Nehru (21 page)

World affairs had always been Jawaharlal's favorite subject, and from the days when he drafted resolutions on international affairs for the annual sessions of the Congress, he enjoyed an unchallenged standing in the country as the maker and enunciator of policy. He carried this on into his prime ministership, retaining the External Affairs portfolio for himself. In one analyst's words, “Nehru's policies were India's, and vice-versa.” (Indeed, for all practical purposes, India had no foreign policy, but Nehru did: senior Indian diplomats sometimes learned of policy from Nehru's extempore speeches in Parliament.) This also meant that areas in which Jawaharlal was not particularly interested — geographically (Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa) or substantively (international commerce and trade relations, defense and security policy) — were largely ignored. Diplomats conducted themselves in his image, focusing on policy, pronouncement, and protocol in the assertion of India's nationhood rather than seeing foreign policy as a means of bringing economic and security benefits to the newly independent country. Given Jawaharlal's extraordinary personal stature, no one dared challenge him; a few who did, early on, were given a taste of the prime minister's temper, and learned quickly to acquiesce in whatever Nehru wanted. As a result, Indian foreign policy emerged whole from the head and heart of one man.

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
⁸
heart.”) 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).

Jawaharlal's independence from the two major political currents dividing the world did give India the rhetorical leadership of the newly independent nations, who saw in nonalignment a strategy for leveraging their material weakness on the world stage. The undoubted skill of Indian diplomats from Nehru on down in developing and articulating their positions meant that, through most of the 1950s, Nehru's India enjoyed an international stature out of proportion to either its military strength or its material means. Jawaharlal bestrode global diplomacy like a colossus, quoted, admired, and feted; he embodied an emerging world that was just finding its voice, and he did so with grace and style. Even that old curmudgeon Churchill called Nehru the “Light of Asia.” (A well-worn story, perhaps apocryphal, has Churchill, recalling the years Nehru spent in British prisons, saying, “You must hate us.” To which Jawaharlal replied: “I was taught by a great man never to hate — and never to fear.”)

Jawaharlal was the principal mover behind the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955; it was upon his insistence that China was invited to attend, over Western objections (and Israel was not, because of Arab ones). Nehru made a seventy-minute speech in Parliament before the meeting about the great importance of the occasion: for him Bandung marked the epochal moment when a world long dominated by imperial powers finally found its own feet. (He also arranged for an aircraft, Air India's
Kashmir Princess,
to ferry Chinese diplomats to Bandung. The plane was blown up in midair by a time bomb allegedly placed in it by Taiwanese saboteurs; Chou En-lai, the intended target, was not on board.) The conference itself was something of an anticlimax, with cold war divisions diluting the final communiqué, and it is remembered chiefly for the impressive emergence of a soft-spoken but steely Chou En-lai as the moderate face of a Chinese government that had been in the shadows until then. Bandung was followed by the meeting of what the world came to see as the nonaligned triumvirate — Nehru, Nasser, and Tito — at Brioni in July 1956, where the seeds of what was to become a formal movement were sown.

Then came Suez — Nasser's nationalization of the canal, followed by Israeli and Anglo-French invasions of Egyptian territory. The crisis brought out the anticolonial fighter in Jawaharlal. He cabled Nasser, declaring the events “a reversal of history which none of us can tolerate.” Nehru worked with the U.S. to ensure the withdrawal of the invaders and later contributed Indian troops to the United Nations peacekeeping operation that followed. His stance of firm opposition to Anglo-French imperialism won him, and India, great popularity in the Muslim world. An American diplomat, the former journalist Phillips Talbot, recalled his astonishment a few years later at seeing portraits of Nehru hanging in so many Egyptian homes. A Pakistani poet, Rais Amrohvi, published a verse declaring that Nehru was the kind of infidel Islam would love to embrace. The same year, though, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to crush a nationalist ruler, and Jawaharlal, the great international moralist, at first remained silent, explaining to Parliament that “the broad facts were not clear to us.” He later declared that “in regard to Hungary or Egypt or anywhere else, any kind of suppression by violent elements of the freedom of the people was an outrage on liberty.”

The contrast between his responses to Egypt and to Hungary have often been cited in the West as evidence of Nehruvian hypocrisy, of a moralism that stood somewhere to the left of morality. True, Jawaharlal was instinctively biased against any hint of colonialism, and he was slow to see the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in similar terms. But his prime ministership was replete with instances of intervention against non-Western tyranny. He protested against the writer Boris Pasternak's detention in the Soviet Union; succeeded in obtaining the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas's release from solitary confinement (though he failed to persuade Tito to free Djilas altogether); and spoke up for jailed democrats in Nepal even at the cost of relations with that vital neighbor's monarch. Despite a foreign policy that many saw as tilted against the West (a part of the world he associated more with imperialism than with freedom), Nehru remained a friend to liberty everywhere.

On the whole, India's international standing in the 1950s was Nehru's principal vindication. The thoughtful Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1958, paid tribute to five elements of Nehru's leadership of India that bear quoting here: “the adoption and cultivation of representative government through free and democratic institutions; the serious and responsible grappling with the immense social and economic problems of the nation; the retention and cementing of the unity of the Republic through the great leadership that has been displayed; the leading international role that India has played, especially at the United Nations; and the bringing of questions of principle (such as equality, freedom, nondiscrimination, human rights, humanity, peace) to bear upon political questions.” The force of example, the nobility of aspiration, and the articulation of India's interests as those of a humanistic universalism, all served to give Nehru's India stature and prestige. India did not speak in terms of nation-state rivalry or patriotic chauvinism; under Nehru it sought an altogether loftier place on the world stage. For all its flaws, this credibility was not easily achieved. In the early years of freedom, for instance, the Soviets scoffed at the idea that India was genuinely independent. Nehru's statements and actions dispelled their skepticism.