Читать книгу India and Asian Geopolitics - Shivshankar Menon - Страница 9

India became independent at midnight on August 14, 1947.¹

Spare a thought for Jawaharlal Nehru and the leaders of independent India. Between September 1946, when Nehru took over the interim government of India, and 1950, when the country became a republic, many tasks awaited: to build a country by combining British India with 564 or so sovereign or semi-sovereign princely states; deal with the horrendous consequences of Partition, including the greatest mass migration in history until Bangladesh in 1971; begin changing the abject condition of the people of India; fight a war with Pakistan in Kashmir; and build new instruments of state such as the Indian Foreign Service and repurpose old ones like the Indian Army, the Intelligence Bureau, and the police. Even Indian Standard Time was only introduced on September 1, 1947. Before this, different provinces and princely states had their own times, and reading an Indian railway timetable was a complex skill. Frontiers and boundaries needed to be established and administration extended to every corner of the new state of India. Those involved in the transition had to draft a constitution for the new republic; suppress an armed communist revolution in Telangana; and deal with China’s occupation of Tibet—for the first time in history China had become India’s neighbor. Nehru faced all this simultaneously and without the experience of ever having run even a municipal government. That so much of what was done in those initial days has stood the test of time and has been carried on by the leaders’ successors, not all of whom shared their ideas and preferences, says a great deal about those men and women, their ideas, and their understanding of India. They managed to accomplish much despite disagreements among themselves, largely because of the leadership that Jawaharlal Nehru provided.

In the midst of the chaos of independence, Nehru made one of the great speeches in history about India’s tryst with destiny. As freedom came at midnight on August 14, he spoke about India and the world:

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments. (J. Nehru, “Tryst with Destiny” speech, August 14, 1947)

In that speech we see at the very inception some of the ideas that drove a Nehruvian foreign policy: the overriding priority of ending India’s poverty and backwardness, that peace, freedom, and prosperity for India are linked to that of the world, and that this is now “One World.” Nehru already saw India’s foreign and domestic policies as linked.

These were prescient remarks. As he spoke, most of Asia was still reeling from the aftereffects of World War II and from the vain attempt by colonial powers to reimpose their empires in Asia. China was in the throes of civil war, Japan under occupation, and Indochina, Malaya, Burma, and Indonesia saw colonial masters using brute force against an aroused nationalism that would not be denied. It is difficult to speak of Asian geopolitics in the first few years of the Indian republic. When India became free, southeast Asia was still colonized, except for the Philippines and Thailand, and west Asian countries like Persia were undergoing their own internal convulsions. Yet, rather than being distracted by daily headlines and preoccupations, Nehru already saw Asia free and potentially one political, economic, and strategic space. And he saw the outlines of the three trends that were to shape India’s world in the decade to come: decolonization, the reshaping of subcontinental borders, and the Cold War.

Nehru’s first thought, however, was for “the millions who suffer” in India. India’s condition at independence in 1947 was truly abject. The new government had its hands full dealing with the political, social, and economic consequences of Partition, with a stagnant economy and a country wracked by communal violence and other tensions. Some basic figures show the challenges faced and how far India has had to come. Between 1900 and 1950, India’s GDP grew by less than 1 percent a year, while agricultural and food grain output grew at just 0.5 percent a year. The structure of the economy was colonial, with 49 percent of GDP from agriculture, 7 percent large-scale industry, 10 percent small and medium industry, and 34 percent from services and construction. Some 72 percent of the workforce was in agriculture and only 2.5 percent was employed in factories and mines. According to the 1951 census, only 16 percent of the population as a whole was literate (just 8 percent of girls and women were literate), and the average life expectancy of an Indian born in 1947 was thirty-two years. The country generated only 3,000 megawatts of electricity, and the infant mortality rate was 150/1,000 live births. This was a country that was poor, backward, that could barely feed itself, and that was racked by disease and hunger. It was therefore only natural that government’s priority was internal, on economic development and social transformation.

Two years after independence when the constitution was adopted, B. R. Ambedkar, jurist, economist, and politician, said: “On the 26th of January 1950 we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life we will have inequality. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?”²

One might have added to Ambedkar’s contradictions that of India’s idea of itself as an important world-class civilization, on the one hand, and the actual weakness and condition of its people and the inherited instruments of governance, on the other. The gap between the idea of India and its reality in 1947 was vast. Domestic consolidation had to be the first priority.

Remarkably, the nascent republic was able to integrate itself and stand on its feet despite myriad distractions, war, and crises. Politically, the cartographic reconstruction of India needed immediate attention after Partition and the Radcliffe Award, which drew the boundary between India and Pakistan.³ In 1947 India acquired 81 percent of the British India’s population but only 72 percent of the area, and that needed to be unified and integrated. India’s internal political integration took from 1947 to 1956. The princely states’ territories encompassed some 40 percent of the subcontinent’s area and over a quarter of the population. It took prodigious effort by Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Sardar Patel and others before, as Mountbatten said, “All 564 ‘apples’ fell into the basket.”⁴ The new government’s task was also to fix the external boundaries of India, a task that was by and large completed during the 1950s for all the land boundaries, except those with China and in Jammu and Kashmir, while the maritime boundaries were established by the 1980s.

As formal successor to the Raj, India took over 672 treaties, conventions, and agreements as well as membership in fifty-one international organizations in 1947. But independent India’s apparatus to formulate and implement foreign policy was very limited and had largely to be built from scratch. The Department of External Affairs, along with the higher staffing of the Intelligence Bureau, was the least Indianized part of the British government of India. The Indian Political Service within the elite Indian Civil Service handled India’s relations with Britain’s protectorates on the subcontinent, managed the diplomatic affairs of the Raj, and administered frontier areas. It was divided into two main departments, both directly under the viceroy until the very end of the Raj: the Political Department, which dealt with the princely states and protectorates and the Foreign Department, which handled diplomacy and the frontiers. In the early 1930s the Foreign Department was renamed the Department of External Affairs. While the Indian Civil Service had been opened up to Indians in 1860, Indians were specifically excluded from the Indian Political Service.⁵ The first Indian to be taken into the Political Service was K. P. S. Menon in 1925, but it remained overwhelmingly British and was never truly Indianized until independence. When it became clear during World War II that Britain would be leaving India, a deputy secretary in the Department of External Affairs, S. B. S. Shah, who later played a prominent role in Pakistan, suggested the 50 percent Indianization of the department. Despite Foreign Secretary Caroe and Viceroy Wavell’s support for the proposal, London’s Whitehall took a dim view, and no real expansion of Indian numbers occurred in the External Affairs Department until the interim government headed by Nehru in 1946. In July 1947 the new Ministry of External Affairs inherited only seventeen Indians from among the 124 officers of the erstwhile Indian Political Service of the Raj. In foreign policy therefore the new Indian state was less well resourced than in internal affairs and defense, where the police and the Indian Army were overwhelmingly staffed by Indians and the civil service had been considerably Indianized.

