Nehru
Page 13
After the aggression not a few speeches were made. Nehru spoke several times. Then on December 28 he spoke for two hours. Evading the real issues, he argued that the action was not against, but in conformity with, UN principles; that it was virtually non-violent; and that Gandhi would have justified it (a claim disputed by several of the few genuine Gandhians left in Indian public life). Then came dark hints about the racial division of the world; it was only the whites who had criticised India, and how terrible this racial division could become (‘for the whites’—this was not added in words but was clearly intended). On January 13 he made a speech at Banares praising the army—he would have known nothing of the black marketing or the assaults alleged on Goan women—for its ‘brilliant manner’ in ‘restoring Goa to the Motherland’ and ‘ending Portuguese colonialism’. Krishna Menon also spoke on several occasions but without Nehur’s cat-like delicacy in leaping from one hot brick to another. Krishna Menon just dropped the bricks. For instance, he ridiculed the idea that there was anything in the affair contrary to the UN; India on the contrary was carrying out the UN resolution on ending colonialism. Once Nehru, commenting on a suggestion in the New York Times that India, in remorse for her unilateral violence, should now return Goa to Portugal, said that if any effort were made to get India out of Goa there would be thermonuclear war (presumably launched by Russia, who was praised handsomely for showing that she was a true friend to India because she had vetoed the Portuguese complaint in the Security Council. That Russia was also one of the whites seems to have been overlooked).
The Indian press throughout the Goa affair had disappointed most foreign observers, especially those not long in India. Nehru’s part in it had outraged them. More than one who hitherto had been admirers and lauders of Nehru now turned on him and denounced him as a cynical imposter. Nehru sensed his loss of status. When, three weeks or so after the invasion, a head of government arrived at Delhi airport and the ambassadors were there to take part in the usual welcoming ceremonies, Nehru, for the first time in my experience, did not greet the assembled ambassadors and he avoided looking at them. A member of his family at this time told me that he was ‘crucifying himself over Goa’. Letters regretting what he had done written to him by men whom he respected were said to have cut him to the quick. When reproached by an old fellow-Gandhian of my acquaintance he justified himself, with some sadness, and urged that his conscience was ‘absolutely clear’; but my Gandhian friend was convinced that his conscience was not clear.
Why, how, and when, it was decided to take Goa are questions which cannot yet be answered. On these questions the habitual secrecy of the Indian ruling group remains unpierced. Few of those in the ruling group, too, were in the know. The secret was as restricted and as well kept as was the secret of Eden’s Suez adventure five years earlier. At the time various Indians in politics said that there had been no discussion in cabinet. This has since been denied, but it is likely enough that there was no real discussion. The part played by certain individuals, such as the police officer Handoo,95 and General Kaul96 (who later retired from the army after an unenviable performance during the Chinese attack a year later), would be of interest. Probably the part played by Krishna Menon was crucial. Even the factors leading to the aggression are not yet certain though among those cited at one time or another the following probably counted:
1. The elections. They were due to be held in the following month, January. The government had an interest in taking voters’ eyes off the Sino-Indian border where incidents had been disturbing public opinion which was inclined to be critical of Krishna Menon’s part in army and border policy. Further, in Bombay itself, the only place where there was any sustained interest in Goa, Krishna Menon was fighting a key election against Kripalani, a former president of the Congress Party and the only man left in Parliament who could speak to Nehru with some semblance of equality. Nehru regarded this election as of exceptional importance, as his subsequent, and angry, campaigning there on behalf of Krishna Menon showed.
2. Goa has the best deep-sea harbour in the Indian subcontinent.
3. Goa has great mineral wealth, especially iron ore.
4. If India was to strike she must strike now as efforts to provoke much interest, let alone an uprising in Goa itself, had failed, while inside India interest would not last long so that if there was to be action delay would diminish its political value.
5. It would please the Afro-Asian bloc who would thus see that India is no Uncle Tom.
No one could be surprised that Nehru or India had wanted to end colonialism, or was sensitive about European rulers in Asia, or disliked Salazar.97 But India had no legal right to Goa; and it is not easy to see where, or how, she had any moral right to it. In any case she used force, she used it unilaterally, and she used it after being given an opportunity for negotiation and mediation. This was aggression. And the aggression was without provocation. Moreover, it was aggression on a virtually unarmed neighbour. This, too, was the India of Nehru where hundreds of thousands of words had been uttered on peace and in condemning both force and unilateral action, particularly when gone in for by the West.* Indeed not long before the aggression Nehru had made an eloquent plea to the World Council of Churches, then meeting in Delhi, against war. His plea made such an impression that I recall a visiting clergyman saying to me after Nehru’s address that Nehru was teaching them to be better Christians. At the moment he made that speech the troop trains were already moving relentlessly towards Goa. Finally, the aggression was preceded by a campaign about Goa which was as impudent as anything Mussolini had said about Albania, or Hitler about Sudetenland, before they gorged those countries.
