INDIA: Very Smooth

At New Delhi's Palam Airport this week 25-pounders blasted out a 31-gun salute. Into the blazing heat stepped Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, cool and stiff in his starched, white Rear Admiral's uniform. The Rajputana Rifles band played God Save the King. Soon after, Mountbatten, his Lady and daughter Pamela reached the wide gate of the massive Viceroy's House. The Mountbattens entered a carriage drawn by plume-decked horses and, escorted by gold-turbaned, scarlet-coated guards, were driven the few hundred feet to the crimson-carpeted steps of the Durbar Hall.

Behind them the gates opened and hundreds of Indians and others swarmed in to see the show—perhaps the last full dress panoply of the British Raj. Among the spectators were many delegates from the 32-nation Inter-Asian Relations Conference ; many of them had wishful reasons of their own for wanting to be in a final rite of British rule.

The Mountbattens mounted the steps. At the top stood the Viceroy and Vicereine, Lord and Lady Wavell. Said Wavell: "Did you have a good trip?" Said Mountbatten: "Very smooth." Next day, Wavell was piped and saluted out. With no letdown in ceremony, Mountbatten took the oath as Viceroy, sat for a moment on the red brocade and gold throne.

Smooth "Dickie" Mountbatten, who hoped to soothe India into unity for self-rule by June 1948, was greeted by grating news. The governments of one princely state and two provinces, representing 70,000,000 (about one-fifth of India's population), served notice that they meant to set up as independent states when British rule ended. They were prosperous Travancore, heavily Moslem Sind and Moslem-run Bengal, scene of some of the worst Moslem v. Hindu disorders in recent months. That was doubtless only the beginning of Mountbatten's troubles as (probably) the last of 20 Viceroys.