Harcourt Butler once said, “We want lean and keen men on the frontier and fat and good-natured men in the states.”⁶ Under the Raj, candidates for the Political Service had to be army officers under the age of twenty-six or civilians with five years’ experience. They were required to be unmarried at the time and to pass a not-very-difficult exam. There is some truth in the claim that the Political Department consisted of soldiers with brains and civilians who could ride and shoot. Unhampered by the Civil Service commissioners in London, the Political Department could adopt a more practical approach in selecting the right men to fill the various posts of consul, diplomat, resident, or frontier officer. Curzon paid the ultimate compliment to the Political Service after leaving India when he said, “There is no more varied or responsible service in the world than that of the Political Department of the GOI.”

In 1900 more than 650 “native states” made up British India, containing roughly 63 million people in an area of about 700,000 square miles. No one could be precise about the statistics, since there was no clarity on whether to include Nepal or tiny statelets in Kathiawar. Excluding these, the total was about 630 states with huge variations in their powers and practices. Five of the largest were in direct political relations with the government of India: Kashmir, Hyderabad, Mysore, Nepal, and (from 1876) Baroda, all of which were dealt with by the Foreign Office and its Political Department. The historic Rajput kingdoms such as Jaipur and Udaipur were grouped under the Agent to the Governor General (AGG) in Rajputana; and Maratha principalities Gwalior and Indore were placed with 146 other states under the AGG in Central India. Most of the remainder came under the control of provincial governments including the Sikh states in the Punjab, Travancore and Cochin in Madras, Rampur in the North West Province, and Sikkim and Cooch Behar in Bengal. The majority of all the “native states” of India, over 350 of them, were regulated by the Political Department of Bombay presidency. Nepal was the most autonomous of all the states in the subcontinent (other than Afghanistan after 1880), whose foreign relations were conducted by the government of India. While Calcutta did not interfere in Nepal’s internal administration, it controlled Nepal’s import of weapons and refused to let it fight Sikkim or any other state. “Divide and rule” was rampant within the subcontinent in the complex arrangements that the British made to deal with all these entities.

The major states and all those under the AGGs came within the orbit of the Political Department of the Foreign Office. The foreign secretary in India was a civil servant who, unlike other government secretaries, was not responsible to a member of the viceroy’s council but to the viceroy himself. (There are shades of this practice today in the direct interest that Indian prime ministers take in the Ministry of External Affairs.) The foreign secretary ran the Political Department, dealt with “native chiefs,” and administered the foreign relations of the government of India. His arc of responsibility stretched from Aden to Bushire, up to Kashgar and to Tibet. Foreign Office posts included a resident in “Turkish Arabia,” another in Bushire in the Persian Gulf, and a consul general in Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, each considered significant for the Great Game or protecting the sea route to India. In the hierarchy of politicals, the top posts were the residents of Hyderabad and Mysore who each received salaries of 48,000 rupees, the same as high court judges, the AGGs, and the foreign secretary himself.

In Victoria’s empire, three-fourths of civilians on active service were stationed in the regulation provinces (Bengal, Bombay, Madras, and the North-Western provinces); one-tenth, or some ninety, civilians worked at desks in Calcutta, Simla, and provincial capitals; and the rest were distributed among the native states serving as residents and political agents in the political departments and the non-regulation provinces, where they worked as administrators in Burma, Assam, the Punjab, and central provinces. In all places outside regulation provinces administrative posts were shared between Indian Army officers and the Indian Civil Service. In 1856 Governor-General Dalhousie insisted that places in non-regulation provinces be divided equally between the army and civil service. In 1867 the civilian element was increased to two-thirds and the military role was gradually eroded. By 1903 army officers were no longer employed in the Punjab. In 1907 they were excluded from Assam and confined to Burma and the North-West Frontier. In the Political Department, however, they retained their ascendancy, consistently outnumbering civilians by a ratio of 7 to 3.⁷ Notice the landward bias. The sea was a purely British concern, dealt with by London through the Royal Navy. Some of this bias carried over into Indian institutional thinking after independence, making the new republic sea-blind for a few decades.

The new government of independent India did not inherit a cadre of people versed in foreign policy and strategy. There were a few individual Indians who had been in the Political Service, some of whom became familiar with foreign and security policy because of Caroe and others—personages such as K. P. S. Menon, Girija Shankar Bajpai, and S. B. S. Shah. But actual experience of handling foreign relations was limited and the new India had to build a diplomatic service and foreign office of its own. Despite this inheritance, the government of free India was often assumed to have inherited the institutional embodiment of “subimperial diplomacy,” or have adopted the British view of themselves as being at the center of a vast sphere of influence controlled from the mountaintop capital of Simla.⁸ Instead, the new leaders of India had a very different view of the function of diplomacy and an instinctive mistrust of the instruments of the Raj that they had struggled against to attain India’s freedom.

Nehru built a very different Foreign Office and sought to imbue it with a new spirit. He staffed it with Indians drawn from public life, academia, and the freedom movement, from War Service Commission officers who had enlisted to fight in World War II when the armed forces were among the few respectable careers open to educated Indians, and from the former princely classes. He tried to shape this miscellaneous group into a Foreign Office to serve new India’s interests, imparting his ideas and setting in place practices and habits of intellectual curiosity, pluralism, patriotism tinged with internationalism, and independent thinking, which for many years enabled India to punch above its realpolitik weight in the world.

Speaking to a young Y. D. Gundevia, a future foreign secretary of India, in his South Block office in 1948, Nehru pointed to spots on the world map and excitedly told the young officer, “We will have forty embassies! We will have forty missions!” That was achieved in five years.⁹ Today India has the twelfth largest diplomatic contingent the world, with 181 diplomatic posts of which 124 are embassies or high commissions, 48 are consulates, 5 are permanent missions, and 4 are other representations. India has come a long way.

The government of independent India had its hands full at independence at home and in the subcontinent. But the world doesn’t wait at your convenience, allowing you to sort out your internal order before challenging you. Before the new government could catch its breath, two events pointed out independent India’s geopolitical future as different from that of any previous regime or state on the subcontinent—the creation of Pakistan and China’s entry into Tibet.

In addition, at this same juncture the world was being divided into two camps, one led by the United States and a second by the Soviet Union. On March 5, 1946, at a college in Fulton, Missouri, with U.S. President Harry Truman present, former British prime minister Winston Churchill spoke of an iron curtain descending on Europe “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” Churchill went on to speak of the “special relationship” of the United States and Britain, of the “sinews of peace,” of “Communist fifth columns,” and that there must be no appeasement of Stalin and the Soviet Union—all the main themes of future Cold Warriors in the West.

Different views pervaded the Indian leadership, of course, on how to transform India, on the priorities, and on how to address poverty and inequality. Opinions ranged from the communists, the second largest party in India’s first parliament, some of whose comrades were leading an armed uprising in Telangana, to the extreme right who saw a capitalist road as the only answer, with others through all points in between. Each group was reflected in the ruling Congress Party itself, and each had a foreign policy line of its own. The communists sought an alliance with the Soviet Union, while rightists saw alliance with Britain and the United States as the way forward. Clear differences of opinion ranged from how India should approach its strategic tasks, on its international role, to how to harness the world to India’s economic development.

