Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  The driving force behind Indian, and more particularly Nehru’s, anti-colonialism was disapproval of foreign over-lordship—‘good government is no substitute for self-government’. But there was also in it, as there had been in the old anti-British nationalist movement in India, a strong undercurrent of racial feeling born of sensitiveness about colour. That is why maharajas and Brahmins even more than the low castes hated colonialism, or South Africa, or immigration laws excluding people on the basis of colour. What caused particular resentment was the lumping of all non-European peoples, and independently of cultures, into a single category.*

  It is questionable whether the best interests of the colonial peoples themselves were always served by the manner or the speed with which independence came to them. In more than one case the new state consisted of a congeries of tribes which India officially insisted on treating as a nation. At Bandung in 1955 Nehru said, ‘I think there is nothing more terrible than the infinite tragedy of Africa in the past few hundred years.’ Such was his emotion that he did feel that Europeans were largely responsible for the fact that Africa was not ‘developed’—like France or Denmark. Most politically minded Indians shared these feelings to the full. They also concurred, as the politically minded majority in most countries concur, in double standards—in insisting on one code of behaviour for India and another for others, one as regards the Nagas in NEFA but another as regards Africans in French Guinea.

  The affairs of the Congo and Indian reactions thereto provided a characteristic example of India’s, and of Nehru’s, emotional involvement in anti-colonialism. Only a few points need be mentioned here though the Congo story is complex. After the breakdown of Belgian rule in 1960 Indian passions became quickly engaged. As a result, the bulk of the military force first sent to the Congo to carry out UN policy, which expressed the wishes of the majority of the Afro-Asian bloc in association with the United States, was Indian. Indian troops and aircraft were sent to the Congo at the personal request of Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the UN.* At the same time he arranged personally with his own Government, that of Sweden, to send a Swedish contingent. Various African troops were brought in later. But Indian forces were the spearhead; and they remained the decisive force for a long time. Some of the Indians concerned in the enterprise saw it as a crusade.

  In December 1961 India, dedicated to breaking the Katanga secession,87 tried to force the hands of the British government to send 24 half-ton bombs from Britain for Indian planes to drop on Katanga. (This was the moment when the Goa attack was being worked out.) It was hoped that in this way the ground lost in the unsuccessful effort to crush Tshombe’s Katanga regime in September could be recovered. This Indian initiative came only two months or so after Hammarskjold’s plane had crashed, which caused excitement and indignation in India. Some newspapers described it as ‘a British murder’, and ‘a crime engineered by the British Secret Service’. The Indian Express, for instance, wrote, ‘Never have British hands been so bloodstained …’ Nehru himself, who had recently taken part in the memorial celebrations for Lumumba, made some dark hints.

  The UN forces did not pull out of the Congo until the summer of 1964. By then the anarchy was similar to that in 1960–61; Tshombe had returned, with American blessings this time; and the UN had spent over £150 million on its intervention.

  By colonialism most Indians meant both more and less than colonies. Relatively few Indian anti-colonialists would be worried about their country’s subjugation of the Mongolian peoples of Nagaland,** or about Indonesia’s subjugation of Papuans. What most Indians had in mind about colonialism was any superior place or advantage in the world for the Europeans. It was largely social. Indians, sober and sane as they are on most relations of life, can sometimes lose their balance on race relations as quickly as they can on Muslims or Pakistan. It is the more confusing because it is confused in their own minds. In private they have an infatuation with fair complexions, and, conversely, a distaste for the African’s complexion. African students in India have sensed this and have voiced their resentment of what they regard as Indians’ race prejudices against Africans just as in Communist China African students have sensed and protested against Chinese race prejudices. Yet no African or Asian people become so passionate about race relations as do Indians. This fact stands though the Indian authorities are now doing their best for African students, and though all race, like all caste, discrimination is illegal in India.

  The fall of the European empires was ardently worked for by Nehru’s India. Towards the end Indians lost some of their ardour, disenchanted by the discriminatory treatment meted out to Indians in some of the new African states, or by the warrings between Indians and Negroes in British Guiana, and by the decline in the prestige and popularity of India itself throughout Africa. In general, and increasingly in later years, Nehru’s own part was moderating. What was humanist and universalist in him revolted against racialism, including the vestiges of racialism remaining in himself. He knew after the Nazi and other European behaviour that Africans and Asians had nothing to teach Europeans in the way of atrocities; but he also knew, and felt strongly, that what was bad was not just European racial cruelties or prejudices but all racial cruelties and prejudices.Thus at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in his closing speech, reacting against Sukarno’s environment, and against the self-pity of some of the delegates, he urged them to move from merely thinking about the faults of their erstwhile masters on to reconstructing their countries; and he urged them to remember that people who had been under colonial regimes had normally fallen under them because of defects of their own. This advice was not popular at Bandung. Remembering racial fears amongst certain peoples of European origin he went on:

  We mean no ill to anybody. We send our greetings to Europe and America. We send our greetings to Australia and New Zealand. And indeed Australia and New Zealand are almost in our region. They certainly do not belong to Europe, much less to America. They are next to us and I should like Australia and New Zealand to come nearer to Asia.

