Back With the Rain

Endless armadas of heavy monsoon clouds bombarded central India with the heaviest rains in a century (187.7 in. since June), bringing new life to the parched plains. Everywhere shining green shoots burst; from the fields. In Delhi, the poor took shelter from the downpour, thankful for relief from incessant heat. Outside the capital, amidst the ruins of forts and royal tombs, peacocks spread their glistening fans and danced for their mates.

Back with the rain came Premier Lai Bahadur Shastri, 59, looking none the worse for his apparently mild heart attack. Bustling in and out of his office, he paid two long visits to President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, presided over a lengthy cabinet meeting, tartly denied that he had been totally incapacitated while ill, insisted that he had worked seven hours a day at home during the later stages of his convalescence.

But there seemed to be little likelihood that he would resume the frantic pace of his first 17 days in office. He has shed the foreign minister's portfolio, naming ex-Railways Minister Swaran Singh to handle India's relations abroad. It was a task that Jawaharlal Nehru himself used to carry, but there was no need for Shastri to kill himself merely in order to emulate his indefatigable predecessor. "It is not necessary," wrote a columnist in Bombay's influential Economic Weekly, "for Shastri to be Foreign Minister, Minister for Atomic Energy and Chairman of the Planning Commission--or, for that matter, president of the Mountaineering Institute. He has enough to do as Prime Minister."

In the months ahead, he will hardly take it easy. In the works are plans to visit Ceylon and Bhutan, a possible trip to Washington and, perhaps later, a journey to Moscow, which was originally planned for this month. Also ahead is another round of talks on the Kashmir problem with the Pakistanis. Looming over everything is the need to cope with India's growing food problem. Last week with Shastri up and around again, the government decreed a comprehensive system of price controls for wheat and rice. Then it launched a series of police raids on grain speculators, turning up 7,000 tons of hoarded wheat in a single day.

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