Stand-Off in New Delhi:

...The Opposition is stepping up its demands for an early settlement of outstanding Indian-Pakistan problems...

...The Chinese tried everything throughout the visit to make it appear that negotiations were on...

...A few hours after a joint communique announced the failure of the talks...

...India still faces a tough and dangerous period, but no longer is its vision clouded...

...They tried to talk individually to Cabinet Ministers, using Defense Minister Krishna Menon as an intermediary, and they dragged on talks in temperatures over 100 degrees to make a show of cordiality and resilience...

...Nehru has kept his word to Parliament that not only would he not give up any territory, but would not negotiate until China vacated Indian land...

...If India has gained much useful knowledge from the visit, if many millions of pairs of blinkers have been torn from Indian eyes, the Chinese also should have learned something...

...Industrial production, food output and exports are expanding...

...In consequence, trade with the West is spurting, the U.S.-Indian liaison at official levels is growing closer and American...

...By the middle of the year, it appears certain that Finance Minister Desai will ask Parliament for a new defense appropriation...

...China, in turn, insists that the entire 2,500-mile frontier requires revision...

...When in his airport speech Chou mouthed the same old cliches about friendship and coexistence, Nehru told him bluntly that before friendship could be restored, “What has been done must be undone...

...He did not come to examine the Indian case, but to force India to examine a mass of Chinese documents...

...The Government is quietly dropping, one by one, its hitherto doctrinaire rules regulating private enterprise...

...When the Chinese Premier complained, once again, that the Tibetan revolt had been inspired by India, the response of Finance Minister Morarji Desai was: “Absolute nonsense...

...More and more, socialism is an empty slogan...

...Whenever Chou passed by in the week that followed, the streets of a usually bustling and noisy city were hushed...

...Contrary to expectations here that Chou En-lai—on the advice of his senior colleagues in Moscow—was anxious to ease existing tensions, the Chinese leader arrived with a rigid, uncompromising brief...

...He did not come to compromise or make territorial concessions, as Indian Communists kept broadcasting, but to tell India it was an aggressor...

...Despite the fundamental disagreements, Indians see these gains from the visit: (1) India now realizes the full extent of the menace of an expanding Chinese imperialism...

...2) It also now realizes that Moscow has little or no influence over Peking’s expansionism and that Chinese leaders care very little for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s global strategy...

...All this, in large measure, is the work of Peking’s not so far-sighted leadership, and those who cherish freedom and democracy in this country are grateful...

...Thus, to Peking, Nehru is on the way to earning again the title of “running dog of Anglo-U.S...

...Meanwhile, India continues quietly to build up its forces...

...For the first time, India seems to have fully understood the implications of international Communism...

...It also realized the two countries just did not speak the same language...

...While Indian papers were predicting the failure of the Chinese mission, Radio Peking, quoting Indian Communist newspapers, was regaling its listeners with an account of the “enthusiastic and affectionate welcome our Premier is receiving from the friendly Indian people...

...Chou held a dramatic late-night press conference which went on past 1 AM...

...and when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru agreed to this examination— provided the Indian side of the picture was equally carefully examined —the Chinese suddenly discovered that they had not brought all their documents with them...

...And when the Chinese talked of “2,000 years of Sino-Indian friendship,” Home Minister Govind Vallabh Pant is reported to have responded with, “This is the usual Communist clap-trap...

...The reception given the Premier and his party was correct to the point of frigidity...

...and the Indian people are once again “poor and oppressed...

...British, West German, French, Italian and Japanese capital is being used to set up industry in collaboration with Indian businesses...

...Although Chou and Nehru failed to settle any of the fundamental Sino-Indian problems, the Indian people now realize the ‘menace of an expanding Chinese imperialism’ STAND-OFF IN NEW DELHI By Sharokh Sabavala NEW DELHI LAST MONTH’S visit of Communist Chinese Premier Chou En-lai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi is not regarded here as a total loss, although it failed to lead even to the beginning of a settlement of the border dispute between India and China...

...The Ladakh administration is being reorganized and roads are being pushed through to Sikkim and Bhutan...

...And Chou himself, brushing aside the border dispute as temporary, refused to agree that Indian public-opinion was now hostile to his country...

...For India the immediate aftermath of all this is, in Nehru’s words, a “careful re-examination of Indian policy...

...The usually hospitable people of Delhi were even blunter...

...the majority of the Indian press is “reactionary...

...But the Chinese learned nothing from all this...

...And disruption inside the Communist party continues...

...Early on in this exercise, however, India realized that Chou was not China’s only policy maker, that his room for local maneuvers was extremely limited and that his daily orders came from Communist party chief Mao Tse-tung and Government head Liu Shao-chi...

...As reports of the marathon talks trickled through—Nehru and Chou spent a total of 17 hours together— it became clear that other Indian Cabinet Ministers who met the Chinese party were even more forthright than the Prime Minister...

...It was the performance of an arrogant, assured leader of a country beginning to feel its power...

...Even as he spoke of peace and friendship, and insisted that China would never commit aggression, his whole manner openly and deliberately belied his words...

...3) It realizes that China has started a war of nerves in South Asia, and behind the smokescreen of carefully modulated statements varying from expressions of friendship to veiled threats Peking is probing for soft spots from which eventually to break out of its present confinement...

...At this conference— which he said would be reported verbatim in the Chinese press to show how free it really was—he announced that the entire Sino-Indian frontier remained delimited, that India was gradually expanding the limits of its control in the east up to the “so-called” McMahon Line (which China finds quite “unacceptable”), that the Chinese have been in Ladakh for hundreds of years, and that the road they have built in Aksaichin is a vital link between western Tibet and Sinkiang...

...They left the reception to their policemen and where they inescapably came across the incoming cavalcade, they quietly averted their eyes...

...While territories usurped cannot be reclaimed at present, and short of bombing Sinkiang bases they never will be, official negotiations will go on until September, when Nehru will decide whether or not to accept Chou’s invitation to visit Peking...

...The dispute involves China’s invasion of some 12,000 square miles of Indian territory in the Ladakh region on India’s northwest border, and its forcible occupation of the Indian outpost of Longju, in the northeast frontier territory of Assam...