India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  Through his long tenure as prime minister, Nehru served simultaneously as foreign minister of the government of India. This was natural, for among the Congress leadership he alone had a genuinely internationalist perspective. Gandhi had been universal is tin outlook but had hardly travelled abroad. The other Congress leaders, such as Vallabhbhai Patel, were determinedly inward-looking. Nehru, on the other hand, ‘had always been fascinated by world trends and movements’.2

  Through the inter-war period Nehru remained a close observer of and occasional participant in European debates. In 1927 he visited Soviet Russia, and in the next decade travelled widely over the Continent. In the 1930s he played an active part in mobilizing support for the Republican cause in Spain. He became a pillar of the progressive left, speaking often on public platforms in England and France. His name and fame in this regard were aided by the publication and commercial success of his autobiography, which appeared in London in 1936.3

  Representative of Nehru’s ideas is a speech he delivered on ‘Peace and Empire’ at Friends House, Euston, in July 1938. This began by speaking of ‘fascist aggression but went on to see fascism as merely another variant of imperialism. In Britain the tendency was to distinguish between the two. But in Nehru’s mind there was little doubt that those who ‘sought complete freedom for all the subject peoples of the world’ had to oppose both fascism and imperialism.

  The crisis of the times, said Nehru, had promoted a ‘growing solidarity of the various peoples’ and a ‘feeling of international fellowship and comradeship’. His own talk ranged widely around the hot spots of the world. He spoke of Spain, of Abyssinia, of China, of Palestine, and most sensitively, of Africa. The ‘people of Africa deserve our special consideration’, he pointed out, for ‘probably no other people in the world have suffered so much, and have been exploited so much’.4

  In the late summer of 1939 Nehru planned a trip to India’s great Asian neighbour, China. He had been in friendly correspondence with Chiang Kai-shek, for, as he told a colleague, ‘more and more I think of India and China pulling together in the future’. He hoped to go by air to Chungking, spend three weeks travelling in the hinterland and to return home via the Burma Road. Sadly, the war in Europe put paid to the tour.5

  Nehru was jailed for his part in the Quit India movement of 1942. When he was released in July 1945 his energies were devoted to the endgames of empire. But after it became clear that India would soon be free, his thoughts turned once more to foreign affairs. In a radio broadcast of September 1946 he singled out the United States, the Soviet Union and China as the three countries most relevant to India’s future. The next year he spoke in the Constituent Assembly on how India would be friends with both the US and the USSR, rather than become camp followers of one power ‘in the hope that some crumbs might fall from their table’. As he put it, ‘we lead ourself’.6

  An early articulation of what came to be known as ‘non-alignment’ is contained in a letter written by Nehru to K. P. S. Menon in January 1947, as the latter prepared to take up his assignment as India’s first ambassador to China:

  Our general policy is to avoid entanglement in power politics and not to join any group of powers as against any other group. The two leading groups today are the Russian bloc and the Anglo-American bloc. We must be friendly to both and yet not join either. Both America and Russia areextraordinarily suspicious of each other as well as of other countries. This makes our path difficult and we may well be suspected by each of leaning towards the other. This cannot be helped.7

  Nehru saw Indian independence as part of a wider Asian resurgence. Past centuries might have belonged to Europe, or to the white racesin general, but it was now time for non-white and previously subordinated peoples to come into their own.

