Telling the Painful Truth

...Not long ago in these pages I praised Ved Mehta's Portrait of India for its formidable veracity...

...Between the book's completion at the end of 1970 and its publication in mid-1971, the Indian elections put Mrs...

...The vernacular press has always tended to be venal, dominated by local politicians or by businessmen, but English-language papers like the Times o\ India, the Statesman, the Indian Express and even the strongly nationalist Hindustan Times used to maintain a high level of independence and objectivity, fostering journalists like Frank Moraes, whose commentaries on the political life of free India have been invaluable...

...He is aware of the failings of his countrymen—their pride, their egotism, their divisive passions, their tolerance of inefficiency and corruption...

...An unfortunate consequence of this growing intolerance of the inconvenient or unpleasant truth has been a lowering of the once high standards of journalism in India's English-language press...

...Books depicting negative aspects of Indian society regularly arouse storms of anger in the Lok Sabha and are occasionally banned...

...Essentially a handbook for those who want to know how India operates politically, it is informative, well-written, and certainly one of the best productions of its kind...

...Indira Gandhi's New Congress Party into a secure position of authority that Bhatia, like most India-watchers in the West, did not anticipate...

...This is part of a national touchiness exceptional even among former colonial countries...

...Bhatia was for over two decades an active political journalist in India...

...the British Broadcasting Corporation was expelled from India for an honest television program documenting the miseries of Calcutta's slums, and foreign filmmakers chronically complain that they encounter more bureaucratic interference in India than in some Communist countries...

...He even succeeds in viewing the frenetic rivalry between India and Pakistan, and the central exacerbating issue of Kashmir, with a fine balance of vision...

...The Ordeal of Nationhood covers almost every aspect of India essential to understanding its political and social life: the parliamentary system, the bureaucracy and the Army, so largely copied from the British and hence not always well suited to Indian conditions...

...Bhatia's is not, for example, an impressionistic work, and the intimate flavor of Indian life rarely permeates its descriptions of events and its analyses of trends and institutions...

...Then events in East Pakistan introduced still another critical element into India's internal difficulties and international problems...

...for instance, in his chapter on the Armed Forces we are taken through the Chinese invasion of 1962, only to find the same events narrated from a slightly different standpoint in his chapter on foreign affairs...

...In addition, the structure he has chosen makes it hard for him to avoid repetition...

...At the same time, since the book was written by a Westernized Indian for a Western readership, it does not fully convey the power of traditional ways of thought and living in India, where—as Bhatia remarks in his last paragraph—the world of the bullock-cart is coterminous with that in which India makes its own supersonic aircraft...

...Perhaps because he was writing for an American publisher, Bhatia also neglects India's relationships with the Commonwealth countries...

...Although India is in many respects a true working democracy, where its pride is in question it quickly assumes the characteristics of a totalitarian society...

...After gaining their independence from Great Britain, Indian politicians obsessively squandered then-international influence by lecturing the rest of the world on political morals...

...Recently, however, a growing caution has been evident in the way Indian newspapers handle politically or socially sensitive issues, and as a result one of the most important countervailing forces to the monolithic power of the ruling Congress party is losing its effectiveness...

...India's place in the world and her frequently uncomfortable relations with her neighbors and with the great powers...

...the internal problems created by divisions of language, religion and caste, and magnified by overpopulation, underemployment and low agricultural development...

...Educated Indians often feel that the antiquity of their traditions and their position as the world's second most populous country entitle them to a deference they have not received...

...This combination of experience enables him to provide a very good introduction to the way India works?and in some ways fails to work—almost a quarter of a century after independence...

...Today a younger generation is beginning to lose the smugness of Nehru's period, but there is still a hypersensitivity to any revelation?no matter how truthful—that may harm India's image at home or abroad...

...While Bhatia's view of the immediate future may have to be modified by these unforeseen developments, it is a good index of the general quality of his work that his overall picture of the functioning of modern India as a political entity remains unchallengeable...

...At the same time, he sees all these faults from the Indian side and realizes from having lived abroad how the fixed thought patterns of Westerners and especially of Americans contribute to misunderstanding...

...Yet in some ways a journalist's book like The Ordeal of a Nation falls short of a writer's book like Mehta's Portrait of India...

...Now, in Krishan Bhatia's The Ordeal of Nationhood, we are given another study of India written with an honesty and a courage that are all the more impressive when one considers the resentment with which this straightforward account will be received by many influential Indians...

...all these are examined in depth and with abundant political shrewdness...

...It is perhaps significant that of late the shrewdest and most objective books on India by Indians have been produced by writers living away from their country...

...The past few years he has been working in Washington as a special correspondent for the Hindustan Times...

...Unlike many Indian writers, Bhatia is scrupulously fair to the British, showing that they were far more humane than most colonial powers, but that their real fault was an indifference to the needs of those Indians who were not useful in sustaining their power...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "Mohandas Gandhi," to be published next month BOOKS ON INDIA by Indians are frequently marred by a kind of blustering, self-righteous defensiveness that seems intended to anticipate criticism...