INDIA: The Shade of the Big Banyan

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Worriedly, Indians began asking themselves: After Nehru, who? It was and is the favorite New Delhi dinner topic. Food Minister S. K. Patil put the matter bluntly: "Nehru is the greatest asset we have because he is just like a banyan tree under whose shade millions take shelter." He added that Nehru is also a liability, "because in the shade of that banyan tree, biologically, nothing grows."

The two likeliest candidates to succeed Nehru are Patil himself, a tough, able administrator who is India's closest approximation of an anything-goes U.S. politician, and Finance Minister Morarji Desai, 63, an eccentric but capable mixture of far-out ideas on sex and alcohol (he is against both). Gandhian attitudes, and administrative talent. Both .men are strongly pro-Western, anti-Communist and holders of pragmatic economic views. But when Nehru last year announced that he wanted to step down as Prime Minister, Congress Party stalwarts, swept by panic, cried: "Pandit ji, you are leaving us orphans!"

The Kisan. Nehru agreed to stay on, and apparently can hold the job as long as he wants it. Nehru keeps in trim physically through a half-hour of yoga exercises each morning, including a spell of standing on his head. Whenever he feels drained intellectually, one unfailing source of energy remains to him—the Indian people. Nehru's long romance with the millions on millions of kisans, or peasants, began when he was 31. Brahman-born and British-bred, Nehru had returned home to provincial Allahabad with his sense of innate superiority re-enforced by seven years of upper-class education at Harrow, Cambridge and London's Inner Temple, where he qualified for the bar. Already a romantic dabbler in the independence movement, Nehru agreed to accompany some oppressed peasants to their primitive village. What he saw there filled him "with shame and sorrow —shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India." He saw his homeland as "naked, starving, crushed and utterly miserable."

In speeches to the peasants, Nehru displays none of the perfervid oratory of the demagogue, and could not if he wanted to, since he speaks only one Indian language, Urdu, with any proficiency. Ordinarily he gives long, rambling, extemporaneous talks in English, full of digressions and schoolmasterly asides, that are translated into the local dialect by interpreters. Vast crowds of up to a million assemble to hear him, but the contact is more emotional than verbal. What happens is called by Indians darshan, communion. The multitude is somehow comforted and reassured not by the words but by the presence of Nehru. And Nehru himself seems to lose every trace of fatigue, becomes more alive, uninhibited and relaxed, and he returns to his job with his spiritual batteries recharged.