  A remarkable initiative in this regard was the Asian Relations Conference, held in New Delhi in the last week of March 1947. Twenty-eight countries sent representatives – these included India’s close neighbours (Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon and Nepal), the still colonized nations of Southeast Asia (such as Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam), China and Tibet (the two sent separate delegations), seven Asian ‘republics’ of the Soviet Union and Korea. The Arab League was also represented and there was a Jewish delegation from Palestine. As a Western journalist covering the event recalled, for a week the city of Delhi ‘was filled with the most intricate variety of people, strange in costume and countenance – brocades from South-East Asia, bell-bottoms from the Eastern Soviet Republics, braided hair and quilted robes from Tibet . . . dozens of curious languages and poly-syllabic titles. One way and another, as we kept reminding one another, this multitude represented nearly half the population of the world.’8

  The conference was held in the Purana Qila, a large, somewhat rundown yet still majestic stone structure built by Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century. The opening and concluding sessions were open to the public, and attracted large crowds – 20,000, by one estimate. The official language was English but interpreters were provided for the delegates. Speakers spoke on a podium; behind them was mounted a huge map of the continent, with ASIA written atop it in neon lights. The inaugural address was by Nehru. ‘Rising to a great ovation, he talked of how, ‘after along period of quiescence’, Asia had ‘suddenly become important in world affairs . Its countries could ‘no longer be used as pawns by others’.9 However, as the journalist G. H. Jansen recalled, Nehru’s speech ‘was not directly or strongly anti-colonial. “The old imperialisms are fading away”, he said. With an almost contemptuous wave of the hand he did something worse than attack them; he pronounced a valediction.’10

  After Nehru had his say, each participating country, in alphabetical order, sent a speaker to the podium. This took two whole days, after which the meeting broke up into thematic round-tables. There were separate sections on ‘national movements for freedom’; ‘racial problems and inter-Asian migration’; ‘economic development and social services’; ‘cultural problems’; and ‘status of women and women’s movements’.

  The conference concluded with a talk by Mahatma Gandhi. He regretted that the conference had not met in the ‘real India of the villages but in the cities that were ‘influenced by the West’. The ‘message of Asia’, insisted Gandhi, was ‘not to be learnt through the Western spectacles or by imitating the atom bomb . . . I want you to go away with the thought that Asia has to conquer the West through love and truth.’ 11

  Gandhi made his appearance, but this was really Nehru’s show. His admirers saw it as confirmation of his status as the authentic voice of resurgent Asia. His critics were less generous. In its account of the conference, the Muslim League newspaper, Dawn, complained of how ‘skilfully he [Nehru] has worked himself into some sort of all-Asian leadership. That is just what this ambitious Hindu leader had intended – to thrust himself upon the Asian nations as their leader and through his attainment of that prestige and eminence to further the expansionist designs of Indian Hinduism.’12

  II

  Nehru had often been to Europe before Independence. His first trip to the United States, however, took place two years after he had assumed office as prime minister. The US had not loomed large in Nehru’s political imagination. His Glimpses of World History, for example, devotes far less space to it than to China or Russia. And what he says is not always complimentary. The capitalism of the American kind had led to slavery, gangsterism, and massive extremes of wealth and poverty. The American financier J. Pierpont Morgan owned a yacht worth£6 million, yet New York was known as ‘Hunger Town’. Nehru admired Roosevelt’s attempts at regulating the economy, but he was not hopeful that FDR would succeed. For ‘American Big Business is held to be the most powerful vested interest in the modern world, and it is not going to give up its power and privileges merely at the bidding of President Roosevelt’.13

  Before Nehru’s trip to America in late 1949, an enterprising reporter at Time magazine went through his writings.The exercise revealed that he had ‘simply never given the subje
ct [of America] much thought. As a British university man, he has perhaps looked down snobbishly at American deficiency in culture. As a sentimental socialist, he has ticked off the U.S. as unrivalled in technology but predatory in its capitalism.’14

  Nehru’s feelings were widely shared. Like British aristocrats, the Indian elite tended to think of America and Americans as uncouth and uncultured. Representative are the views of P. P. Kumaramangalam, scion of an illustrious south Indian family. His father, Dr P. Subbaroyan, was a rich landlord and an influential politician – he later served in Nehru’s Cabinet. The son studied at Sandhurst — his siblings in Oxford and Cambridge. These, a brother named Mohan and a sister named Parvathi, went on to become leading lights of the Communist Party of India. This predisposed them to a dislike of America. But in this respect the brother who was an army officer outdid them. After Indian independence he was sent for training to the artillery school at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. From here he wrote to a Madras mentor of how

