Three Forward, Two Back

As he rose wearily from his teakwood parliamentary bench one morning last week, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru found himself in an unusual and unpleasant position. For the first time in years, the relative handful of Indian M.P.s who oppose Nehru were in a position to attack him where he prides himself most: in his role of high-minded overseer of other nations' misdeeds.

All over India, intellectual leaders were criticizing Nehru for hurling thunderous denunciations at Britain and France for their invasion of Egypt while expressing only mild concern over Soviet Russia's ruthless repression in Hungary. In a letter to the Times of India, Nehru's brother-in-law, Raja Hutheesing, put to the Prime Minister an unanswerable question: "Under what international law has the massacre of thousands of Hungarian people been termed by the Government of India ... a civil strife?"

Slight Change. Worse yet, Nehru's stand on Hungary was turning world public opinion against him and his nation. Under the title Commonwealth Split, British Author A. P. Herbert wrote in Punch:

My opinion of Nehru Is practically zehru, And I could stand it, If we lost the Pandit.

From the U.S., the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Walter Reuther, a longtime Nehru admirer, cabled a bitter protest at India's stand. Nervously, Nehru's own Foreign Office warned him that by equivocating on Hungary he was jeopardizing his position in the Asian bloc, and reducing the likelihood that any profit would come out of his forthcoming trip to the U.S.

On the strength of this wave of criticism, the Socialist Opposition in Parliament demanded a debate on India's foreign policy. Opening the two-day debate, Nehru, his face grim, read off an hour-long speech which he had carefully written and rewritten the day before. By the time he was half through, his opponents knew that their attack had been parried in advance. Abandoning his previous assertions that the Hungarian affair was "unclear," and essentially a civil war, Nehru flatly admitted: "The fact is that ... the Soviet armies were there against the wishes of the Hungarian people."

Unique Capacity. This was the sharpest attack on Russia that Nehru has made, and next day the Times of India happily hailed it with the headline, EMOTIONAL BIAS IN FOREIGN POLICY GIVEN UP. In cold fact, the praise was only partly earned. For every admission of Russian guilt that Nehru made, there was an offsetting reference to Anglo-French guilt in Egypt. At least once Nehru seemed to imply that the invasion of Egypt was morally worse, saying: "There was no immediate aggression [in Hungary] as there was in the case of Egypt."

Throughout the speech it was clear that the Indian Premier's unique capacity for swallowing Communist lies was not yet exhausted. All the talk about deportation of Hungarians to Siberia, he suggested, might have occurred because the Hungarian government "have taken steps to allow some representatives of the workers ... to go themselves to sit at the various points of exit from Hungary to see if anything was being done there or anybody sent away. Now it is quite conceivable that ... it might have been thought that they were being deported."

Nehru's new line seemed to satisfy most Indians. Nehru, said one Socialist, had taken three steps forward and two back, but the important thing was that one step had been gained. Outside India, it was hard to see how so small and belated a step forward warranted much enthusiasm.

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