only by proving fertility, and such contraceptives as diaphragms and birth control pills are either too complicated or too expensive. Best hope for the future are the intrauterine devices that are simple, cheap and reliable. Most popular now in India is the "coil," a plastic, S-shaped loop inserted in the womb, which can be removed if the woman wants a child. India's first coil factory is already producing 15,000 loops a day, and government doctors travel through the countryside, explaining their use to the peasantry.
View from the Falls. Shastri's compulsion to compromise was better applied in the great January language crisis. In that month, India adopted Hindi (which only 40% of Indians speak) as the nation's official language. Southern Indians -- speaking mostly Tamil or Telugu--rose up in a wave of riots, murders and suicides to protest so blatant a move on the part of the "arrogant" Indo-Aryans of the north. Shastri muddled through several weeks of bloodshed, finally decided to rescind the January order and for the moment retain English as well as 14 southern languages. "We have to find some middle course," he temporized. More than a decade ago, Nehru toyed with the idea of making English the official language (he himself could barely speak Hindi) but dropped the notion when he realized it would undercut his support among the masses.
In her foreign relations, India is confronted with problems as severe as those at home, but in the diplomatic field Shastri's vagueness and middle-course tendencies are less likely to cause trouble. Red China still occupies 14,500 sq. mi. of Himalayan India; the injection of massive U.S. military aid has helped deter Peking from pushing downhill into the oil-and rice-rich plains along the Brahmaputra adjacent to Burma. Pakistan -- lately linked to Red China through a reciprocal defense agreement -- remains India's implacable enemy. Shastri showed boldness at the run-in on the Rann, but again he compromised a bit: in the settlement concluded last month, India surrendered a few square miles of the Rann. Since the bleak reach of mud and desert is largely under water during the current monsoon season, it scarcely counts against him.
Shastri has managed to build a slight reputation abroad as a man of some mettle. His response to Washington's cancelation of his June visit showed that--when his country's pride was involved--he had spunk. Shastri flew off to Canada and viewed the U.S. from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, told reporters that he could not come to the U.S. this fall even if Lyndon Johnson wanted him. (He may very well come next spring.) Shastri has maintained his aid arrangements with both the big powers. The U.S. this year will give him $110 million (Washington's biggest aid outlay and due to grow), while the Russians provide nearly as much--including the huge Soviet steel mill planned for Bokaro. India's arsenal now includes both Russian MIGs and American tanks.
Question of Will. India under Lai Bahadur Shastri remains hung up on its dipolar destiny: karma and dharma. According to Hindu philosophy, two major injunctions dictate a man's way of life. Karma is predestined fate, the godly consequence that dictates the caste and society into which the Hindu is born as punishment or reward for the way he behaved in his previous incarnation. Dharma is the grace--or righteousness--that accrues to a man who accepts his karma-ordained condition. Over the centuries, karma has come to mean passive acceptance of hunger, disease, poverty and humiliation on the sweltering, swarming Indian subcontinent. This acceptance of fate, buttressed by the humble self-righteous ness that Indians can adopt better than any other human beings, has resulted in a loss of initiative. Bombay Editor Rajmohan Gandhi (a grandson of the Mahatma) sees India's failings not in terms of climate or demography or language barriers but rather in the simple fact that Indians have no will to work.
Yet under the slothful surface, India is astir with powerful new social and economic forces. The nation does not now possess the know-how or the energy to raise itself from poverty and despair. To that extent, India's lethargy is a valuable check against firebrand revolutionaries who would hope to trade on Indian misery with offers of Marxist panaceas. Shastri's emphasis on agriculture is only a stop-gap measure, certainly not the ultimate answer to India's woes. Once it has learned to feed itself, it can then move slowly, sanely toward industrial self-sufficiency. It may take a bolder man than Shastri to carry such a program through. But somewhere among India's millions, among the young who hunger for education and get it, there will doubtless emerge a dynamic leader to rally the nation and lift its spirits--a man who perhaps combines Nehru's flamboyance and Shastri's humility. At that point, hope will return to a subcontinent.
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