It was not for nothing that Nehru did not set foot in Goa until eighteen months after the invasion. By then the prosperity of Portuguese times had gone and the people of Goa, more particularly the Catholic and educated half, were more resentful than ever. The elections were not held until two years after the invasion. Nehru’s party, Congress, then lost in every one of the 28 seats they contested. The United Goan Party, which wanted a separate Goa state, won half the seats; illustrating the clear division between the Catholic Portuguese-speaking Goans and the Hindus, illiterate low castes predominating among the latter. Goa was still ruled directly from Delhi.
Nehru’s biographers, if they care for the high moral reputation which he had enjoyed for so long, and for its decline, will have to seek for the reasons which led him to Goa, no less than for the reasons which led to his stand on Kashmir. Until then Nehru remains charged with machiavellianism. We who watched him for so long are sure that he was not as machiavellian as this, and that he did not knowingly utter so much untruth. Nehru, in spite of Goa, was no hypocrite and no imposter. We do not yet know what were the compulsions he was under. But whatever the reasons, while he lost a great deal for something as small as Kashmir he lost still more for something still smaller, Goa. And whether, as is probable, he allowed himself to be edged, bit by bit, and especially because he was ill at the time as well as old and tired (he had to have teeth extracted because of a toxic condition a few days after the aggression, and a few weeks later a serious kidney disease was diagnosed), into a situation from which escape was very difficult, he can be acquitted of hypocrisy. But he cannot be acquitted of a failure.
The Chinese Attack
The second anticlimax of his prime ministership took place a year later, in November 1962, when Chinese troops suddenly crossed the disputed border and virtually destroyed the Indian troops opposing them—troops of that Indian army which he had praised for their brilliant performance in Goa.
As a result Nehru was forced, within the space of a few weeks, to dismiss Krishna Menon from the government; to witness an explosion of nationalism inside India exceeding even that of 1959–60; and to undertake to increase the armed forces to almost double and to give army leaders, whom he had always distrusted, a standing which could make the army, hitherto without political importance, a force no longer to be ignored in In
dian political life, and, finally, to accept the principle of military aid from the West, notably from the USA and Britain, which could jeopardise his cherished policy of non-alignment. For a week or so towards the end of 1962 it looked as though he himself might be swept from office. The agitation against him was fomented to the utmost by those groups which wanted to get rid of him because of his socialism and by those politicians who had old personal scores to pay off, but most of it came from disillusionment with Nehru’s foreign policy and from fear that China would launch an invasion deep into India. Indians felt that they had been misled by their leader, rather as the British felt about Baldwin in 1939–40.
Such was the mood that there were even attacks on his patriotism; demands were made for giving up non-alignment; and some Indian jingoes, including overweight MPs who were too unfit to waddle half a mile, cried out for an Indian invasion of Tibet and for full-scale war with China.
For a while Nehru almost lost his sang froid. His own mood was even more disillusioned and more bitter than that of the people; because he was wounded by the Indian people as well as by the Chinese government. He was completely taken aback by the Chinese proceeding to the lengths of such a scale of attack, by the scale of the defeat of the Indian troops, and by the scale of the reactions in Indian public opinion. He sent letters to President Kennedy, Prime Minister Macmillan and to other leaders, written under the impression that the Chinese might push right into India and not merely into the semi no man’s land in NEFA; he appealed urgently for help. There are claims, not wholly without evidence, that he asked the Americans about, and apparently for, American air intervention or protection.
Two days after he sent his appeals the Chinese made their own ceasefire and offered to withdraw to the positions they had been occupying before the attack. This saved Nehru. He might well not have survived a continuation of the Chinese thrust, or even the Chinese presence in the territory they had won, given the panic and the resentments against him in India at the time. It also saved him from the kind of military aid from the West which could have ended non-alignment. Such was Nehru’s resilience, and his adroitness, that he weathered the storm and within a few weeks was regarded once more by the majority of Indians as indispensable. The malcontents had to be content with lesser scapegoats, such as General Kaul, the nominee of Krishna Menon who was commanding the Indian Army in NEFA, not gloriously, Thapar, the army chief of staff, and, at length, Krishna Menon himself, the defence minister. By then Nehru was probably regretting his appeals to the United States and the United Kingdom and was probably turning his mind to ways of getting such help as they would give without allowing the West either bases or forces in India, just filling in some gaps in India’s armed strength, such as supersonic fighters. He refused to break off diplomatic relations with China.
One thing he could not cancel was the speech he made on not letting Chinese have an inch of Indian territory. This might have been politically expedient but he went on repeating it to the extent that it made it difficult for him later to come to a settlement with China.
The Indian press and politicians at the time spoke much about ‘the Chinese hordes’ near the Indian border; and some spoke of the invincibility of the numbers involved, or of Chinese plans to get control over India’s oil in Assam, or even over the port of Calcutta. This is to be taken as a sign of the fright which the Chinese attack made on Indians. The truth is that there were only two or three Chinese divisions involved, and that the Indian Army suffered a limited defeat. As the official Indian report on the affair a year later pointed out,* and as anyone familiar with the Indian Army at the time could have guessed, the Chinese were tougher, better trained, better equipped, and better led. The Indian Army, which has troops with a fighting potential as good as any in the world, especially from what in British days were called (and correctly called, though Indian nationalists had repudiated the term) the martial races, had been giving too much time to ceremonial parades. The report referred to the inferior training in mountain warfare, the inferior quality in officers, especially at the senior level, where there was incompetence and negligence, and the inferior information about the Chinese. The orientation of the army had been directed against Pakistan; war had been thought of as the kind of war which would take place along and across the Punjab frontier; that is where the bulk of the Indian striking force was kept. It should be added that no politician of rank or standing in India, and perhaps a dozen at the most at any level in political life, had had any experience of soldiering. It is doubtful if there were half a dozen MPs at Delhi who had any personal knowledge of, or who took any interest in, or had arry instinct for, army or defence matters.
