India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Almost from the time of Independence the United Kingdom had seen Pakistan as a potential ally in the Cold War; as, in fact, a ‘strong bastion against Communism’. By contrast, India was seen as being soft on the Soviets. Winston Churchill himself was much impressed by the argument that Pakistan could be made to stand firm on Russia’s eastern flank, much as that reliable Western client, Turkey, stood firm on the west. The brilliant young Harvard professor Henry Kissinger endorsed this idea – in his view, the ‘defense of Afghanistan [from the Soviets] depends on the strength of Pakistan’.29

  For Republicans like Dulles, the fight against communism was paramount. Hence the tilt towards Pakistan, which he saw as a key member of a defensive ring around the Soviet Union. From bases in Pakistan American planes could strike deep into Soviet central Asia. Dulles’s view was seconded by Vice-President Richard Nixon and their combined efforts ultimately prevailed over President Eisenhower, who was worried about the fall-out in India following any formal alliance with Pakistan.30

  American military aid to Pakistan ran to about $80 million a year. The US also encouraged the Pakistanis to join the anti-Soviet military alliances in central and Southeast Asia known as CENTO and SEATO. Two months before Dulles signed his pact with the Pakistan is an American missionary who had worked for years in the subcontinent warned that ‘to weigh Pakistan militarily over and against India would alienate India’31 That it certainly did, although there were others trains on Indo-American relations as well. In the ongoing conflicts of the Cold War – as in Korea and Indo-China – India was seen as being too neutral by far. Nehru’s vigorous canvassing of the recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and his insistence that it be given the permanent seat in the UN Security Council then occupied by Taiwan, was also not taken to kindly by Washington. There were an increasing number of Americans who felt that Nehru had ‘entered the arena of world politics as a champion challenging American wisdom’.32

  As perhaps he had. For, as Nehru wrote to the industrialist G. D. Birla in May 1954, ‘I do not think that there are many examples in history of a succession of wrong policies being followed by a country as by the United States in the Far East during the past five or six years. They have taken one wrong step after another . . . They think that they can solve any problem withmoney and arms. They forget the human element. They forget the nationalistic urges of people. They forget the strong resentment of people in Asia against impositions.’33

  The industrialist himself was rather keen that the two countries forge better relations. In October 1954 Birla visited the UnitedStates and spoke to across-section of influential people. He even had half an hour withJohnFosterDulles, who complained about how India ‘misrepresented them as war-mongers and so on andso forth’.34 In February 1956 Birla visited the United States again on a bridge-building mission. He asked Nehru for advice, and got asermon. ‘Dulles’s statement about Goa has angered everybody here’, said the prime minister. ‘Indo-American relations are much more affected by this kind of thing than by the aid they may give. Then there is the American military aid to Pakistan, which is a constant and growing threat to us and, in effect, adds to our burdens much more than the actual aid they give to us.35

  The next month John Foster Dulles made so bold as to visit New Delhi. The record of his talks with the Indian government is still classified, but we do have the proceedings of a press conference he addressed. Here, the secretary of state was subject to a series of hostile questions. He was asked why he had said that Goa was an integral part of Portugal. Dulles did not deny this, but clarified that he was for a ‘peaceful solution’ of the controversy. Then the talk turned to military aid to Pakistan, and the possibility that it might lead to an escalation of the conflict in Kashmir. Dulles defensively answered that ‘the arms supply to Pakistanis not designed in anyway to be a threat to India’. When the questioner persisted, Dulles angrily remarked that ‘we do not feel that because there is a dispute over Kashmir . . . Pakistan should be unarmed so that it could not resist Soviet Communist aggression’. The secretary of state thenthreatened to walk out if any more questions were asked on Goa or Kashmir.36

  India and the United States did seem to have much in common -the democratic way of life, a commitment to cultural pluralism, and (not least) a nationalist origin myth that stressed struggle against the British oppressor. But on questions of international politics they resolutely differed. America thought India soft on communism; India thought America soft on colonialism. In the end, that which divided seemed to overwhelm that which united; in part because of the personal chemistry – or rather, lack thereof – between the key players on either side.37

  III

  Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Soviet Union two decades before he toured North America. Arriving by train from Berlin, he reached the Russian frontier on 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. ‘Lenin worship’ was abundantly on display. There were red flags and busts of the Bolshevik hero everywhere. Nehru went on to Moscow, a city which impressed him both with its physical grandeur and its apparent social levelling. ‘The contrasts between extreme luxury and poverty are not visible, nor does one notice the hierarchy of class or caste.

