Disillusionment in New Delhi:

...conflict in Laos since the first Geneva conference six-and-a-half years ago...

...New Delhi, like London and Washington, knows that what already has been lost on the battlefield cannot really be retrieved in the conference room...

...It has taken the loss of 12,000 square miles of its own territory and the witnessing of mass murder in neighboring Tibet to bring about this realization...

...Today, all these hopes and expectations have been shattered...

...The difference, of course, is that Moscow thinks and acts from a position of strength...

...As India sees things now—although this has not been officially spelled out—a cease-fire in Laos will temporarily obstruct the onward march of Communism in Southeast Asia, with a few more road blocks possibly thrown up by the present Geneva Conference...

...He was obviously referring to the Soviet-U.S...

...Sharokh Sabavala, New Leader correspondent in India, also writes jor the Christian Science Monitor...

...These gentlemen are all bound by one common aim: to make it quite impossible for Krishna Menon to succeed the present Indian Prime Minister...

...And as the International Control Commission—-made up of Canada, India and Poland—reconvened in New Delhi last week and quickly got down to work to hammer out a unanimous report to its co-chairmen, it was apparent that all its efforts to supervise a quick cease-fire were unrealistic...

...and, more important, what it is doing appears to have the full approval and support of both Washington and London...

...Even Prime Minister Nehru is going out of his way to tell his fellow-countrymen that Kennedy's good faith is not open to question...

...As a firm believer in neutrality, India expected a neutral Laos would be born after the 1954 Geneva conference...

...Disillusionment in New Delhi By Sharokh Sabavala Bombay India's role in bringing about a new cease-fire in Laos has brought little satisfaction to the nation or to its chief foreign policy architect, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru...

...Ceylon is in turmoil, partly owing to the attitude of settlers of Indian origin who are inclined to defy the laws of the legal Government, and is less friendly than in the days of Premier S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike...

...Until very recently, it continued to believe in the peaceful intentions (at least in Asia) of the Chinese Peoples' Republic, hoping that Asian nations would never be threatened by their neighbors...

...Finally, all this has brought about an accelerated war of succession in the ruling Congress party, with even Nehru's Cabinet colleagues jockeying for position...

...it must always come from within...

...Indonesia openly flirts with the Chinese Communist leadership, while Thailand and South Vietnam remain nominally free, thanks to the bayonets of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO...

...If anything, it has served to disillusion the Indian people both about the true worth and effectiveness of the country's foreign policy and the peaceful intentions of international Communism...

...Prime Minister U Nu of Burma, who has made his own border pact with China, frequently goes into retreat in a villa placed at his disposal—in China—by Premier Chou En-lai...

...The neutral crust of Laos has progressively crumbled under the provocative actions of the Soviet, North Vietnam and Chinese-supported Pathet Lao, and the inadequate preventive measures taken by an anti-Communist Government which appeared to spend all its time looking hopefully over its shoulder for external military and economic assistance...

...aided by British diplomats in New Delhi, London and Moscow, has pushed hard to get Moscow to implement the cease-fire...

...Yet the feeling persists here that the effort has been made too late...

...With these hopeful signs, Nehru...

...A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Nehru complained querulously that the big powers first made blunders, tied everything up into knots and then, "at the 11th hour," feverishly ran around trying to untie the knots...

...The bill's pilot, Home Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, has done nothing to hide its real purpose of curbing Communist antinational activity, particularly in the northern areas adjacent to the Tibet border...

...Malaya, not yet fully integrated, has its own problems with citizens of Indian and Chinese origin...

...The strenuous efforts made in recent weeks by Russia to keep the Indian Communist party from slipping under Chinese hegemony is considered here a significant straw in the wind...

...And irrespective of global strategy, over which there was and is considerable disagreement, India has never really believed, even in the days of John Foster Dulles' "brinksmanship," that the United States would deliberately foster or commit an act of aggression...

...Russia, like India but for different reasons, apparently is not averse to a few road blocks being erected in Laos at the present time...

...India is doing something in its usual roundabout way...

...This situation, together with the dubious role played by Prince Souvanna Phouma, the withdrawal from the whole affair of Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the attitude of the Laotian King, Savang Vathana, and the growing lethargy of the Boun Oum administration, has left Nehru no other alternative but to try to carry through what he helped to start as expeditiously and as poker-facedly as possible...

...India now knows what experience should have taught it long ago—that neutrality cannot be superimposed from without...

...There also is the very reasonable and accommodating attitude of the Polish delegation to the International Commission, which, together with its Indian and Canadian counterparts, has worked efficiently and without delay to get the Commission off the Indian ground and into Laos...

...Both Pakistan and Nepal have opened direct negotiations with Peking and turned hostile to this country...

...Implicit in this attitude is an oblique answer to Senator J. William Fulbright's (D.Ark...

...In New Delhi's view, Laos today could be written off even as a potentially neutral nation, if it were not that Moscow no longer seems over-enthusiastic about Pathet Lao successes, which are also successes for Peking and its Asian satellites...

...The growing Indian feeling of isolation is producing not unfavorable local reactions...

...One of them is Parliament's recent passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, a measure seeking to punish those who question India's territorial integrity, i.e., the Communists...

...recent angry query why India, the largest uncommitted nation in the region, is not doing more—or anything—to keep Laos out of the Communist clutches...

...The crisis in Laos brings home to the Indian people, if not to the Government, its increasing isolation in South Asia...

...Finally, even though the recent events in Cuba have been analyzed and absorbed without giving either the Government or the people more than a mild attack of indigestion, there remains a lingering suspicion that the Kennedy administration no longer can resist domestic pressures for some kind of strong action...

...For by this time, Laos has been reduced to pockets of conflicting interests, with Communist influence everywhere seemingly in the ascendant...

...New Delhi also realizes that the "peaceful" intentions of Communist China in Asia were no more than time-gaining and lulling measures...

...Another result of India's feeling of isolation is the growing sympathy for President Kennedy's problems in places like Cuba and Laos...