Land of Peace

Jawaharlal Nehru, disciple of the nonviolent Gandhi, likes to scold everybody else (especially the Western nations) for their bellicose natures. Last week some of the stones he has been throwing were thrown back at Nehru's glass house.

Since India gained freedom in 1947, Nehru has repeatedly demanded an end to all colonial enclaves in the subcontinent. When his huffing, puffing and pleading did not blow the colonial walls down, armed Indian nationalists (often Communist-led) began to stir up revolts in the enclaves, and Nehru gave their activity the kind of silence that implies approval. France let three of its tiny colonies go (Chandernagor, Mahe and Yanaon), and last week the French Foreign Office let it be known that the last two, Pondicherry and Karikal, would be ceded to India within "the next few weeks." These small faraway colonies were no longer of strategic, economic or sentimental importance to France (TIME, April 12).

Portugal, however, felt passionately different about its numerous picturesque fragments on India's west coast. Goa, chief among them, is the symbol of a golden age of Portuguese conquest four centuries ago and important to Catholic Portuguese as the final resting place of St. Francis Xavier. Goa is also economi cally profitable: last year the port exported more than $11 million worth of manganese and iron ore. In Lisbon, Nehru's designs on Goa were greeted by obstinate fury. Lisbon's Diario de Noticias angrily denounced Nehru as a misguided forerunner of Communism. "The spectacular show staged by Indian imperialism ... is nothing but an episode ... of the subjugation of Asia to the sinister disintegrating forces of Russia," it went on. "Portugal will not let this sordid spoliation, which also affects the whole Christian West, be accomplished without denouncing it to the world by raising its voice and shedding its blood."

India's nationalists served notice of a "peaceful" march on Goa in observance of India's Independence Day (Aug. 15). Portugal's scholarly strongman, President Salazar. countered by dispatching a frigate and more troops to reinforce his "Rome of the East."

At week's end, Nehru, so free with advice to others, got some advice for himself. In one form or another, nine nations expressed concern to India (among them the ex-colony of Brazil, supporting Mother Portugal). Typical was Britain's Foreign OSce's "earnest hope that there will be no resort to force or to methods bound to lead to the use of force."

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