Indian Attitudes

By VICTOR ANANT

TT is unwise to return late at night to a place you know well. By day I would have recog- nised and rejoiced, but at night my anticipation had an edge of suspicion. I was 'searching for shadows. I might have responded differently to India if I had not (a) arrived in New Delhi a month after Suez, (b) shown a British passport and (c) acquired three counterfeit two-anna coins within a few minutes of leaving Palam airport. It was a jumpy coach ride into the city. As the luggage was unloaded I could hear the laughing hyenas in the distance setting out on their nightly scavenging for food.

No drinks. No sleep. In the morning I call on the External Affairs Ministry. The official who looks through my credentials as a foreign corre- spondent pops his first question. 'Why don't you join the External Affairs publicity department? We can use experienced journalists who have been abroad.' I am unprepared for this. He re- peats the question. I lose all my formal poise and reply, 'There are two reasons. First, I re- nounced Indian nationality three years ago. Second, I don't understand Indian foreign policy.' He ignores my explanations and says, 'My dear man, you as an Indian should know that ours is not a foreign policy at all. It is a way of life.' The tone of my new relationship with the land of my birth is struck.

Art election poster reads BETWEEN GOD

and the Congress High Command stands the ELECTORATE.

The candidate is a Congress woman who has not been given a ticket. A week later I read in the papers that she has withdrawn from the elections. * , *

The South is bitter about the changeover to Hindi. Hindi has been adopted as the official language of the Indian Union, but no date has been fixed for the changeover. Only the Russians and Chinese seem to have made up their minds that the future belongs to Hindi. The interpreters with their visiting delegates speak fluently, to crowds in Hindi. I don't suppose that when Mr. Macmillan visits India next January he will care to follow the Russian or Chinese example.

* * *

Eartha Kitt is to have dinner with the Prime Minister. She arrives at nine p.m. from Karachi and is due to present herself at the Prime Minister's residence an hour later. The Daily Mirror is one of the papers I work for and I think it will he'a good story for them. So I ring LIP the Prime Minister's secretary in the after- noon and ask him if he knows what is on the menu. PM's secretary : 'I am sorry I don't know, and anyway I don't see how this should interest you.'

Myself : 'You see I. propose interviewing Miss Kitt after the dinner. If I knew the menu it would add a little colour to my story.'

PM's secretary : 'We don't want that kind of journalism in India, Mr. Anant.'

Myself : 'But it's not for India. It's for Britain. And I can get the menu from Miss Kitt later on. If you give it to me now it'll save me some time as I shall have to cable my story late.'

PM's secretary : 'You are a very dangerous man, Mr. Anant.'

Myself : 'Look here, you are talking to a correspondent accredited to the Government of India, and you must not say things like that. I'm not a bomb-thrower, you know.'

PM's secretary bangs the phone down. Later, Miss Kitt talks to me till one a.m. She wouldn't discuss Lady Mountbatten, who was also present at the dinner.

* * I feel perfectly at ease talking to Mr. Nehru. But in Mr. Krishna Menon's presence I feel disturbed. One conversation with him went like this : K. M.: 'Well, I'm not dead yet, am I?'

Myself : 'No, sir.' • K. M.: 'You know Mere are no journalists with integrity left. The days of the pioneering, fighting journalist are over Now there's only a second- rate lot.'

Myself : 'What about politicians, sir? Aren't they a second-rate lot, too? The histrionic Mr. Khrushchev, for example.'

K. M.: 'I don't think Mr. Khrushchev is histrionic or second-rate. I wouldn't like to work under him, mind you, but he's as important as Mr. Dulles. You know it was only the Russian rockets threat that made the British and the French withdraw from Egypt.'

Myself : 'I don't think you really believe that, sir. His bluff . .

K. M.: 'The British may say now it was bluff, but at that time I was at the United Nations. And I could see how jittery the British and French delegates were then.'

Because Mr. Krishna Menon has an interest- ing mind, perhaps the most interesting in Asia today, I find his casual, give-away remarks en- lightening. India negotiates from weakness. Is that why, as leader of Asian countries, it needs to feel sure that there is a major Power in the background to brandish the big stick on its behalf when necessary?

At sessions of the All India Congress Com- mittee delegates sit on a platform. No one can keep his back straight. They lean back, sprawl, curl up, rest on an elbow, are eternally aslant. An enormous vocabulary of Sanskrit (the language of the Hindu gods) has found its way through the Congress Party into government projects. The experimental atomic-energy reactor is called Apsara—a Hindu water nymph. When India changed from rupees, annas and pies to rupees and naya paisa (decimal coinage) a press in- formation handout read : 'The shanya, zero, is India's greatest gift to mankind. It was discovered by a Hindu mathematician 2,000 years ago.'

How different the Communists are! Mr. Nam- boodiripad, Chief Minister of Kerala, stammers. It makes you like him at once. He has a robust sense of humour. He sits upright. The Kerala Health Minister said to me about family plan- ning, 'All this propaganda and leaflets and con- traceptives is rubbish. What we have to do is to legalise abortion.' That is the kind of vision the Communists have.