Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  As for Nehru’s own concern for foreign affairs, for years little of moment happened anywhere without his making a public statement on it, often lecturing some government or other; often, in the first half of his term, a Western if not the British government itself; and often in a lofty way. His speeches and statements on foreign affairs must run into hundreds of thousands of words; perhaps millions.* In the early days of his government, while the speeches were apt to be scolding they consisted at the same time too much of vague generalities. They gave a good deal of offence in Washington, and sometimes in London. On the other hand the Cold War, the armaments race, and the looming menace of a thermo-nuclear holocaust, were of interest to every human being; India had a concern no less than America or Russia; and reasons were certainly not lacking for pointing the finger at the fomenters of the Cold War. When the documents become available they will probably establish that on the whole Nehru was a valuable counterpoise to the brinkmanship of the most dangerous of the Dulles’ years.

  Non-alignment and realpolitik

  The starting point of Nehru’s foreign policy was non-alignment. This had variations in detail from time to time which led to a good deal of confusion about it for some years. It did not mean, for instance, neutrality (e.g. of the Swiss kind). Nor did it mean that either Nehru or India would ordinarily be neutral in a conflict between freedom and the opposite, the 1956 Hungary affair65 notwithstanding. Still less did it mean non-violence, though Nehru himself was not without pacifist inclinations. It was essentially a refusal to align India with either one of the two power blocs around which the world was then polarised; in particular, a refusal to join with the United States or to allow the United States to have bases on Indian soil. Nehru claimed a freedom to judge every issue on its merits.

  After the Chinese invasion of Indian territory in 1962 non-alignment was much criticised in India, partly as an indirect attack on the Communist Party, on socialism, and on Nehru himself, but partly, too, for itself. Yet for the preceding fifteen years there were very few Indians who had questioned it; very few who did not praise it. It responded, in fact, to that non-attachment which is deeply rooted in Hindu psychology, as well as in Nehru’s own predisposition to avoid all emotional involvement with others. Nehru once said that he would rather India be reduced to dust than to give up non-alignment. It responded, too, surely, to the best interests of India; at least up until the Chinese attack in 1962. Whether one of the claims made repeatedly by Nehru, namely, that the extension of armed alliances made the Cold War more likely to become a Hot War, was correct or not, and whether ‘international communism’ from after Stalin’s death was or was not the danger Dulles and his associates said it was, there could be no doubt that an American alliance was not worth the price of Russian enmity to India. Russia is much nearer to India than America; and, further, she, like India, shares a long frontier with China—and the troubles which common frontiers bring. It is true that the policy of non-alignment was sometimes conducted in such a way, or with such hectoring words, as to make India disliked unnecessarily. It is true, too, that Indians were inconsistent in 1962–63, in being shocked that their fellow protagonists of, and former pupils in, the doctrine of non-alignment, such as Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia or Ghana, refused to align themselves with India against China; and that India while moralising against the Cold War was up to the eyes in a cold war of her own with Pakistan. How she was angered by non-alignment in others as regards the Indo-Pakistan cold war was demonstrated again and again. But non-alignment paid India. The figures for the aid she has received from both sides show this. The West has in fact virtually committed itself to India’s defence as well as to its plans; and Russia no less than the West goes on giving both civil and military aid. Non-alignment has been found profitable by other new or undeveloped countries, too. And did it really do harm to the cause of peace or to the true, as distinct from the imaginary, interests of the West?

  India’s attitude to armed alliances was often confused, even by Indians, perhaps at times by Nehru himself, with the policy of non-alignment. Both attitudes were connected with India’s and Nehru’s genuine concern for peace and to stop the spread of the Cold War, especially in Asia. But a good deal of Nehru’s condemnation of armed alliances derived from his objection to the United States giving arms to Pakistan and to Pakistan’s being a member of SEATO and of CENTO (originally known as the Baghdad Pact66). Nehru, like most Indians, feared that Pakistan by virtue of this tie-up would be given a military advantage over India which might be decisive in the event of war breaking out between them. And, of course, it was largely for this reason that Pakistan had, in Dulles’ words, been willing to ‘stand up and be counted’ (against international communism). So many high principles were proclaimed so often on all sides that the basic motivation became lost in the deceiving or rationalising verbiage.

