Nothing Wonderful

Kerala, washed by the tepid waters of the Arabian Sea on the Malabar Coast, is the smallest and one of the poorest of India's 13 states; it is also one of the best educated (literacy is estimated at 52%). Education and poverty go badly together: in cities like Cochin and Trivandrum, some college graduates work as messenger boys for $5 a month, others as dhobis (laundrymen) for 20-c- a day.

India's Communists paid special attention to this combination of circumstances during the general-election campaigns. "Many of you are college-educated," cried Communist candidates, "but when was the last time you could afford a book?" These tactics, aided by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's persistent refusal to alert his people to the dangers of Communism, paid off last week: when the returns were in, the Communist Party had won 60 of the state assembly's 126 seats, had another five Communists who ran as independents also safely on their side. Nehru, who had picked Cochin to make a speech praising the Soviet plan for the Middle East while ridiculing local Reds as silly nonentities, saw his overstuffed Congress Party come out with only 43 seats, the remainder divided up among smaller parties.

Not even the Communists were exuberant enough to pretend that their victory in Kerala (known until last year as Travan-core-Cochin) heralded a Communist India. Said Communist Party Central Committee Member Govindan Nair: "People seem to think we have liberated the state, and expect us to do wonderful things. We are not going to do anything wonderful." His party, said Red Leader Nair, would try to give Kerala a stable and efficient government, and thus "win the confidence of the entire country." The Reds have long wished to set up a "Yenan" in India's hinterland, much as Mao worked from his headquarters in the caves of Yenan in North Shensi province to seize all of China.

After Nehru's open-armed welcome to Bulganin and Khrushchev in 1955, Congress Party politicians boasted that Nehru had effectively taken the play away from India's Communists. Instead he had conferred respectability on them as a legitimate democratic alternative. Besides winning Kerala, the Communists picked up at least one seat in every one of the other twelve assemblies. Through skilled selection of constituencies rather than any appreciable gain in popular vote, they have emerged as India's second largest party. The Congress Party of Gandhi and Nehru is far away out front, and Jawaharlal Nehru did not seem really worried.

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