To begin with, permit me to say that I root India’s foreign policy in her struggle for freedom. So, of course, did Mr Nehru. But my perception of the Indian freedom movement is different from his.
Inspired by the Marxist view of the world in the thirties, Mr. Nehru came to see the Indian movement as part of a larger anti-imperialist struggle of which he saw the Soviet Union as an important constituent by virtue of its ideological opposition to capitalism and to its offshoot, imperialism. He did not accept the proposition that the Soviet Union was the leader of this imperialist drive. Otherwise, he would have logically belonged to the Communist Party of India and not to the Indian National Congress. But he did come to believe that the two struggles – the Soviet Union’s and Asia’s including lndia’s, were linked.
I do not accept this interpretation. In my view, Stalin in the thirties was not engaged in our anti-capitalist-imperialist struggle. He was wholly preoccupied with building what he called “socialism in one country,” consolidating his own power in the Soviet Union and the Comintern and subordinating all communist parties wherever they existed to the Kremlin. In my view, even outside the Soviet framework, there did not exist a world-wide or even an Asia-wide freedom movement. The Indian freedom movement stood alone by itself with no connection with any other. It was greatly encouraged by external events, Japan’s victory over Russia (a white power) 1905, or de Valera’s fight for a free Ireland or the stirring in Egypt against the suzerain British power.
But it had no links with any one of them. And, as is evident, the white Irishman’s struggle against a white power was as much a source of inspiration for us in India as the yellow Japanese success against white Russia. Race consciousness was not an important element in India’s freedom struggle, though it was not free from this element altogether.
British Influence
Unlike the mutiny of 1857, India’s freedom struggle was also not an atavistic throwback to the country’s past. It did not represent a determined effort to get rid of the British intrusion and return to the past. It was the handiwork of men and women who had absorbed the Christian missionary and liberal humanist criticism of their society and sought to reshape it in a new image borrowed from the West, largely Britain. The Indian freedom movement was the product of the Indian social reform movement beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy towards the beginning of the 19th century. This movement was the product of the British impact which inevitably spread with the spread of the British system of education.
As the phrase “social reform movement” itself shows, educated Indians in the 19th century were seeking to reform their society to make it accord with their newly acquired values. They were not seeking either to restore the past or supplant it altogether. By and large, they did not become Christians even if they accepted Christian missionary criticism of Hinduism, or, to be more precise, of Hindu practices and customs. They remained Hindus, which means that they remained keen to preserve their religious-cultural heritage to the extent it could accord with the spirit and demands of the modern age.
To begin with, the leaders of the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 by Octavian Hume, a retired British ICS official, were not sensitive to the second aspect of the deeper Indian quest, the desire to preserve the country’s religious-cultural heritage. They were modernisers. But the inevitable reaction soon set in and by the turn of the century, we saw the rise of traditionalists like Aurobindo Ghose and Surendranath Pal in the Bengal and Tilak in the Bombay Presidency. This interaction between the modernisers and the traditionalists was to dominate the Indian freedom movement up to the time of its consummation on August 15, 1947. The Gandhi-Nehru leadership represented these two faces of the Indian freedom movement.
But while the freedom struggle ended on August 15, 1947, with the modernisers broadly in command, India’s deeper quest – the dual quest for the preservation and revival of the religious-cultural heritage and modernisation – could not and did not end on that date. It has continued and will continue as far into the future as we can see.
Nehru’s Outlook
Mr. Nehru was not insensitive to this quest. But as the very title of one of his major works, “The Discovery of India”, will show, he was not quite caught up in it as most other educated Indians have been. His family background – acceptance of first the Muslim-Persian culture and then of Western ways – and his upbringing – he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge – made him somewhat of an outsider even among educated Indians. As he himself admitted in his autobiography, he was not at home in the Indian setting. Apparently, in India’s past, Lord Buddha and Buddhism appealed to him more than the dominant faith of the land, Hinduism. So when he looked for symbols for the independent sovereign Indian state in the country’s past, he opted for Asokan lions and the Asokan Chakra (wheel of dharma).
It is difficult to say whether or not Mr. Nehru’s basic approach would have been different if the growing Hindu-Muslim conflict had not dominated the country’s political scene during his entire political career in the pre-independence period, if India had not been partitioned on the basis of religion, if a virtual communal holocaust had not followed partition, and if fighting Hindu communalism, protecting the Muslims left in India (35 million at the time of independence and now 70 million), restoring their self-confidence and accommodating them within the system, were not all to consume a great deal of his energy as India’s Prime Minister, especially in the first years. Basically he was secular in his outlook because it was shaped by the secular political culture of the West. And the exigencies of the Indian situation could only confirm him in his conviction that his was the right approach to the problem of consolidating the Indian state.
But he could not change the basic Indian reality and the basic Indian quest. India’s gaze has not turned either wholly inward or towards the past. She was wanted to modernise herself and has, therefore, sought to maintain her contacts with her principal challenger-interlocutor, the West. Before independence and for some years after independence, the West for India meant Britain. Gradually, the United States has replaced Britain.
Mr. Nehru clearly saw India playing a leadership role in conformity with its concept of a worldwide anti-imperialist struggle. Thus he organised the first Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947 when India was not yet an independent country, and he followed it with the Bandung Conference in 1955. But as the border conflict with China began to simmer m 1956, even if still beyond the public view, he came to realise that Asian unity was a hollow creed, a false god he had worshipped. So he quietly backed away from it.
Impact of Islam
Then he lent his enormous energies to the shaping of the nonaligned group which held its first summit in Belgrade in 1961. There he clashed with Sukarno and Nkrumah. Their anti-Western rhetoric nauseated him. He felt that they did not recognise the danger of a nuclear conflagration and the need to do all one could to avert it. As it happened, the Soviet Union was testing multi-megaton nuclear bombs just as non-aligned leaders were meeting in Belgrade.
More importantly, the nonaligned countries, to his dismay, failed to back India at the time of the Chinese aggression in 1962. Even President Nasser, whom Mr. Nehru had supported fully, at some cost to India’s interest, at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956, adopted an above-the-battle mediatory attitude. This must have added to Mr Nehru’s disillusionment.
It is not possible for me to say whether Mr. Nehru drew from his unhappy experience the conclusion that India belonged neither to Asia nor to the so-called third world. But this is a fact which cannot be seriously disputed.
India has little in common with either Africa or Latin America. This no one will dispute. So the issue is whether India belongs to Asia except in the purely geographical sense of being located there. There again, no one will seriously dispute that India has hardly ever understood the Sinic World which may be said to include, in addition to China itself, Japan, the two Koreas and Vietnam. South-East Asia was once an area of immense Indian activity as the presence of Angkor Wat in Kampuchea and of Borobodur in Indonesia aptly illustrate. But that was over a millennium ago. Today, south-east Asia has little interest in India or for India.
In view of the impact of Islam and of Persian and Arabic languages and cultures, India feels closer to the predominantly Muslim West Asia than to Buddhist-influenced south-east Asia. But this and the presence of 70 million Muslims in India notwithstanding, it would be idle to pretend that India belongs there. The Arabs certainly feel closer to Pakistan than to India, despite New Delhi’s consistent support to them on the Palestinian issue. And, needless to add, India has little capacity, to influence the course of events in that part of the world.
(To be continued)
This is the first part of the text of the talk at Princeton University on November 16.
The Times of India, 8 December 1982