Low Levels

Marching into New Delhi's presidential mansion last week to present his credentials as the new U.S. Ambassador to India, scholarly-looking Ellsworth Bunker was momentarily jolted by a loud, off-key blast from a brace of turbaned trumpeters. Next morning when he opened his paper the ambassador was greeted with yet another sour note: a slashing attack on the U.S. and Britain by India's Prime Minister Nehru.

Electioneering in the industrial city of Kanpur, Nehru explained the British and American U.N. vote to condemn India's seizure of Kashmir (TIME, Feb. 4) as simply a reward to Pakistan for its membership in SEATO and the Baghdad Pact. The intent, said Nehru, was "to make India change her independent policy." Then, amidst wild cheers, he cried defiantly: "India will not change her stand on Kashmir one iota under any threat."

As evidence of the lengths to which India is prepared to go to keep Kashmir, Indian Puppet Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed and his followers last week succeeded in winning a majority of seats in the Kashmir legislature three weeks before a single vote could be cast. (The new legislators, explained the pro-Indian state election committee, had either been unopposed or opposed only by citizens whose nomination papers unfortunately proved invalid.)

The anti-Western mood that Nehru was whipping up in India last week had all but undone any good that came out of the Eisenhower-Nehru meeting. British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald reported to London that Britain's standing in India is at a dangerously "low level." In fact, not all Indians apparently recognize at what point they are to check their criticism of Britain and the U.S. The Economic Review, official organ of Nehru's Congress Party, published two inflammatory editorials. The first suggested that the foreign policy of the Eisenhower Administration reflects the prevalence of juvenile delinquency in the U.S. The second, dealing with Queen Elizabeth's recent tour of Portugal, commented: "Elizabeth II is sorry that the world is not able to appreciate the hanging by the neck of Greek patriots in Cyprus or the butcheries of the Portuguese in Goa. We regret the low level of intelligence."

In the U.S. the Economic Review's remarks whitened not one hair. But in Britain, which still resents the fact that Nehru raised more outcry over Suez than over Hungary, remarks about the Queen simply Will not do. NEHRU INSULT TO QUEEN, headlined the London Daily Mail. Hastily, Nehru condemned the article as "wholly intemperate." Said he: "I am greatly disturbed that the Queen's name should have been brought into this, and I should like to offer my apologies to her."

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