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 to an 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 him as 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 line were 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 shortsighted’. 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 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 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
Almost from the time of Independence the United Kingdom had seen Pakistan as a potential ally in the Cold War; as, in fact, a ‘strong bastion against Communism’. By contrast, India was seen as being soft on the Soviets. Winston Churchill himself was much impressed by the argument that Pakistan could be made to stand firm on Russia’s eastern flank, much as that reliable Western client, Turkey, stood firm on the west. The brilliant young Harvard professor Henry Kissinger endorsed this idea – in his view, the ‘defense of Afghanistan [from the Soviets] depends on the strength of Pakistan’.29
For Republicans like Dulles, the fight against communism was paramount. Hence the tilt towards Pakistan, which he saw as a key member of a defensive ring around the Soviet Union. From bases in Pakistan American planes could strike deep into Soviet central Asia. Dulles’s view was seconded by Vice-President Richard Nixon and their combined efforts ultimately prevailed over President Eisenhower, who was worried about the fall-out in India following any formal alliance with Pakistan.30
American military aid to Pakistan ran to about $80 million a year. The US also encouraged the Pakistanis to join the anti-Soviet military alliances in central and Southeast Asia known as CENTO and SEATO. Two months before Dulles signed his pact with the Pakistanis an American missionary who had worked for years in the subcontinent warned that ‘to weigh Pakistan militarily over and against India would alienate India’.31 That it certainly did, although there were other strains on Indo-American relations as well. In the ongoing conflicts of the Cold War – as in Korea and Indo-China – India was seen as being too neutral by far. Nehru’s vigorous canvassing of the recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and his insistence that it be given the permanent seat in the UN Security Council then occupied by Taiwan, was also not taken to kindly by Washington. There were an increasing number of Americans who felt that Nehru had ‘entered the arena of world politics as a champion challenging American wisdom’.32
As perhaps he had. For, as Nehru wrote to the industrialist G. D. Birla in May 1954, ‘I do not think that there are many examples in history of a succession of wrong policies being followed by a country as by the United States in the Far East during the past five or six years. They have taken one wrong step after another . . . They think that they can solve any problem with money and arms. They forget the human element. They forget the nationalistic urges of people. They forget the strong resentment of people in Asia against impositions.’33
The industrialist himself was rather keen that the two countries forge better relations. In October 1954 Birla visited the United States and spoke to a cross-section of influential people. He even had half an hour with John Foster Dulles, who complained about
how India ‘misrepresented them as war-mongers and so on and so forth’.34 In February 1956 Birla visited the United States again on a bridge-building mission. He asked Nehru for advice, and got a sermon. ‘Dulles’s statement about Goa has angered everybody here’, said the prime minister. ‘Indo-American relations are much more affected by this kind of thing than by the aid they may give. Then there is the American military aid to Pakistan, which is a constant and growing threat to us and, in effect, adds to our burdens much more than the actual aid they give to us.’35
The next month John Foster Dulles made so bold as to visit New Delhi. The record of his talks with the Indian government is still classified, but we do have the proceedings of a press conference he addressed. Here, the secretary of state was subject to a series of hostile questions. He was asked why he had said that Goa was an integral part of Portugal. Dulles did not deny this, but clarified that he was for a ‘peaceful solution’ of the controversy. Then the talk turned to military aid to Pakistan, and the possibility that it might lead to an escalation of the conflict in Kashmir. Dulles defensively answered that ‘the arms supply to Pakistan is not designed in any way to be a threat to India’. When the questioner persisted, Dulles angrily remarked that ‘we do not feel that because there is a dispute over Kashmir . . . Pakistan should be unarmed so that it could not resist Soviet Communist aggression’. The secretary of state then threatened to walk out if any more questions were asked on Goa or Kashmir.36
India and the United States did seem to have much in common – the democratic way of life, a commitment to cultural pluralism, and (not least) a nationalist origin myth that stressed struggle against the British oppressor. But on questions of international politics they resolutely differed. America thought India soft on communism; India thought America soft on colonialism. In the end, that which divided seemed to overwhelm that which united; in part because of the personal chemistry – or rather, lack thereof – between the key players on either side.37
III
Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Soviet Union two decades before he toured North America. Arriving by train from Berlin, he reached the Russian frontier on 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. ‘Lenin worship’ was abundantly on display. There were red flags and busts of the Bolshevik hero everywhere. Nehru went on to Moscow, a city which impressed him both with its physical grandeur and its apparent social levelling. ‘The contrasts between extreme luxury and poverty are not visible, nor does one notice the hierarchy of class or caste.’
Nehru wrote a travelogue on his trip; its tone is unfailingly gushing, whether speaking of peasant collectives, the constitution of the USSR, the presumed tolerance of minorities, or economic progress. A visit to Lenin’s tomb prompted a reverie on the man and his mission, ending with a ringing endorsement of Romain Rolland’s claim that the Bolshevik leader was ‘the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless’. He was taken to a model prison, which he thought illustrative of the ‘better social order and humane criminal law’ of the socialist system.
