Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Jawaharlal saw foreign policy as an emanation of national values as he understood and articulated them, derived from Hindu precepts and Buddhist ethics. (“There was no cold war,” he once said, “in Ashoka’s 8heart.”) The repeated articulation of idealism as the basis of policy (going back to Nehru’s invocation of “one world” in his September 1946 broadcast as head of the interim government) was matched by an Olympian disdain for “power politics”: when the U.S. offered support for an “Indian Monroe Doctrine” in southern Asia in 1953, Nehru turned John Foster Dulles down with scorn. Indian diplomats who have seen the files swear that at about the same time Jawaharlal also declined a U.S. offer to take the permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council then held, with scant credibility, by Taiwan, urging that it be offered to Beijing instead. Nehru took pride in his principled approach to world politics. But it was one thing to fulminate against Great Power machinations, another to run a national foreign policy with little regard to the imperatives of power or the need for a country to bargain from a position of strength.

The eighteen-day state visit of Yugoslav leader Tito (Josip Broz) from December 16, 1954 reflected a decisive shift in India’s foreign policy toward the doctrine that became known as “nonalignment.” Jawaharlal pulled out all the stops for Tito, a Communist who had thumbed his nose at the Soviet Union and preserved his country’s independence from both of the blocs then dividing the world. The joint declaration issued by Nehru and Tito on that occasion spelled out what had become known as the “Panch Sheel,” or five principles Jawaharlal wished to see followed in world affairs: respect for sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in internal affairs, equality, and “peaceful coexistence.” To Nehru, who had signed a similar accord with the People’s Republic of China earlier that year, this was the only possible recipe for a self-respecting independent nation and the only means to avoid entanglement in the cold war then bedeviling the world. But the Panch Sheel formula, hailed in China and Yugoslavia, was curiously devoid of any reference to other principles he had advocated during his long struggle for freedom: democracy, human rights, and self-determination. Nor was there any explicit correlation between the principles he was affirming and the needs of the Indian people; foreign policy was an end in itself, rather than a means to promote the security and well-being of the citizenry in whose name it was conducted.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the fact that, under Nehru, the articulation of foreign policy took on the form of an extended, and excessively moralistic, running commentary on world affairs, once again something more understandable in a liberation movement than in a government. Nehru’s foreign policy positions were self-justifying emanations of his intellect; to link them to direct benefits to the Indian people was beneath him. (He refused, for instance, to raise the issue of food aid with Truman in 1949, saying he did not travel with a begging-bowl in his hand.) Nor did he draw the link between foreign policy and national security: if Kashmir and the northern borders had to be secured for India, and Western support was indispensable for this, his approach could scarcely have been better calculated to achieve the opposite effect. Indian sanctimony also periodically antagonized would-be friends among smaller states: in 1957, Thailand cancelled a royal visit to New Delhi after Jawaharlal made scathing references to its “Coca-Cola economy,” and the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations reported to Tokyo that his attempts to work with India had been rebuffed on the grounds that its policies were not sufficiently independent as to make collaboration worthwhile. Such positions might have satisfied the amour propre of a self-regarding elite, but to others they were both shortsighted and insufferable, and they would not be forgotten when, in years to come, India needed friends among those it had spurned.

The portrayal of Jawaharlal Nehru’s view of the world as synonymous with the larger interests of mankind, and of his voice as that of humanity’s conscience (a description actually used by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser), did little to promote good bilateral relations with countries that might have been useful to India. The United States, in particular, found his criticism grating, and his first two visits there, in 1949 and 1956, occurring as they did at a time of widespread fear of communism in America, were not politically successful, though Jawaharlal was accorded all the attention due an international superstar. (The U.S. also prompted his most memorable public quip, when he remarked in 1949, “One must never visit America for the first time.”) Nehru’s sympathy to China, his improving relations with the Soviet Union, and his opposition to the U.S.’s policy of regional alliances modeled on NATO (Pakistan joined both CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization, and SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) made a clash inevitable. It did not help that the U.S. dismissed nonalignment in trenchant terms — neutrality between good and evil, Dulles famously proclaimed, was itself evil — whereas Nehru prized his independence of thought and action above all else. (A probably apocryphal anecdote has Dulles demanding of Nehru, “Are you for us or against us?” Nehru replied: “Yes.”)

The story was a little different with the Soviet Union, with which Jawaharlal sought to establish relations as soon as he took over the interim government in 1946. Stalin regarded him (and for that matter Gandhi) with undisguised suspicion as bourgeois democrats and faux revolutionaries, but the Soviets welcomed any sign that India was breaking free of British (and Western) influence. One of independent India’s first ambassadors in Moscow was Jawaharlal’s sister Nan, the gracious Vijayalakshmi Pandit (later the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly). Pandit’s appointment was seen as an indication of the importance her brother attached to the relationship with the USSR, but she turned out not to be the wisest choice to convince Moscow of India’s anti-imperialist bona fides. The elegant Pandit spent so much time in Moscow’s Western diplomatic circles as to provoke one commentator to remark that “India’s ambassador forgot that Moscow was not the place to promote good relations between India and the USA.” Worse, she was indiscreet enough to express her personal anti-communism to American and British diplomats without first checking for bugs, and the Russians, unamused, did not find it worthwhile to grant her an audience with Stalin.

Things began looking up after the dictator’s death. The USSR’s willingness to enter into barter trade with India (Russian wheat in exchange for Indian jute and cotton), Moscow’s support for India over Kashmir (resulting from Soviet concerns about Western strategic designs in the area), and Nehru’s frequent criticisms of the West, all helped smooth the way to better relations. Jawaharlal’s visit to the USSR in June 1955 was a huge success (“I am leaving a part of my heart,” he declared upon his departure), as was its reciprocation by Khrushchev and Bulganin in November. The Russians were happy to oblige Jawaharlal by building the public-sector steel plants he so craved at a time when the West was insisting that such investment would have to come in the private sector. All the same, Jawaharlal kept his independence from the Communists, playing a neutral role on Korea (where India supported the West on the UN resolution and chaired the Repatriation Commission) and Indochina (though India’s chairmanship of the International Control Commission was seen by the U.S. as tilted toward the Communists). India’s mediation was also crucial in obtaining the release in 1955 of U.S. pilots downed in China, to which Jawaharlal had paid a visit the previous year, meeting Mao for an hour and Chou En-lai for three (the slogan “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” — “Indians and Chinese are brothers” — was reportedly coined by Nehru at this time).