KREMLIN GRANTS INDIAN BOURGEOISIE HUGE ARMAMENTS CREDIT
A reoent trip by India's President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Defence Minister Chavan to Moscow paid off handsomely for the Indian bourgeoisie. The Kremlin announced that it had agreed to gend huge shipments of arms to India, mostly on credit.
According to the weekly London _Economist (September 26], the credits amount to around £50,000,000 [ET = $2.50] and “is Like ly in the end substantially to exceed that figure. u
. Moscow had already granted India six MIG-21 fighter planes (of which two orashed), The Khrushchev government has now agreed to bring India's supersonic fighter strength up to three squadrons, a total of forty-nine aircraft. It has also agreed to rush a pro» jected alroraft plant in India itself to produce MIG fighter planes.
The Eoonomist concludes: "Against a China weakened by the loss of Sovict military aid (western experts reckon that its air force in partioular is now short of both planes and petrol, and therefore of training), the Indian forces may soon be able to prove a far tougher antagonist than the debacle of 1962 would suggest,"
These facts show that the Soviet bureaucracy has token an other long step toward lining up militarily with the Indian bourgeoisie against the Chinese Revolution and the Chinese workers state, The military aid granted by Khrushchev to Nehru in 1962 against China was one of the main causes that triggered off the public break between Peking and Moscow, Undoubtedly this latest betrayal of the elementary interests of the workers states as a whole will in turn further sharpen already tense Sino-Sovict relations,
Knrushchev'!s decision to take this big new step in helping the Indian bourgeoisie militarily is all the more scandalous in
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view of the acute food shortage in India, which in some regions is nearing famine. A genuine Marxist-Leninist leadership in the Soviet Union would have offered India huge oredits for food, appealing, if necessary, over the head of the bourgeois government to the Indian people themselves and pointing out how the Congress regime is squandering money in arms needed for feeding the people and for developing the economy.
Tt would have stressed the direct relation between the huge increase in armaments expenditures, the rise in prices and the decrease in food supplies in India,
It vould have called upon the Indian people to take the road of agrarian revolution and soolalist reconstruction, the road of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, not the road of capitalist armanents and bourgeois profiteering,
Instead of acting in this way, as Lenin and Trotsky would have when they headed the Soviet Union, fostering the rising militaney now apparent among the Indian masses, the Kremlin has decided to bolster the power and prestige of the bourgeois regime, helping to arm it against the Chinese Revolution and against the Indian masses. In the given context, it is hard to conceive a more ooun= terrevolutionary measure than the one taken by Khrushchev,
It is true that ill«timed and ill-explained military opera~ tions of tne Chinese leaders in the past helped to prepare the ground psycnologically for this latest betrayal by the Kremlin; but revolutionists must not permit this to be used as an apology for ganging up with world capitalism and Indian reaction against the Chinese workers state,
JOHNSON SAYS A KIND WORD FOR PEACE
Johnson has been cautiously picking up the peace theme in his campaign for the White House. At Manchester, New Hampshire, on September 28 he said that he didn't want to extend the war in South Vietnam to the north, "Before I start dropping bombs around the country, I would want to think about the consequences of getting American boys into a war with 700,000,000 Chinese,"
However, Johnson virtually cancelled this out by stating in the same breath his intention to continue the war in South Vietnam, Let no one charge him with being "soft on Communism!
Aotually Johnson's demagogy on peace is about the palest ever uttered by a presidential candidate, Woodrow Wilson promised flatly to keep America out of World War I, Roosevelt promised the mothers of America “again and again and again't that he would keep
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America out of World War II. Eisenhower enjoys the unigue distincetion of being the only presidential candidate to have carried out a peace promise. He took the United States out of the Korean conflict.
Just how much value can be placed on Johnson's campaign propaganda can be judged by remarks made the very next day in Tokyo -by William P, Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Af fairs, This top official in Johnson's administration in a prepared address before the Research Institute of Japan made the followin: belligerent declaration:
"Expansion of war outside South Vietnam, while not a course we wont or seek, could be forced upon us by the. increased external pressures of the Communists, including a rising seale of infiltra~ tion,"
Bundy developed the State Department's well-known "domino" theory, Acoording to this, if South Vietnam "goes Communist” then. the rest of Southeast Asia will go next. This will be followed by India, and eventually Australia, Africa and Latin America,
The Soviet Union also came under attack from Bundy. "But we doubt that the Ue S.S,R. has yet abandoned her Communist expansionist aims," he said, "and certainly to the point where in the foresecable future she coulda be relied upon to play a constructive role in assist~ ing other nations to defend themselves against Communist China.'
While the