Journey's End?

Heavy-lidded, his inevitable rose limp in his buttonhole, Jawaharlal Nehru stood up behind his teakwood desk in Parliament one day last week and said, almost inaudibly: "We have reached the conclusion of our journey." After 40 hours of debate and long years of dickering, India was going to get a new States Reorganization Bill, reapportioning the country into 14 large and viable states and six centrally run enclaves, e.g., the capital city of New Delhi. The bill repelled the chaotic factions who have cried for the fragmentation of India along the boundary lines of its 844 languages and dialects. The key move, thought up by Nehru's Socialist and independent opponents and gratefully grasped by him, was to fuse the hostile linguistic factions of Marathas (27.5 million) and Gujrati (17.5 million) into one big, Texas-sized, bilingual State of Bombay (see map).

The possibility of a sensible solution of an anxious question confounded the Communists, who multiply upon the sting of linguistic hatreds, and infiltrate smaller states more easily. "No, no, no!" the Communist M.P.s cried when the outcome was announced. Next day the Communists got some comfort when Gujrati students raged through the squalid streets of the textile center of Ahmedabad demanding a separate Gujarati state, attacking police and politicians in confused skirmishes that cost the city 16 dead.

Jawaharlal Nehru treated the parliamentary outcries of the home-grown Reds with fine scorn: "No one would dare raise his head against the government's decision in a Communist country, because then the head would disappear." But he was disturbed by the riots that followed the House of the People's unanimous vote (the Communists abstaining). "Parliament puts its seal upon [a bill] and it becomes law," said Nehru. "What happens then? Do you go on fighting about it? Once you lose in Parliament, do you take the issue to the streets? Are we becoming an opera for the world to laugh at?"

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