  And reacting against Sukarno once more, this time at the Conference of Non-Aligned Powers held in Belgrade in 1961, Nehru, with typical courage, opposed the Indonesian president’s attempt to turn the conference from a move against the atomic armaments race into merely one more occasion for anti-colonialist slogans.

  If Smuts and Nehru could have been thrown together and cut off from everyone else in some mountain hut for a week or two they would have astonished each other by discovering how much they had in common, including their doubts.

  The Commonwealth

  Nehru insisted on India’s remaining in the Commonwealth. It is true that India got a good deal out of it while she was required to give little or nothing in return. It is true, too, that the first country India turned on in any mood of ill-temper was usually the United Kingdom, as the Suez affair,88 the Congo,89 Hammarskjold’s death,90 African affairs in general, the Common Market.91 Kashmir, or the British immigration restrictions, bear witness. No claims or distortions could be too extravagant in these attacks; and the refrain was often accompanied with a threat about leaving the Commonwealth. It is true, again, that as regards relations with other Commonwealth members, the country India regarded as her worst enemy, Pakistan, was a fellow member, and the country she hated most next after Pakistan, namely, South Africa, was until latterly another fellow member.

  The attitude of India to the Commonwealth in Nehru’s day was thus one of wanting the best of both worlds—to be treated as part of England, and a part of the West, and to be given aid and comfort from it, and yet to be free to damn it when feeling so disposed. But it was also tempered with a strain of goodwill, even of sentimentality, especially as regards England. Indians’ attitude to England has been a tangle of love–hate. Krishna Menon, as an actue English diplomat once said, has been at once the worst enemy and the best friend of Britain in India. The Indian regard for Britain might be eroded away as the generations trained by Englishmen die
off, but the British have been wise enough to be forebearing and, usually, silent under irritable Indian press attacks, like those noted above. Indian ill-temper rarely endures for long. In view of the historical connections—a large proportion of British families have had some connection with it at some time or other—England owes something to India.

  An example of both the destructive and the constructive side of Nehru was provided by the question of South Africa’s place in the Commonwealth. He had something to do with South Africa’s leaving the Commonwealth. South Africa is a hard case; but keeping her out of the Commonwealth had not a little in common with keeping China out of the UN. Nehru, however, was convinced that the Commonwealth could have no reality unless it was multi-racial, and sincerely multi-racial. It was on that ground that he was using his influence to keep the new African states in the Commonwealth. Nehru, in short, had a good deal to do with making the Commonwealth the multi-racial group it is today.

  The Cold War

  Nehru’s attitudes to the West and to the East respectively came in for much criticism in the West.

  His power and his sense of achievement and fulfilment were at their highest in the years 1952 to 1958. These were also the years during which McCarthy flourished, symbolising the hysteria and conformism which gripped many Americans; the years when Dulles dominated the foreign policy of the United States and, as Nehru thought, the foreign policy of the West as a whole. Nehru saw Dulles’ policy as misconceived and as encouraging the arms race and thereby involving grave risk of war, and so nothing less than the survival of humanity.

  As late as 1956, Dulles, who distrusted Nehru as much as Nehru distrusted him—as was not concealed when Dulles visited India in 1954—said that ‘the conception of neutrality is obsolete, immoral, and short-sighted’. For Dulles neutrality in all forms, including non-alignment, was a refusal to choose between evil and good; that is to say, between communism and anti-communism. Nehru, who did not much bother about some of Dulles’ men describing him as a crypto-communist, felt that this was too uncomplicated a definition of good and evil. Nor did he 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 gargantuan 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 subsidised 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. Dulles was as disinterested and as brave as Nehru himself, as rock-like in character, and he had no difficulty in showing up the discreditable part played by many communist intellectuals and communist parties over the years, and the results of their doctrine that the ends justify the means or that the interests of a certain foreign power always take precedence. But he never changed the conviction of most educated Indians that foreign policy, including American foreign policy, dealt mostly, and inevitably, if regrettably, with the world as it is, which is to say with power. It dealt with the interests and the security of States rather than with morality. Still less were most educated Indians convinced that American-type capitalism was the only moral or, in every case, the most utilitarian, way to run an economic system.

  Some of the conditioning factors in Nehru’s outlook have already been touched on. Thus all along he refused to see the communist states as a monolith. He was early aware of the frictions and rivalries among them. He was aware, too, already in the early 1950s, on the one hand of developments inside Russia, which would mean a richer and different Russia from the war-wrecked Russia of Stalin, and, on the other hand, of certain basic similarities and affinities between Russians and Americans. I recall his talking on these matters with great force, as also on relations between Russia and China, as far back as 1954. For some years before others sensed the position, Nehru was convinced of tensions between China and Russia, and that the tensions grow. Later he came to see in Russia a counterpoise to China. Perhaps he felt that in the long run China would inevitably be more powerful than Russia.

