Shastri Has Travelled Little From India

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30630, 22 December 1964, Page 4

Shastri Has Travelled Little From India

(N.Z.PA.-Reuter) NEW DELHI. The visit of India’s Prime Minister (Mr Lal Bahadur Shastri) to London to meet the British leaders was his first journey to Britain—or to any Western country for that matter.

As Home Minister, the 60-year-old Mr Shastri went to Nepal last year, and in October he led India’s delegation to the Nonaligned Nations’ Conference in Cairo. Before that, he had never travelled outside India.

He should have attended the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference last July, but the strain of events following Mr Nehru’s death at the end of May, including taking over as Prime Minister, led to his collapse with exhaustion.

Although there were reports that he had suffered a second heart attack—he had one in 1959—he and his doctors deny that his heart was affected this time.

Mild and homespun, and only just over five feet tall, Mr Shastri presents a contrast to the elegant, cosmopolitan Mr Nehru, to whom Britain was almost a second home. Mr Nehru described himself as “a queer mixture of East and West” and he was always something apart from tihe mass of the Indian people in spite of the close bond which he felt he had with them and the adulation which he received. - INDIAN CLOTHES

Mr Shastri is demonstrably a man of his people. In dress, in manner, and in diet he is one of them. In a crowd of them, he would not stand out.

He wears the ankle-length loin cloth which is the standard garment of the mass of Hindus. In fact he has criticised Government officials in the villages for wearing trousers, because, he says, it cuts them off from the people. He likes to joke about how short he is. Only a little while before Mr Nehru's death, Mr Shastri was asked his opinion about the succession. He replied: "Whoever succeeds him will be a small man—l am a small man.”

During the six months he has been in power, he has had to grapple with the worst crisis independent India has faced: shortaee of food and high prices. These are issues affecting everyone in the country.

There have been food riots in many areas, most recently

in the Southern Indian State of Kerala, which is under the Central Government’s direct administration. BUMPER HARVEST

Mr Shastri has said that a bumper crop is now being harvested and that the crisis will be over in January. In fact, however, Indian agriculture has been in the doldrums for the last four years, leaving an annual 5 per cent over-all deficit in food grain requirements. The shortage is mainly of wheat. Production of this food grain only meets half the demand.

The balance is coming almost wholly from the United States, which has earmarked 20 per cent of its wheat crop for India. Mr Shastri’s efforts to enforce a national food policy have met with stubborn resistance from some of the Chief Ministers of some of the States. Indian commentators are now describing these in terms as strong as “war-lords” and “satraps.” CEYLON SETTLEMENT Last month, he thrashed out a settlement of a 25-year-old dispute over people of Indian origin in Ceylon with Ceylon’s Prime Minister, Mrs Sirimavo Badaranaike.

This achievement after previous efforts had failed was applauded. But the actual agreement which means India accepting as her nationals half a million people now in i Ceylon, and repatriating them, has been criticised, in Madras, which will have to absorb them.

Towards Pakistan, too, Mr Shastri has been conciliatory in spite of criticism. So far. he has nothing to show for his efforts, and Indo-Pakistan relations remain bitter, with frequent clashes along the cease-fire line dividing the areas which each country holds in Kashmir exacerbating relations. Mr Shastri still has rivals within the Congress party. The puritanical Mr Morarji Desai, who as Finance Minister once appeared Mr Nehru’s inevitable successor, heads a strong Right-wing grouping which is not without the sympathy of the Rigbtwing Opposition Swatantra party. ON THE LEFT

On the left, stand the associates of Mr Khrishna Menon and K. D. Malaviya, both former Ministers, who demand a strong Socialist line. 1

From the Left, especially, comes the cry that Mr Shastri must stick rigidly to all Mr Nehru’s policies. He told Parliament in September that he accepted them, but spoke out strongly of his right to apply them in his own way. The difference in approach of the two men is perhaps reflected in the reactions provoked. Whereas Mr Nehru always received the benefit of the doubt from the Left, Mr Shastri gets it from the Right. But there is no sign at present of Mr Shastri’s position being threatened, and there seems little doubt that he has a stronger national following than any other Indian leader.