For Nehru, India’s independence marked the rise of Asia. As he had said in the Tryst speech: “Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart.” As early as 1928 the Calcutta Congress resolution had spoken of an “Asia whose fate is tied together” and sought a conference on Asia in 1930. One of the first tasks Nehru undertook was to organize the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in March 1947, inviting not just the states of Asia but also those who were still colonized or not yet free. For Nehru it was through a larger “community of peace” and through political, economic, and cultural ties and solidarity that Asia would overcome its deficit of power and prosperity and find security.

On the other hand, K. M. Panikkar, along with C. Rajagopalachari, T. T. Krishnamachari, and others, was akin to the British in seeing India’s centrality in what they called the near and far east. They especially saw an advantage in maintaining close association with Great Britain. Panikkar had advocated as early as 1919 to “knit India to England and England to India in free partnership.”¹⁰ In 1943 he saw India as a security provider and key economic power for the region because of its “geographic position, size, resources, manpower and industrial potential.”¹¹ He quoted President Quezon of the Philippines as declaring that “without a free India no nation in south-east Asia can be free.” Panikkar was not alone in his suggestions. T. T. Krishnamachari advocated a regional organization from Suez to Australia with a defense council, all centered on India and in association with Britain. Others such as Iqbal Singh and P. N. Kirpal advocated similar views. Within the Congress Party itself, there were differences. Patel too seemed sometimes to suggest that he believed that India’s rightful place was as a Western ally opposed to totalitarian Communist regimes.

Perhaps the clearest expression of Panikkar’s views was in 1946 when he wrote, in words that echoed Caroe: “The Indian Ocean area together with Afghanistan, Sinkiang and Tibet as the outer northern ring constitute the real security of India. Geographically also this is one strategic unit, with India as its great air land center and as the base and arsenal of its naval power. From the central triangle of India the whole area can be controlled and defended.”¹²

This is a very different view of India’s role in Asia’s geopolitics from Nehru’s sense of an Asian renaissance based on decolonization and an equal association of free states in opposition to imperialism and bloc politics that he called the “area of peace.” Panikkar and Patel prioritized the fight against communism and saw a role for India as a security provider in southeast Asia. Nehru, instead, prioritized decolonization as a means to enable pan-Asian solidarity, leading to joint actions to preserve peace, in contrast to the traditional power politics of the United States and western powers that he blamed for India’s and Asia’s condition. Where Nehru and Panikkar agreed was that the Cold War had established a new global strategic order—an extension of a European-dominated system that would ultimately be transient.

There was also a “Hindu” alternative to the debate in the Congress, often called Hindu nationalism, although Hindus were involved in all sides of the discussion. Swami Vivekananda had argued at the end of the nineteenth century that reformed Hinduism based on the early Vedas could liberate India and free the world from “fanaticism and religious wars.” This, he believed, would involve karma-yoga, making Indians physically strong and rebuilding Indian civilization using modern ideas. Once India mastered science and became a “European society with Indian religion,” it would conquer its former conquerors, Muslim and Western, by spiritual rather than by military power. The idea that India’s security could be achieved by universal acknowledgment of the truths of Hindu sanatana dharma (roughly, the true, eternal way) also later drove the thinking of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, president of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha political party, and M. S. Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (or National Volunteer Organisation) from 1940 to 1973. This idea is also reflected in current prime minister Narendra Modi’s professed goal for India as a vishwaguru, or world teacher. Savarkar and Golwalkar both argued that Hinduism is destined to bring world peace, but that sanatana dharma would only be taken seriously when India is a “self-confident, resurgent and mighty nation.” Both men had a Hobbesian view of an anarchic world composed of “selfish individuals and parochially minded communities” where war was inevitable. For them national power came from exclusionary religious nationalism and a strong martial national identity. Cosmopolitanism was nether desirable nor necessary for Savarkar. Alliances were to be based on self-interest rather than ideals for Golwalkar: “Nations change their friends and foes as it suits their self-interest.”¹³ Theirs was, at that time, a small voice without influence on power and was focused by its leaders on eliminating “internal threats”—Muslims, Christians, and communists—in the pursuit of which they were ready to work with the colonial power while admiring the European fascists.

The Indian Communists too had their own internal debate on foreign policy because not all were willing to blindly follow the Comintern or Soviet line. They differed on whether India was ripe for armed revolution, and since Soviet policy under Stalin had shifted on this question (depending on Stalin’s need for Britain during the war and his rather dim view of peasant revolutions in China and India), the Comintern line kept shifting too. Those Indian communists not flexible enough to follow the shifts and who thought for themselves soon found themselves outside the party and even less effective than before in shaping newly independent India’s policy. It was only after they broke free of outside direction and tutelage and began thinking as Indians in the 1960s that the communists began to have some influence on India’s foreign policy.

At independence all sides of the debate were, in a sense, anticipating events, and all were ultimately blindsided by what actually transpired. India’s independence came well before most of southeast Asia was free. Ideas of a greater Indian role in southeast Asia, whether as a leader of pan-Asianism or as a security provider along with Britain, ignored the resentment and hostility aroused by India’s role as the gendarme of colonialism in Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Indian Army’s significant contribution to restoring colonialism in Indonesia, Malaya, and Indochina after World War II. It was the Indian Army that actually defeated the Japanese Army in land warfare on the Asian continent. In the last months of 1945, troops of the British empire, most of them from the Indian Army, had reconstituted the great crescent of land that Britain had occupied before 1941 and had then fanned out beyond it, from Bengal through Burma and Thailand and on to Singapore. By 1946 the British military empire stretched wider still, from the Persian railhead at Zahedan to New Guinea and the Australian seas—an arc of control from Suez to Sydney. For a while Indian troops occupied half of French Indochina and large parts of Indonesia and were part of occupation forces in Japan.¹⁴

It was this use of the Indian Army as an instrument of the British empire that Nehru and the Congress objected to. One of the first things that the interim government under Nehru did after coming to power in September 1946 was to ask for and secure the withdrawal of Indian Army units from Japan, Annam, and other points, but it was only in 1947 that all Indian Army units were finally withdrawn from southeast Asia.

Panikkar’s ideas of India working in partnership with Britain as a security provider in postwar Asia were not practical policy after Partition. The internal security duties the army had to perform and the war in Jammu and Kashmir of 1947–1948 severely limited what the army could do. India lacked the maritime dominance in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea of the Royal Navy before 1941, and had lost its access to west Asia with Partition. Nor did the situation in southeast Asia permit India to play the sort of role that Panikkar envisaged. Patel’s death in December 1950 removed the last powerful advocate of such thinking within government. And perceived British perfidy at the United Nations on Kashmir in 1948 made argument for continued close association with Britain more difficult. This did not extend to Nehru, who saw value in finding a way for India to remain in the Commonwealth as a republic, without owing allegiance to the British sovereign as had been the case. It also says something for Nehru’s catholicity of outlook and tolerance, and perhaps of the paucity of Indian experience and talent, that despite differences in approach, he appointed K. M. Panikkar as his second ambassador to China and, after 1951, Egypt, whose leader Nasser was Nehru’s friend and partner in building the idea of nonalignment.

Whatever their differences on how to engage with the world, all sides in the debate were agreed on an active Indian role abroad. Nehru not only summoned an Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947, but thereafter played an active role mediating conflicts in Korea and Indochina and pushed for decolonization in Asia. The high point of pan-Asianism was probably the Bandung conference of Afro-Asian countries in 1955. Thereafter, the Cold War and preoccupations with decolonization made options of working with the West much less likely and attractive.

