Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  A glance at a map showed the fundamental problem of a state with 1,100 miles of India bulging between West and East Pakistan. It was as if Massachusetts and Texas formed a single state, with all the intervening states being hostile. The Pakistani capital was situated in Karachi because Lahore was too close to the giant neighbour. In the 1960s it would be relocated to Islamabad, cooler than Karachi but regrettably more susceptible to military coups organized from the army HQ at nearby Rawalpindi, a chronic problem India’s politicians were spared. However, the same glance at the map revealed the geopolitical importance of the new state, for as early as 1948–9 both the CIA and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff highlighted Pakistan’s proximity to the Soviet Union and China.6

  India had little resonance in the American imagination, whatever fitful curiosity there was about Gandhi in illustrated magazines. Although 350,000 US engineering and logistics troops had been stationed in wartime India, including Kennedy’s future Secretary of State Dean Rusk, many more GIs had fought and died in Europe and on the islands of the Pacific. In so far as Americans had a view of India, beyond a handful tantalized by its ‘spirituality’, this derived from Rudyard Kipling or Katherine Mayo’s 1927 bestseller Mother India, which popularized British views of the sub-continent for a US audience. While pushing for the early independence of the sub-continent, US policy-makers overlooked the likelihood of partition. They hoped the Muslim League would stop short of an independent Pakistan, but did nothing significant to discourage it.

  The Americans underestimated the physical and cultural shock they would encounter in the sub-continent. During the Raj, the long sea voyage had given the British a gradual induction into the heat and the pervasive smell, with the shift to the exotic starting at Suez. Air travel meant travellers were hit in the face as they disembarked. Visiting US dignitaries blanched as they progressed through fetid slums from the airport to their sweltering quarters. The crush of people overwhelmed them, as did the ordure in the streets and the stray cows. Everywhere dusty heaps of rags stretched out begging bowls. Naked, wild-looking holy men went about with painted faces, and sepulchral Hindu temples, teeming with lascivious sculpted idols, were another shock to anyone disposed to moral outrage. The New York Times correspondent Cyrus Sulzberger wrote of a major place of worship in Old Delhi as being ‘hideously ugly’.7 Visiting academics spoke of ‘the dysentery circuit’. When John and Robert Kennedy visited in 1951 they both succumbed to ‘Delhi belly’, hiding curried chicken under lettuce leaves to avoid the perils of eating it.

  The cultural gulf yawned even wider for the few Indians who visited the US, with the requirement of demonstrating an income of $12 per diem in order to obtain a visa proving a challenge even for junior diplomats. Although the Indian caste system, with light-skinned Brahmins and dark-skinned Untouchables, was self-evidently racist, Indian visitors purported to be outraged by white American attitudes to African-Americans. Meat-eaters also smelled bad to vegetarian Hindu visitors, despite the obsessive American concern with hygiene, while they loftily judged that cities filled with cars betokened an anomic absence of human solidarity that was no more evident in Brahmins outraged whenever an Untouchable Dalit crossed their cast shadow.8

  At least at elite levels, Indians and Americans shared a common language, and words like ‘goons’, ‘thugs’, ‘Boston Brahmins’ and ‘Hollywood moguls’ reflected some cultural cross-fertilization. Yet there was little mutual interest. There was no oil at stake and the US did not have domestic Hindu or Muslim lobbies. The deep emotional bonds that existed with Chiang Kai-shek’s China were entirely lacking, even though India had also attracted large numbers of American missionaries, including John Welsh Dulles, author of Life in India and the Presbyterian missionary grandfather of Foster Dulles. There was a feeling that despite Mountbatten’s culpable mismanagement of partition and his responsibility for the trouble in Kashmir, the British could be left to take care of Western interests. Under Truman the US adopted a stance of neutrality between India and Pakistan, imposing an arms embargo and – after heavy British lobbying – urging Nehru to submit the Kashmir dispute to international arbitration.9

