Khrushchev Returns to India

...The Soviet entourage made a hurried explanation of a lingering cold from which the Premier had not quite recovered...

...The conjectures are endless...

...A week before the Soviet Premier's arrival, India sent a stiff note to Peking reaffirming its border stand and Nehru, in a five paragraph letter accompanying it which denied all of China's previous contentions, nevertheless invited Chou En-lai to visit New Delhi in the second week of March for talks...

...Or perhaps the Soviet Premier, alarmed by reports that Indians really were beginning to see through Communism, hurriedly broke his journey at New Delhi to reassure them as to its peaceful and friendly content, at least as far as the USSR is concerned...

...The USSR, for its part, could not but be relieved that despite all that had happened in the last six months, and the tremendous press and public pressures to which the Government was being subjected, official India appeared still to remain neutral...

...Khrushchev was present at the signing of a 1500-million-ruble loan agreement under which 10 specific third (Indian) Five Year plan industrial projects are to be materially assisted...

...It was clever to imply that because of its alleged past misdeeds, the West really remained in India's debt, though the USSR, with no such debt to wipe out, was really leading in the field of foreign aid...

...As things seem to have turned out, everyone was a bit right and a lot wrong...

...During his three-and-a-half days in this city, the Soviet leader, received with all ceremony but with an unusually un-Indian reticence, addressed the joint Houses of Parliament, received a civic welcome, visited the World Agriculture Fair, attended a banquet and lin Ambassadorial reception in his honor and during one whole morning was closeted alone with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and two interpreters...

...Having come on a voyage of discovery more than four years ago and turned himself into one of the popular heroes of the Indian Revolution, perhaps he returned briefly to find out how time has treated this popularity, particularly in view of the fact that his fickle public had found itself another favorite—from a country which has not been too popular in Soviet Russia...

...aid, he must have understood that despite everything he and his colleagues have been saying, not only is this country more grateful for and less afraid of accepting this aid, but it now is planning its future, at least the next 15 years, on the basis that this aid will be both substantial and continuous...

...But from the very first moments at the airport, the lukewarm greeting appeared to put him off his stride...

...The very quiet was impressive because it seemed to emphasize the lack of necessity to make a lot of new noise about what was an old reality...

...Still another reason may have been the need to discover the effectiveness of Western, particularly U.S., aid to India and of the counter-measures devised in 1956 as a result of his first visit...

...Since Khrushchev always has wanted a face-to-face meeting between the Prime Ministers of the two countries which are his "very good friends," there was nothing left for him to do once the invitation had been issued...

...Is India, like Delhi, surfeited with VIPs...

...But now the individual has gone again and his audience is discovering that when all is said and done his visit has mattered surprisingly little...

...Or has it at last learned to look behind the glittering surface of a ceremonial goodwill mission...

...Indian newspapers, quick to mark the change from last time, came out with headlines reading: "What Makes Mr...

...Gromyko insisted that "everything was going fine...

...And apart from a few know-it-alls, everyone has been wondering what his visit has really been about...

...If he came to evaluate Indian appreciation of Communism, he must now have discovered that his alarm is justified...

...It was clever to scatter as gifts replicas of Soviet moon pennants and to so jockey some Indian speakers in return that they would call the Soviet Premier a sputnik of peace, as did the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, or Lower House...

...Another source stated emphatically that since the Khrushchev visit was turning out to be the biggest flop of his colorful career, the visitor's glumness heralded a definite break between India and its already compromised neutrality...

...Lukewarm reception given to Soviet leader indicates change in Indian attitudes since 1954 visit KHRUSHCHEV RETURNS TO INDIA By Sharokh Sabavala NEW DELHI SOVIET PREMIER Nikita Khrushchev has come and gone...

...A third group held that the Soviet Premier was deliberately playing to the gallery because he was preoccupied with the urgent need of bringing about a meeting between Nehru and Communist Chinese Premier Chou En-lai...

...Instead of quips, clowning and wisecracks which so endeared him to the masses in the past, the distinguished guest was glum and taciturn...

...During this period he was the cynosure of all eyes, the center of critical but not unfriendly attention, a position to which he should now be accustomed...

...Indian officials, not to be outdone, made elaborate excuses for Delhi's feeling of "staleness" after having received too many important guests in too short a time...

...There remained then the question of aid...

...When he addressed the workers of the Soviet-engineered Bhilai steel plant in central India, moreover, Khrushchev went over to the offensive, warning that while the West usually wanted something in return for aid—trade, business or monopolistic concessions—the Soviet Union wanted nothing, for within the next few years it was going to surpass the United States as the richest, most industrially powerful, most technologically advanced nation in the modern world...

...If he came to probe Indian reaction to foreign SHAROKH SABAVALA reports on India for the Christian Science Monitor...

...If, in 1960, Khrushchev came to measure his popularity in terms of popular acclaim, he must be a sorely disappointed man...

...Khrushchev also came to New Delhi with two daughters, two grandchildren and a son-in-law to compare notes with Indian President Rajendra Prasad, who is a family man par excellence...

...He joined in open-mouthed wonder when his daughters were looking at a snake-charmers' act and this Indians found good and human, coming as it did from the world's most powerful individual...

...A fourth, pointing to Khrushchev's growingly acrimonious public pronouncements, was quite sure that all that remained of Indo-Soviet friendship was the red-banner decor in the streets of town...

...One source was of the opinion that a new Moscow-Delhi axis was being formed...

...Nehru particularly was pleased with the Khrushchev visit to the United States, for which he takes some of the credit, and the summitry which it seems to have engendered...

...Khrushchev has also promised to broaden the base of Soviet aid and while doing so he was careful to point out to several different types of Indian audiences that while it was the duty of Western countries to repay in cash and kind to that part of the underdeveloped world which in the past it had exploited, the USSR had an easy conscience in this respect...

...Here was a Khrushchev in something like his old form—aggressive, boastful, vainglorious, humorous in a heavy-handed way, shrewd enough to get in a sharp thrust now and then...

...Though no new axis was formed, Indo-Soviet friendship was reaffirmed, but quietly...

...When it heard this Parliament roared with laughter, but outside, peasants gathered in the thousands to attend the Agriculture Fair and seemed to appreciate this sally as something other than funny...

...Khrushchev Glum...

...It was Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's turn to radiate bonhomie and Khrushchev's to look as if he wanted constantly to say nyet without quite enough courage to do so...

...Since there was no hard news, no leaks from the Nehru conference chamber, the capital's whispering gallery of "diplomatic channels" and "authoritative sources" had a field day with a bewilderingly wide range of suggestions...

...Khrushchev also must have been relieved, as were most anti-Communist Indian circles, that thanks to Nehru's adroit sense of timing he did not have to participate actively in the solution of the dispute with China while in Delhi...

...Official India has been very pleased with Moscow's attitude in the Sino-Indian dispute and the pleasure in no way dimmed after it had explained to Khrushchev in person that China had committed an act of deliberate aggression against India, and now also was officially accused of "breach of faith...