16

The Cold War and India

Different from what Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser, often claimed, it was not China that was the global Cold War wild card. China under Mao was too ideological, too inward-looking, to serve that role. If there were a Cold War wild card it was India, a democracy of then more than four hundred million people, which had got its independence from Britain in 1947 and had largely adopted a British-style system of government. The new Indian leadership, under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress Party, defined itself as nonaligned, anticolonial, and socialist. While inspired to a significant degree by Soviet ideas of centralized planning, Nehru was fiercely opposed to the concept of power blocs. The Cold War, as an international system, repelled him. In Nehru’s view, it was in its essence based on European preoccupations and drew attention away from the real problems the majority of the world’s population faced: underdevelopment, hunger, and colonial oppression.

For the patrician Nehru, socialism was first and foremost about social assistance and equality in the broadest sense. Much inspired by British Left-wing traditions during his education at Harrow and Cambridge, the first Indian prime minister saw himself as “temperamentally and by training an individualist and intellectually a socialist.… I hope that socialism does not kill or suppress individuality. Indeed, I am attracted to it because it will release innumerable individuals from economic and cultural bondage.”¹ In the Congress Party resolution on economic policy, passed the year before the Second Five Year Plan started in 1956, “the national aim is a welfare state and a socialist economy. This can only be achieved by a considerable increase in income and much greater volume of goods and services and employment. Economic policy must, therefore, aim at plenty and at equitable distribution.”²

To get the kind of development Nehru and the Congress leadership was looking for, Third World solidarity, national sovereignty, and freedom of action was essential. New India therefore in many ways defined itself in opposition to the Cold War, domestically and internationally. It was a key convener in assembling the Bandung Conference of 1955, and it became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. In its foreign policy, it emphasized the role of inclusive international institutions, especially the UN. Well before European or Superpower détente set in, Nehru believed that the Cold War as an international system was detrimental to India’s interests and those values he felt his country represented. Foreign leaders sometimes tired of Nehru’s moralistic lectures and his insistence on India as an example. But his country was a power to be reckoned with, both in its Asian setting and through Nehru’s insistence on India as a Cold War antidote.

WHILE SETTING UP India as an example for others seemed relatively easy, given the chaos that reigned in many parts of the postcolonial world, forging policies that would further Nehru’s aims at home and abroad was more difficult. Under Nehru, Congress remained wedded to the British-style institutions that the country had adopted, including one person / one vote elections at least every fifth year. Some Indians argued that in a country with more than 80 percent illiteracy such a system was administratively ineffective and politically meaningless. The Indian Communist Party castigated Nehru for not doing enough to uproot entrenched social oppression in the countryside, especially through the caste system, or to curb exploitation of workers in the cities. The Communists built substantial support in many Indian states, such as Kerala and West Bengal, and was the largest opposition party in parliament. But they were always vulnerable to Nehru’s attacks on them for supporting violence, disregarding Indian national interests, and oppressing individual freedoms. In the late 1950s, after the Communists won the elections in Kerala, Nehru intervened to have them unceremoniously booted out of office by the central government. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, who had been made president of the Congress Party with which the local Communists had been feuding, tolerated no resistance: “When Kerala is virtually on fire, it becomes the Center’s duty to go to the aid of the people; the misrule of the Communist rulers of the state has created a situation which… does not brook legal quibbling.”³

Brooking no resistance at home—from Communists, recalcitrant landowners and aristocrats, or from ethnic minority groups—Congress’s main foreign challenge was fighting the consequences of the 1947 partition of India. Nehru claimed to have accepted the creation of Pakistan as an independent state, and indeed he did prefer it, as any sensible person would, over the continuation of the ethnic slaughter India had descended to during the year of independence. But the existence of a religious state, carved out of Indian territory both to the west and the east, vexed him as a radical secularist. He confessed privately that it would have been better if Pakistan had not existed. But, since it did exist, he insisted on treating it as an equal. What made such an approach difficult was the ongoing fighting in the state of Kashmir, located between India and Pakistan in the northwest. In 1947 Kashmir had acceded to India, but parts of its Muslim majority clamored for inclusion into Pakistan or independence. After a brief war, India controlled two-thirds of Kashmir, and Pakistan the remainder. For Pakistani leaders, fighting Indian control of Kashmir was a matter of national liberation. For Nehru, it was a matter of India’s territorial integrity and its status as a noncommunal, multi-ethnic state. Nehru’s own ancestors hailed from Kashmir. Though India offered a plebiscite to settle the matter, there was no way the prime minister, or his country, would give up Kashmir to Pakistani pressure.

