Round & Round

Last week India's little Communist Party saw a chance to move its country toward the frustration and chaos the Reds have helped to create in much of postwar Asia. The Indian government acted faster than the Reds and thwarted them--for the present.

Two years ago, before anyone foresaw the heights inflation would reach, the government signed a contract with the All India Railwaymen's Federation. It included a cost-of-living allowance pegged to rising prices. The government argued later that it could not keep the contract without contributing to the disastrous price spiral. The railway federation, dominated by Jai Prakash Narain's Socialist Party, screamed that it had been betrayed. In December its 350,000 members voted to strike on March 9.

The Chance. During the breathing spell between strike vote and walkout, U.S. educated Socialist Narain talked with the government. By Feb. 16, he told his railroad men that the government had granted a $3 monthly pay raise to low-paid employees and would consider other demands. The union leaders voted to postpone the strike. But some rank-&-filers wanted their full contract rights. The Communists grabbed their chance.

Red leaders of local unions blasted the Socialists with familiar Moscow invective: "Betrayers! Opportunists! Careerists!" then announced they would go ahead with the strike. Boss Narain promptly expelled the Communist locals from his federation.

The Result. The government of India went further. In Madras, 73-year-old Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel thundered: "Labor is not in the hands of people who can guide it properly. Unless they succeed in removing Communists, there will be nothing but ruin for this country." Patel did not wait for the unions to arrest Communist leaders. He started a roundup of his own. By week's end, some 1,000 Communists were crammed into already-bulging provincial jails. In the New Delhi legislature a bill was introduced which would impose stiff fines and jail sentences for strikers against essential industries, i.e., railways, postal telegraph and telephone, arms manufactures, etc.

By week's end small gangs of Communist terrorists were getting revenge. In the Calcutta area they bombed an airport and engineering works, killed seven people. The raids were timed as a warning to Prime Minister Pandit Nehru who had announced he would address India's legislative assembly on Communism.

Nehru was not terrorized. In his angriest attack on the Reds, he said: ". . . Communists have looked upon these strikes not from the trade union point of view . . . but as a weapon designed to create a chaotic state in the country . . . [They are] deliberately seeking to create famine conditions by paralyzing our railway system ... It is not the government's conception of civil liberty to permit methods of coercion and terrorism."

A high-ranking official explained what the government was afraid of: "The Communists know we are caught in a vicious circle. To save India from disorder and Communism we need to raise living standards. To raise living standards we need order. So it goes, round and round."

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