Foreign News: A Good Look

India's political wind is veering about. Recently the weathercocks have indicated that Nehru & Co., though they still proclaim their neutrality, are more & more neutral on the side of the free world.

Last week Nehru's government selected members of a "goodwill mission" to go to Red China next month, paying back the visit to India late last year of a Chinese "goodwill mission" (whose calculated effect, Nehru now evidently perceives, was to stir India's Communist Party into an impressive showing at the polls). Heading the list is Nehru's sister, Madame Pandit, recently envoy to Washington, and before that envoy to Moscow (where, though she arrived with a rosy view of the Russians, she became miffed because Stalin never received her). The Chinese Communists now regard her as so pro-American that, were she not Nehru's sister, they would have vetoed her from the mission.

Also picked for the mission are A. N. Deva, head of India's Socialist Party, which from the start has seen through Mao Tse-tung's agrarian false whiskers; Dr. Shanti Bhatnagar, who negotiated the recent U.S.-British oil-investment program in India; and Leilamani Naidu, who guided the Red Chinese good-will mission around India and was thereafter the pet hate of China's embassy.

The mission was carefully picked to give Nehru solid guidance on Red China—something his biased and gullible Peking ambassador, K. M. Panikkar, has failed to do. Panikkar's stock with Nehru is reported to be low. It wasn't helped any a fortnight ago when Panikkar's daughter Devaki married one of India's most prominent Communist bigwigs.