INDIA ON THE VERGE

...From present indications, I should say that a greater danger would be Indian inability to get foreign capital in any considerable quantity...

...Many Indians, with some reason derived from the history of the past, fear that foreign capital must mean foreign imperial control...

...On the issue of actual or potential Communist aggression by Stalin in world affairs, his commendable desire for peace, and above all to keep his country out of world war, leads him to give his neutrality an amoral quality of neutralism on the jssues raised by world Communism...

...II To some extent pessimism in India and the growth of Communism may result from the fact that people expected too much from independence and from Gandhi's party as the builder of the nation...

...Workers might indeed be absorbed into an industrial system that does not now exist, but by no means fast enough to answer the cry: "When and what do we eat...

...He continued: "We can't even feed ourselves, and where is there hope in that...

...Repeatedly I was told that if the monkeys which scamper about the United Provinces were killed there would be plenty of food for men...

...I suspect that he put great emphasis on his foreign policy, which is generally popular, partly to escape the difficulties of the domestic scene...

...My recent travels convinced me that Asia and the world will not escape Communism, or some weird and terrible national and religious Fascism, or such chaos as China endured during the regimes of the war lords, unless the free nations can rapidly adopt and expand a Point Four program for progressive industrialization of backward areas, preferably under international direction and guidance...

...Unless they will specify the nature of that religion and its relation to tolerance if not to brotherhood, their preachments are dangerously unrealistic...

...that its administrative performance is poor, and that there are hints of actual corruption...

...Partition was attended by communal riots in the name of religion which displaced some 12,000,000 Hindus, Sikhs, and Moslems and killed by violence or hunger perhaps a million men, women, and children...

...This - was precisely the thing that not so long ago every Anglo-Indian said could not be done...

...many Moslems argue that its continued existence makes the practice of true democracy impossible...

...These are not majority opinions, and some of my Indian friends may feel hurt that I should quote them...

...They do not make it the answer to India's problems which in so large measure concern the whole world...

...The charming 12-year old daughter of my host in Bombay gave me her autograph written in four languages she speaks: English, Hindi, Malayan, and Gujerati...

...They are, however, significant...

...Thus was I greeted by an elderly gentleman at the conclusion of my talk at the Rotary Club in Bombay...

...He doesn't appear particularly happy as the manager of his own party...

...Since I left India there are growing signs of a split in the Party on the right and on the left...

...Such modern industry as there is in India is preponderantly under the control of two capitalist groups, Tata and Birla, more than American industry ever was...

...The government hopes to avoid future famine, but the problem of hunger will remain...

...It boiled down to a belief that only a ruthless Communism could discipline the Indian nation in the process of industrialization and accumulate the necessary capital out of the stomachs of an already hungry people...

...Gandhi is dead and he has no successor...

...Industry itself can't jump to the most modern and efficient methods of mass production without creating wholesale unemployment...

...The first step in meeting those problems is to understand their nature...

...More than once I was told: "We Indians lack character...

...Nehru and many of the wisest Indians believe in birth control, and some beginnings have been made to popularize its voluntary and efficient practice...

...It will not be an easy process...

...This negative action, important as it is, doesn't constitute an adequate land policy, as the Congress Party critics both on the right and the left have pointed out, but the attack on landlordism is important...

...For that reason Asoka Mehta, an able socialist theoretician, is working at what he calls a "lock" system for raising the level of mechanization and industrialization, stage by stage, much as boats are raised in the locks of a canal...

...The extraordinary difficulties Nehru faces may explain his policy...

...In India he sponsors repressive laws and administrative practices against Communists that go farther than anything America has dreamed of...

...This is not to say that the government has no good economic plans, but it faces an unusually difficult situation...

...To discuss such a program lies beyond the scope of this article...

...Preachers of all sorts, from bishops of various churches to Henry Luce, the magazine emperor, continually tell us that what this troubled world needs is more religion...

...Here, however, a new difficulty arises...

...The plain truth is that India's problems, like most of Asia's, are insoluble on a purely nationalist basis...

...Meanwhile the population grows and food production decreases...

...It has no adequate domestic program...

...This was probably not the popular feeling, but I listened to many similar expressions of pessimism from different kinds of people in different cities...

...the English at least had character...

...They had pushed their policy of terrorism too far for the Indian taste...

...The relative inefficiency of Indian workers is directly the result of lack of proper food...

...And India, be it remembered, offers not the worst but probably the best hope there is on the Asiatic mainland for achieving a democratic solution of the problems that confront ancient lands caught in a revolutionary awakening...

...On top of these basic economic and political difficulties, India has a linguistic problem which seems to me to present greater difficulties in the way of achieving democratic union and a vigorous national culture than the Indian intellectuals want to admit...

...There is now the danger that communal rioting will flare up again before the problem of Kashmir is settled...

...He is the author of many books, including "America's W a y Out: A Program for Democracy," "Appeal to the Nations," "We Have a Future," and "A Socialist's Faith...