On the world stage, Nehru stressed India’s nonaligned foreign policy and the need for global solutions to world problems, preferably through the UN. His visit to the United States, during which he famously did not hit it off with his host, President Truman, was intended to socialize the Americans into the expanding community of nations. “Two tragic wars have demonstrated the futility of warfare,” Nehru told the US Congress. “Victory without the will to peace achieves no lasting result.… May I venture to say that this is not an incorrect description of the world today? It is not flattering either to man’s reason or to our common humanity. Must this unhappy state persist and the power of science and wealth continue to be harnessed to the service of destruction?… The greater a nation, the greater is its responsibility to find and to work for the right answer.”⁴

India refused to come in on the US side in the Cold War, as Truman had hoped and almost expected. Bilateral US economic assistance continued. But “they expected something more than gratitude and goodwill,” Nehru said on returning home, “and that more I could not supply them.”⁵

The Americans did indeed hope for more. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, found it very difficult to accept that nonalignment in the Indian case meant just that: an insistence on an independent foreign policy and a refusal to become subservient to either power bloc. On Korea, for instance, Nehru condemned the North Korean attack, but immediately began searching for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Written off in Washington as hopelessly naive, the Indian initiatives did have an effect, especially on the cease-fire and prisoner of war negotiations at the end of the war. But Nehru’s efforts to end the war did not leave much of an impression on Truman. “Nehru has sold us down the Hudson,” the president reportedly complained in late 1950. “His attitude has been responsible for us losing the war in Korea.”⁶

While Nehru kept his distance from the Americans, Pakistani leaders were happy to embrace them. Economically hobbled at home and feeling under pressure by India, the Muslim elite that had created the Pakistani state rushed to link up with US Cold War efforts. Pakistani envoys presented their country as a key link in the Cold War chain around the Soviet Union, especially since India had refused to contribute to the anti-Communist cause. Without US aid, they claimed, Pakistan could easily become a target for Soviet expansionism and the Soviet search for warm-water ports. In 1954 the Eisenhower Administration rewarded them with a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, under which Pakistan received substantial US military aid. Pakistan also joined the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Baghdad Pact, which promised support from the United States and Britain in case of an attack on its territory. The other Asian members of these pacts were the Philippines, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Nehru was livid. When receiving Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, in New Delhi in 1956, the Indian prime minister castigated US policy. “He said he recognized that NATO might have been born of a real necessity,” Dulles reported, but

he doubted the genuine security value of any of the Asian arrangements. He bitterly deplored SEATO and Baghdad, which he felt Pakistan had entered not for security against the Soviet Communists but in order to get strength to use against India. He felt that the Pakistanis were a martial people and a fanatical people who could readily attack India.… He deplored the fact that United States armament of Pakistan was leading India to arm and to make large expenditures for defense when it wanted to concentrate its efforts on improving its economic and social condition. (In this discussion of Pakistan with which he dealt at length, he showed signs of strong emotion.)⁷

Much of Nehru’s foreign policy was designed to break out of the south Asian strictures posed by partition. With some right, he blamed colonialism for south Asia’s ills. It was the British, Nehru thought, who had set Muslims against Hindus, and who had set up independent states on the periphery of the subcontinent: Burma, Ceylon, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. They had accepted Goa as a Portuguese colony on the Indian west coast. They had given power to an assortment of territories ruled by princes and maharajas, whom the prime minister now had to tempt, cajole, and threaten into becoming full members of the Indian state. Anticolonial and Asian solidarity was therefore important to Nehru, first and foremost among the major Asian states. In his first years in power he reached out to Indonesia, which he saw as an equivalent to India in southeast Asia. He also wanted to work closely with China, in part in order to convince the Chinese Communists that they were Asians first and foremost. And he opposed the US Security Treaty with Japan, which he saw as a Cold War arrangement imposed on an Asian nation.

At Bandung in 1955, some participants came to view the conference as a bit too much of an Indian show, given Nehru’s superstar status. His message to the conference was clear, though. The Cold War was against the interests of the Third World. Threatening the world with nuclear annihilation was not only immoral but it deflected from the real problems the postcolonial countries faced: poverty, illiteracy, epidemic illness, and social dislocation created by colonialism. The new postcolonial states had to work together to overcome both the ills left over from the colonial era and current Cold War threats. And the only way to get such cooperation going was for other countries to learn from India’s nonalignment and its willingness to stand up for Third World principles even if the Cold War Superpowers told it not to. Somewhat sanctimoniously, Nehru told the leaders assembled at Bandung that on some issues they would have to give up their own national interests to support what was morally right and good for the common cause.

Nehru’s key preoccupation in the follow-up from Bandung was to extend what he called practical solidarity to causes of decolonization, national unity, and opposition to foreign domination. At the UN, India lambasted the tardiness of European countries in setting African countries free. It spoke out against the increasing US role in Indochina, and welcomed the revolutions in Egypt and in Cuba. But unlike more radical Third World countries, Nehru continued to believe that cooperation with Europeans was possible, and that violent conflict should be avoided. Radicals such as Nasser were disappointed with India’s position in favor of negotiations during the Suez Crisis or its lack of military support for African liberation movements. Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nelson Mandela deplored India’s emphasis on mediation and arbitration, and its continued willingness to remain within the British Commonwealth.

Within India itself, however, Nehru was moving further to the Left in his attempts to further his country’s rapid development. Since the 1930s, the Congress leadership had been fascinated with Soviet planning models and the success these plans seemed to have in modernizing a backward country. After independence, Indian economists trained in Britain and influenced by Left-wing Labour ideas of state-centered development began putting together large-scale plans for how India could change into an industrial power while feeding its increasing population. But in spite of their British background, the Five Year Plans the Indian experts drew up were more GosPlan than LSE, more Lenin than Laski. The concrete and proven example of the Soviet experiment weighed heavier than vague and contested British schemes. In the Second Five Year Plan, from 1956, Nehru’s chief planner, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, outlined the aims of the enterprise:

