While the Guns Were Silent

The towns and villages in India's North East Frontier Agency were blacked out from dusk to dawn last week. At the front, an uneasy truce was maintained as Indian troops warily waited to see if the Red Chinese forces would keep their pledge to withdraw 12 1/2 miles behind the lines they occupied on Nov. 7, 1959. But while the guns were silent, the diplomats were at work.

In New Delhi, Britain's Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State W. Averell Harriman sat through a grueling round of conferences with Indian officials. Their mission was twofold: to organize military aid to beleaguered India, and to seek an end to India's long festering dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. The controversy dates back to independence in 1947, when the Hindu ruler of Kashmir opted to join India instead of Moslem Pakistan, despite the fact that 77% of the province is Moslem. Bloody violence erupted; the United Nations proposed a plebiscite as a means of settling the problem; India refused. Since 1949, a tenuous peace has been kept along Kashmir's U.N.-supervised cease-fire line, which gives India possession of two thirds of the province.

In New Delhi Sandys, with the sympathetic support of Harriman, impressed on Jawaharlal Nehru that unless the Kashmir problem was solved, there would be little hope of defending the subcontinent against Chinese aggression. As they pointed out, four divisions of crack Indian troops had been tied down along the cease-fire line; Red China was trying to play Pakistan off against India by offering the Pakistanis a non-aggression pact. No longer counseled by ousted Defense Minister Krishna Menon, who obsessively regards Pakistan as India's main enemy, Nehru finally agreed to write Pakistan's President Ayub Khan, suggesting top-level talks on Kashmir. Ayub promptly assented. This, of course, was no assurance that the two foes would ever come to an accord in the bitter dispute at the conference table; but at least they would now be negotiating--and in the process perhaps hurling fewer curses at each other.

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