INDIA: Three Score & Ten

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Prime Minister Jawaharfal Nehru last week celebrated his 70th birthday with jaunty self-confidence. To newsmen who asked him for some words of wisdom for New Delhi's schoolchildren, he replied, "A birthday message? That sounds very pompous." Then, accepting a last garland of flowers from a little girl, Nehru got into his plane and was off to the hill resort of Dehra Dun to spend a relaxed weekend with his grandchildren.

Nine Dead Bodies. To Nehru, things seemed to be going better for a change. Abroad, Red China, after long months of border aggression and arrogant bluster, had finally sent him a note couched in terms of common civility. China's Premier Chou En-lai proposed that the armed forces of both nations withdraw 12½ miles from the positions they now hold, and urged an early meeting to discuss frontier problems. Such a move might be advantageous to China but not to India, replied Nehru tartly, since it would mean acceptance of Chinese control over large areas claimed by India. Nevertheless, he added, "the spirit of the Chinese letter is not bad." The Reds also returned ten Indian policemen captured in last month's skirmish in Ladakh, as well as the bodies of nine others killed in the same fight.

Nehru was still worried by Peking's militaristic intentions, but heartened by the support India was getting around the world. In Moscow, instead of siding with his Communist partner, Nikita Khrushchev was urging both sides to embrace and make up. The remote land is not worth fighting over, said Khrushchev at a Moscow reception, though "give a general any situation and he will find strategic significance in it. I don't trust generals' appraisal of strategic significance."

As for the U.S. position on the quarrel, U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter surprised reporters in Washington last week by remarking that the U.S. had not "taken any sides at all" in the Sino-Indian border dispute and, when pressed, conceded that "the U.S. has no view whatsoever as to the rightness or wrongness of this issue." After the conference, when prodded by his aides, Herter hastily issued a statement that his press conference remarks "related only to the legalities of the rival claims." But, whatever the legalities, he said, the Chinese Reds were "wholly in the wrong" in using force to assert their claims.

Sixty-Two Cheers. Any sign by Nehru that he was determined to resist Chinese encroachment would obviously find his people behind him. In fact, some were well ahead of him. Last week a crowd of 300 university students paraded to Nehru's home demanding the dismissal of unpopular Defense Minister V. K. Krishna Menon because of his "brazenfaced defense of Chinese aggression in Tibet." Menon, who has been in New York attending the U.N. General Assembly, flew home at week's end to give his counsel to Nehru.