It must provide for a larger increase in production, in investment and in employment. Simultaneously, it must accelerate the institutional changes needed to make the economy more dynamic and more progressive in terms no less of social than of economic ends. Development is a continuous process; it touches all aspects of community life and has to be viewed comprehensively. Economic planning thus extends itself into extra-economic spheres, educational, social and cultural. Each plan for a limited period becomes the starting point for more sustained effort covering longer periods, and each step in advance opens out new vistas and brings into view new problems to be solved.⁸

The launch of the Second Five Year Plan coincided not only with India’s championing of South-South solidarity, as at Bandung, but also with a substantial boosting of ties between India and the Soviet Bloc. Khrushchev visited India in 1955 and in spite of finding Nehru almost as difficult to deal with at the personal level as the Americans did, the Soviet leader was quick to declare a new era of Soviet-Indian friendship. Soviet aid began coming to India, although it for many years paled in comparison with development aid from North America and western Europe.⁹ But Khrushchev went further than just money, technology, and experts. He also unequivocally supported the Indian position on international issues such as Kashmir. Somewhat cynically, the Indian embassy in Moscow told Nehru that “the Soviets are afraid that their eastern partner, China, with her enormous man-power and growing industrial strength might prove to be an uncomfortable friend. To cope with such a contingency when and if it arises, they want to establish counterbalancing conditions.… Who else could do it better than India?…”¹⁰

China had been a conundrum for Nehru ever since he became Indian prime minister. During the Chinese civil war, Nehru’s sympathy had mainly been with the Communists because of their rural roots and their program for social justice. But first and foremost he deplored the violence of the war and the doctrinaire Marxist approach the CCP showed after its victory. In Nehru’s mind the two were connected. War fostered extreme radicalism and aggression. He wanted to build closer relations with China as a fellow Asian country, but he was cautious because of the new Beijing regime’s willingness to use terror to solve domestic problems and because of its ideological alliance with the Soviet Union. Even so, Nehru made it clear that China needed to be included in the Afro-Asian group of countries that he hoped to build. “I have no doubt at all,” he told his colleagues, “that the Government and people of China desire peace.”¹¹

The status of Tibet, an autonomous borderland that China claimed as part of its sovereign territory, was a key problem in the Sino-Indian relationship. The Chinese Communist leaders feared that independent India was continuing British attempts at influencing Tibet for its purposes. Nehru, however, had no problems accepting China’s sovereignty over the region, although he sympathized with the young Dalai Lama’s attempts at keeping as much self-government as possible. The Indian prime minister was also keen that Tibet kept religious freedom for its largely Buddhist population. The Indian consulate in Lhasa, which served as a listening post for matters going on in Tibet, reported on the backwardness of the country and its need for development from “a curiously preserved antiquated feudal system more cruel than benign.”¹² But it also stressed Tibet’s role as a giant buffer zone between China and India.

When Chinese Communist troops entered Tibet in 1950, Nehru appealed for Chinese “forbearance and generosity” toward the Tibetans, but also advised the Tibetans to attempt to work with Beijing. To be on the safe side, he offered the Dalai Lama exile in India if needed. But he also authorized military support for the Tibetan government. “Supplies of arms and ammunition began to pour into Tibet by April 1950,” according to the Indian consulate in Lhasa.¹³ India’s support did not help much, however, and by late 1950 much of Tibet was under control of the People’s Liberation Army. Nehru refused US offers of joint support for the Tibetan resistance. Instead he advised the Dalai Lama, who was camped close to the Indian border, to return to Lhasa and agree to some of the Chinese demands in order to preserve as much as possible of Tibetan freedom.¹⁴

Mao Zedong was furious over Indian behavior on Tibet. In conversations with the Soviets, he referred to Nehru as a double-dealing imperialist agent and the “running dog” of British and American interests. The fact that Nehru had left the British diplomat and Tibetologist Hugh Richardson in place as Indian consul in Lhasa proved their case, the CCP leaders believed. While Beijing appreciated India’s support in ending the war in Korea, it took a long time for any real trust to develop between the two sides.

In 1954, as part of China’s contribution to the Soviet post-Stalin peace offensive, Beijing agreed to talks with Delhi on the Tibet issue. Nehru, who had been calling for such talks for a long time, was delighted with the newfound Chinese approach. He knew, of course, that China had now cemented its position in Tibet, and that Mao’s sudden reasonableness was in part connected with this. But the Indian prime minister was genuinely surprised at how much the principles the Chinese put forward as general concepts for Sino-Indian cooperation did fit with his own ideas. Incorporated in the agreements were what Nehru began referring to, in Sanskrit, as Panch Sheel, the five virtues, and the Chinese, after consultation with the Soviets, as the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. They included the principles of “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful co-existence.”¹⁵

At Bandung, Nehru highlighted the Panch Sheel principles as a basic foreign policy for the Afro-Asian countries and movements. In reality, of course, they were far less than a policy, but also more, in terms of common propositions, than East and West had been able to agree on during the Cold War. For the Indians, the Five Principles were principally a way of tying China into an outer circle of Third World cooperation. While truly independent and nonaligned countries like India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Ghana were to be the core of South-South networks, Nehru hoped that Asian states like China or Japan would be able to participate in spite of their Cold War alliances. The long-term aim, Nehru stated openly, was to break them away from their orientation toward the Cold War and bring them fully into an Afro-Asian partnership for global change.

