India After Gandhi (29 page)

Before Nehru’s trip to America in late 1949, an enterprising reporter at
Time
magazine went through his writings.The exercise revealed that he had ‘simply never given the subject [of America] much thought. As a British university man, he has perhaps looked down snobbishly at American deficiency in culture. As a sentimental socialist, he has ticked off the U.S. as unrivalled in technology but predatory in its capitalism.’
¹⁴

Nehru’s feelings were widely shared. Like British aristocrats, the Indian elite tended to think of America and Americans as uncouth and uncultured. Representative are the views of P. P. Kumaramangalam, scion of an illustrious south Indian family. His father, Dr P. Subbaroyan, was a rich landlord and an influential politician – he later served in Nehru’s Cabinet. The son studied at Sandhurst — his siblings in Oxford and Cambridge. These, a brother named Mohan and a sister named Parvathi, went on to become leading lights of the Communist Party of India. This predisposed them to a dislike of America. But in this respect the brother who was an army officer outdid them. After Indian independence he was sent for training to the artillery school at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. From here he wrote to a Madras mentor of how

This country is not one that Iwill ever get fond of. I have not got a very high opinion of them. The people that I have to deal with are very kind, hospitable and have been very good to the two of us. But somehow I feel there is a trace of artificiality in that and also it is the result of trying to impress one. They I think are very jealous of the old world and its background and culture and this results in an aggressive inferiority complex. As for their state of morality, there is none. People seem to delight in trying to outwit each other by any means, mainly crooked. The politicians are racketeers and big business has a tight grip on everything in the country. The small country tradesman and the farmer I think have their hands pretty securely tied by the big men. I do hope our country proceeds with caution and doesn’t get entirely under the influence of the [United] States.
¹⁵

Americans, for their part, had their own prejudices about India. They admired Gandhi and his struggle for national independence, but their knowledge of the country itself was scant. As Harold Isaac once pointed out, for the postwar American there were really only four kinds of Indians. These were: (1) the
fabulous
Indians, the maharajas and magicians coupled with equally exotic animals such as tigers and elephants; (2) the
mystical
Indians, a people who were ‘deep, contemplative, tranquil, profound . . .’; (3) the
benighted
Indians, who worshipped animals and many-headed gods, living in a country that was even more heathen than China; and (4) the
pathetic
Indians, plagued by poverty and crippled by disease – ‘children with fly-encircled eyes, with swollen stomachs, children dying in the streets, rivers choked with bodies . . . Of these images perhaps the last two predominated. It was no accident that the book on the subcontinent best known in America was Katherine Mayo’s
Mother India
, a book that Gandhi had described as a ‘drain inspector’s report’.
¹⁶

Nehru in part shared the prejudices of Indians, and he was sensible of the American ones. But for this first high-level encounter between the youngest and richest to put them on hold. In August 1949, as he prepared for his trip, Nehru was uncharacteristically nervous. ‘In what mood shall I address America?’ he asked his sister Vijayalakshmi. ‘How shall I address people etc.? How shall Ideal with the Government there and businessmen and others? Which facet of myself should I put before the American public – the Indian or the European’ . . . I want to be friendly with the Americans but always making it clear what we stand for.
¹⁷

Nehru spent three weeks in America, delivering a speech a day to audiences as diverseas the UnitedStates Congress and a congregation in a Chicago chapel. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Columbia University and listened to by a crowd of 10,000 at the University of California at Berkeley. He displayed the common touch, being photographed with a taxi driver in Boston, but also made clear his membership of the aristocracy of the intellect, as in a much-publicized visit to Albert Einstein in Princeton.

Addressing Congress, Nehru spoke respectfully of the founders of America, but then counterposed to them a great man from his own country. This was Gandhi, whose message of peace and truth had inspired independent India’s foreign policy. The Mahatma, however, ‘was too great for the circumscribed borders of any one country, and the message he gave may help us in considering the wider problems of the world’. For what the world most lacked, said Nehru, was ‘under-standing and appreciation of each other among nations and peoples’.

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 toan 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 himas 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 linewere 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 short sighted’. 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 argantuan 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 Pakistan is 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 others trains 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 withmoney 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 UnitedStates and spoke to across-section of influential people. He even had half an hour withJohnFosterDulles, who complained about how India ‘misrepresented them as war-mongers and so on andso forth’.
³⁴
In February 1956 Birla visited the United States again on a bridge-building mission. He asked Nehru for advice, and got asermon. ‘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