An article entitled “India And The Superpowers” in this space on September 22 when Mrs Gandhi was in Moscow, said: “They (CPI leaders) must know that non-alignment is not another name for pro-Sovietism and anti-Americanism and that the gap between a non-aligned policy find a pro-Soviet one cannot be bridged by anti-imperialist rhetoric”. This understandably annoyed the CPI general secretary, Mr Rajeshwara Rao, who in a letter to this paper protested that we had even “denied the content of our non-alignment policy which is anti-imperialist and based on friendship with the Soviet Union… as formulated by the late Pandit Nehru and pursued by our country since then”.
This erroneous view of the country’s foreign policy is not limited to the CPI and its supporters. It is much more widespread. Indeed, a lot of westerners, especially Americans, tend to accept it. That makes it necessary to correct the wrong impression.
In a subsequent article entitled “Mrs Gandhi’s Visit To Russia” on September 25, we returned to the subject and emphasised that India had never endorsed specific Soviet positions in its conflict and competition with the West, especially as it related to Europe, that the interests and approaches of the two countries (India and the Soviet Union) inevitably diverged, that when they converged, as they did on Pakistan and China, the convergence was of necessity limited, that “essentially Indo-Soviet relations are bilateral and not global in scope” and that when Mrs Gandhi deplores the nuclear arms build-up, “she is by no means saying that the other side (the West) is to blame for it”.
Mutual Benefit
Three days later at the end of Mrs Gandhi’s visit to the Soviet Union, the UNI, one of the country’s two principal news agencies, ran, apparently on the basis of an official briefing, an interpretative report which said: “While India shared the Soviet concern about the danger of a nuclear war… it did not endorse the various proposals put forward by the Soviet side because they were made in the context of the arms race between the US and the USSR.” It added that India “does not envisage for itself a global role” and that “its basic approach is to nurture and develop further Indo-Soviet relations for mutual benefit… without getting involved in cold war approach (sic) or entanglement”.
This was obviously a significant report. Rarely do official spokesmen allow themselves the liberty to speak with such candour. But for some reason it attracted little attention. All the same, it is clear that as at least some of those close to the Prime Minister see it, India’s relations with the Soviet Union are bilateral and not global in scope. India has sought and established mutually beneficial relations with the Soviet Union. It has not gone in for a comprehensive alliance or a partnership with the latter.
This interpretation of Mrs Gandhi’s approach poses a problem for pro-Soviet leftists who have all along treated the policy of non-alignment as a thinly disguised form of pro-Sovietism and anti-Americanism. The honest way out for them would be to seek a clarification from Mrs Gandhi. But that involves a level of risk which they may not be willing to take. So they resort to the indirect method of criticising “commentators” who “view national interests in the light of definitions provided by that US ‘imperial brains trust’, the Council on Foreign Relations”.
This is perhaps a snide reference to a recent seminar which the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, a wholly government of India set-up, and the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, had organised near Wisconsin. The dates of the seminar were fixed, as they are in all such cases, several months in advance, that is long before Mrs Gandhi’s visit to the United States was arranged and announced or perhaps even thought of. But by one of those coincidences which occasionally occur, the seminar took place just on the eve of her trip. And some of us journalists, who do not always care to check the facts, managed to create the impression that the Indian participants had gone to the United States in order to prepare the ground for the visit.
Distortions of Pacts
Though the issue is peripheral to my present purpose, it may be useful to set the record straight. At the seminar and during the private discussions, neither the American nor the Indian participants set forth what can be called the official US or Indian view. The discussions were unstructured, to use a favourite expression of the Americans. The two “sides” differed among themselves. Some individuals – Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of The New York Times and Selig Harrison, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for instance – were critical of their country’s attitude towards India. The same was true, though not equally true, of the Indian side.
The tactic of attacking some unnamed individual when in fact the target is the Prime Minister is not new. We take note of it because an attempt is being made once again to confuse non-alignment with pro-Sovietism and anti-Americanism. This makes it obligatory for us to clarify certain issues which have got blurred.
The sources of confusion are so many that it is difficult to dispose of all of them in a short newspaper article. Perhaps it is not even necessary to try and do so. It should suffice to deal with certain principal distortions of facts.
It is, for example, absurd to talk of India having been at any stage leader of an anti-imperialist struggle. For one thing, nothing like a world-wide anti-imperialist movement has ever existed. Leaders in one country may have derived inspiration from those in another. But at no stage have they tried to establish even a pretence of co-ordination among themselves. For another, the Indian leaders have never thought in those terms. Mr Nehru repeatedly forswore any such ambition on India’s part.
Some Marxists in the service of the Stalin-dominated Communist International had managed to sell to Mr Nehru, in the late ’twenties and early ’thirties the proposition that the Soviet Union was engaged in a world-wide anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle and that as such it was a natural ally of all freedom movements in Asia. And Mr Nehru himself spoke of the need to view India’s own independence movement in the larger framework of an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle. But the basic proposition regarding the Soviet Union was itself open to question.
Stalin was not engaged in any serious attempt to overturn the capitalist-imperialist system, though the Soviet bogey served the imperialist powers rather well. He was, as we know only too well, too busy, on the one hand, consolidating his power in the Soviet Union and in the Communist International and, on the other, transforming the nature of Soviet economy through the collectivisation of agriculture to worry about imperialism.
On the eve of and in the wake of India’s own independence. Mr Nehru espoused the cause of the freedom of all colonial peoples, the non-official Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1946 and the Bandung Conference in 1961. Mr Nehru himself had commitment to this cause. But that did not bring into existence a world-wide anti-imperialist movement. And by the time of the first non-aligned summit in Belgrade in 1961, Mr Nehru himself had come to the conclusion that the anti-imperialist struggle was more or less over and that it had now become necessary to give the topmost priority to the issues of war and peace.
Nehru’s Policy
After August 15, 1947, till the time of his death in May 1964, Mr Nehru was the Prime Minister of India and as such responsible for protecting and promoting its interests. He was sensitive to his responsibility to this country and, therefore, willingly subordinated his personal predilections to the requirement of his office. The West made a great deal of his refusal to criticise the Soviet armed intervention in Hungary in 1956 and it ignored his compulsion to keep Moscow happy as well as his refusal to campaign against it on a variety of issues. This, too, helped promote the same impression which the leftists were trying to spread – that Mr Nehru was pro-Soviet and anti-US (or even anti-West). But as India’s Prime Minister, he was neither. He could not be, and he was not, engaged in any ideological or moral crusade.
The evidence in support of this proposition is overwhelming. Mr Nehru was not opposed to NATO. He took exception to a number of US moves but he expressed himself strongly only on those which impinged on India’s national interest, as the US decision to arm Pakistan and to keep China out of the United Nations. He sincerely believed that it was necessary to bring China into the UN in order to make it accept obligations which flow from the UN Charter and thus to tame it.
Mr Nehru found the American approach simplistic and the American personality brash. But neither this personal reaction nor the fact of the US decision to arm Pakistan prevented him from trying to befriend it and seek and get aid from it. The same was true of his approach towards the Soviet Union. He was above all a nationalist and therefore keenly interested in using the American card to strengthen his bargaining position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the Soviet card to compel the Americans to be more forthcoming in their aid to this country. No one can deny that the policy has paid India good dividends.
The Times of India, 6 October 1982