  Nehru wrote a travelogue on his trip; its tone is unfailingly gushing, whether speaking of peasant collectives, the constitution of the USSR, the presumed tolerance of minorities, or economic progress. A visit to Lenin’s tomb prompted a reverie on the man and his mission, ending with a ringing endorsement of Romain Rolland’s claim that the Bolshevik leader was ‘the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless’. He was taken to a model prison, which he thought illustrative of the ‘better social order and humane criminal law’ of the socialist system.

  As compared to bourgeois countries, concluded Nehru, the Soviet Union treated its workers and peasants better, its women and children better,even its prisoners better. The credulousness of the narrative is made complete by the epigraph to the book of his travels – Wordsworth on the French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven.’38

  Nehru’s biographer points out that he visited ‘the Soviet Union in the last days of its first, halcyon period. If his reaction was idealistic, it was partly because there was still some idealism in the air. 39 This is true, after a fashion; for there was still aglow about Lenin (whose own intolerance was not yet widely known outside Russia); while the extermination of kulaks and the Siberian death camps lay in the future. And of course there were other such endorsements provided by Western fellow-travellers of the 1920s. Like them, Nehru had come intending to be impressed; and he was.40

  It was, above all, the Soviet economic system which most appealed to Nehru. As a progressive intellectual of his time, he thought state ownership more just than private property, state planning more efficient than the market. His Glimpses of World History contains an admiring account of the Sovietfive-year plans. Yet at no time was he attracted by the Bolshevik model of armed revolution or by the one-party state. His training under Gandhi predisposed him towards non-violence, and his exposure to Western liberalism made him an enthusiast for electoral democracy and a free press.

  After Independence, relations with the Soviet Union were at first frosty. This was because the Communist Party of India, with Moscow’s blessing, had attempted to overthrow the state. But the insurrection failed, and the Soviets also thawed. Now they sought to woo India away from the Western camp. In 1951, while the American Congress debated are quest for food aid from India, the Soviets – unencumbered by democratic procedure – offered to send 50,000 tons of wheat at once. Indian efforts in mediating in the Korean conflict were also appreciated by Moscow. Previously, Asian states had been judged by their suitability for communism; but(as with Dulles’s America) the Cold War made ideology more flexible. It no longer mattered if acountry was socialist; what was crucial was whether it was on one’s side.41

  The consummation of this change was th
e reception given to Jawaharlal Nehru when he visited the Soviet Union in 1955. ‘Wherever Nehru went in the Soviet Union’, wrote one observer, ‘there were large crowds to greet him. In all the factories workmen gathered in thousands to have a glimpse of him.’ At Moscow University ‘the students left their classes and gave him a great ovation’. (One of the students was Mikhail Gorbachev; years later, he was to recall in his memoirs the impact made on him by Nehru and his idea of amoral politics.42)On the last day of his stay the Indian prime minister was due to speak at a public meeting in Gorky Park. But the crowd turned out to be far larger than anticipated, so the venue was shifted to the stadium of the Dynamo Moscow football team.43