  This country is not one that Iwill ever get fond of. I have not got a very high opinion of them. The people that I have to deal with are very kind, hospitable and have been very good to the two of us. But somehow I feel there is a trace of artificiality in that and also it is the result of trying to impress one. They I think are very jealous of the old world and its background and culture and this results in an aggressive inferiority complex. As for their state of morality, there is none. People seem to delight in trying to outwit each other by any means, mainly crooked. The politicians are racketeers and big business has a tight grip on everything in the country. The small country tradesman and the farmer I think have their hands pretty securely tied by the big men. I do hope our country proceeds with caution and doesn’t get entirely under the influence of the [United] States.15

  Americans, for their part, had their own prejudices about India. They admired Gandhi and his struggle for national independence, but their knowledge of the country itself was scant. As Harold Isaac once pointed out, for the postwar American there were really only four kinds of Indians. These were: (1) the fabulous Indians, the maharajas and magicians coupled with equally exotic animals such as tigers and elephants; (2) the mystical Indians, a people who were ‘deep, contemplative, tranquil, profound . . .’; (3) the benighted Indians, who worshipped animals and many-headed gods, living in a country that was even more heathen than China; and (4) the pathetic Indians, plagued by poverty and crippled by disease – ‘children with fly-encircled eyes, with swollen stomachs, children dying in the streets, rivers choked with bodies . . . Of these images perhaps the last two predominated. It was no accident that the book on the subcontinent best known in America was Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, a book that Gandhi had described as a ‘drain inspector’s report’.16

  Nehru in part shared the prejudices of Indians, and he was sensible of the American ones. But for this first high-level encounter between the youngest and richest to put them on hold. In August 1949, as he prepared for his trip, Nehru was uncharacteristically nervous. ‘In what mood shall I address America?’ he asked his sister Vijayalakshmi. ‘How shall I address people etc.? How shall Ideal with the Government there and businessmen and others? Which facet of myself should I put before the American public – the Indian or the European’ . . . I want to be friendly with the Americans but always making it clear what we stand for.17

  Nehru spent three weeks in America, delivering a speech a day to audiences as diverseas the UnitedStates Congress and a congregation in a Chicago chapel. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Columbia University and listened to by a crowd of 10,000 at the University of California at Berkeley. He displayed the common touch, being photographed with a taxi driver in Boston, but also made clear his membership of the aristocracy of the intellect, as in a much-publicized visit to Albert Einstein in Princeton.

  Addressing Congress, Nehru spoke respectfully of the founders of America, but then counterposed to them a great man from his own country. This was Gandhi, whose message of peace and truth had inspired independent India’s foreign policy. The Mahatma, however, ‘was too great for the circumscribed borders of any one country, and the message he gave may help us in considering the wider problems of the world’. For what the world most lacked, said Nehru, was ‘under-standing and appreciation of each other among nations and peoples’.

  This was diplomatically put, but elsewhere Nehru spoke more directly. At Columbia University Nehru deplored the desire to ‘marshal the world into two hostile camps’. India, he said, would align with neither, but pursue ‘an independent approach to each controversial or disputed issue’. In his view, the main cause of war was the persistence of racialism and colonialism. Peace and freedom could be secured only if the domination of one country or one race over another was finally brought toan end.18

  The American press was impressed with the Indian prime minister. The Chicago Sun Times went so far as to say that ‘in many ways Nehru is the nearest thing this generation has to a Thomas Jefferson in his way of giving voice to the universal aspirations for freedom of people everywhere’.19 The Christian Science Monitor described himas a ‘World Titan’ . When he left, a columnist in the St. Louis Post Dispatch observed that ‘Nehru has departed from us, leaving behind clouds of misty-eyed women’.20 Even Time magazine admitted that, while Americans were still not sure what Nehru stood for, ‘they sensed in him, if not rare truth, a rare heart’.21