  Relations with India were personalized to an unfortunate degree, chiefly because Prime Minister Nehru thought that his cosmopolitan background uniquely equipped him to act as minister for external affairs. As such he did not deign to consult the cabinet on foreign policy or world affairs, about which (from memory) he had written a remarkable epistolary history while in British captivity in the early 1930s called Glimpses of World History. Here one might learn that the empire of Genghiz Khan was more significant than that of Julius Caesar. Nehru’s colleagues were content to leave world affairs to him since they were much more interested in domestic portfolios, which brought real powers of patronage and self-enrichment. Snobbish attitudes and poses Nehru had acquired from the British also combined with Gandhian moralism to conceal a conventional ambition for India to be recognized as a great power. Every conversation with him felt like a lecture, in which his Fabian socialist self-righteousness grated on American nerves. He fashioned an ideology of non-alignment, based, he claimed, on recognizing what was worth while in the rival Cold War social systems. It was a poor choice to adopt the standard Western leftist’s pose of moral equivalence between the two systems when, in the absence of any alternative, India would be reliant on US aid to embark on a London School of Economics-inspired bureaucratic socialist economic model that proved no less stultifying in India than in Britain and, indeed, anywhere else it was adopted.

  Nehru’s India would also be in the vanguard of denouncing imperialism and racism, and worked to give Southern Asia a coherent voice in the vacuum left by departing European empires. Still containing more Muslims than lived in Pakistan, India would also seek to dispel any negative impression resulting from its undemocratic land grab in Kashmir by being uncritically supportive of Muslim interests in the Middle East. Yet, during the first interview between Nehru and Ambassador Henderson, when Henderson touched on the need to resolve the conflict in Kashmir if there was to be any prospect of US aid, Nehru rejected American ‘moral dictation’, adding that there could be no compromise between a secular India and an Islamic Pakistani ‘theocracy’ engaged in a ‘crusade’ – an unfortunate but highly revealing choice of word that not only Westerners have used.

  Before Nehru embarked on his first visit to the US in the autumn of 1949, Henderson advised Washington that the Indian leader was a ‘vain, sensitive, emotional and complicated person’. For an agnostic he talked a lot about spirituality. Many of his less attractive characteristics stemmed from an America-hating English nanny and his education at Harrow, where ‘he consorted with and cultivated a group of rather supercilious upper middle class young men who fancied themselves rather precious . . . He acquired some of their manners and ways of thinking.’ Unlike them, being just a drunk or deeply stupid did not mitigate Nehru’s snobbery, for he was neither. Prolonged exposure to the fashionably ‘progressive’ Mountbattens, including an intimate – although perhaps non-sexual – relationship with the promiscuous Edwina, had coloured his view of Americans as ‘a vulgar, pushy, lot, lacking in fine feeling’ with a culture ‘dominated by the dollar’. Although the Americans were anxious to make the visit a success, they contrived to send a plane known as The Sacred Cow to convey Nehru from London to Washington. This did not augur well.

  Every encounter with senior US policy-makers, from Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, left a sour taste in the Indians’ mouths. The CIA reported that the view of Nehru’s inner circle was that Americans were ‘elementary and material’, while from Truman downwards the Indian Prime Minister felt he had encountered only ‘mediocrities’. At a dinner with bankers intent on giving India a loan, the fastidious Nehru was so appalled by the ‘vulgarity’ of being told that ‘twenty billion dollars were around the table’ that he refused to pick it up. Exhausted by the pace of his whirlwind tour, he
failed to press the fact that India urgently needed a million tons of wheat.10

  Enter the Dragon, Again

  More than bad personal chemistry explains why the US would ultimately favour Pakistan. The early Cold War was a time of ‘with us or against us’ on both sides. India’s desire to be master of its own destinies was reflected in its response to the 1949 ascendancy of Mao’s Communists in China. The US withheld recognition of Mao’s regime and sought to generalize this line among all democratic powers. India made it clear that it intended to break ranks, arguing that the nationalistic Chinese Communists would not indefinitely accept Soviet tutelage. Although proved right in the longer term, in the short term Nehru was to be painfully reminded that Chinese nationalism was a greater threat to India than Communism would ever be. But for the moment India needed peace with China so as to build the new nation, while China did not need a problem on its western flank when it had trouble in the east with the Americans over Korea and Taiwan.

