Abstract

Chronic Violence in India

According to the author, Indian Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's military exploit in Goa, India, after the long stalemate on his northern border where China has taken 15000 square miles of territory India claims as her own, has awakened the Western world to the fact that India is not, after all, committed to a policy of nonviolence in the Gandhian pattern. India, too, is capable of playing power politics and using military force where her own interests are involved. Perhaps Goa will provide a useful corrective to the image of India as the land where nonviolence determines behavior. The fact is that the country is full of internal violence resulting, from its complicated social structure of languages, castes, religions and ethnic groups. If these frictions should ever get out of control, all of Asia would feel the effects, and so would the rest of the world. The Government of India is engaged in a desperate race with time, to see whether it can raise the standard of living sufficiently to maintain democracy as the accepted means of solving its problems.