INDIA: The Shade of the Big Banyan

(2 of 9)

Reconciliation. No longer do Americans in India find themselves subjected to the special brand of Indian inquisition that used to feature a series of needling questions: Why does the U.S. back dictators like Chiang Kai-shek and Franco? Why does the U.S. arm Pakistan, India's obvious enemy? Why are Negroes oppressed in the South? Last month, when quietly competent U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker addressed the first session of the newly formed Indo-American Society in rambunctious, left-wing Calcutta (where Eisenhower was burned in effigy in 1956), he was astonished to find that it had already a thousand dues-paying members. Eleven months ago a poll in Madras, asking which "Europeans" were most preferred by Indians, was won by the British with 80%. A similar poll last month found Britain and the U.S. split fifty-fifty.

India and the U.S., so very different—one with the highest per capita income in the world, the other with very nearly the lowest—so long at odds in foreign policy, now find themselves accenting what they have in common: they are the world's two largest democracies. Both threw off British rule. In Gandhi and in Lincoln, each has a national hero whose qualities of charity, compassion and gentleness both nations revere. U.S. aid to India, once grudgingly given and grudgingly received, has accelerated rapidly of late, is now past the $2 billion mark. As Indians get over their new-nation sensitivity about needing economic help, some even recognize the justice of the U.S. desire to see that the money is prudently spent.

In turn, Americans are outgrowing the compulsion to lecture Indians endlessly and to demand profuse gratitude for favors given. Wrote an Indian editor: "Americans have conducted themselves with an unusual dignity over India's breach with China. They have successfully resisted the temptation of crowing—at least in public—over the fulfillment of their earlier warnings that we were playing with fire in wooing the Chinese. What Americans had not been able to achieve by the expenditure of millions of dollars —seen and unseen—has been accomplished for them at one stroke by Chinese folly."

In this atmosphere of unparalleled good will, Dwight Eisenhower will this week get his first look at India. What manner of country is it?

Haze of Heat. The land is vast and cruel, running some 2,000 miles from the icy peaks of the Himalayas, in the heart of central Asia, down to the steaming jungles of Cape Comorin, on the Indian Ocean. In summer, wrote Rudyard Kipling, there is "neither sky, sun, nor horizon. Nothing but a brown-purple haze of heat. It is as though the earth were dying of apoplexy." During this furnace season, millions of Indian villagers lie gasping in their mud huts; wells dry up and fields blow away. When the monsoon rains come in the fall, the torrential downpours drown the arid land in surging floods. Only in the winter months does India appear comfortably livable and nature kind.