In other words, while there were differing conceptions within the Indian leadership of India’s role in the geopolitics of Asia initially, no view was fully in consonance with the reality of the situation in Asia or with India’s capabilities, further constrained by the consequences of Partition. Most Indian leaders deferred to Nehru’s greater knowledge of the world in matters external to India. In any case, Nehru’s stress on decolonization and pan-Asianism—a prevailing view up to Bandung in 1955—was soon eclipsed by the Cold War and the great powers.

Nehru, as we have seen, had a grander, more expansive, and more ambitious view of India’s role in Asia than other Indians who thought of these issues. Nehru sought nothing less than a radical and complete reworking or remaking of Asian and global geopolitics. Three overarching causes impelled him to do so: the first was the need to transform India. The second was the threat of nuclear annihilation after the atom bomb gave nations the power to destroy human civilization. And the third was the need to free Asia and Africa from the colonial yoke. Nehru saw these as interlinked and as warranting an area of peace, or a concert of peace-loving peoples and countries, which would lead ultimately to One World. Almost all his international initiatives through the early 1950s were intended to further these goals.

In March 1947, with India’s independence a few months away, Nehru convened a conference at the foot of the Old Fort in Delhi of twenty-eight Asian countries that were independent or still colonies. In his inaugural address he spoke of pan-Asianism not as a turning away from the West but of Asia taking its rightful place in the world. “Asia, after a long period of quiescence, has suddenly become important again in world affairs,” he said. “For too long have we of Asia been petitioners in Western courts and chancelleries. That story must now belong to the past. We propose to stand on our legs, and to co-operate with all others who are prepared to co-operate with us. We do not intend to be the playthings of others.” Brave and strong words that still inspire. He also said that

in this work there are no leaders and no followers.… Apart from the fact that India herself is emerging into freedom and independence, she is that natural center and focal point of the many forces at work in Asia. Geography is a compelling factor, and geographically she is so situated as to be the meeting point of Western and Northern and Eastern and South-East Asia. Because of this, the history of India is a long history of her relations with the other countries of Asia.¹⁵

Was Nehru reasonable to seek such grand goals? For Nehru that was a secondary question. He saw that power, military and economic, was not enough without legitimacy. He was also realist enough not to underestimate the difficulty of what he was trying to achieve. To those who thought he should concentrate on India’s internal development and not the world, he would answer that world peace was essential for India’s development. Besides, he believed strongly that India, with her civilizational legacy, was the natural thought leader of global processes despite her limitations of hard power.

One must admire the boldness of Nehru’s worldview, unlike those of Panikkar and others whose thinking was somewhat derivative and shifted with the fashion of the day. But Nehru’s ideas, prioritizing legitimacy over power, also led him to ignore real threats and ultimately to failures, as in his dealings with China.

However, three of Nehru’s goals were actually achieved in large measure, although not by the means he envisaged or entirely by Indian agency. First, India’s and Asia’s economies today have been transformed beyond expectations, but not following Nehru’s chosen economic path. Second, a nuclear holocaust has been averted, thus far. Third, Asia and Africa have been decolonized. In little more than fifteen years following India’s independence, the regional international system was transformed from one dominated by empires to one populated by sovereign states. Decolonization in the Indian Ocean region was a far more fundamental shift than even the end of the Cold War. Rather than just a shift in alliances or a change in power distribution, or the entrance and departure of new states, it changed beliefs about the legitimacy of empire and replaced empire with sovereign states. For the first time in centuries the constituents of the regional Asian order were essentially identical in the Indian Ocean, maritime Asia, Europe, and the rest of the world.¹⁶ Whether this was due to the better side of our natures asserting themselves or because of the operation of balance of power politics dear to realists, or other reasons, is something that will always be contested. Ironically, Nehru’s ultimate goals of Asian solidarity and One World have become the slogans of a nation he might not have expected, China.

It is easy in hindsight to criticize Nehru for his advocacy of One World in a Cold War world. We forget that this was not just an Indian idea and that it had wider attraction. U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt was among the leaders who had spoken of the idea. In India the Quit India resolution of the Bombay Congress in 1942 championed the cause of world federation: “The future peace, security and ordered progress of the world demand a world federation of free nations, as on no other basis can the problems of the modern world be solved.” Even in 1942 this was not a new sentiment for Nehru and the Congress. Earlier resolutions on foreign affairs, from 1921 onward, had spoken of “an Asia whose fate is tied together” and sought a conference on Asia in 1930. It was hardly surprising that India was therefore one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the UN at its inception.

The role that India played in these processes of decolonization, Asian solidarity, and peace building in the 1950s was truly remarkable, given its lack of capability and domestic preoccupations and the increasingly unpropitious international situation. But in the end Nehru’s attempt to remake Asian geopolitics came up against the state of the world in the Cold War, Asia’s own divisions, and events.

In the aftermath of another world war, the world that the new Indian state was born into in 1947 was still in flux and dominated by U.S. economic, military, and political power. The United States faced only the Soviet Union as a potential but far weaker competitor. Despite Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech, the Cold War was not yet set in stone.

India was among the first colonies to achieve freedom. Nehru’s first instincts were to seek good relations with all. He visited the United States relatively early in 1949 and again in 1956, but by then, the lines of U.S. policy had already hardened. A McCarthyite United States was judging the world through a yes or no test: communist or not communist. The newly empowered country seemed to be searching for scapegoats to blame for the loss of China to the communists. In India’s case this was ameliorated somewhat by the U.S. hope that democratic India could be won to the anticommunist cause, having just fought off an armed Communist uprising in Telangana, by an appreciation of India’s potential as a market, and by India’s potential as a partner against communist China. But Nehru’s three-week visit from October 11 to November 4, 1949, did not go well. Nehru’s sympathies were with American progressives such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who was a persona non grata to the State Department. Nehru added three days to his stay to meet with friends on the left, such as actor and activist Paul Robeson, and with the NAACP and others fighting segregation in the country. As U.S. politics moved away from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and into Cold War ideology under Truman, Nehru was increasingly out of tune with U.S. policy. Nehru was certainly not anti-Western, but his idea of the West diverged from the direction in which the United States and Europe were evolving. Ironically, this occurred just as the United States was gaining an increasing role in Asia, independent of Britain and the declining European colonial powers, and when neither the Soviet Union nor China could match the United States in Asia. Asia’s politics and economy throughout Nehru’s lifetime were largely determined by the actions of the United States and its allies and the reactions they provoked. At no stage could the Soviet Union build alliances or a military and economic presence in Asia to challenge the United States.

Nehru also tried to reach out to the Soviet Union, which he had visited in 1927, but until Stalin’s death in 1953, nothing significant occurred. Stalin reportedly did not once meet the first Indian ambassador, Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, although he did meet two of her successors. In part, both Stalin and China’s Mao, his ally, were skeptical of India as a former part of the British empire. It took some time for both to accept Indian independence as genuine. Stalin may have revised his view of India, however, after seeing India’s neutral approach and attempts at mediation during the Korean War, leading to his pulling back on support for communist revolution in India.

