India: Pride & Reality

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The ashes of Jawaharlal Nehru have long since disappeared into the silt of the Ganges, carrying with them the faint shadow of the rose he always wore in his lapel. Gone with the Pandit is the image of India as a moral bulwark of the "nonaligned" world, a pious mediator between the great powers. Gone with the jaunty jodhpurs and preachy pronouncements is the hope that India might soon be an economic success. Gone, too, are the pride and the confidence that inspired India in its formative years. India without Nehru stands dispirited and disillusioned, a land without elan where a rose in the lapel is somehow out of place.

The death of Nehru last year was only one of the shocks that have forced the world's largest democracy to face reality. Before that came the Red Chinese attack in October 1962, which discredited India's foreign policy and exposed Delhi as a military powder puff. Then last year the country was struck by its worst food crisis since independence, as riots erupted from Bangalore to Bombay. The shortages of grain called into question Nehru's economic policies, which stressed industry and paid little attention to the more basic problem of agriculture. And looming in the background was the seemingly insoluble deadlock with Pakistan, typified not only by the Kashmir question but also by the threat to India's borders in the desolate Rann of Kutch.