India’s foreign policy after Bandung aimed at building a closer cooperation among countries in Asia and Africa on issues of anticolonialism, disarmament, and development. Congress leaders invited delegations from other new countries to visit India and to study its experience in science, technology, planning, and education. At the UN, Indian representatives pushed for international solutions to Cold War conflicts, and supported liberation movements in southern Africa, Algeria, and Indochina (where Delhi viewed the Vietnam conflict mainly as an issue of decolonization and opposed US involvement). Indian diplomats and activists also reported on US race issues. To most of them, the American unwillingness to face up to racial oppression in their own country was a sign of how little could be expected from Washington on questions of international decolonization. Nehru firmly believed that decolonization and human rights were linked in a global context. Even so, he remained a skeptic toward using UN human rights declarations as instruments of foreign policy because he believed that in most cases state sovereignty trumped international agreements on domestic matters. Nevertheless, Nehru found UN resolutions and conventions to be of great use since they could be turned against racial discrimination in South Africa or British colonial oppression in Kenya.

The other main aspect of Indian foreign policy was to build a broad bloc of nonaligned states in order to defeat the Cold War. This project was linked to the Third World initiatives coming out of Bandung, but it was still separate. Its intention was to get countries of very different political orientations to break with the Cold War dichotomy and declare themselves as nonaligned. This aim meant, for instance, that there was no room for China or Japan, but that Indonesia, Ghana, and Egypt played leading roles beside India. The big addition was Yugoslavia, whose flamboyant leader, Tito, became a key figure in the Non-Aligned Movement. His visit to India in 1954, during which he lauded all of his hosts’ concepts of foreign policy, made him a hero in Delhi. Tito was, Indian diplomats observed, “the first great European statesman who came to Asia not as a representative of colonizers, but as a great friend of Asian nations.”¹⁶ In the summer of 1956, discussions among Nehru, Nasser, and Tito on the Yugoslav island of Brioni kicked off the idea of a more formal cooperation among countries committed to nonaligned principles, not only in Asia and Africa, but also in Europe and Latin America.

Since its expulsion from the Soviet bloc on Stalin’s whim in 1948, Yugoslavia had lived a precarious existence on the margins of Europe: still Communist, but sustained by Western aid and defended by its own substantial army. Tito wanted his country to be more than a heroic outcast. He saw Yugoslavia as a beacon of independent socialist development and as a model for new countries in the Third World that did not want to subsume themselves in a Cold War dichotomy. It was possible to be socialist, independent, and respected by both power blocs, Tito claimed. After Khrushchev’s 1955 admission that Stalin’s accusations against Tito had been pure fantasy, Yugoslavia’s stock in the Third World rose even higher.

For India and other new countries, Yugoslavia also played a major role as an arms exporter and supplier of military advisers. Up to Tito’s death in 1980, his country was the militant wing of the Non-Aligned Movement, supplying equipment from its own plentiful military industry, not only to independent Third World countries, but also to liberation movements in Angola, Zimbabwe, and Guinea. In some cases Yugoslav military supplies rivaled those of the Soviet Union and provided a lifeline for countries that feared becoming too dependent on Moscow for their defense needs. Nehru and his successors regarded Tito as perhaps their closest ally. Nehru’s daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, viewed the Yugoslav leader as a mentor in international affairs, almost like a substitute father.

But India also believed that it could have a more direct influence on the Soviet Union itself. Nehru never gave up hope on weaning the Soviets away from their Cold War behavior. Moscow reacted aggressively because it felt threatened, the Indian prime minister believed. “Whoever might have been responsible for this ‘cold war,’ the effect on the Soviet Union was to create apprehension and a continuing sense of danger,” he told his chief ministers in 1955. Nehru found that it was “probable that if there is a marked improvement in world tensions and the cold war ceases, then internal developments and changes will take place in these East European states.”¹⁷ Indian diplomats saw Khrushchev’s break with Stalin’s policies at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Twentieth Congress in 1956 as a consequence of India’s benign influence. Soviet leaders visiting India “must have been impressed at once by her progress and her abhorrence of violence. The theory that violence was not a prerequisite for the transformation of society was thus a recognition of a state of affairs which had come into existence. The conversations of the Soviet leaders with our Prime Minister and the intensive study of his books… must also have prompted Soviet leaders to discount the role of violence in the march towards socialism.”¹⁸

The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 dented the Indian image of the Soviet Union, but did not destroy it. India continued to receive Soviet aid for its development programs and to build its military capacity. But Nehru became even more preoccupied with the cause of nonalignment and the idea of building an anti–Cold War bloc. His doubts about the more radical approaches of Nasser, Nkrumah, or Sukarno did not lead to divergence. Rather, such doubts reinforced India’s need to be close to the other nonaligned nations, in order to influence them. After all, Nehru concluded, what drove his fellow Third World leaders toward unnecessary radicalism was the unwillingness of the imperialist states to give up their positions and privileges. The 1960–61 Congo crisis was a case in point. Nehru was horrified at Lumumba’s murder and placed the blame squarely on the Belgians and their US partners. India committed five thousand troops to UN peacekeeping operations in the country, on the condition that the secretary-general guaranteed Congo’s national integrity.