  Nehru’s rosy view of Mao’s regime was influenced by his Ambassador to Beijing, a product of Christ Church, Oxford, called Kavalam Panikkar, whose daughter was married to Govindan Nair, the leader of the Communist Party of India, and who totally misrepresented the Red Chinese regime. Consequently Nehru took the amiable and urbane Premier Zhou Enlai to be representative of the rest of the Chinese leadership, which was neither. In fact Zhou’s private response to Nehru, taking him under his wing, was ‘I have never met a more arrogant man than Nehru.’ India was as surprised as anyone by the North Korean invasion of the South, but after voting to condemn North Korean aggression, the Indian UN delegation did not support military action to defeat it and then tried to act, unbidden, as mediator, which succeeded only in annoying the Americans. India further irked the US by voting against UN condemnation of the Chinese intervention, on the grounds that the US had ignored Indian warnings. Nehru’s attempt to deal himself a hand in Korea had consequences. The Truman administration had sent a proposal to Congress requesting $190 million in food aid for India once it was clear it was facing catastrophic famine. But Nehru’s public anti-Americanism caused the proposal to limp through Congress, where it was transformed into a loan.11

  In the 1950s Nehru favoured the slogan ‘Hindee Chinee bhai-bhai’ (India–China brotherhood) to characterize what he hoped would be joint condominium over Asia. This survived China’s sudden occupation of Tibet in 1950, a land that Indians were emotionally and mythically attached to, and which had gained a degree of independence in 1911. The Chinese did not even mind India hosting the exiled Dalai Lama after 1959, but they objected to the welcoming circus of 300 reporters this entailed, for they expected India to curb the Dalai Lama’s political activities. But now Chinese troops were on India’s northern borders, where vast expanses of nothingness on the roof of the world were provisionally mapped with dotted lines drawn by the departed British. While the Chinese surreptitiously built a long road to link Xinjiang with western Tibet, elsewhere Indian troops asserted claims India had inherited from the British. Although the Congress party dominated the Lok Sabha (India’s parliament), sundry defectors and renegades from Congress provided a vociferous opposition, including thirty-one Communists. Many Indians were appalled by harsh Chinese behaviour in Tibet – throwing rotten eggs and tomatoes at posters of Mao – and accused Nehru of appeasement, for this concept really travelled well. Even the Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel castigated Nehru for his naivety towards Mao’s ‘agrarian reformers’, pointing out that Communism merely cloaked a series of historical, national and racial claims that could be fairly described as imperialist. Nehru got a taste of that when he met Mao in 1954 and found himself ‘ushered into a presence, as someone coming from a tributary or vassal state of the Chinese empire’. He tried the empty platitudes of ‘Panch Sheel’ or Peaceful Coexistence based on Respect, and even mysticism, about the ‘striving of the Indian spirit towards these Himalayas’. To this the Chinese drily responded that ‘myths and legends could not be cited as a basis for the [territorial] alignment claimed by India’. They had seized one huge area around Aksai Chin by stealth, and by 1959 they were looking for an even bigger area below the disputed McMahon Line, which from 1914 onwards established the border between Imperial India and Tibet, and duly became the disputed frontier which separated India from China.12 Nehru complacently thought of the Himalayas as a natural Maginot Line, and cut the defence budget accordingly.

  Meanwhile, deepening relations between Washington and Pakistan also infuriated India. Initially, Pakistan did not seem to amount to much, with only 17.5 per cent of the financial assets of the Raj. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs had six officials, three of whom were British hold-overs, none of whom even possessed a typewriter. A month after independence, 40 per cent of Pakistan’s central government staff was stranded in New Delhi because savage communal violence had interrupted rail travel. They had to be flown to the new capital on chartered flights.13

  Americans knew even less about Pakistan than about India. One US millionaire thought that the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister and his entourage were Palestinians. Another, perplexed by the blank space separating West and East Pakistan on his menu card, thought it might be in Africa. In more populous East Pakistan, Bengalis and others resented western Punjabi domination of the new state. Everything about the new nation seemed provisional and not destined to last. Although the Punjab in West Pakistan had once been the granary of the Raj, India’s control of the Indus headwaters meant that it could, and did, divert water away from Pakistan’s irrigation canals, making Pakistan dependent on US food aid.