As the Cold War hardened in Asia in the mid- to late 1950s, it affected and limited the geopolitical space available to India. While the United States approached others with a for-or-against-communism attitude, a more isolated Soviet Union saw any country that was not an enemy as a friend. The United States organized SEATO in 1954 and CENTO in 1955, further hardening Cold War positions. Pakistan was a founder member of both.¹⁷ The Soviet Union, on the other hand, lacked allies or a treaty presence in Asia apart from North Korea and its difficult partner, China. The Soviets therefore befriended countries that could be neutral like India. As U.S.-Soviet relations intensified in the mid-1950s through various crises, and as Sino-Soviet antagonism worsened after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Indo-Soviet ties warmed through the late 1950s, surviving despite Nehru’s public criticism of the Soviets during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and in 1958.

As noted above, Nehru preferred a nonpartisan role for India during the Cold War, one free of the entanglement of alliances. He had learned a valuable lesson from World War II, when the country had been dragged into the conflict by its British overlords. “We propose, so far as possible, to keep away from the power politics of groups aligned against one another, which have led in the past to world wars and which may again lead to disasters on an even vaster scale,” Nehru said in September 1946. An early sign of this policy was the decision by the new government of independent India to forgo war reparations from Japan after World War II and not to sign the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which Nehru considered victor’s justice. Instead India signed a separate peace treaty with Japan and sought to facilitate Japan’s reentry into the international community.

For Nehru nonalignment was as much pragmatism as principle, an instrument as much as a policy. It was, he said, “not a wise policy to put all our eggs in one basket … purely from the point of view of opportunism … an independent policy is the best.”¹⁸ He always said that nonalignment was best judged by its results and outcomes in practice. He was temperamentally opposed to any attempt to raise it to credo or to institutionalize it. Nehru therefore successfully resisted attempts by China at Bandung and by Indonesia’s Sukarno and others later to organize the nonaligned countries into a regular system of meetings with a secretariat. For Nehru it made no sense to oppose the Cold War blocs only to form another bloc of the nonaligned. Such institutionalization as did occur, and even the nomenclature of a Non-Aligned Movement, only became current and was adopted as his influence waned, particularly after the war with China in 1962. When China tried and failed with Sukarno and others to create an alternate bloc of Afro-Asian countries after 1962, it became clear that Nehru’s looser conception of nonalignment, which allowed countries to use the policy for their own ends rather than be led by a bloc or its leaders, was much more practical and appealed to many more countries.

Nehru’s grand conception of India’s place in the world was chiefly circumscribed by geopolitical changes that followed the partition of India and the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Both Pakistan and China limited Nehru’s attempt to remake Asian geopolitics. As Olaf Caroe noted, partition had turned the subcontinent in on itself, and in his eyes the events of 1947 were tantamount to the “negation of India’s power.¹⁹

The new government of India was faced at birth with outright war and a series of Pakistan-related crises, the most significant of which involved Jammu and Kashmir in 1948, 1950, and 1951. Those had been preceded by Junagadh and Hyderabad and by bilateral crises over water, property, refugees, and other issues.

The details of Kashmir’s accession to India and the war of 1947–1948 are well known. Less well known, probably because it was a lingering and long-lasting crisis, was the continued suffering caused by migration between what was then East Pakistan and India. In 1950 violence against minorities in East Pakistan triggered the movement of a large number of refugees to India, leading again to the brink of war. War was only averted by Nehru using military mobilization to coerce Pakistan into accepting his proposals for steps to restore confidence in the minorities. Nehru and Pakistan prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan did so in the April Nehru-Liaquat pact in Delhi. Several factors impinged simultaneously on the government of India’s responses and actions vis à vis Pakistan thanks to the constant overlay of other events on the running Jammu and Kashmir crises, such as the effects of Pakistan policy on integration of states like Hyderabad with recalcitrant rulers seeking independence, the communal situation in India, and broader international ramifications. For instance, the decision to move militarily into Hyderabad on September 13, 1948, was hastened by the storm in Jammu and Kashmir. It is this interrelationship between events that drives decisionmakers’ minds and that historians miss if they consider each issue in isolation. Initially, Patel was open to the possibility of Kashmir joining Pakistan. In the Constituent Assembly he was skeptical of giving Kashmir special status through the device of Article 370. But once war broke out, and he saw the ramifications of Kashmir acceding to Pakistan on other states like Hyderabad, he changed his mind.

The creation of Pakistan had one immediate geopolitical consequence—India now had a hostile neighbor in the west, with claims on Indian territory, which had won independence from India, not from Britain as India had done, and whose fragile sense of identity was built from the beginning in opposition to India. The story is told that when Zia-ul-Haq, president of Pakistan, was asked in 1987 why he had introduced nizam-e-mustafa (literally, rule by the prophet) to Islamize Pakistan, he replied: “If an Egyptian stops being a muslim he is still an Egyptian, if a Turk stops being a muslim he is still a Turk, but if a Pakistani stops being a muslim he becomes an Indian.” Even if apocryphal, the story reveals a truth that Pakistan’s rulers are conscious of—the fragility of the Pakistani sense of identity.

The international situation was also not helpful to India when Pakistan first sent tribal raiders followed by the Pakistan Army into Kashmir in an attempt to force the Maharajah to accede to Pakistan and then to take it by force. India, after Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India on October 26, 1947, sent in troops and complained to the UN Security Council about Pakistani aggression. There was no doubt and ample proof of Pakistani aggression. But for their own purposes, to use Pakistan and to insert themselves into the issue, the United Kingdom led the United States into treating the matter as a dispute between two states over the status of Jammu and Kashmir rather than as a case of aggression that must be vacated. The prevarication and diplomacy involved is well described in Chandrashekhar Dasgupta’s book both as a description of the issue and of how power politics is played. The United Kingdom worked consciously for a solution to Jammu and Kashmir that was satisfactory to Pakistan. The United States was persuaded to go along with British policy on Jammu and Kashmir in the UN in 1948.²⁰ That these parties could find no solution to the dilemma of Jammu and Kashmir was due to India’s coercive strategy and willingness to go it alone and reject what was pushed onto the country through the UN.

There has been much second guessing of the Indian decision to take the Kashmir issue to the United Nations, and of the conduct of the war, including the decision to accept a UN-sponsored ceasefire in December 1948. Patel, for one, questioned Nehru’s promising the UN a plebiscite or referendum to determine the future of Kashmir. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, clear and certain and never available to the participants. For me, what stands out is how limited were the instruments available to India at the time. The first commanders-in-chief of both the Indian and Pakistani armies were British and reported more extensively to their own diplomats and their compatriots in Pakistan or India than to their nominal political masters in India. In India there were even occasions when the British commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, General Roy Bucher, did not carry out direct orders from his Indian masters. When a key moment arrived regarding the prosecution of the war in Jammu and Kashmir, it was the considered advice of the Indian and British military commanders to Nehru that India could not carry the war to a victorious conclusion and that India accept a ceasefire.

