How Moral Is Nehru?

Prime Minister Nehru last week again came out firmly against India's alignment with the Western democracies.* He was against it, he told the Indian Parliament, on moral grounds: "Alignment means that you do what you think is not right, but what others think is right for you to do."

Same day, Moralist Nehru got an answer. In Bombay with other Western and Indian intellectuals attending a Congress of Cultural Freedom, Swiss Moralist Denis de Rougemont (The Devil's Share) drew applause from his Indian audience as he developed a parable on neutrality. Said Calvinist De Rougemont:

"Imagine a wolf, a lamb and a shepherd. The lamb decides to remain neutral between the wolf, which threatens him, and the shepherd, who protects him. He hopes that by doing this the wolf, instead of eating him, will busy himself first of all with the shepherd, or perhaps the shepherd will attack the wolf. By this means the lamb, who still feels that he is not strong enough to act, will gain time. It is a defensible policy.

"What would not be defensible, but a transparent piece of trickery, would be if the lamb attempted to justify his politics by moral or doctrinal reasoning."

* In a busy week, Nehru also found time for a trip to Kashmir, the province bitterly contested by India and Pakistan, where he conferred with local government leaders and rejected as "extraordinarily objectionable" a U.S.-British move for U.N. arbitration of the Kashmir dispute (TIME, March 12). Nehru was accompanied by his daughter Indira, and by Countess Mountbatten, wife of India's last British viceroy.

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