The Congo crisis was the prod that led nonaligned countries to meet in Yugoslavia’s capital, Belgrade, in 1961 to set up regular conferences and arrangements, later known as the Non-Aligned Movement. While strongly in favor of nonaligned cooperation, Nehru had been a skeptic toward setting up a more integrated organization, in part because he feared that it would reduce India’s flexibility and independence in foreign affairs. Concerns over Congo had proven him wrong, even to himself. The non-bloc countries had to cooperate and take charge of the process of decolonization. If not, the Superpowers would exploit it for their own purposes. And the aborted Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit in Paris in 1960 proved that the Superpowers were not able to manage their own affairs, far less those of others. “War,” said the final statement from the Belgrade meeting, “has never threatened mankind with graver consequences than today.” But at the same time the participants stressed that “imperialism is weakening. Colonial empires and other forms of foreign oppression of peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America are gradually disappearing from the stage of history.”¹⁹

The fear of many of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 was that the death throes of colonialism could lead to new wars. While “a lasting peace can be achieved only if… the domination of colonialism-imperialism and neo-colonialism in all their manifestations is radically eliminated… the Conference resolutely rejects the view that war, including the ‘cold war,’ is inevitable, as this view reflects a sense both of helplessness and hopelessness.… They affirm their unwavering faith that the international community is able to organize its life without resorting to means which actually belong to a past epoch of human history.”²⁰ For Nehru, the Belgrade declaration was both a design for a future without a Cold War and a warning about how fragile global peace actually was.

The nascent Non-Aligned Movement consisted of some strange bedfellows. While China had been excluded, Fidel Castro’s Cubans made one of their international debuts at Belgrade. Only a year later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Castro would call on the Soviet Union to risk global nuclear war in defense of Cuban independence. But a number of conservative monarchies were also represented: Ethiopia, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. Belgrade was not only different from Bandung because European and Latin American countries were represented; it was also different because the conference was more about the right to independence, sovereignty, and peace than about Third World solidarity. The state, in its various forms, played a more central place at Belgrade than it had done at Bandung. This was not surprising, perhaps, because of the sheer number of new states that had come into existence between 1955 and 1961. But, together with the Group of 77, it signaled a future in which states and their demands would rub up against a more radical reorganization of international affairs as envisaged in the early phase of decolonization.

For India, the need for security for its young state would become glaringly visible only a year after the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement. The 1962 war with China destroyed much of the optimism that Nehru’s young assistants, though not always the prime minister himself, had shown about the future. Nehru was less concerned about the charges of naiveté leveled against him inside and outside of India than the effects the war would have on his country’s international aspirations. As the Chinese armies advanced, Nehru despaired to the point of asking for a Soviet and then a US intervention. While the Soviets hedged their bets, not least because of the need for Chinese support in the concurrent Cuban crisis, the Kennedy Administration responded with airdrops of weapons for the Indian army. The president wanted to use India’s urgent needs as a way of improving relations with Delhi. “By the Chinese action,” Kennedy said, “the subcontinent has become a new area of major confrontation between the Free World and the Communists.… The Indians themselves are at long last fully aware of the Chinese Communist threat and appear to be determined to meet it.”²¹

In spite of his government’s considerable responsibility for its outbreak, it is true to say that the war broke Nehru’s heart. He had hoped to be a peace-maker between East and West. And he had hoped that India, in its domestic as well as its foreign policy, would be an example of self-sufficiency and nonalignment for others to follow. Instead he was reduced to pleading for aid from the Superpowers to stem the military advance of another Asian country. “It is a tragedy,” he noted, “that we who have stood for peace everywhere, should be attacked in this way and be compelled to resist attack by arms.”²² After the cease-fire, Nehru felt that his Asian policy was in tatters. Neither he nor his successors gave up on India’s policy of nonalignment. But especially after Nehru’s death in 1964 this policy was inoculated with a solid portion of Indian nationalism, particularly with regard to its own region.

Pakistan’s response to the US military aid to India during the China crisis was to further build its own relations with Beijing. This was perhaps the Cold War’s most unlikely romance. The Pakistani officers who engineered the alliance were conservative Muslims who had no interest in China’s Communist excesses. And the Chinese accepted the Pakistani embrace simply on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. When Washington, still Pakistan’s main ally, demurred, the Pakistani military dictator, General Mohammed Ayub Khan, increased pressure on India in Kashmir. He wanted to show Pakistan’s military prowess to the Chinese and demonstrate to US president Johnson that his country was not dependent on American aid. Outwardly, the 1965 Pakistani incursion into Indian-controlled Kashmir was presented as a Kashmiri people’s rebellion. But the Indian government knew better.

Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, an otherwise unassuming man, decided to strike back. He ordered large-scale attacks against Pakistani forces not just in Kashmir, but in western and eastern Pakistan simultaneously. With its forces defeated on the battlefield, Ayub Khan’s regime was in trouble. The Americans refused to help, and the Chinese did not have the capacity. The Pakistanis’ unlikely appeals to the Soviets for assistance just showed what dire straits they were in militarily. Ayub’s desperation over his own folly did, however, give Moscow a rare Cold War opportunity to play the peace-maker. The terms for the cease-fire were negotiated under its auspices in the Soviet central Asian city of Tashkent. In territorial terms, the result was close to status quo. But Pakistan’s weaknesses had been exposed, as had India’s ability and intentions to be the predominant power within its region.

Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, was chosen as prime minister after Shastri’s sudden death, from a heart attack, during the Tashkent negotiations. India’s new leader was a far tougher policy-maker than either of her predecessors. She was committed to a secular, socialist India that controlled its region and sought global influence through the UN and the Non-Aligned Movement in light of what she saw as its national interests. Even more than her father, she was profoundly skeptical about the US role in the world and viewed the Soviets as easier to work with, especially in light of the ongoing US alliance with Pakistan and Pakistan’s flirtation with China. Gandhi’s main security concern was Beijing, and the intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict in the late 1960s alerted her to how much the Soviets and the Indians had in common strategically, even though she did not share Moscow’s Communist ideology.

China’s drift toward further radicalism and the Cultural Revolution frightened the Indian leaders, as it did many others. It convinced them that India would be even more of a target for Beijing than it had been in the past. Although they noted that China’s self-inflicted damage “does not cause us any pain,” they reacted sharply against harassment of Indians living in China, including the sacking of a Sikh temple in Shanghai and attacks on the Indian embassy in Beijing. Indira Gandhi made it clear that Indian policy toward China, including giving asylum to the Dalai Lama, would not change unless China stopped encouraging Pakistan to act aggressively and fomenting Communist rebellions within India itself. “India,” noted the Ministry for External Affairs in Delhi, “is still the only sector in which the Chinese can indulge in military adventurism and hope to get away with it.”²³

The Non-Aligned Movement became Gandhi’s favored foreign policy arena. As the movement expanded, she increasingly took a central place in it. The movement, she said, “means equality among nations, and the democratization of international relations, economic and political. It wants global cooperation for development on the basis of mutual benefit. It is a strategy for the recognition and preservation of the world’s diversity.”²⁴ But Gandhi was far too realistic to put all her eggs in one basket with regard to security and international affairs. Her Non-Aligned Movement strategy paralleled, but did not impede, increased cooperation with the Soviet Union on technology and defense. Gandhi made sure to keep her independence also vis-à-vis Moscow. She sharply criticized the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She also attacked any Soviet attempt to increase its influence in Pakistan, for instance through small-scale weapons sales to the regime in Islamabad. Even a “symbolic supply could be dangerous,” the Indian foreign secretary admonished visiting Soviet leaders in 1969. “The prospect of Soviet tanks fighting Soviet tanks could not be welcome in the Soviet Union.”²⁵ The United States remained a key supplier of civilian aid to India. This vital assistance came from the US government, from US contributions to multilateral organizations, and from private foundations. But US aid to India and its help during the war with China did little to improve the overall political relationship. India’s criticism of US Asian policies grated many American leaders and made them regard the Indians as ungrateful. US attempts to get more sympathy from Delhi on its intervention in Indochina in the wake of the China war made no progress. When US vice president Hubert Humphrey was sent to India to solicit Indira Gandhi’s support, “she confined herself to expressing concern at the likely escalation of the conflict in Vietnam and the need for a peaceful solution.”²⁶ The US unwillingness to sacrifice its alliance with Pakistan also got in the way of a closer US-India relationship. And Indians commented sharply on what they saw as a lack of racial justice in the United States and the lack of a US commitment to racial equality worldwide. The United States, said a 1969 overview of US internal changes by Indian diplomats, “has reached a stage, where a dangerous relationship exists between… black rage and white fear. The confrontationist tactics of the one evoke a reactionary response in the other.” It was this response, Gandhi believed, that had produced Richard Nixon’s election victory in 1968.²⁷

But Indira Gandhi’s main challenge as she fastened her grip on Congress and Indian politics was not the relationship with the United States. It was domestic development in India. First and foremost she felt the need to make more progress in battling her country’s chronic problems with poverty and hunger. India had avoided China’s development disasters, but also it had made much less progress in promoting health and education. A country priding itself on its democratic development was still dependent on food aid from abroad. Gandhi was convinced that the Indian development model would pay off if the political conditions were right. But in India, as in Pakistan and much of the Middle East, extreme forms of social oppression were left untouched in spite of the leaders’ socialist rhetoric. Congress politicians were promising opportunities for all, especially at election time, but then allied themselves with local elites to the detriment of the low-caste poor. Instead of being an instrument for social change, the Congress Party had become a tool for families who had ruled and exploited their neighbors for generations under colonial rule.

Indira Gandhi was determined to root out these shortcomings, but she felt she needed more power in order to do so. In 1969 she nationalized key banks and concentrated executive power within her own secretariat. When her more radical policies led to a split in the Congress Party, Gandhi’s faction won the 1971 national elections hands-down on the slogan “Get Rid of Poverty.” She moved the country closer to a strict centralized planning regime, in which the government was responsible for most economic activities. When accused of betraying her father’s more liberal policy, Indira bristled. “My father was a statesman,” she responded. “I’m a political woman. My father was a saint. I’m not.”²⁸

The 1971 Bangladesh war, the biggest crisis in south Asia since independence, gave Indira Gandhi the chance to prove that she was indeed no saint. The crisis had its origins in the Cold War, and especially in the relationships among Pakistan, India, China, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Although the trigger that set the war off was the Pakistani generals’ abysmal treatment of the people in the eastern half of their country, the scene had been set by the sudden rapprochement between the United States and China through Kissinger’s Beijing visit in July 1971. This harmonization was what Indian leaders had feared most. From the mid-1960s on, Indian security advisers had warned that “the great temptation before the Western world would be to prop up China as a counterweight to the USSR.”

