Morning After

It seemed like just another Christmas dance in Goa's capital city of Pangim. Still dressed in their jungle-green combat uniforms, 300 Indian army officers of the conquering "Black Cat" 17th division shuffled in time to the music. Patiently the 300-man stag line waited to dance with the only women who had been inveigled to attend the dance--three lonely Goan girls. "They don't like us," said an Indian officer. "They don't want jungle green here. They want white skins."

Despite Indian assertions that the Goan people were delighted with their "liberation," Indian troops elsewhere in Goa were received with similar muted enthusiasm. No welcoming arches or banners were strung over the streets, and the few Jai Hind (Hail India) slogans painted on official buildings had mostly been slapped on by the Indians themselves, not by an exuberant citizenry. Fraternization between the Indians and the Goans was almost nonexistent. Armed Indian infantrymen, their weapons slung over their shoulders, went sightseeing on near-deserted streets.

Bootleg Water. Beyond a few shattered buildings, little destruction was evident anywhere, although India had shrilly claimed at the start of hostilities that the Portuguese were under orders to wage a scorched-earth campaign. Only real damage that the Portuguese inflicted was to blow up the main water pipes outside of Pangim. Each guest at Pangim's Mandavi Hotel last week was given a single bucket of rusty well water to shave and bathe, and bootleg water sold at one rupee (14 cents) per pail. Obviously overmatched, and equipped with armored vehicles that were little better than museum pieces, the Portuguese defenders had surrendered quietly, and by last week they were packed off to prisoner-of-war camps, from where they will be repatriated to Portugal. The Indians treated their 2,000-odd prisoners well. At the P.W. barracks at Ponda, the prisoners ran their own camp, cooked their own meals, were only lightly guarded. On Christmas Day, while Bing Crosby records of Adeste Fideles echoed across public squares, they were each given a three-course meal, ten cigarettes, and a tot of wine.

Into the vacuum left by the exit of the Portuguese have swept five boisterous, brawling political parties, each hopeful of attracting Indian favors by horror stories of subjugation under the Portuguese. One political leader, J. M. D'Souza of Goa's National Union Party, claims that the Portuguese civil authorities kept a collection of whipping canes, allowed their prisoners to pick the cane with which they were to be beaten. The Portuguese sometimes administered the beatings themselves, he said, but sometimes they were given by native Goans disguised in black masks against the wrath of their victims.

Lipstick & Minesweepers. Whatever the local politicians might eventually accomplish in Goa, the immediate problems were economic. Goa's virtually duty-free status sent swarms of Indian soldiers into shops stocked with inexpensive foreign luxury items seldom seen in India because of the government's stringent import restrictions. Shopkeepers did a brisk business in transistor radios, cameras, electric appliances, cosmetics, perfumes, wines. In one Pangim shop alone, Indian soldiers bought 1,400 Max Factor lipsticks. Truckloads of refrigerators were purchased by army officers for shipment home. But the days of the modest boom are numbered. High on the agenda of the Indian government is the introduction into Goa of the same import bans that apply to the rest of India.

Already considerable progress has been made in getting Goa's administration back into working order. Finance Ministry officials are drafting a new budget that will bring the former colony under the economic supervision of the central government, and the State Bank of India has taken over Goa's Banco Nacional Ultramarino. Goan policemen, who had vanished when the Indian troops first appeared, were back on the job wearing their Portuguese uniforms. An Indian postal official arrived in Goa with $3,000 worth of Indian stamps, and Indian telegraph and telephone authorities wrestled with the problem of replacing Goa's antiquated, hand-cranked telephones.

Indian navy minesweepers carefully swept Mormugao harbor, India's richest prize from the invasion and the finest natural harbor on the Indian subcontinent. Biggest economic boon of union with India for agriculturally impoverished Goa will be the availability of cheaper food. After India placed a trade embargo on Goa in 1954, the Goans were forced to import most of their food and vegetables from as far away as The Netherlands. The trade ban will soon be lifted.

"An Eye on Elections." Despite the overwhelming popularity in India of Nehru's Goan "conquest," and for all the economic benefits that it will reap from the former Portuguese colony, a few rumbles of discontent arose last week over India's resort to force. They came from a respected source: venerable Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, 82, leader of the conservative Freedom Party, close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, and the only Indian to serve as Governor General of his country.

In the Freedom Party's organ, Swarajya Rajagopalachari assailed India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru for "this claptrap Goa action. No cartoon can do full justice to the contradictions of our international peace policy arising out of Mr. Nehru's action. India has helped undermine the prestige and power of the U.N. Security Council. India has totally lost the moral power to raise her voice against the use of military power." India, continued Rajagopalachari, had claimed that its action was based on anticolonialist grounds, yet had courted a Soviet veto of the U.N. request for a cease-fire even though "some people think the Soviet empire is the greatest colonial power in the world today."

Though he agreed that the presence of the Portuguese in Goa "was an offense to Indian nationalism," Rajagopalachari added that "it was not a greater offense than China's exploits on the Himalayan border. Our nationalism has led us into impatience at the wrong moment, when in the international world there is trouble brewing everywhere, and we have a mission for promoting peace and a special qualification for fulfilling that mission. The moment may have been thought just the time by those who had an eye on the elections, but from the international angle it is the wrong moment."

Nehru shrugged off the criticism. At a press conference he rejected a purely academic suggestion that India pull out of Goa. said: "There would be hell in the world if this happened." He also temporized on the question of Red China, hedged on whether he would demand that the Red Chinese withdraw from the 14,000 square miles of Indian territory that they occupy. Nehru publicly thanked Nikita Khrushchev for his understanding of the "motives and ideas" behind the Indian invasion, said that he deplored the Western condemnation of the action. "I do not like this division of opinion--to put it very crudely, white and black," he said. "It is a bad sign, but there it is. I have been distressed by this more than anything."

Nehru also tried to mend his U.S. fences. Recalling that diplomatic approaches from the U.S. and Great Britain had twice postponed the invasion date, he said: "We appreciate the anxiety of the U.S. to help us solve this problem." Asked if he had a New Year's thought for the world, Nehru replied: "I may sound like a hypocrite, but my message is 'Work for peace.' >:

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