Ten Years After

Setting down at New Delhi in a BOAC Britannia late one morning last week, Britain's Harold Macmillan found Union Jacks fluttering over India's capital in festive display for the first time since the British Raj moved out in 1947. Out at the airport to greet the only British Prime Minister ever to visit India while in office was an array of notables headed by Jawaharlal Nehru and backed up by thousands of cheering citizens.

In the four days that followed, Harold Macmillan--who plans to visit five Commonwealth nations in as many weeks--donned festal garlands, shucked off his shoes before placing a wreath on Mahatma Gandhi's shrine, ceremonially visited the spot from which British forces launched their final assault on Old Delhi during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. But the bulk of Macmillan's time was taken up in political discussion. In repeated talks with Nehru, he got an earful of Indian ideas on the necessity for nuclear disarmament and the desirability of a new summit meeting. At a banquet in Macmillan's honor, Neutralist Nehru warmly praised the British Prime Minister for his tentative endorsement a fortnight ago of an East-West nonaggression pact--an endorsement that Britain's Foreign Office has been trying to explain away ever since. Lunching with Indonesia's President Sukarno, who has made India his first stop on a six-week "rest cure" away from his fragmented country,* Macmillan listened noncommittally to an appeal for his aid in moderating Australian opposition to Indonesia's claim to Dutch New Guinea.

Flying off to Pakistan at week's end, Harold Macmillan took with him the cheering knowledge that the British are today more popular in India than ever before. Little more than ten years since Britain's viceroy ruled in New Delhi, British residents in India are more numerous (40,000) than they were in the last days of Empire, and, thanks to the new spirit of equality, enjoy far pleasanter relations with their Indian colleagues. As for the Indians themselves, they show surprisingly little resentment of the fact that Britons still control 80% of all foreign investments in India, own a majority (64%) of India's tea industry and a quarter of the vital jute industry. Given the choice, say Indian public-opinion surveys, more Indians would choose to visit England than any other place on earth.

* Also in India last week: Red Czechoslovakia's Premier Viliam Siroky, who tactfully left Delhi to tour the Indian countryside shortly before Macmillan's arrival.

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