Accentuating the Negative

For India's Jawaharlal Nehru and his doctrine of active neutrality, the week started off brightly indeed. Fresh from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting in London, Nehru moved triumphantly across Europe in what at times resembled a royal progress, wearing his familiar brown tunic, white churidar trousers and the inevitable red rose. Consulted at every turn with much the mixture of deference and bewilderment once accorded the Delphic oracle, the Indian Prime Minister reacted with a purr of self-satisfaction so audible that in Hamburg (where he accepted two honorary degrees) he felt obliged to explain. "When people ask me why I am so pleased with myself," said he, "I tell them: because I have always done exactly what I wanted to regardless of consequences."

Talking about the foreign affairs of others was in fact ideal for this purpose; Nehru could say exactly what he wanted, and the consequences were the responsibility of the others. In Bonn German Foreign Ministry officials persuaded flinty old West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to be obliging to Nehru, though the Chancellor scorns Nehru's way of thinking. Adenauer even went so far as to break his no-Sunday-engagements rule in order to take Nehru on a cruise up the castled Rhine. They met three times for four hours, and both stubborn men had the honesty not to feign a friendship they did not feel. When newsmen asked the Indian Prime Minister whether he accepted Bonn as the only legitimate German government, he made a characteristically Delphic response: "You want me to plunge headlong into the sea before I learn to swim." Nor was Nehru prepared to give any assurance that India would not some day recognize Communist East Germany, "I do not know what future developments will bring," said he.

Plugs & Pressures. Chary as he was of words that might commit him, Nehru was as usual generous with advice. In Bonn he urged his West German hosts to seek reunification of Germany by "peaceful negotiations." In a speech before the German Foreign Policy Association at Koenigswinter he put in a vague plug for liberation of Russia's East European satellites ("They are, of course, under a certain domination . . . and I certainly believe they should be free") and a firm one for Red China's admission to the U.N. ("What is the good of calling a few people sitting on Formosa China?"). Then, moving on to Paris, he strongly pressured French Premier Guy Mollet to negotiate a cease-fire in Algeria. But when pressed for specific suggestions, Nehru retreated to Delphi. "I am Foreign Minister of India, not France or Algeria," he said.

At midweek Nehru joined Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and Egypt's President Nasser at Tito's pleasure dome on the Adriatic island of Brioni. Here, where the ancient galleys and triremes of Rome once anchored, and at a later date Mussolini played, were gathered three unlikely bedfellows. THE MOST IMPORTANT POLITICAL CONFERENCE OF THE POSTWAR WORLD headlined Cairo's Al Ahram. "These three peace men," said the captive Egyptian press, would bring sanity to a mad world, and in this meeting of Europe, Asia and Africa would create a "Third World Force." Tito too basked in the splendor of the moment.

But Jawaharlal Nehru would have none of it. Even before he reached Brioni Nehru began to bill the conference as a casual meeting, arranged only after he learned that by rare coincidence "Nasser also would be traveling in Yugoslavia." And from the moment that Tito, resplendent in a panama white linen suit, white shoes and black pocket handkerchief, greeted him on Brioni's quay, Nehru was clearly determined to let the wind out of the whole affair. At the end of the first five-hour session, with Tito and Nasser standing sheepishly silent, Nehru wearily chided the 120 newsmen who had assembled to cover neutralism's shining hour. "It is really extraordinary," said he, "that we cannot meet in a friendly way without you gentlemen attaching the highest importance to it ... We have not settled all the world's problems. Repeat not."

This statement was thoroughly confirmed by the joint communique issued when the conference ended. With the exception of another demand for Red China's admission to the U.N., a cautiously worded expression of sympathy for "the desire of the people of Algeria for freedom," and a kind word for "safeguarding legitimate economic interests" in the Middle East, the communique carried little but vague platitudes of a pronounced Nehrunian cast. "Points on which there could be no agreement were just left out," explained one Indian diplomat. Tito, in halting English, bade his guests goodbye. "Come soon back," he said.

Problem for a Nurse. On the last day of the Brioni conference the U.S., in an astutely timed move to discourage the spread of neutralism, coldly withdrew its offer to help Egypt finance construction of the billion-dollar Aswan High Dam (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Flying off to Cairo with the bruised Nasser, Nehru, the high priest of neutralism, found himself at week's end playing nurse to a new and noisy member of the family. It was doubtful, however, that Nurse Nehru could offer 38-year-old Nasser much in the way of consolation or even advice.

The difficulty with the diplomatic doctrine that Nehru likes to call "nonalignment" is that it has no philosophic basis, no platform; it can only respond. Since the positive objectives of its adherents vary widely, neutralist powers, as Brioni proved, are rarely able to agree on anything but negatives.

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