We felt, however, that this might be a dangerous move, because there was an essential difference between these two countries, which needed to be recognized. The USSR also had its world-wide ambitions, but they were pursuing these in a more peaceful manner than the Chinese. Perhaps this was due to the fact that they had had 40 years in which to develop, during which they also had built up some prosperity for themselves; perhaps it was due to the realization of the dangers of nuclear war. But ultimately the USSR presented less of a danger to the world community than China, particularly with regard to the issue of war and peace. China, far more than [the] USSR, would pursue her course with ruthless determination, quite undeterred by the prospect of a large scale war.²⁹

The specific danger, for India, lay in Pakistan’s close relations with both the United States and China. The symbolism of Kissinger leaving for Beijing from Islamabad was not lost on India’s leaders. But, in spite of its centrality in international affairs, as a state Pakistan had been going downhill ever since its inception in 1947. When the generals had tried to democratize in 1970, the result was an election victory for the Awami League, an eastern Pakistani movement that wanted to make the country into a democratic confederation, in which the Bengali population of the east had a genuine say. Predictably, the western Pakistani general who was president, Yahya Khan, nullified the result and arrested Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Awami League. When unrest broke out in eastern Pakistan, the generals introduced martial law. Soldiers began attacking neighborhoods in the east that had a high percentage of Bengali nationalists or Pakistani Hindus. Large numbers of refugees started crossing over to India. Both in public and in private Indira Gandhi began describing Pakistan’s policy toward the Bengalis as “genocide,” and started preparing a military intervention. Her motives were both humanitarian and strategic.

The Nixon Administration was blind to the disasters the Pakistani generals inflicted on their own countrymen, but saw the Cold War strategic setback the splitting up of Pakistan could lead to for the United States. Visiting Delhi on his way to Pakistan and, secretly, from there to Beijing, Kissinger tried to strike a pose of uncertainty on how far the United States would go to assist Pakistan in case of a war. The Indians would have nothing of it. When Kissinger claimed that he had been unaware of continued US weapons’ shipments to Pakistan during the crisis, the Indian foreign minister shot back: “It is surprising that such a high placed official as you are not given full facts.… The embarrassment over all this is… for you. Yet it is a serious blow to our relations.” Pakistan, Foreign Minister Swaran Singh said, “has been sustained wholly by you.” With seven million refugees and increased fighting along the eastern border, “there is a limit to what we can take.… We would like to know whether we are coming in the way of your interests. If we are, we would like to take a second look at our own policies.”³⁰

A week later Washington and Beijing jointly announced Nixon’s forthcoming visit to China. Kissinger told the Indian ambassador that the United States would not help his country if China intervened in an Indian war with Pakistan. The Indian response was swift. Picking up on proposals made earlier by the Soviets, Gandhi agreed to a treaty of friendship between India and the Soviet Union. “In the event of either being subjected to an attack or a threat thereof,” said the treaty, the two sides “shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat.”³¹India also started a large-scale program for training Bengali guerrillas to fight in eastern Pakistan. And on the prime minister’s orders, the Indian military began preparations for a full-scale invasion of Pakistan if diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis did not succeed fast. “The Indo-Soviet Treaty appears to have taken both Beijing and Washington by surprise,” reported the Indian embassy in the US capital. “The treaty represents a certain reassurance for India and a certain advance for the Soviet Union in Asia and a corresponding setback to Sino-US maneuvers.”³²

On 4 December 1971 India launched a combined ground, sea, and air operation against eastern Pakistan. Within a few days, the Pakistani military in the east was crushed and a Bengali administration began ruling the territory as independent Bangladesh. Seeing the jubilant crowds in the capital, Dacca, it was difficult for anyone not to see the Indian intervention as a liberation. But Nixon and Kissinger viewed it as Indian aggression. They moved parts of the US Seventh Fleet into the Indian Ocean and told their new Chinese friends that “we are afraid that if nothing is done to stop it, eastern Pakistan will become a Bhutan and western Pakistan will become a Nepal. And India with Soviet help would be free to turn its energies elsewhere.”³³ But the Chinese knew that an intervention this late in the game would be risky, and with all her military objectives reached, Indira Gandhi quickly accepted a cease-fire. South Asia settled into a new status quo, with India even more predominant, still nonaligned but also closer to the USSR than ever before.

Nixon and Kissinger, in conversations that oozed racism and misogyny, fumed that “the bitch” had tricked them. “We’ll be paying for it for a long time.… It will be interesting,” Kissinger told the NSC, “to see how all those people who were so horrified at what the Paks were doing in East Pakistan react when the Indians take over there.”³⁴ “What we are seeing here,” Kissinger told the president, “is a Soviet-Indian power play to humiliate the Chinese and also somewhat us.… And the effect of that will be on all other countries watching it is that the friends of China and the United States have been clobbered by India and the Soviet Union.”³⁵ The Nixon Administration set out to punish India as best it could.

The sense of enmity in Washington was reciprocated in Delhi. “Military aid to Pakistan from the US has been one of the potent causes of the military getting the upper hand in the internal affairs of Pakistan and in sustaining its unnatural hostile posture towards India and ambitions over Kashmir,” said one Indian Ministry of External Affairs report to the prime minister.³⁶ “China and USA both do not mind sacrificing Indian interests if it holds them tighter close.”³⁷ Indians, claimed another Delhi policy review, have “been bewildered and shocked by the persistent stand of the US administration against India, against the freedom struggle of Bangladesh and in support of the Yahya regime [in Pakistan].”³⁸ Indira Gandhi was not going to seek American friendship anytime soon.

