THE man most widely held responsible for India's conquest of Goa is not Jawaharlal Nehru, but Nehru's abrasive, acerbic Defense Minister, Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, who apparently provided the necessary push to overcome his master's remaining scruples. With elections due in February, Nehru and Menon have been under continuous harassment from Indian leftists for not expelling the Portuguese "imperialists" and from moderates and rightists for ignoring Red China's new incursions on India's northern frontier. Acting against Goa was one way to cover up inaction against China. Moreover, Menon's own parliamentary seat was in danger, and shrewd Indian political opinion held that Menon could only win if he made himself popular by "solving" the Goa situation.
Flamboyant, brusque, rude and arbitrary, as well as quick, capable and intelligent, Menon has long antagonized the West—and a great many of his own countrymen. As he flew to New York last week to uphold India's case at the U.N., he ran true to form. Asked during a London stopover if Mahatma Gandhi would have approved of the Goan invasion, Menon snapped: "Well, he's not here, is he?" A possible clash between Menon and the U.S.'s Adlai Stevenson from the rostrum of the General Assembly was avoided when the two men met in private, thus depriving the Assembly of a spectacular verbal display.
When he is on the attack, which is most of the time, Menon's expression is ferretlike. Brain surgery last October for a blood clot deprived him of his elaborately curled silver locks, making his looks even fiercer. Though he has no known history of any leg ailment, he constantly brandishes a cane as if it were a weapon. A teetotaler and vegetarian, Menon, 64, dresses with Savile Row impeccability at the U.N.; at home in India, he wears a loose-fitting, collarless jibbah in which, says one Western observer, "he looks like Boris Karloff playing John the Baptist."
In crackling (and self-cultivated) Oxonian accents, he has put forth Nehru's ideas with a snarling eloquence all over the world, giving them a leftist spin that invariably directs them against the West. Menon bends over backward to make allowances for the Communists, in 1956 voted against a U.N. resolution calling for the removal of Russian troops from beleaguered Hungary. He mouthed the Russian line at the Geneva conference on Laos last summer, has echoed Russia's call for an uninspected nuclear test ban. Once criticized by the former Senator William F. Knowland for his consistent advocacy of Red China's admission to the U.N., Menon acidly counseled the California Republican to "visit a doctor, a psychopath, or somebody."