Friends & Reactionaries

The heat of India's rousing hospitality for the two top leaders of Communism had not yet faded when Prime Minister Nehru stood before a mass meeting in southerly Trichur one day last week and delivered an icy assault. Communism is outmoded, said Nehru: "The brave and great revolutionary Communists have become great reactionaries."

Nehru was playing a favorite game. He was talking only of India's own Communists, against whom he has warred for his eight years as Prime Minister while exchanging warm visits and friendly sentiments with their Communist masters abroad. "What the world needs in the atomic age," said Nehru, "is something revolutionary and dynamic, yet the Indian Communists . . . cling to doctrines which have no relations to facts today."

India's leader, it turned out, also had some reservations about Khrushchev and Bulganin and their performance while in India. But Nehru was considerably less outspoken about this. He sent his Cabinet a formal note (allowed to leak to the press) describing the Russians' anti-Western speeches as embarrassing, especially in view of India's position of neutrality between the Western and Soviet blocs. But they were guests, the Prime Minister explained, and could have been silenced only with "great difficulty."

Addressing 50,000 Indians in Coimbatore, Nehru said: "Some people in the West are very angry that we gave the Russians a warm welcome. Countries-whether on this side or that--think you should be either with them or against them. But we shall make friends with all who are friendly with us, and we shall continue to be friendly with those who do not want to be friends with us. But naturally our contacts will be closer with those who are friendly than with those who refuse to be friendly."

He was obviously quite flattered by the attention India was getting, and kept referring to it. At Nilambur he said: "We are one of the great nations of the world. Why did all these people* come here? Because they all want to discover how we Indians manage to work peacefully together." At Kozhikode he cried, "India's voice carries weight in the world. We cannot escape our destiny as a great nation."

* Among recent visitors' Bulganin, Khrushchev, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, Burma's U Nu. Canada's Lester Pearson, Red China's Madame Sun Yat-Sen.

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