Billion-Dollar Troubles

Washington was host this week to a vitally important meeting of creditors. Delegates from the U.S., Britain, West Germany, Canada and Japan gathered in a high-ceilinged conference room at World Bank headquarters to decide what they could do about Debtor India. It was a billion-dollar question.

In New Delhi, India's Finance Minister Morarji Desai warned Parliament of the widening gap in foreign exchange, said the government may have to ''mobilize" all the nation's gold--from women's jewelry to hoarded bullion. India needs some $300 million additional credit this year, $500 million next year, more than a billion dollars by 1961. Desai found the situation so desperate that, to avoid defaulting on foreign payments, he was preparing at week's end to make his first journey outside India to plead his nation's case in London, Washington, Montreal. The trip was briefly jeopardized by Desai's ascetic refusal to be inoculated or vaccinated (he opposes on moral grounds the "injection of foreign substances into the body"). Fortunately, the Western countries exempted him from usual health regulations so that he could plead his nation's ill health.

Gouged Earth. Desai leaves behind him an India exhaustedly beginning its twelfth year of independence. For all of its troubles--poverty, illiteracy, disease, violence --much has been accomplished. Considering the handicaps of 14 major languages and some 800 dialects, and the world's second largest supply of people (387 million), India is a model of governmental stability: since 1947, it has had the same Prime Minister, Nehru; the same ruling party, the Congress Party; the same governing philosophy, democratic socialism. Unlike most nations from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, India is not seriously threatened by a revolutionary group or a military clique. Communists rule one state, Kerala, but are having troubles there, and have made surprisingly little headway among the mass of peasants and workers. Across India, steel mills are going up, cities expanding, the red earth being diligently gouged for canals, dams, roads. Among the young, caste distinctions are losing importance, and some Brahman students even do special tutoring among their Untouchable classmates. Universities now graduate more and more engineers and technicians instead of the former stream of lawyers and white-collar unemployables.

But after eleven long years, the zeal to build a brave new India is cooling. The national leadership, from Nehru down to the lowliest babu, seems more tired than inspired. The ruling Congress Party politicos, in their 60s and 70s, seem reluctant to make way for younger men. Corruption, cynicism and maladministration have dulled the nation's spirit. India still produces more babies than it does food to feed them. (Its population increases at the rate of about 5,000,000 a year, nullifying all gains in agricultural productivity.) Money that could help prop the economy goes into the military budget in fear of a possible war with Pakistan over Kashmir.

Worst of all, India has been brought to the edge of bankruptcy by its overambitious second five-year plan, which has now run half its course. Foreign nations, from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R., have poured some $1.7 billion into the plan. New Finance Minister Desai, taking office five months ago, slashed the plan to its essentials, but India's exchange gap still widens. Because of the recession, foreign firms were able to deliver goods to India faster than was anticipated, and they demanded prompt payment at a time when the principal Indian exports--tea, cotton textiles, jute--were suffering from declining earnings.

The Continent Years. Financial troubles (a subject that has always bored Nehru) are now producing political echoes. If most Indians felt that Prime Minister Nehru was the right man to steer India through its first decade, many now wonder if he is the man for the different job now demanded. Editorialists who once hesitated to criticize Nehru now say that what is needed is not preachment and planning but more concentration on getting present tasks done efficiently, less "neutralist" involvement in world affairs, and a more aggressive attack on domestic ills. Nehru himself, sensing that he is out of step with the times, has repeatedly speculated aloud about resigning, only to change his mind at the panicky pleadings of Congress Party henchmen.

If Nehru goes, who can replace him? In Washington next week, U.S. officials will be meeting the man whose name most often tops the list of possibilities. At 62, Finance Minister Morarji Desai is a lean, thoughtful disciple of Gandhi; he neither smokes nor drinks, and maintains an extraordinarily ascetic attitude toward sex (after fathering five children, he practiced continence for the next 20 years). He has a bony face, jutting ears, and a firm scoop of jaw that gives a triangular shape to his head. With little of Prime Minister Nehru's magnetism or flashing mind and manner, he appears to some as an Indian Estes Kefauver, with a blandly enigmatic exterior; lidded eyes, slipper-soft movements, a courtly air, cold-sore smile and reserved manner.

Desai is also a man of many and definite opinions. Some of them, in an interview last week with TIME Correspondent Donald Connery:

ALCOHOL. "In a hot country, where 90% of the people are vegetarians by habit and custom, liquor has a very deleterious effect. Vegetarians get drunk much sooner than meat eaters. Fundamentally, it is necessary to take this temptation away from the people. It is not an easy job, but has man ever improved by going on the line of least resistance?"

GANDHIAN SIMPLICITY. "If I dream of a simpler life for people, I am simply dreaming. I can't even influence my own family. We can only hope to hold the acquisitive nature of man in check. The common man wants a good material life. The uncommon man must teach him to be both acquisitive and good."

INDIANS. "Our worst trait is that we talk against our colleagues. We are a weak people--cowardly physically and mentally. Two thousand years of suppression have undermined the nation's courage until we became afraid of everything. Under the British, we learned to evade taxes. We broke the laws clandestinely. We found it useful to tell lies. But people are now beginning to speak out courageously."

NEHRU. "Human foibles are hard to remove. He has always ridden on the crest of the wave since childhood. He was lionized from the very beginning. He could run away with anything. A feeling of indispensability grew up in him. Intellectually he is humble, spiritually he is not. If he believed in God, he would be another Gandhi. As it is, he believes the scientific way is the only way."

COMMUNISTS. "They obviously do not believe in democracy.''

WORLD LEADERS. ''They should all do less public talking because it always raises problems of prestige.''

BIRTH CONTROL. "I know I am called wooly-headed about such things. I don't preach against it because I am a voice in the wilderness. I am not dogmatic, however. I consider it the right of anyone to practice birth control if he wants to. But once a man can have pleasure without the consequences, he will become weak and immoral. This isn't the right way to seek God, or truth. The carnal pleasures of life have never made minds great."

FANATICISM. "I don't want to make the world over in my image. I am not a fanatic. Fanaticism is madness. It is a bar to thinking. Nobody has done more harm in the world than fanatics. Fortunately, they are rare in democracies."

Kind but Ruthless. In India, Desai is respected for his integrity, his crisp, pragmatic approach to problems, his tough, determined handling of the communal riots in Bombay when he governed the state in 1956, and his crackdown on local Communists. Though a believer in Gandhian pacifism, Desai explains: "Violent means are not immoral, but violence tends toward immoral action." Commented a Bombay reporter: "In his mastery of the art of maintaining law and order, Morarji Desai has hardly any equal in the country. He can be kind, but he can also be ruthless."

Desai could well display a leadership that would be sharply different from that to which India is accustomed--more pro-Western and anti-Communist in world affairs, more austere and rigorously efficient domestically. He has already exhibited a quality rare in Indian public life: the courage to be unpopular. If this quality does not do him in. it may yet raise Desai to the prime ministry.

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