  During Nehru’s long domination of Indian foreign policy there were changes, naturally. For one thing India’s relations with the outside world expanded greatly. In 1950 there were about thirty foreign missions in Delhi; today there are about eighty. In an average year a score or so of international conferences now meet in India. Accompanying this change in the quantity of India’s external relations there has been a change in their quality—a change from a sort of pacifist internationalist idealistic approach to a sort of macht politik. The Gandhian doctrine of Soul Force came to count for little. Krishna Menon, not Gandhi, became the symbol of Indian foreign policy. The Indian armed forces came to take up a sizeable proportion of the Indian budget, even before the Chinese attack in 1962. At the end there were also some second thoughts on the Afro-Asian brotherhood.67 Without tracing steps in the progress from Soul Force to power politics, from Gandhi to Krishna Menon, or without disentangling policies from the three separate levels between which they were apt to oscillate in Nehru’s time, namely, idealist, emotional, and realpolitik, I will now deal with the subjects which were of main concern.

  Relations with Pakistan

  First, relations with Pakistan.

  Two alternative policies had been possible as regards Jinnah’s agitation for Pakistan. First, accept the fact that religion is the great divider; and so, in the interests of that homogeneity without which no state can function, let the Muslims go, let them have Pakistan. Muslims, it can be added, had some reason for distrust about their security in India, at least as far as some Hindus of importance were concerned; and, further, their religion was based on an entirely different, often on an antithetical worldview, as well as on different social customs and different laws, from that of the Hindus. Or, second, refuse to accept that religion need be a divider, at least for long, and accept the fact that all Muslims in India will not or cannot go to Pakistan. The corollary of this policy would be that India should either have fought a civil war, just as the Americans fought their Civil War, in order to prevent the dismemberment of the subcontinent; or, more wisely, that they should have played along with Jinnah and his successors, leaving the door open, at almost any cost, so that the Pakistanis could make their return, or at least that they could be brought into a confederation. Until as late as the 1937 Congress cabinets, perhaps even as late as the war years, the proponents of Pakistan probably did not expect, or even want, Pakistan to be created. Gandhi’s Quit India movement of 1942 had much to do with making Pakistan practical politics for Jinnah, the vain, cold-hearted, clever, impressive demagogue, himself so little Muslim that apparently he had not mastered the prayer ritual. How much Nehru’s famous gaffe at a press conference decided, or enabled, Jinnah to turn the agitation for Pakistan from a bargaining point into a commitment for a separate sovereign Muslim state can be left to the historians. It is enough to say here that after both Congress and the Muslim League, following on the Attlee government’s decision in July or August 1945 to give India independence as soon as possible and to send Cripps and two other ministers out to India to arrange the terms, had accepted the British Cabinet Mission’s plan of a centre with control over def
ence, foreign affairs, and communications, while other matters were to be left to the control of Muslim provinces and non-Muslim provinces, Nehru, following Azad as president of Congress, suddenly announced, without consulting his party, that the plan, a precarious compromise in a very difficult situation, was not binding on Congress. He blurted this out because he was hungering for the strongly centralised state dear to all revolutionaries and socialists and was still refusing to see the reality of Muslim fears and hatred and separatism. Jinnah decided to strike. The Congress–Muslim interim government of 1946 thus never really functioned. When Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in March 1947 he decided that the only way to avoid bloodshed and chaos was to accept partition and for England to quit that summer instead of in June 1948, the date mentioned by Attlee just before Mountbatten had left London.

