Ten years after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru's govern-
ment in India is facing its most severe test. Outwardly there is
simply an economic crisis in which a shortage of capital is
holding up development plans, but it is in essence the crisis of
democracy in Asia. The question of whether parliamentary
democracy can survive in this alien soil will be settled in the
next few years, and the stage on which its struggle for survival
is to be played out is India. . . .

It would be absurd to expect that in ten years India had
created a stable working democracy comparable with that of
Britain or the United States. You do not have to be long in
India before you see that the government of India does not
rest in parliament, or in the cabinet. Nehru alone governs India
--just as Winston Churchill governed Britain in 1940-1942. But
Nehru (like Churchill) is not a dictator by nature or choice; he
pretends that he is in fact as well as in theory the servant of
parliament. For him, parliament is an important instrument in
carrying out his political and social revolution, which will eventu-
ally result in India's becoming a genuine parliamentary democracy.
He uses parliament to explain his purposes and plans, to educate
the new masters of India, to point the moral that the government
of the people is responsible to the people.

It is very largely through parliament, which he uses as a
sounding board to reach the whole nation, that Nehru has put
across a surprisingly clear impression of the nature of the new
India he is trying to create. He wants to make India secular,
socialist, and scientific, and each concept is in daring opposition
to the dead weight of Indian tradition.

By making India secular, Nehru challenges the whole religious
structure of Hindu society on which India's way of life has been
based for centuries. The Indian constitution's ban on discrimina-
tion against the untouchables strikes at the root of religious

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