...The sanctity of the cow prevents proper development of cattle and hence not only deprives the people of meat but of adequate dairy products...

...After all, the party was united only on the struggle for political independence...

...Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party in the United States, was six times its unsuccessful candidate for President...

...Americans must play the fortunate brother, not the Santa Claus role...

...Here I want to insist that all the evidence points to the high improbability of India's salvation for democracy under a purely nationalist program with such economic aid from abroad as might be dictated by ordinary considerations of profit and investments...

...Not only four languages but four different scripts...

...So will the replacement of the wooden plows and the ancient sickles with which ground is prepared and grain is harvested...

...It could be greatly relieved by measures which sound simple but which run squarely into conflict with Hindu religious notions...

...Two—It gave legal equality to the millions of outcasts whose miserable condition had religious sanctions among orthodox Hindus...

...Ill But great as these achievements are, they do not meet India's enormous problems...

...Communism derives much of its aggressive force from its quality of secular religion...

...Birla was Gandhi's great friend, but all the union leaders with whom I talked much preferred to deal with the Tata concerns...

...VI What has divided the old India, what still threatens the peace and prosperity of the great subcontinent, is religion...

...Then, at about our grammar school level, they must learn Hindi, which is to be the national language of India...

...When I was in India the Communists were at least temporarily on the decline in strength...

...Recent dispatches indicate, however, that under their new policy as critics of the Congress Party and advocates of a united front against it, they are making progress...

...Nothing can excuse our Congress for the wrangling and delay before India was finally sent wheat to break the serious famine in Bihar and Madras, but Nehru also handled the matter badly at his end...

...He is the advocate of world peace and of negotiations with Communist forces—outside of India...

...Geography and history, in particular the British occupation, and the nationalist movement so extraordinarily led and inspired by Gandhi, will probably guarantee Indian unity...

...Labor unions are growing and making some gains in the miserable wages of the workers, but not enough to give them proper food or to produce the state of mind which accepts the necessity for more production...

...The law is one thing, the social practice in Indian villages is another, as I have seen with my own eyes...

...That requires us to look at facts neither through the spectacles of Western prejudice nor the rose glasses of romantic appreciation of the "spiritual East," but as they are...

...But this will cost money...

...Nehru has many elements of greatness and one must feel profound sympathy for the difficulty of his position...

...Now he, the critic of American anti-Communist "hysteria," has proNORMAN THOMAS had exceptional opportunities to study conditions in India first-hand on a recent journey there to attend the Congress on Cultural Freedom...

...On Kashmir he is unyielding...

...Conceivably these conditions could be rather rapidly changed...

...So does industrial production per worker...

...Four—The governments of the Indian states have passed laws, some of which are tied up in the courts, abolishing a worse than feudal system of landlordism in the rural areas...

...The mayor of Bombay told us that his city had ten linguistic groups, each of whose native tongues was spoken by over 100,000 people...

...Then, for the next 10 or 15 years at least, they must learn English for college or university work...

...It or any systematic industrialization will require capital which India lacks...

...The per capita annual income in India according to United Nations figures was $57 in 1949 (in the United States, it is $1,453...

...We don't like Communism but we'll have to take it...

...Even so the new government under its almost absolute control has done four great things: One—With the understanding cooperation of the British Labor Government, it brought about complete independence on terms of mutual friendship—a fact with which every thoughtful visitor is deeply impressed...

...In India religious differences between Moslems and Hindus were responsible for a partition that in terms of geography and economics makes no sense...

...The caste system in general is growing weaker...

...The poverty I saw in some districts of Italy and Yugoslavia this year was appalling, but seemed light in comparison to the misery of Indian villages and city slums...

...Fortunately for the builders of a united India, linguistic differences do not have the divisive nationalist implications which usually attend them in Europe...

...Three—Under the leadership of Patel, a strong man now dead, the government brought about—at a price, but without war—the end of the almost absolute rule of some 600 princes, and the adherence of their territories to the new India...

...Why...

...I found the most idealism, the nearest approach to an adequate domestic program, and the most hope among the Indian Socialists...

...If by some miracle completely modern tools and methods could be introduced into Indian agriculture, millions of peasants would be idle...

...Of these the first and greatest is poverty, and that in turn is bound up with overpopulation...

...I would ask, and the answer never was given in military terms...

...Most of my Indian friends will agree that Nehru's Congress Party is not popular...

...posed to Parliament the grant to the executive of sweeping powers of control over the press...

...The program must be genuinely cooperative...

...But who are we Americans to become censorious when we remember that in almost a century after the Emancipation Proclamation our colored fellow-citizens are still so far from complete equality...

...Today the countrymen of Gandhi are, out of their terrible poverty, spending in India some 50% of their government's budget on arms—in Pakistan the figure is 70...

...Much can be done by bringing more land under cultivation through irrigation and otherwise, and by restoring land farmed or grazed out by improper use...

...Children in the poorly equipped Bombay primary schools start with their household tongue — usually Mahratti or Gujerati...