India rejected the UN resolution of April 1948 but accepted the resolution of August 1948 with conditions. Pakistan refused to implement critical parts of the resolutions, such as the withdrawal from Jammu and Kashmir of Pakistani forces and tribal forces, but later began to use the resolutions for propaganda. Once a ceasefire took effect on December 31, 1948, the ceasefire line was delimited within six months. None of the subsequent steps envisaged by the UN resolutions or agreed to by both India and Pakistan, albeit with conditions, such as the truce agreement, plebiscite, and others, were ever implemented, and they were soon made irrelevant by developments on the ground. All in all, however, in practice India’s core interests were preserved in Jammu and Kashmir.

As a result of India’s actions to secure Kashmir and the country’s further mobilization in 1950 and successful use of coercive strategies, Pakistan concluded that it could not take Kashmir from India by conventional war. Thus, formal peace was maintained for several years, while Pakistan concentrated on covert means and sought to destabilize Jammu and Kashmir and India itself, a policy that continues today.²¹

There are some who blame India’s coercion and success in thwarting Pakistan in Kashmir for the outsize political role of the Pakistan Army in Pakistan’s politics. This puts the cart before the horse. One of the Pakistan Army’s calculations in starting the war in Kashmir may well have been that hostility toward India would help the army gain power within Pakistan. Besides, jihad in Kashmir gave the Pakistan Army allies among the religious right in Pakistan.²² Responsibility for that can hardly be laid at India’s door.

As noted earlier, the 1948 war over Kashmir made Pakistan available as a Western partner as the Cold War began. Olaf Caroe argued in the late 1940s that control of the oilfields of southwestern Asia were critical, that in the contest between the West and the Soviet Union, control of India (and Pakistan after Partition) would ensure control of the Gulf region, that stability in the Middle East depended on British control of undivided India, and that with India’s breakup Pakistan would have to take over the role of enabling control of the oil fields.²³ After Partition, the West found a ready client in Pakistan. The United States and the United Kingdom worked to create a Western-oriented South Asia in order to serve their Cold War interest in containing the Soviet Union and China. When the war in Jammu and Kashmir made it clear that India-Pakistan hostility made it impossible to have both India and Pakistan as allies and forced a choice between the two, Caroe’s arguments about Pakistan’s utility prevailed in Western counsels. The United Kingdom argued that having created Israel and alienated Muslim opinion throughout the Middle East, it and the United States would be seen letting down Pakistan, an untenable position to the Arabs, if they did not support Pakistan in Kashmir. Besides, India’s neutrality in Korea and on other issues made that country an unlikely partner.

From a Pakistani point of view, the serial Kashmir crises were proof of its need to obtain arms and external security guarantees. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan sought weapons from the United States in a letter to Secretary of State Dean Acheson on October 25, 1951. Two weeks later the United States sought discussions with Pakistan on the defense of the Middle East.

The 1948 war had another effect with lasting consequences. It transformed the Indian Army, previously viewed as an imperial instrument of British India, into the national army of India in the popular mind and in the minds of the leaders of the freedom movement. The war also clarified Indian attitudes as to force and its use. Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence, himself justified this war because Indian territorial integrity was threatened.²⁴ As far back as 1928 Gandhi had written, “If there was a national government, whilst I should not take any direct part in any war, I can conceive of occasions when it would be my duty to vote for the military training of those who wish to take it.… It is not possible to make a person or society non-violent by compulsion.” At a prayer meeting on September 26, 1947, Gandhi spoke of his long opposition to all warfare, but added that if all other avenues had failed to secure justice, war was the only alternative left to the government. Faced with tribal raiders sent by Pakistan into Kashmir in October 1947, Gandhi said that it was right to save Srinagar (capital of Jammu and Kashmir) by rushing troops there. He added that he would rather that the defenders be wiped out to the last man to clear Kashmir’s soil of the raiders than to submit.

On October 7, 1950, 40,000 troops from two divisions of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the Sino-Tibetan border at three points. On the same day China announced its military support for the beleaguered North Koreans who had bitten off more than they could chew by invading South Korea and provoking American-led intervention.

The creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and its occupation of Tibet in 1950 marked the second major geopolitical shift that accompanied the birth of the modern Indian state. Tibet was to be central to India-China relations in the 1950s and to have long-term consequences for Indian policy long after the fate of Tibet itself as a political entity had been decided.

It had been clear for some years that China intended to occupy Tibet, as it figured into Mao’s 1936 list of territories lost to China, which also included Nepal and Bhutan. While waiting in the western hills outside Beijing, from April to September 1949, he had noted the “liberation of Taiwan and Tibet” among the first tasks of his new government.²⁵ Nehru and his officials were aware that this would create problems along India’s borders. They therefore initiated contacts in 1947 with the Tibetan government of the Dalai Lama to see what might be done, and the military options were examined internally from 1948 on. An Indian Army major, Zorawar Chand (Zoru) Bakshi, later called “India’s most decorated general,” was sent into Tibet by Foreign Secretary K. P. S. Menon to report on the situation and its possibilities. The Tibetans themselves were divided on what to do and the fourteenth Dalai Lama was still a minor. Apart from Finance Minister Tsepon Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa and Head of the Mint Tsarong Dzasa, the rest of the Kashag, or Tibetan cabinet, did not want to risk provoking the Chinese with a military buildup. When the cabinet did finally ask for arms from India and sent a delegation to canvas the world in 1948, it was too little too late. India supplied some weapons in June 1949 and attempted training, but as Chief of Army Staff General Cariappa told Nehru in October 1950, the Tibetans had no military capacity to withstand the battle-hardened PLA, which had just driven the nationalist Chinese troops off the Chinese mainland. Cariappa added that the Indian Army itself, engaged in war in Kashmir and internal security duties, could at best spare one battalion of troops for Tibet. They would not be acclimatized and deployment would be limited to Yatung in the Chumbi Valley or, at the limit, no further than Gyantse and then not for long. In effect, India had no real military options in Tibet.

Nehru therefore had no choice but to use nonmilitary means such as diplomacy and persuasion. And in that, too, he was inhibited both by what the British had done to promote and recognize Chinese suzerainty over Tibet (in order to keep the Russian bogeyman out) and by the Tibetan desire to negotiate directly with China. The British had consistently refused to arm the Tibetans in the past, and a 1940 British Foreign Office note opined, presciently, that “China is bound to absorb Tibet after the war if not before and we can do nothing to prevent it.” Once the Chinese moved in, the United States encouraged the Dalai Lama to go into exile in Thailand or Sri Lanka, but he chose not to accept the offer. Mao had offered better terms and abandoning his people in Tibet must have seemed wrong.²⁶

Nehru is sometimes accused of “losing” Tibet in 1950, but he had little choice but to choose non-intervention. In effect, India had no military options and little diplomatic play. On November 18, 1950, Nehru wrote: “It must be remembered that neither the UK nor the United States, nor indeed any other power, is particularly interested in Tibet or the future of that country. What they are interested in is embarrassing China.” Sadly, this is arguably as true today as when Nehru wrote those words. When the Tibetans appealed to the United Nations on November 7, 1950, they received no support.

The signing of the 17 Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet on May 23, 1951, between the Tibetan authorities and the People’s Republic of China, further limited India’s options. The agreement has since been repudiated by the Dalai Lama. Incidentally, this remains the only such agreement in the People’s Republic’s history, and its signing implicitly recognizes de facto Tibetan independence before 1950 and that Tibet’s status is different from that of the rest of China.

Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel had written to Nehru early in November 1950 bitterly criticizing Chinese actions in Tibet and warning against the dangers this posed to India. Nehru answered the note on November 18 and scheduled a discussion of the issues raised by Patel in cabinet, but Patel died on December 15, 1950. The conventional wisdom is that Patel’s concerns were ignored. In actual fact, much of what he advocated was put into practice both before and after he had written of his concerns. While Patel may have died, the real author of Patel’s note, Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai, remained in government as secretary general in the Ministry of External Affairs and then governor of Bombay and continued to advise and be consulted by Nehru.

Nehru’s realism is evident in the actions he took when it was clear that China would occupy Tibet. He moved quickly to fasten the Himalayan states to India and to ensure the security of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). The treaties with Nepal (July 31, 1950), Sikkim (December 15, 1950), and Bhutan (August 8, 1949) bound their security to India’s. The Chinese reacted to the treaty with Bhutan but not the others, saying that India had no right to make Bhutan a protectorate. On November 20, 1950, Nehru declared in parliament that the McMahon Line is India’s boundary “map or no map,” and that “we stand by that boundary and will not allow anyone to come across that boundary.” A North and North East Border Defense Committee was set up under Deputy Defense Minister Major General Himmatsinhji to advise on measures to secure the entire India-China border, particularly the eastern sector. NEFA was formed and detached from Assam to be put under direct central government administration. The Sixth Schedule of the Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950, for the administration of NEFA. Normal administration was introduced into the zone between the boundary and the inner frontiers left by the British in the northeast. In 1956 the Indian Frontier Administrative Service was formed. On February 12, 1950, Major R. (Bob) Khathing arrived in Tawang to extend Indian administration and expelled Tibetan ecclesiastical officials. (The Monpa tribes in this area, now the Kameng division of Arunachal Pradesh, are all of non-Tibetan origin.)

However, one must question some other steps that the government of India took in that period. For instance, on November 1, 1950, defense expenditure was pegged by the government at 1 percent of GNP, the Army was reduced by 50,000 men, and capital expenditure on defense was capped at 350 million rupees. The pre-Partition Indian Army of half a million had already been reduced by Partition to 280,000 and by 1951–1952 only numbered 230,000. The defense budget of 1.65 billion rupees was cut in 1952–1953 to 1.6 billion rupees.

India’s subsequent actions in relation to Tibet can also be called into question. In 1954 India gave up the privileges and rights that it had inherited from British India in an Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between India and the Tibet Region of China. Under the agreement India agreed to dismantle its wireless, telegraph, military detachments, and posts in Tibet and to effectively limit Indian presence and trade in Tibet. India even permitted the Chinese to feed their troops in Tibet with grain from India, and for the first few years Chinese supplies to Lhasa went through India! When an agreement with China was first being considered in 1951, Girija Shankar Bajpai, K. P. S. Menon, and others urged Nehru to make the agreement conditional on a clear understanding of where the India-China boundary lay and to negotiate that simultaneously. The ambassador to China, K. M. Panikkar, on the other hand, opposed the linkage to the boundary or even raising the issue. Nehru chose to listen to Panikkar.

By 1956 when the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama came to India on November 24 for the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment, eastern Tibet or Kham was in full-fledged revolt against the Chinese.²⁷ The Dalai Lama told Nehru that he did not wish to return to Tibet. Chinese concern over the Dalai Lama’s new position is evident from Premier Zhou Enlai’s three visits to India—between November 1956 and January 1957—until he managed to persuade Nehru and the Dalai Lama to drop the idea. Nehru always regretted this decision. In 1959, however, India readily granted asylum when the Dalai Lama escaped Tibet, and asylum continues to be assured in India—partly perhaps to ameliorate Nehru’s guilt at having asked the Dalai Lama to believe Chinese assurances in 1956.

Tibet, and China’s determination not to lose Tibet, was to be central to India-China relations in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately leading to war in 1962. In the early 1950s, China’s pretext for occupying Tibet was to protect it from an Indian takeover. This was also the argument used by Mao to justify the 1962 decision to attack India.

The Tibet issue had other long-term consequences for Indian foreign and security policy. India and the United States kept their relations on an even keel through the 1950s despite U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ charge that nonalignment was “immoral.” This was in part because the two countries agreed on Tibet. Such congruence was expressed in clandestine cooperation with and support for the Tibetan guerrilla resistance, begun as early as 1956 when China began consolidating its hold over the Khampas in eastern Tibet and settling Tibetan nomads in Szechuan prefectures.

Another consequence is still working itself out today, even when Tibet should no longer cause China neuralgia, now that Chinese power makes it unlikely that China will lose her physical grip on Tibet. After 1956, convinced that India was using the Tibetan refugees and the Dalai Lama to separate Tibet from China, China looked for other levers to pressure India. One that was close at hand was Pakistan, with its inveterate hostility to India, which was and remains the cement in the relationship between these two dissimilar allies.

Significantly, widespread sympathy for the Tibetan refugees and the Dalai Lama in India led to public opinion, the media, and the Indian parliament becoming increasingly hostile to China through the 1950s. China’s brutal treatment of peaceful Buddhist Tibetans who represent no threat still arouses widespread indignation in India. This effectively limited the Indian government’s options in dealing with China and the boundary question. There was no realistic prospect of rolling back the Chinese occupation of Tibet or of securing international recognition of Tibet as a country. Nor was there a meaningful possibility of working with the Chinese, as Nehru tried briefly in 1954–1956, to make Tibetan lives better and to preserve their autonomy, their links with India, and India’s role and presence in Tibet. Especially after 1959, given Chinese paranoia about Tibet, there were few good options for India’s Tibet policy.

Although a lack of hard power may have limited India’s options vis à vis China during this period, it did not inhibit dealings with the rest of the subcontinent. A stark contrast exists between Nehru’s methods in Nepal and Bhutan in 1947–1951 and those of China in Tibet. Nehru was quick to seek to stabilize relations with the Himalayan kingdoms and did not hesitate to use India’s dominance to influence their internal affairs, drawing on the legacy of British India but preferring minimal coercion and interference in the subcontinent’s affairs, unlike his less restrained daughter, Indira Gandhi.²⁸ Under Nehru, India assumed responsibilities that had previously been managed by British India in the Himalayan kingdoms in the treaties signed with Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan soon after independence. All three had been part of the inner ring of the Raj. In 1940 the Foreign Department had described Nepal as “a state with very special relationship with His Majesty’s Government.” The status of Bhutan and Sikkim was never clearly defined. As a nationalist, Nehru saw advantage in reorganizing their existing rights and international personality, ambiguous as those were. As a realist, however, he was wary of changes that might affect Indian security or the ability of the subcontinent to be a cohesive geopolitical unit.

