PEACEFUL' INVASION , S UPERFICIALLY at any rate Mr. Costello's attitude
towards the violent 'liberators' of the IRA and Mr. Nehru's towards the non-violent satyagrahis who invaded Goa at the weekend are not without their similarities. 'I shall use no force against Goa,' says Mr. Nehru in effect, 'but I shall do nothing to stop a peaceful invasion.' No one should be in any doubt as to Mr. Nehru's difficulties at home where an excitable public can only too readily be inflamed into hysteria, but they do not altogether excuse the mental and verbal shifts by which he dodges the fact that a 'peaceful invasion' is a contradiction in terms. Authority is obliged to protect itself against any sort of invader who challenges it, and we can by no•means be sure that the Portuguese police could in fact have dealt with this last challenge—no less real because the chal- lengers did not carry weapons—without recourse to firearms. In the official Indian attitude there is a strong mixture of what an unsubtle Westerner might justly call hypocrisy. It may well be that Portugal will eventually have to surrender the territory of Goa; but until the Portuguese authorities come to the con- clusion that they will lose in the long run, Mr. Nehru—for whose activities outside India the world has good reason to be grateful—should resist the temptation to invoke the divine right of geography, even if for no higher reasoq. than that it makes those activities look rather less impressive.
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