The In-Betweeners

A valet carefully blue-rinsed Marshal Tito's silver hair. The Marshal donned a corset, a medal-spangled uniform with extremely wide red stripes down the pants, then strode off to a fashionable garden party. Behind him through lines of bowing guests, like a plainly dressed retainer showing off a gorgeous bull mastiff, came India's Jawaharlal Nehru. After several days of such festivity, the Marshal decided that he should also demonstrate that he was a Socialist man of the people. Tito thereupon upset New Delhi's snob-laden society by inviting red-turbaned railroad porters to a diplomatic reception. "You have seen all my uniforms," joshed

Tito to Nehru, "now I would like to see your farming cooperatives."

In a plain civilian suit. Tito addressed India's combined Houses of Parliament. "Admissions by the present Soviet leaders that Yugoslavia was wrongly treated," he said, had convinced him that "there has been a change in Russia . . . Tensions have now subsided." Tito tenaciously discoursed upon Yugoslavia's Socialism in heavily accented English, but when he left the subject of Asia behind, the Indian M.P.s lost interest and began chattering to one another. Tito also talked alone with Nehru for ten hours. The gist of his message: Malenkov is less ambitious than Stalin and lacks Stalin's iron will; Malenkov considers that Stalin committed ideological errors in his last years, and now concedes that different countries (e.g., Yugoslavia, India) may follow their own chosen paths to Socialism.

Before a roaring wood fire, Nehru asked Tito about his relations with the West. Tito assured Nehru that Western aid carried no strings, that the West favored strong, independent countries. Nehru interposed: "Even if they are building Socialism?" Tito answered Nehru: "Provided that they are genuinely independent." The capitalist West simply has to aid underdeveloped countries, said Communist Theoretician Tito, or choke itself with its own productivity. Tito and Nehru subsequently put out a joint communique (written by Nehru) denying that they would form a "third bloc, or third force." In private. Jawaharlal Nehru expressed their reasoning more bluntly: "If we align ourselves with one or the other bloc, we cease to count."

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