Like all subsequent governments of India, Nehru’s government treated south Asia as the core of India’s security sphere. From the point of view of India’s smaller neighbors, India was an influential presence in their economies, polities, societies, and culture. India’s predominance in south Asia—with 75 percent of the population, 79 percent of GDP, and 75 percent of land area of south Asia narrowly defined, without Afghanistan and Myanmar—is compounded by its geographic centrality to the subcontinent. All other south Asian countries border India but none border one another, except Pakistan-Afghanistan and Bangladesh-Myanmar. It is natural for other states in the subcontinent to hedge against Indian dominance and push back, while at the same time drawing cultural, political, and other influences from India. And with sizeable ethnicities across each of India’s borders, the internal stability of its neighbors directly affects India’s security and vice versa.

From the 1950s these same affinities—crossborder ethnicities, social commonalities of language, religion, and culture, and economic integration, as well as porous borders within the subcontinent—have affected India’s security. Indian reactions to developments in the subcontinent are not a colonial Raj reflex or a regional hegemon’s policy. Instead those reactions constitute a neighborhood policy that flows from geography and history.²⁹ What India sees as defensive reactions to developments is sometimes seen differently by others. India is not helped by the fact that official and political India has adopted a very different and idealistic way of presenting its actions in the subcontinent as purely benevolent and altruistic. Particularly in its neighborhood policy, this sets up a false binary between values and interests, between the demands of realpolitik and stated principles like non-interference and sovereign equality. In most cases, the demands of both are or can be reconciled. Where they cannot, India has invariably chosen realpolitik over declaratory consistency.

Take, for instance, Nepal. In 1950–1951 India actively assisted King Tribhuvan and democratic forces led by the Nepali National Congress, which had been formed in 1947, to bring about the fall of the Rana autocracy. King Tribhuvan sought refuge in India in November 1950, and a pro-democracy rebellion by the Nepali Congress succeeded in February 1951. India strongly supported democratization then and during the rest of the decade. When I. K. Singh led a rebel faction of the Nepali Congress into revolt in January 1952, India provided military assistance to support the democratic regime forcing him to flee to exile in Tibet. But when the royal coup of 1960 ended Nepal’s first experiment with democracy, returning the kingdom to royal autocratic rule, India chose to work with the resulting regime of King Mahendra.

In Burma, as well, India worked closely first with General Aung San’s interim government and then, after he and his interim cabinet were assassinated in July 1947, with Prime Minister U Nu’s democratic government. India even provided military assistance for U Nu to fend off a communist rebellion in 1948. When Burma became free on January 4, 1948, there were 12,000 Kuomintang troops in northern Burma, and Karen ethnic insurgents were fighting the government with the full support of the Communist Party of Burma and the Chinese communists. Nehru provided the embattled government of Burma with weapons, ammunition, and six Dakota aircraft. U Nu later said, “Without the prompt support in arms and ammunition from India, Burma might have suffered the worst fate imaginable.”³⁰ Burma had pleaded with the United States to prevail on the Kuomintang on Taiwan to withdraw their troops from Burma, but to no avail. India and Burma then took the issue to the UN Security Council in April 1953. This was part of a policy of working with the governments of neighbors to stabilize the periphery and build the larger Asian area of peace, as Nehru called it, rather than an ideological call. Later, when the 1962 military coup ended fourteen years of multiparty democracy in Burma, India again worked with the new regime. In both these cases, the changed external environment, particularly with China, and an assessment of the internal stability of the new dispensations led to a pragmatic policy choice rather than a futile attempt to export India’s preferred liberal democratic values.

India’s active commitment to Indonesia’s freedom was also evident even before the country was fully independent. Nehru had met Mohammed Hatta in Brussels in 1927. Between 1946 and 1949, with the Indonesian struggle for freedom at its peak, the Indian National Congress under Nehru did its level best to support the struggle. Earlier Nehru had been firm in opposing ideas in the Congress of sending a brigade to Vietnam to assist Ho Chi Minh in his armed struggle against the French. But he was ready to extend all other kinds of support to General Aung San’s effort in Burma and to Sukarno and Hatta in Indonesia. On July 22, 1947, Indian politician Biju Patnaik, who had flown Hatta back to Indonesia, piloted a Dakota to help Indonesia’s prime minister, Sutan Sjahrir, escape the Dutch. India also raised the Indonesian issue in the UN Security Council on July 30, 1947, and with U.S. support resolutions were passed calling on Holland to stop its brutal crackdown. The Dutch, however, were not deterred. In early January 1949 Nehru convened an eighteen-nation conference on Indonesia in Delhi, and its conclusions were soon reflected in UNSC resolutions on January 28, 1949, recognizing the Republic of Indonesia. Sukarno visited India within weeks of assuming office on January 1, 1950, and was the chief guest at India’s first republic day on January 26, 1950.

India soon overcame a mixed reputation and legacy it had inherited at independence by strongly committing to decolonization, supporting national movements in southeast Asia, and working with established governments and democrats in the subcontinent. India had proven that it was no longer a colonial state. India also had to overcome the fact that some Indians had worked with the Japanese occupiers, which some nationalists in southeast Asia found repugnant. To overcome this legacy was truly an achievement for India.

Nehru is sometimes accused of neglecting the subcontinent in his pursuit of peace in Asia and the world, but this view is unfair. He perceived south Asia—a term popularized in the 1970s by U.S. social scientists and limiting in its scope—as deeply part of Asia. In this he was probably right. The subcontinent’s problems of poverty, security, and development, and of a peaceful international environment, were no different from those in the rest of Asia. Indeed, he practiced activism in the subcontinent and attempted to make the subcontinent as a whole a part of his larger conception of an Asian “area of peace.”³¹

Early actions by India in the late 1940s and 1950s in the subcontinent suggest an instinctive consolidation of the periphery by India through the renewal or renegotiation of treaty commitments, the coordination of foreign policies, and economic and social integration with immediate neighbors, the two largest excepted, China and Pakistan. The initial focus was on the neighbors with whom India shared a land boundary. The land boundaries were by and large agreed in principle in the 1950s, though demarcation on the ground was to take several years, again except for Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir and with China. The initial sea-blindness was soon overcome in the next two decades when maritime boundaries with Indonesia, Malaysia, and others were agreed, and the Indian Ocean region and neighbors such as Singapore began to play a growing role in Indian thinking.

The other geopolitical consequence of the creation of Pakistan was that India was cut off from central Asia, and its dealings with west Asia were now limited to the sea route, a route that India no longer dominated or controlled. The role that British India had played in west Asian security was no longer possible for India without extraordinary effort and diversion of resources. In any case, developments in the region itself minimized any role India could play because of the mix of new Arab nationalist and pro-Western regimes installed in west Asia after World War II. The creation of Israel in 1948 had further polarized west Asia and the Muslim world, which fed into India’s difficult relationship with Pakistan and the communal situation at home. This required particular effort by India to balance and manage its relations with countries in west Asia.

All in all, India successfully managed the rapid shifts in her geopolitical situation in the early years, before the Korean War hardened Cold War positions into alliances like CENTO and SEATO in the mid-1950s. However, events did limit India’s options. The choice of nonalignment, the best policy at the time, was limited in its effect on others. In a broader sense, India was on the side of history on the big questions of the time—decolonization, nuclear disarmament, and expanding the zone of peace, as Nehru called it. But that did not make short-term choices any easier or the environment any less challenging as Pakistan and China showed, while successive Cold War crises limited India’s political space.