The Web of Responsibility

Soon after India's 5,000-man Custodial Force sailed last fall for Korea, Prime Minister Nehru promised his followers that India "would not run away from her responsibilities." These were: 1) hold the 22,500 anti-Communist and 350 pro-Communist prisoners, with minimum bloodshed, for 120 days; 2) supervise explanations, prevent coercion and guarantee repatriation for those who requested it; and 3) release all remaining P.W.s as free civilians at the end of the 120 days --at 12:01 a.m., Jan. 23, 1954-India's disciplined troops and civil servants handled the first two jobs in a calm, conscientious manner that won the respect of the free world. But Jawaharlal Nehru last week studied India's third responsibility--the release--and decreed that his proud nation should run away.

"Unilateral Action." In two similar notes, framed in New Delhi by Nehru, signed in Panmunjom by Lieut. General K. S. Thimayya, India told the Communists and the U.N. that it would turn back the P.W.s to their original captors starting Jan. 20, three days before the deadline. India warned that the P.W.s must be detained indefinitely behind barbed wire until the long-stalled political conference, or a bilateral U.N.-Communist agreement, can determine their fate.

Nehru thereby avoided the onus of releasing the P.W.s himself, and tried to place a cruel stigma upon the U.N.'s inevitable release of the anti-Communist P.W.s: if the U.N. let the prisoners go, as it had repeatedly promised them, it would be guilty of "violating the armistice." Nehru then asked his sister, U.N. General Assembly President Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, to hold a special Assembly debate in February on the Korean "deadlock," and any nation which had not responded to the invitation by Jan. 22 .would be considered to have accepted. In this Nehru went too far: not only the U.S., but Great Britain and France refused to be so pressured, and Mme. Pandit had to extend the time limit.

In Korea, General Thimayya, who has been publicly reproved by Nehru for his independent desire to free the P.W.s, found himself reversed. Privately he told Swiss and Swedish neutrals that he had got the best compromise he could from Nehru, but in public, Good Soldier Thimayya unflinchingly accepted responsibility for Nehru's decision. "Any agreement, General?" called out one U.N. newsman, as Thimayya sludged through Panmunjom's melting snow the day Nehru's stand was announced. "No, no agreement," he replied, "just unilateral action." "By whom?" Thimayya drummed his swagger stick against his chest: "By me." "Inalienable Right." The U.N. Command, gratified at least that its principle of voluntary non-repatriation would be upheld, replied that it would accept the P.W.s as quickly as Thimayya could turn them over. Then Commanding General John Hull told India, straightforwardly, that he would release the P.W.s on the 23rd, "in recognition of their inalienable right of freedom of choice." Retention of the P.W.s, as Nehru demanded, would "negate the very principle of human rights for which so many men of this Command have fought and died." Peking also got off a loud protest to Nehru.

To those around, the world who were only half-listening, Nehru "the Neutral" seemed to have completely bought the Communist position that the U.N. had no right to set the P.W.s free. Indian newspapers, which quickly respond to Nehru's notions, took up the cry that the explanation sessions had failed--not because the Chinese had stalled, but because the U.N. had indoctrinated and intimidated the P.W.s.

What was Nehru up to, anyhow? He had provided magnetic leadership during his people's surge to independence. In the old days, he cried: "Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened ... we cannot, and shall not, be neutral." Now, enmeshed in the web of responsibility, he appears to wait for each side to take its specific stand upon cold war issues, then steers India in between.

This might be a useful, if risky, foreign policy for his own country. But having accepted a neutral's responsibility on an international commission, he was presumably bound to judge the case disinterestedly on its merits. To judge it instead on the basis of politic considerations of his own is a betrayal of the neutral's classic function.

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