Nehru had had to bend to the storm. But he escaped surrender. He took various steps to appease public opinion, such as setting up the Defence Council and putting some of the critics of himself on it; but he gave it no real power; it enabled him to hamstring the discontented retired generals. He circumvented the pressures for giving up non-alignment and for accepting the proffered Western umbrella. He circumvented the pressures for giving up the plans or for turning the Indian economy into a war economy; or for concentrating the armed services on the hypothesis of China as the enemy; or for breaking off relations with China. At the same time he managed to get more aid out of the West—the Pakistanis feared that it would be enough to tip the balance against them still more—though he failed to get the supersonic jet fighters. What he got, as someone said at the time, was military reliance without military alliance; which was not little. He bowed to some pressures from the United States and England, notably to hold talks with Pakistan; but, helped by Pakistan’s overplaying its hand, he let the talks drag on for a few months until they petered out. He got the United States, apparently with the help of an American ambassador who was new to these matters and to diplomacy, to recognise the McMahon Line. Hitherto the Department of State had refused to recognise it, a fact not without significance; the White House now overruled the Department of State. And inside India itself he put the Emergency to good use by getting more power for the central government. It was a virtuoso’s performance; and the more remarkable as Nehru, not long recovered from the first serious illness in his life, was old and tired. But he could not recover what mattered most: his former standing as leader in his party and in Parliament or with the educated classes.
And the picture of India which emerged then was not one to give comfort to his drooping spirit. He could not have been happy about a good deal in the nationalism which had come over India. Indians, until recently soporific from the years of speeches about the India–China brotherhood, felt black betrayal by China. Under the first shock Indian mobs fell on harmless Chinese who had been living in India for many years—Japanese diplomats, who looked like Chinese to the Indian mob, felt obliged to put signs on their cars to the effect that they were not Chinese. This reaction against the Chinese, understandably heated at the beginning, settled in a few quarters into a nationalism which was narrow-minded, self-centred, legalistic, and moralising.* Just as India had insisted that there was nothing to discuss with Portugal over Goa or with Pakistan over Kashmir she now took the line that there was nothing to discuss with China. China must accept the so-called Colombo power proposals in toto, though in fact those powers had had their doubts about at least some of India’s case just as few if any Afro-Asian countries were convinced that there was no case for discussion. When in October 1963, a year after the attack, Chou En-lai offered to visit Delhi to discuss a settlement this was dismissed as ‘a mere propaganda trick’. Nehru, in short, was left with little if any leeway for negotiating what was negotiable.
Evening Light
As 1963 opened Nehru looked on a prospect littered with ruins—the ruins of his hopes, and the ruins of a prestige seemingly so impregnable for a dozen years or more. Kashmir; Goa; the Chinese border; Indian standing in Africa and South East Asia; in India itself the Naga uprising; Indian nationalism getting out of hand; Hindu revivalism gaining ground; communal v
iolence worse than ever; more and more money on armaments; the plans awry; hunger; more inefficiency in government at all levels; corruption at all levels, including amongst his own ministers; gloom about what would happen on a scene which he must soon leave. Indians were even impugning his patriotism. Nehru probably took little comfort from the fact that whatever the truth about his failures the biggest truth of all was the immense scale of the problems the first prime minister of India had had to wrestle with, and how successful he had been with some of the problems and how near to succeeding with others. By 1962 and 1963 anyone knowing him over the preceding ten years was struck with the marks of sadness. His voice had lost some of its timbre; his silences had become longer and more enigmatic.
The Chinese invasion was the blow of havoc. The existence of Pakistan, like the connected massacring of Muslims by Hindus and of Hindus by Muslims, outraged his sense of reason, his belief that the world is, or can be made, a rational place. Goa had undermined his confidence in himself. The Chinese invasion had undermined his confidence in men, in Indian men as well as in Chinese men; it had repeated the outrage on his sense of reason, but it had done more: it had betrayed a trust; a trust given generously, and for great ends. Trust is the foothold of life itself. Betrayal, the basest wrong, shatters the very ground on which we walk and have our being; that oaths are straw, that men’s faiths are wafer cakes … Nehru walked in a dazed way after Goa. After the Chinese invasion he never walked firmly again.
Did this lover of poetry know Browning’s lines on Aeschylus soliloquising in his last years?
I am an old and solitary man,
Mine eyes feel dimly out the setting sun,
Which drops its great red fruit of bitterness,
Today as other days as every day,
Within the patient waters.