As compared to bourgeois countries, concluded Nehru, the Soviet Union treated its workers and peasants better, its women and children better, even its prisoners better. The credulousness of the narrative is made complete by the epigraph to the book of his travels – Wordsworth on the French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven.’38
Nehru’s biographer points out that he visited ‘the Soviet Union in the last days of its first, halcyon period. If his reaction was idealistic, it was partly because there was still some idealism in the air.’39 This is true, after a fashion; for there was still a glow about Lenin (whose own intolerance was not yet widely known outside Russia); while the extermination of kulaks and the Siberian death camps lay in the future. And of course there were other such endorsements provided by Western fellow-travellers of the 1920s. Like them, Nehru had come intending to be impressed; and he was.40
It was, above all, the Soviet economic system which most appealed to Nehru. As a progressive intellectual of his time, he thought state ownership more just than private property, state planning more efficient than the market. His Glimpses of World History contains an admiring account of the Soviet five-year plans. Yet at no time was he attracted by the Bolshevik model of armed revolution or by the one-party state. His training under Gandhi predisposed him towards non-violence, and his exposure to Western liberalism made him an enthusiast for electoral democracy and a free press.
After Independence, relations with the Soviet Union were at first frosty. This was because the Communist Party of India, with Moscow’s blessing, had attempted to overthrow the state. But the insurrection failed, and the Soviets also thawed. Now they sought to woo India away from the Western camp. In 1951, while the American Congress debated a request for food aid from India, the Soviets – unencumbered by democratic procedure – offered to send 50,000 tons of wheat at once. Indian efforts in mediating in the Korean conflict were also appreciated by Moscow. Previously, Asian states had been judged by their suitability for communism; but (as with Dulles’s America) the Cold War made ideology more flexible. It no longer mattered if a country was socialist; what was crucial was whether it was on one’s side.41
The consummation of this change was the reception given to Jawaharlal Nehru when he visited the Soviet Union in 1955. ‘Wherever Nehru went in the Soviet Union’, wrote one observer, ‘there were large crowds to greet him. In all the factories workmen gathered in thousands to have a glimpse of him.’ At Moscow University ‘the students left their classes and gave him a great ovation’. (One of the students was Mikhail Gorbachev; years later, he was to recall in his memoirs the impact made on him by Nehru and his idea of a moral politics.42) On the last day of his stay the Indian prime minister was due to speak at a public meeting in Gorky Park. But the crowd turned out to be far larger than anticipated, so the venue was shifted to the stadium of the Dynamo Moscow football team.43
Six months later the Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev came for a return visit. The Indians in turn pulled out all the stops. Before the visitors arrived in Delhi, loudspeakers exhorted the people to turn out in numbers, in grateful response to the reception the Russians had given Nehru. In the event there were spectacular turnouts in all the cities the duo visited. There were several reasons for this enthusiasm: the curiosity for the exotic and foreign, the Indian love of a good show and, not least, the deep vein of anti-Western feeling which took vicarious pride in Russia’s challenge to the USA. The crowds were biggest in radical, anti-imperialist Calcutta, where students and factory workers made up a good proportion of the half a million who came out to cheer the Soviet leaders. But even New Delhi was ablaze with illumination. ‘The brightly lit Delhi Stock Exchange vied with the Communist Party office in a challenge of festive lights.’44
In their three weeks in India Bulganin and Khrushchev visited steel mills and hydroelectric plants, and spoke at public meetings in no fewer than seven state capitals. The most significant of these, without question, was Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir state. Here they made clear that they accepted the Valley as being part of the Indian Union, and the Kashmiris as being one of the ‘talented and industrious peoples of India’.45 Nothing could have sounded sweeter to Indian ears.
IV
On the eve of Nehru’s departure for Moscow in 1955 an Indian critic had worried that he would be taken in by his hosts. For ‘like many another sensitive nature, accustomed in its late twenties and early thirties to regard the Soviet Union as truly Progressive, the Prime Minister seems never to have quite got over the vision of those days. Despite all that has happened since then, the Soviet [Union] still retains for him some of that enchantment. To its virtues he continues to be very kind, to its vices and cruelties, he is almost blind.’46
The writer was A. D. Gorwala, a Western-oriented liberal. There were others like him, Indians who believed that India should ally more st
rongly with the democracies in the Cold War.47 But these were most likely outnumbered, and certainly outshouted, by those Indians who suspected the United States and favoured the Soviet Union. One reason for this was that while the Americans were loath to ask their European allies to disband their empires in Asia and Africa, the Russians spoke frequently about the evils of racialism and colonialism.48
Nehru at first tried hard to avoid taking sides in the Cold War. But, as he often said, this non-alignment was not mere evasion; it had a positive charge to it. A third bloc might come to act as a salutary moderating effect on the hubris of the superpowers. We have spoken already of the Asian Relations Conference in 1947. Another such effort, in which Nehru played an important part, was the Afro-Asian conference, held in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955.
Only countries that had independent governments were invited to Bandung. Twenty-nine sent delegations, including India and China. Four African nations were represented (the others still lay under the colonial yoke); but delegates from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria all came. The meeting discussed methods of cultural and economic co-operation, and committed itself firmly to the end of colonial rule. For, as President Sukarno of Indonesia observed, ‘how can we say that colonialism is dead so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree?’49
Nehru considered the Bandung Conference ‘a great achievement’; it ‘proclaimed the political emergence in world affairs of over half the world’s population. [But] it presented no unfriendly challenge or hostility to anyone . . .’ As he told the Indian Parliament on his return, the historic links between Asian and African countries had been sundered by colonialism; now, as freedom dawned, they could be revived and reaffirmed.50
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