  On the other hand Dulles was correct in feeling that Nehru’s neutralism was not always strictly neutral between East and West; that Nehru was apt to show an indulgence towards the communist states which he did not show towards the United States. The socialist in Nehru, and the enthusiast for the kind of planning and constructiveness and hopefulness which he credited to Russia ever since his visit there in 1927, did predispose him that way. His obituary speech on Stalin delivered in the Indian Parliament in 1953 carried the praise rather further than these obituary occasions require and so confirmed some Americans in their worst fears about Nehru. The rein he gave to Krishna Menon in certain fields of foreign relations reinforced their fears. Year after year he sent him to the UN where he became a byword for a certain line of action as well as for occasional eccentric exhibitionism; in an environment which stimulated exhibitionism to a peculiar degree, over and beyond the fact that men in public gatherings tend to vanity and a lower level of behaviour than in private life. It is true, too, that Nehru’s indignant outburst on the Suez affair was not matched by any outburst on Russia’s suppression of the Hungary uprising; though, from the books coming out on the Suez affair, it is not manifest why it should have been. Over the years Nehru’s foreign policy was not pro-communist nor pro-East. It was punctilious about non-alignment, and for the rest it exerted itself on the side of good sense and peace. Nehru undoubtedly had a deep abiding uneasiness about America’s fitness for her primacy in the world but his opposition to American talk of military intervention in South East Asia in 1954 after Dien Bien Phu,92 or to the activities of the CIA, or to the threats of brinkmanship and massive retaliation voiced by American admirals and generals before President Kennedy restored normal service discipline, was approved of by many people in the West, and indeed by some people in the United States. Nor did Nehru’s conviction that some kind of neutralisation was the least dangerous policy for Laos93 in particular and for South East Asia in general have anything to do with the pro-East prejudices which were alleged against him. Nehru found the communist’s only-one-way absolutist account of life, and grounds for policy, as unacceptable as Dulles’ categories of good and evil. Both were far too simple for him.

  To sum up, Nehru’s attitude to the Cold War between West and East was based not on any communist sympathies but on a concern to safeguard peace in the world, qualified by a concern to safeguard India’s interests. He did contribute to peace, notably in Korea.94 There is reason to believe that he refused certain Russian overtures about the Congo. Whether this non-alignment was a luxury which India could permit herself only because she could always come in under the American umbrella in case of need is a question which can be answered only when we have more documentary and other knowledge than we have now. The answer will depend on whether Soviet Russia really had expansionist and revolutionary designs, or could be reasonably assumed from the information then available to Dulles and other leaders in the West to have any, and really was a threat to the peace, especially after Stalin’s death.

  The question remains, however, whether, given the potentiality and the mood of Communist China, India might now have a case for giving up Nehru’s policy and of aligning itself with the West. Rajagopalachari, for instance, has argued that, given the facts of the world as they are, there is no sense in India’s bankrupting itself by trying to go it alone, and that India’s independence sought through second-class armaments, purchased on credit, is liable to be apparent not real independence. The answer to this question must depend on the degree to which China is a danger to India or to world peace. In any case it would still seem to serve no interest of India to align herself with the West at the cost of Russia’s enmity. Rajagopalachari meets this point by looking forward to the day when Russia will also be aligned with the West, indirectly if not directly. At all events Indians will probably come to see what Nehru decline
d to admit, namely, that in the world of power politics as it exists some countries, owing to their geographical or to other circumstances, have good reason for entering into a defensive alliance. Nehru was too absolutist in his condemnation of SEATO, NATO and CENTO.

  Other Foreign Policy Matters

  Little need be said about the other subjects in foreign relations with which Nehru was concerned. As regards the arms race, he was sincere in wanting to stop it, but any role he could have played was defeated partly by his failure to offer anything constructive and partly because, thanks largely to Kashmir and Goa, his own bona fides were suspect in some quarters. He refused to allow India to have any part in the making of thermonuclear weapons. The pressure to make them is likely to grow significantly now that he has gone.

  As regards the UN, he valued it as a potential peacemaker and as a step towards the world-government which he believed inevitable in the long run if mankind was not to destroy itself. But he valued it no less as an institution which gave India, and other Afro-Asian or non-aligned nations, almost powerless in the world from the military point of view, a forum where their voice could not be ignored. The UN gave a majority to the Afro-Asian countries. They could pass resolutions which were treated as of a quasi-legislative validity (for instance on the Congo), and which continuously needled the developed countries into giving money for aid programmes, while towards the huge costs of running this institution (including its dozen specialised agencies) India and her Afro-Asian allies, though calling so much of the tune, paid a mere trifle. It was the West, and mainly half a dozen countries, which bore the financial burden as well as the political burden of the UN. Why Nehru did not press for India’s being a permanent member of the Security Council is not clear. India’s claim is already nearly as strong as that of Britain or France. It will no doubt be pressed in the future; and then a similar claim will come from Pakistan and others.