  Six months later the Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev came for a return visit. The Indians in turn pulled out all the stops. Before the visitors arrived in Delhi, loudspeakers exhorted the people to turn out in numbers, in grateful response to the reception the Russians had given Nehru. In the event there were spectacular turnouts in all the cities the duo visited. There were several reasons for this enthusiasm: the curiosity for the exotic and foreign, the Indian love of a good show and, not least, the deep vein of anti-Western feeling which took vicarious pride in Russia’s challenge to the USA. The crowds were biggest in radical, anti-imperialist Calcutta, where students and factory workers made up a good proportion of the half a million who came out to cheer the Soviet leaders. But even New Delhi was ablaze with illumination. ‘The brightly lit Delhi Stock Exchange vied with the Communist Party office in a challenge of festive lights.’44

  In their three weeks in India Bulganin and Khrushchev visited steel mills and hydroelectric plants, and spoke at public meetings in no fewer than seven state capitals. The most significant of these, without question, was Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir state. Here they made clear that they accepted the Valley as being part of the Indian Union, and the Kashmir is as being one of the ‘talented and industrious peoples of India’.45 Nothing could have sounded sweeter to Indian ears.

  IV

  On the eve of Nehru’s departure for Moscow in 1955 an Indian critic had worried that he would be taken in by his hosts. For ‘like many another sensitive nature, accustomed in its late twenties and early thirties to regard the Soviet Union as truly Progressive, the Prime Minister seems never to have quite got over the vision of those days. Despite all that has happened since then, the Soviet [Union] still retains for him some of that enchantment. To its virtues he continues to be very kind, to its vices and cruelties, he is almost blind.’46

  The writer was A. D.Gorwala, a Western-oriented liberal. There were others like him, Indians who believed that India should ally more strongly with the democracies in the Cold War.47 But these were most likely outnumbered, and certainly outshouted, by those Indians who suspected the United States and favoured the Soviet Union. One reason for this was that while the Americans were loath to ask their European allies to disband their empires in Asia and Africa, the Russians spoke frequently about the evils of racialism and colonialism.48

  Nehru at first tried hard to avoid taking sides in the Cold War. But, as he often said, this non-alignment was not mere evasion; it had a positive charge to it. Athird bloc might come to act as a salutary moderating effect on the hubris of the superpowers. We have spoken already of the Asian Relations Conference in 1947. Another such effort, in which Nehru played an important part, was the Afro-Asian conference, held in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955.

  Only countries that had independent governments were invited to Bandung. Twenty-nine sent delegations, including India and China. Four African nations were represented (the others still lay under the colonial yoke); but delegates from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria all came. The meeting discussed methods of cultural and economic co-operation, and committed itself firmly to the end of colonial rule. For, as President Sukarno of Indonesia observed, ‘how can we say that colonialism is dead so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree?’49

  Nehru considered the Bandung Conference ‘a great achievement’; it ‘proclaimed the political emergence in world affairs of over half the world’s population. [But] it presented no unfriendly challenge or hostility to anyone . . .’ Ashe told the Indian Parliament on his return, the historic links between Asian and African countries had been sundered by colonialism; now, as freedom dawned, they could be revived and reaffirmed.50

  This last protestation was in answer to the charge that Bandung and the like were, in essence, anti-Western. How ‘non-aligned’, in fact, was non-alignment? In India, its ideals were put sternly to the test in the second half of 1956. In July of that year Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the company that managed the Suez Canal. Britain (whose strategic interests were most threatened by the action) reacted by asking for international control over the Canal. Nehru, who knew both parties well, tried hard to mediate. But he failed, and ultimately, in late October, the British, in collusion with the French and the Israelis, undertook a military invasion of Egypt. This act of neocolonial aggression drew worldwide condemnation. Finally, under American pressure, the Anglo-French alliance was forced to withdraw.51

  Close on the heels of the invasion of Egypt, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. This followed a popular revolt which had overthrown the Soviet client regime in favour of a more representative government. Moscow reacted in brutal fashion to restore the status quo ante. Their action, like that of the British and the French in the Middle East, was viewed as an unacceptable infringement of national sovereignty.

