"Shame! Shame!"

In most respects, the Prime Minister of India was much the same old Nehru after Tibet as he had been before: while granting political asylum to the Dalai Lama, he was still busily placating Peking. When Red China charged that Kalimpong was the "command center" of the rebellion, Nehru at first denied the charge, then admitted that the border town was indeed a hotbed of spies--"spies who are Communist, antiCommunist, red, yellow, pink, white." He refused to be bothered by the fact that the Chinese embassy circulated an editorial repeating the old Kalimpong charges even after he denied them; after all, he said, the West sometimes said some nasty things about India, too. When M.P.s pleaded with him to condemn Peking's repression, he contented himself with calling for calm and patience.

Nevertheless, for all his tergiversations, Nehru had taken, for Nehru, his own giant step. For the first time, he actually talked back to the Chinese Communists. When Peking declared that any discussion of the Tibet rebellion in the Indian Parliament would be "impolite and improper," Nehru hotly retorted: "It is open to this House, this Parliament, to discuss any matter it chooses." He even expressed public doubt as to the authenticity of the "rather surprising letters" the Dalai Lama was supposed to have written. "I should like to have a little greater confirmation about them," he said, "about what they are, under what circumstances they were written, whether they were written at all." And at week's end he reiterated his doubts: "I cannot imagine the Dalai Lama's being pushed about by his own people."

But by far the most striking change in India was not in the leader but in the led. Outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, members of a right-wing Hindu party demonstrated against the "atrocities" in Tibet. In Parliament, cries of "Shame! Shame!" greeted the Indian Communist Party when it offered its congratulations to Peking for "leading the people of Tibet to prosperity and equality." "Why," asked the Indian Express of Nehru, "this strange tenderness for Communist feelings as contrasted with the disregard for the sensitivities of the democracies?" Said the Hindustan Times: "Let us hold our heads low. A small country on our border has paid the ultimate penalty for its temerity to aspire to independence . . . Much else could die with Tibet if we do not even now heed the warning."

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