Era of Good Feeling

Military danger sometimes makes strange bedfellows, and for a while it looked as if Pakistan and India might patch up their differences in a defense agreement. Communist China's machinations in Tibet have had widespread effects, from the conciliatory talks in Karachi and New Delhi to proposals by Vice-President Nixon and Senator Kennedy that the U.S. boost India's rate of economic growth to that of China's.

India, Pakistan and the United States seem to have mellowed on certain points of contention under the influence of the Tibetan situation. Nehru sounds more and more like a "Western" diplomat rather than a "neutralist," and American attitudes toward India warm as Indian outrage over Tibet grows. Last week The Times of India was filled with enough good feeling to advocate a summit meeting between Nehru and Mohammed Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan, praising the new Pakistani government as "the one with which we can do business. Its leaders have on more than one occasion made conciliatory references to India and recognize the danger and futility of continued emnity with this country." And Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Manzur Qadir, earlier suggested that the two countries reconsider their relationship.

A number of forces will have to be overcome before the old enmities are resolved, however. Each country is suspicious of the other's use of American aid, claiming that when the U.S. strengthens one nation it endangers the other. On April tenth, Pakistani-owned Sabre jets downed an Indian reconaissance plane, an incident which did much to arouse Indian ill-will. Disputes over division of the Indus Basin and control of Kashmir have yet to be settled and there still exists distrust among Indian politicians of the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan's government, its absence of parties, elections, and an independent judiciary.

There may never be a military pact as such Nehru said as much in a speech the other day, citing India's policy of nonalignment as the force which kept India from "drifting" and losing her self-respect. Nehru has always been reluctant to give up the Ghandian ideal of non-violence and non-militarism, and to obligate India to fight for another nation would be an admission of the final defeat of this ideal.

But the fact that both India and Pakistan are admitting that differences have mellowed will ease American foreign policy problems in the Near East. Nixon's proposals for aid are indicative of the new respect India is gaining in American eyes as a bastion of freedom, "the battleground of democracy" as he phrased it. Ideally, India would become a little more like Pakistan in its resolute anticommunism and Pakistan more like India in its democracy--thereby ending the triangle of suspicion which has existed between these two powers and the United States.