  There was, however, one set of people who did not warm to the visitor from India – the mandarins of the State Department. Nehru had several long discussions with the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, but these went nowhere. In his memoirs Acheson wrote dismissively and with some despair about Nehru’s visit. In their talks he found him ‘prickly’, arrogant ‘he talked to me . . . as though I was a public meeting ),and too ready to pick on the faults of others (notably the French and Dutch colonialists) without recognizing any of his own. When Acheson broached the subject of Kashmir, he got ‘a curious combination of a public speech and flashes of anger and deep dislike of his opponents’. Altogether, he found Nehru ‘one of the most difficult men with whom I have ever had to deal’.22

  Other American officials were more sympathetic to Nehru. One such was Chester Bowles, who was ambassador in New Delhi from 1951-3. Witnessing Nehru at work in his own environment, Bowles was visibly impressed by his commitment to democracy and democratic procedure, and to the rights of minorities. Dean Acheson, and many other Americans, divided the world into two categories: friends and foes.23 That was not a reading that Bowles endorsed. He insisted that ‘it is immature and ridiculous for us [Americans] to jump to the conclusion that because he [Nehru] is not 100 per cent for us, he must be against us’.24

  During Bowles’s tenure India and the United States drew closer. The US sent experts and equipment to help with Indian programmes of agricultural development. But the popular mistrust persisted. A writer from Delaware, touring the subcontinent in the early fifties, came across many educated Indians for whom the United States was a country ‘isolated by gross faults, stewing alone in the unthinkable sins of materialism, imperialist ambitions, war mongering, political corruption, spiritual and cultural poverty, racial discrimination and injustice’.25

  The mutual distrust deepened after 1953, when the Republicans found themselves back in power after twenty years out of it. Towards the end of that year William F. Knowland, the Republican leader in the Senate, undertook a six-week world tour. After he returned home he told the US News and World Report that Jawaharlal Nehru did not represent all the nations or peoples of Asia. Said Senator Knowland emphatically: ‘Certainly Nehru does not speak for the Republic of Korea, for Japan, for Free China or Formosa, for Thailand, Viet Nam, Laos or Cambodia. He certainly does not speak for Pakistan. The only countries he might be able to speak for with some authority, or at least represent their views, would be India itself, Indonesia which is also neutralist in outlook, and perhaps Burma . . .’.26

  These views were shared by the new
secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Dulles was the coldest of cold warriors, whose foreign policy was dominated by his obsession with communism. In the battle against the Soviet Union, Dulles was prepared to disregard the internal political systems of other nations. Generally speaking, dictators who toed the American linewere to be preferred to democrats who didn’t: ‘If he is a bastard, at least he is our bastard, as he is famously supposed to have said.

  Dulles and Nehru disliked each other from the start. The American claimed that ‘the concept of neutrality is obsolete, immoral, and short sighted’. Those who professed it were, in effect, crypto-communists. Nehru, naturally, did not take kindly to this interpretation. As the Australian diplomat Walter Crocker wrote, the Indian prime minister did not miss the irony that,

  as regards the sanctity of the Free World and the Free Life proclaimed by Dulles, he, damned by Dulles, was carrying India through a argantuan effort towards Parliamentary Democracy, the rule of law, freedom and equality for all religions, and social and economic reforms, while among the countries which Dulles praised and subsidized because they were ‘willing to stand up and be counted’ as anti-Communist were effete or persecuting tyrannies, oligarchies and theocracies, sometimes corrupt as well as retrograde.27

  Dulles further offended Indian sensibilities when he suggested that Portugal – a trusted US ally – could keep its colony of Goa as long as it chose to. However, the secretary’s decisive contribution to wrecking Indo-US relations was the military pact he signed with Pakistan in February 1954. As one historian drily remarked, ‘Mr Dulles wanted pacts . . . Pakistan wanted money and arms.’28