  Apart from the wound in Kashmir, Pakistan had problems with the hatchet-faced gang who ruled Afghanistan, a people whom non-Pushtun Pakistanis regarded as murdering savages. But India and Russia were covertly encouraging Afghan irredentism through demands for an independent ‘Pushtunistan’ to encompass Pakistan’s North West Frontier, so as to accommodate the wild Pashtun tribesmen (known to the British as Pathans) who straddled that border. That is still the goal of today’s Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, in so far as they will not manage to take over both of these states.

  When the first US Ambassador to Karachi died of cancer within four months of arrival, it took two years to replace him; Pakistan mattered that little. Truman also deflected Pakistani appeals for economic and military aid; when Karachi requested $2 billion, it received $10 million. Although the Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan paid a highly successful visit to the US in 1950, it may or may not have been an accident that nearly 500 tons of weapons and ammunition destined for Pakistan blew up in New Jersey. Liaquat Ali was assassinated soon after arriving home in circumstances that have never been explained, as the assassin was instantly killed.

  Official US attitudes began to change when Pakistan joined Muslim Turkey in wholeheartedly supporting US action in Korea, although Pakistan sent no troops because of anxieties about India and Kashmir. Since Pakistan spent 70 per cent of its government revenue on defence, it was not keen to take on further military commitments. By contrast India seemed flaky, pink and unreliable. The warmth with which US officials and visiting journalists began to report on Pakistan is striking. Starting with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Shia leader of the Muslim League, Pakistani leaders emphasized the radical incompatibility of Communism and Islam. Jinnah’s successors were jolly fellows, not given to the icy moralizing of their southern neighbour. George McGhee’s dealings with Liaquat Ali were ‘like a breath of fresh air’ after the ‘wishy-washy’ Nehru, whose conversation reminded many Americans of a dense fog. The Pakistani army commander General Ayub Khan, the Sandhurst-trained son of a former Indian Army NCO, was a particular favourite. He was a no-nonsense type who liked expensive horses and fine shotguns. The horse Sardar, which he had presented to Jackie Kennedy, would follow the gun carriage carrying her husband’s coffin after his assassination. Unlike Nehru, who would not remain in a room where alcohol was served, the moustachioed Pakistani military crowd were convivial
topers.14

  US enthusiasm for Pakistan owed much to American adoption of the British view of the northern ‘warrior races’. It was no accident that Loy Henderson regarded Nehru as ‘essentially a feminine personality’.15 McGhee’s view was that, unlike the polytheistic Hindus, whose many gods and complex caste system gave them a highly conditional grasp of truth, the Pakistanis were fine fighting men whose Islamic faith impressed on them a keen sense of good and evil.16

  The big tilt towards Pakistan began in the early Eisenhower era. How the two nations had responded to Korea was reflected in how aid was dispensed. Whereas a Republican Congress immediately halved the aid being granted to India, Ike easily persuaded it to give food aid to Pakistan. The former generals Eisenhower and Ayub Khan would also get along famously, not least because Ayub had deep respect for the former Supreme Commander in Europe. Dulles and Nehru also had a history, starting with Nehru’s refusal of Indian endorsement of Dulles’s peace settlement with Japan on the grounds that only fellow Asians should be involved. By contrast, Dulles was mightily impressed by the good show Ayub Khan put on when he visited Karachi after a grim sojourn in New Delhi. Months later Dulles enthused the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with his vivid tales of ‘the lancers . . . fellows that had to be 6 feet 2 inches to be qualified and they sat there on these great big horses’. Such men ‘are going to fight any Communist invasion with their bare fists if they have to’.