  From time to time it is said by journalists—who often repeat one another—that the partition of the subcontinent, that is to say, the creation of Pakistan, was ‘the supreme failure of the British’. The truth, on the contrary, is that the British had no blame for it. The blame was religious hatred. Religious hatred was stirred up to the pitch where the two communities lacked the necessary minimum homogeneity for constituting a single state. This is the reason why Ireland is partitioned, and Korea (for ideological hatreds are the same as religious hatreds); just as it is the reason why some Swiss cantons or German principalities were entirely Protestant and others entirely Catholic, on the well-established principle of cuius regio eius religio. Rajagopalachari, with his usual penetration, saw, and was reconciled to, the case for partition years before it came. If Mountbatten can be blamed at all, which is questionable, it would be for hastening with so much speed that the boundaries were not decided upon before Pakistan was created, and that the necessary protective measures against communal disturbances had not been worked out.*

  Partitioning Bengal should have been resisted. At least an attempt should have been made to set it up as a third republic. Here again the blame belongs to the Hindu and Muslim leaders and to religious hatred.

  The creation of Pakistan was a disappointment to Nehru; probably a mortifying disappointment as it cut against his conviction that the state must always be secular, and therefore against his sense of the rational. But his own record in the affair was one of exasperation rather than cold statesmanship, and of a hurry to get independence. He certainly did not agree with those, reportedly Gandhi among them at the end, who thought that it would have been better to delay independence for a generation or two rather than to pay the price of partition. About Muslims he was always ambivalent—insisting on protecting them and encouraging them on the ground that they were Indians but at the same time irritated, often angered, with them because they took their religion, which he little valued, so seriously.

  Confronted with the existence of Pakistan as a fact, however, Nehru did try his best to coexist with it—to live and let live. Unluckily, after the death of Liaqat Ali Khan68 he had to deal with heads of state and heads of government in Pakistan, such as Nazimuddin,69 Ghulam Mohamed,70 and the two Mohamed Alis,71 most of whom were incomparably inferior to him in intellect or in integrity and all of whom were incomparably inferior to him in political standing inside their own country. It was not unreasonable that he should be circumspect or distrustful. Ayub72 was another matter; but Ayub did not arrive until the end of 1958.

  On the issues dividing India and Pakistan, with one exception only, Nehru always insisted, often against the advice or wishes of his ministers or of his senior officials, on the generous view and on giving Pakistan the benefit of the doubt. This was so in the case of the financial disputes, in the canal waters affair, in frontier readjustments, and in movement of persons. In India itself he always made it clear that he was the unflinching protector of the Muslim minority; by then a rather frightened demoralised minority. Thus the Muslims were allowed to retain customs which Nehru himself regarded as barbarous, such as polygamy, and which were made illegal for Hindus. He also gave place and promotion to more than one Muslim who was inferior to Hindu candidates just because he was a Muslim. He refused to exchange missions with Israel because he wanted the goodwill of the Arab countries, which are Muslim.

  The one exception was Kashmir.

  Kashmir, like other such cases, Schleswig-Holstein or Trieste or Danzig, attained an emotional and political status altogether out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. The emotionally political is always very difficult to deal with rationally. The millions of words uttered on Kashmir by both sides inflamed public opinion and produced rigidities and quasi-commitments which made it almost impossible to negotiate. The Security Council had held no less than 124 meetings on Kashmir up to April 1964. The millions of words also befogged the truth. Thus the weaknesses on Pakistan’s side were sometimes overlooked. Thus, too, little men and big scoundrels were given an importance and a respectability they could not have dreamed of otherwise.

  Without going into details it is enough to say here that after fighting broke out in Kashmir Nehru, in effect, undertook to have ‘a fair and impartial plebiscite’73 and to abide by its results. That is the first plain truth. The Indian delegate told the Security Council in 1948—I happened to be there at the time—that the accession to India was not unalterable and that after the emergency Kashmir would be free to ratify the accession to India, or to accede to Pakistan, or to become independent.* The second plain truth is that after making that promise India refused to hold the plebiscite. Splitting straws and trailing red herrings, such as about aggression—the Indian claim being that Pakistan had sent the Pathan marauders into Kashmir—or about the validity of the instrument of accession signed by the fugitive maharaja, or about the validity of its confirmation by the packed Kashmir Assembly, and building up a huge sandhill of legalism, has been on a scale, and with a subtlety, familiar to those who know the workings of lawyers and the courts in India and Pakistan. The detached student, however, can find little escape from the presumption that Nehru circumvented the plebiscite because, in the Valley at least—and it is the Valley which is wanted—it would have gone against India.

