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Shastri has managed to build a slight reputation abroad as a man of some mettle. His response to Washington's cancelation of his June visit showed that—when his country's pride was involved—he had spunk. Shastri flew off to Canada and viewed the U.S. from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, told reporters that he could not come to the U.S. this fall even if Lyndon Johnson wanted him. (He may very well come next spring.) Shastri has maintained his aid arrangements with both the big powers. The U.S. this year will give him $110 million (Washington's biggest aid outlay and due to grow), while the Russians provide nearly as much—including the huge Soviet steel mill planned for Bokaro. India's arsenal now includes both Russian MIGs and American tanks.
Question of Will. India under Lai Bahadur Shastri remains hung up on its dipolar destiny: karma and dharma. According to Hindu philosophy, two major injunctions dictate a man's way of life. Karma is predestined fate, the godly consequence that dictates the caste and society into which the Hindu is born as punishment or reward for the way he behaved in his previous incarnation. Dharma is the grace—or righteousness—that accrues to a man who accepts his karma-ordained condition. Over the centuries, karma has come to mean passive acceptance of hunger, disease, poverty and humiliation on the sweltering, swarming Indian subcontinent. This acceptance of fate, buttressed by the humble self-righteous ness that Indians can adopt better than any other human beings, has resulted in a loss of initiative. Bombay Editor Rajmohan Gandhi (a grandson of the Mahatma) sees India's failings not in terms of climate or demography or language barriers but rather in the simple fact that Indians have no will to work.
Yet under the slothful surface, India is astir with powerful new social and economic forces. The nation does not now possess the know-how or the energy to raise itself from poverty and despair. To that extent, India's lethargy is a valuable check against firebrand revolutionaries who would hope to trade on Indian misery with offers of Marxist panaceas. Shastri's emphasis on agriculture is only a stop-gap measure, certainly not the ultimate answer to India's woes. Once it has learned to feed itself, it can then move slowly, sanely toward industrial self-sufficiency. It may take a bolder man than Shastri to carry such a program through. But somewhere among India's millions, among the young who hunger for education and get it, there will doubtless emerge a dynamic leader to rally the nation and lift its spirits—a man who perhaps combines Nehru's flamboyance and Shastri's humility. At that point, hope will return to a subcontinent.