Instead the Indian prime minister turned increasingly authoritarian in domestic affairs and friendly toward the Soviet Union internationally. The high point of Soviet-Indian cooperation was in the mid-1970s, as the USSR expanded its military and economic cooperation with India, including the building of steel plants and the exploitation of oil and coal reserves. The Soviets were also instrumental in providing assistance for India’s “peaceful nuclear test” in 1974. “The Soviet Union,” said a 1974 Indian government report, “continued to support India’s policy of non-alignment and her contribution to the strengthening of world peace and to the struggle for the removal of all vestiges of colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism.”³⁹

When Indira Gandhi in 1975 responded to a Supreme Court decision invalidating the last elections by refusing a new vote, restricting civil liberties, and ruling by decree under a state of emergency, the Soviets began hoping that India would follow in the footsteps of the People’s Democracies and some postcolonial states by introducing socialism through a one-party system. “Should small groups with the backing of big finance, press and foreign friends, but without support of the masses, be allowed to force their ideas upon the majority?” Indira Gandhi asked her party. “Will there be democracy, when India is weakened?”⁴⁰ But Indian democracy was far too robust even for a leader of Indira Gandhi’s stature to put aside. Under pressure from increasing political unrest at home, she called an election in 1977, which she felt certain she would win, but ended up losing to an opposition alliance headed by former Congress minister Morarji Desai. The first non-Congress government since independence had little to offer in terms of new policies. But it managed to rebuild Indian democracy after the Emergency, while keeping its international policies in place. The aging Desai and his advisers were afraid that the Soviets would break their links with India with Indira Gandhi out. “Indo-Soviet relations are characterized by deep understanding and close identity or broad similarity of views,” said a policy overview from the new foreign minister. “Friendship and understanding with the Soviet Union has hitherto been one of the main directions of India’s foreign policy. This has both emotional content and hard-headed logic.… Today there is a vast spectrum of inter-weaving relations from which both political and economic advantages have accrued to India.”⁴¹

The new Desai government was not going to throw these advantages overboard. The Indian foreign secretary met Soviet diplomats and told them that “while a number of important events have taken place in India… it was important to remember that India remained where it was and its foreign policy remained unchanged.” The Desai government would “preserve the character of India’s foreign policy not merely because they have inherited it but because they realized its rationale in terms of India’s interests.” The Soviets and the Indians, the foreign secretary said, “could have continued confidence in each other and look forward to the further development [of] the many different links of cooperation between the two countries in the interest of mutual benefit.”⁴²

At a carefully managed meeting with the similarly senescent Brezhnev in Moscow in 1979, the Indian prime minister tried to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The Soviet-Indian partnership was confirmed. Both were frightened by the rise of political Islam in nearby Iran. Asked by Desai what was really going on in Iran, the Soviet leader confessed, “The devil only knows.… There was that uprising of the people. Thousands demonstrated.… We always had good relations with Iran, with the Shah also. He came to us and I went to him.… [Now] the Shah is not there. The Americans supported him! Now there is the new regime and the Americans would like to adapt themselves to the new regime also. The Rightists [Islamists] have made their appearance there and they want to have close relations with the USA.”⁴³

To nobody’s surprise, Indira Gandhi was back in charge after the 1980 elections in India. The prime minister was not exactly chastened, but certainly more aware of her role as “a political woman” than ever. She also feared for India’s unity and cohesion in a world where issues of identity, religion, and nation had started to replace the Cold War ideological divide. The rise of Islamism frightened her as much as it had Brezhnev and Desai. Already before the elections in India, the Indian Foreign Ministry had warned the Soviets about the resistance that the new Communist government in Afghanistan was giving rise to. “While we could not openly say so…, our own principles of secularism did not necessarily rejoice at the emergence of the religious fervor in many countries which both India and the Soviet Union considered as important,” Indian foreign secretary Jagat Singh Mehta told the Soviet ambassador.⁴⁴ But some of the damage was self-inflicted. “In many Arab countries,” Mehta continued, “there was a strong feeling that Islam was being threatened by the [Communist Afghan] Khalqi government. This was of course not India’s view but we were bringing it to their notice as a friend.”

For India, and especially for the new Indira Gandhi government after 1980, the world was turning faster than they would like to see. Most Indian leaders, including many of those who had opposed Congress, were wedded to India’s planned economy development model. They liked to see centralized states abroad, with whom they could negotiate on trade and security issues. Although they complained endlessly about Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet-American détente was in many ways in India’s interest. Indira Gandhi hoped that over time her country could develop good working relations with the Americans also, possibly by way of Moscow. Ethnic and religious mobilization in south Asia and the Middle East could get in the way of such hopes, the prime minister feared.

But in returning as prime minister, she also still felt the influence of the Cold War on India. Gandhi deplored “the unceasing effort of other countries to mold our policies to fit in with their global strategies.” She saw more “uncritical acceptance of foreign postulates” within India than before. “We should not imitate other countries or other systems, nor is it our aim to become improved editions of them,” Gandhi warned.⁴⁵ But, just as for her predecessors, Indira Gandhi’s room for maneuver remained circumscribed by the Cold War. In spite of its many efforts, even a country as significant as India was never able to fully break away from the global conflict molding its policies.