  Indian commentators saw the invasions of Egypt and Hungary as wholly comparable. Both were ‘acts of international brigandage by powers that commanded permanent seats in the UN Security Council – both had ‘spread a wave of cynicism throughout the world’. As a Madras journal pointed out, while the independence of Egypt threatened the oil resources of Britain and France, ‘the independence of Hungary would not only threaten the supply of uranium so essential for the maintenance of the Red Army in top form, but would cause a dangerous rift in the Soviet empire. London could not countenance the first and Moscow could not tolerate the second. Hence their acts of naked aggression which amount to a savage exhibition of the predatory animal instinct.’52

  Nehru had criticized the Anglo-French intervention as soon as it happened.53 But now, when the United Nations met to discuss a resolution calling upon the Soviet Union ‘to withdraw all of its forces without delay from Hungarian territory’, India, represented by V. K. Krishna Menon, abstained. This caused great resentment in the Western world, and exposed the Indian government to the charge of keeping double standards.54

  There was also much domestic criticism of India’s stand. There was an angry debate in Parliament, and sections of the press deplored ‘our shameful sycophancy to the Soviet rulers . . .’ ‘By kowtowing to Russia we have abdicated our moral pretensions’, wrote one journalist. It was speculated that the government may have been influenced by its uncertain hold over Kashmir, since one of the UN resolutions it had abstained from asked for an internationally supervised plebiscite in Hungary.55

  Later research has revealed that Nehru was actually deeply unhappy about the Soviet invasion. He had sent several private messages to Moscow urging it to withdraw its troops. Afterwards, India spoke out in public too, but the damage had been done. It was compounded when Nehru stood by Krishna Menon’s original abstention, on the grounds that insufficient information was available at the time.56

  The fiasco over Hungary undermined Nehru’s international credibility. Non-alignment was seen by some as meaning ‘fierce condemnation of the Western bloc when its actions are wrong’, but ‘equivocal language when the Soviet bloc goes off the rails’.57 The episode also exposed the prime minister to the charge of putting personal loyalty above national purpose. For while he privately deplored what Krishna Menon had done, he stood by him in public.

  Krishna Menon was an oldfriend of Nehru, and in his own way a remarkable man. Educated at the London School of Economics, he was also the
first editor of Penguin’s prestigious non-fiction imprint, Pelican Books. In the 1930s he had worked tirelessly in canvassing British support for Indian independence. But he also found time to act as an unofficial spokesman and literary agent for Nehru. He was rewarded with the High Commissioner’s job in London after Independence. Here he worked very hard, but also made enemies, through his arrogance and by frequently advertising his friendship with the prime minister.58

  After returning from London, Krishna Menon was made a Cabinet minister without portfolio. He became a sort of roving ambassador, representing India at the UN and at disarmament meetings in Geneva. A man of forceful opinions, he was controversial both in his homeland and out of it. The ‘lucidity of his intellect’, wrote one journalist who knew him well, ‘is sometimes clouded by passions and resentments’. Since his ‘likes and dislikes are stronger than would seem quite safe for a man in his position’, it did seem ‘strange that a man who carries such a storm around with him should have been used for delicate diplomatic missions’.59

  Even before Hungary there had been adverse comment about the prime minister’s reliance on Krishna Menon. Within the Congress, there were many who were uncomfortable with his pro-communist leanings.60 And the Western press cordially hated him, a New York paper speaking of the ‘lack of loveableness’ in this ‘least tactful of diplomats’.61

  But Nehru would stand by Menon. As early as 1953 it was being noticed in Delhi that the prime minister ‘turns blue when anyone criticises his diplomatic pet, Mr Krishna Menon’. This blindness was to cost Nehru dearly over Hungary in 1956. But he still would not discard him. Why? A helpful answer is provided by Alva Myrdal, who was Sweden’s ambassador in India at the time, and knew Nehru well. The prime minister, concluded Myrdal, ‘knew Menon’s shortcomings but kept listening to him because of his brilliance. Menon was the only genuine intellectual foil Nehru had in the government’, the only man with whom he could discuss Marx and Mill, Dickens and Dostoevsky.62