  Why did he persist in this circumvention?

  The Kashmir affair is one of the mysteries in Nehru’s political life. It remains a mystery even when we allow that the West exaggerated Pakistan’s innocence or Pakistan’s Westernism; Pakistan, as we have noted, joined SEATO and CENTO as an insurance policy against fire from India. By 1963, when India, under the stress of her fears of China, and of Anglo-American pressures, was offering concessions unimaginable a little earlier, Pakistan refused to compromise. The West on more than one occasion increased the tension between the two countries by well-meaning but ill-formed efforts to mediate instead of letting the two countries feel their own way to a solution. But why, in the first instance, did Nehru promise a plebiscite? Was it because he thought at the time that he could win it? If so he made a big mistake in not holding the plebiscite at once. And why did he take the issue to the United Nations? And, not long after promising a plebiscite and taking the issue to the United Nations, why did he do so much, and go so far, to get out of the plebiscite? Had he come to believe that he could not win it? Had he some personal infatuation for Kashmir? His family was Kashmiri Brahmin by origin but they left Kashmir seven generations ago. Or was his motivation political?

  If the motivation was political what exactly were the considerations? Foreigners in Delhi in my time used to be told by officials and ministers what delegates were told at the UN, namely, that Nehru and India must insist on keeping Kashmir because Kashmir, the whole of Kashmir, had legally acceded to India and its accession was irrevocable, so that there was thus no need and no case for a plebiscite; indeed, it was added, the portion of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan was held by aggression and that portion should also rightly be under India. Officials and ministers would then go on to say that India must have this Muslim community in order to show both Indians and the world that India was really a secular state, unlike Pakistan
which was a theocratic state. Further, if India let Kashmir go to Pakistan there would be a terrible Hindu uprising against the Muslims inside India, for instance in UP and Bihar, and another terrible carnage like that of 1947. Few found this official Indian line convincing. Nor, when foreign observers were assured that India was ready to make concessions to Pakistan, could they get more than vague generalities. And since 1954 most foreign observers, not to put too fine a point on it or to go into details, were curious about Krishna Menon’s part in official policy.*

  Though wavering about Kashmir for a month or so after the Chinese attack in October–November 1962, Nehru soon became adamant again. And, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that Indian public opinion, once it recovered from the shock of the Chinese attack, as expressed in Parliament or the Congress Party or the press, was by then no less adamant than Nehru, and much less restrained. How easy it was to inflame Indian public opinion (by which is meant, as always, the politically minded groups—a fraction of the total Indian population—and which had always been kept ignorant by the Indian press as to how the UN or the world at large felt about India’s case in Kashmir) was shown in the excited reaction to the request made by Britain in the Security Council when Pakistan once more, in January 1964, brought to it the Kashmir question. The British delegate was unable to accept the Indian plea that no dispute existed and that therefore there was nothing to negotiate; he requested that both parties hold constructive and sincere talks. This was denounced in India as a betrayal by Britain and there was the familiar clamour for leaving the Commonwealth. Krishna Menon brightened his armour, somewhat tarnished since his fall a year or so earlier, by denouncing, with much applause in Parliament, ‘the temerity of Britain’ in asking India to negotiate with Pakistan ‘after Britain had misruled India for 150 years’. Britain, he went on, was trying to get the empire back by the side-door.* Chou En-lai’s choosing to visit Pakistan in that February (1964), and while there to express China’s support for Pakistan’s case for a plebiscite in Kashmir, did nothing to cool the excitement. Pakistan had been flirting with China for some time in a way which could only irritate when it did not alarm Indians.