In terms of the preceding analysis of the American interest in economic development, the Indian scene has two characteristics that lend special urgency to an adequate program of American loans to that country. The first is that the present Indian leadership has quite clearly centered its bid for national unity on a common effort to achieve constructive economic goals, in a framework of democratic consent. Economic development goals are a live political issue in India, as they are not (to anything like the same extent) in any other underdeveloped country. Indian foreign policy, anti-colonialism and the Kashmir issue frequently reach the headlines of the Western press; and, of course, they play a significant role in domestic Indian politics. But the Congress Party will not stand or fall at home, as Nasser and Soekarno may, on its external successes.
Indians will judge the Congress Party on how far and how fast it achieves the modernization of India by the voluntary and essentially democratic methods it has chosen to employ.
In India we have the opportunity of confronting the Communists with a serious dilemma. They would, of course, like to exploit IndianWestern tensions. But these are not as much at the center of the thinking of Indian intellectuals as is the case, for example, in the Middle East. The Russians would like to appear as the friends of Indian economic development, which has come to have genuine importance to a great many Indians.
But ultimate Communist success in India depends on the failure of the economic development efforts sponsored by what Communists would describe as the present bourgeois regime. As long as the West fails to insure adequate resources for a successful Indian take-off the Communists can successfully pursue the tactic of providing enough help to be symbolically persuasive of their good intentions, but not enough to make a significant difference to the outcome of the Indian Second Five-Year Plan. Thus the success of current Communist tactics in India depends on an American and Western European failure to cover the foreign exchange gap.
The present leaders of the Indian state of Kerala, which went Cornmunist at the last elections, are likewise giving evidence that they are faced with a dilemma. If within the state for which they have responsibility they pursue aggressive and coercive Communist policies, which the Indian electorate finds uncongenial, they may lose their slim parliamentary majority. On the other hand, if they are constructive and reasonable, suppressing their distinctively Communist policies and cooperating with private interests and with the national government, they weaken their case that only Communism can satisfy Indian aspirations for economic advance. Their great hope, of course, is that the national effort will fail
and that they can contrast national failure under Congress leadership with at least partial success in Kerala. We have it in our power to help frustrate this Communist hope; but it will take substantially more than we are now doing.
Let us be clear about the nature of the danger confronting us. There is no immediate threat of an extension of Communist control from Kerala to the national government in India. The commitment of most elements of Indian leadership to the methods of consent and non-violence is so deep that even if economic development lags, an early Communist takeover is exceedingly unlikely. What is likely over the years, if development loses its momentum, is increasing conflict and confusion within the Congress Party, a resurgence of sectional and linguistic interests perhaps breaking into violence, a heightening of the political and social tensions created by mass unemployment—in short, a reversion to the kind of political instability which tempts otherwise moderate persons to support anyone who can maintain order. While there is no Communist-inspired crisis at present, the prospects are poor for stable and effective democratic government if the present development program fails.
It is precisely in the fact that no serious political crisis is on the immediate horizon in India that our great opportunity lies, for we have learned in many other places around the globe that the salvage of situations which have been permitted to degenerate into crises is an exceedingly expensive, precarious and time-consuming business. In India there is still time in hand for us to use. We can demonstrate that we have a national interest in the development of the underdeveloped countries that lies deeper than our concern to chalk up day-to-day points in the game of cold-war diplomacy. Indian-American relations are important for their own sake. But they are even more important as an earnest of America's determination to play a constructive as well as a fire-fighting role in world affairs. In India, where a serious and promising attempt is being made to forge a new nation around the ideals of domestic progress by democratic procedures, it would be most shortsighted of us not to do what we can to make the effort a success.