A Tryst with Destiny IIIA

Nehru’s Foreign Policy Legacy

Rohan Rajesh

Continuing the series from last week, in this article, I will be discussing Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreign policy legacy. If you want more background about Nehru’s life and domestic political legacy, read this article from two weeks ago. If you want to read my assessment of Nehru’s economic legacy, read this article from last week. In those articles, I argued that Nehru’s domestic legacy was vital to India’s democratic development while Nehru’s economic policies, while they made sense at the time, can be viewed as misguided with the benefit of hindsight. Nehru’s foreign policy legacy is arguably Nehru’s weakest spot. Nehru’s conception of foreign policy was a product of the idealism of the Indian independence movement. However, as we shall see, Nehru’s idealism (although significant to Indian soft power in the Third World) was subject to significant (and oftentimes justified) criticism amidst the realpolitik of the Cold War. 

I had intended to write about Nehru’s foreign policy in one article. However, that proved to be impossible, so I have split it into two parts. In this article, I will discuss some of Nehru’s military actions in the subcontinent, his leadership in the global anti-colonialism movement, his policy of non-alignment, and his relations with the United States. In the next article, I will discuss relations with China, arguably Nehru’s greatest failure.

“A Queer Mixture of East and West”

Nehru had always been an international figure. His command of the English language and his time in London made him a keen student of Western culture. That said, he was still always rooted in the sublimity of India’s culture and history. Nehru was keenly aware of the strangeness of his identity, writing, “I have become a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” That said, these were exactly the qualities needed to represent independent India on the world stage. Indeed, Prime Minister Nehru was concurrently India’s External Affairs Minister (the Indian equivalent of the United States Secretary of State).

To Attack or Not to Attack

Nehru inherited an interesting philosophical legacy. Indian independence had mostly been achieved through a nonviolent nationalist movement. Would the Indian state become nonviolent as well? What about when its territorial integrity was threatened? For Nehru, this moral struggle began right after independence. While attempting to cajole the various Rajas and Nawabs that controlled significant territory within India, war broke out over the princely state of Kashmir when Pashtun paramilitary forces from Pakistan attacked the state. The Maharaja of Kashmir begged India for military support. India agreed on the condition that the Maharaja acceded to Indian control. The Maharaja, who entertained ideas of controlling an independent Himalayan kingdom on the lines of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim, reluctantly agreed. 

It is unclear why Nehru chose to incorporate Kashmir. There are multiple theories. Nehru himself was a Kashmiri Pandit, so that may have influenced his division to retain Kashmir in India. While Pakistan argued that Kashmir was Muslim-majority and so should go to the Muslim state, Nehru argued that India was a secular state and that Kashmir’s religious demography should not be a factor in which country it joins. As the war dragged on, Nehru appealed to the United Nations (an institution which Nehru whole-heartedly supported). The UN Security Council mandated a cease-fire: Pakistan was to pull out its troops from Kashmir, and a plebiscite was to be held. Neither country agreed to the stipulations, and the conflict (whose history you can read about here) has raged on to this day.

Nehru also used military means to incorporate the princely state of Hyderabad in 1948 and the Portuguese territories in western India in 1961. The latter was particularly controversial in the West since Portugal was a NATO ally. President Kennedy angrily told the Indian ambassador to the US, “You spend the last fifteen years preaching morality to us, and then you go ahead and act the way any normal country would behave … People are saying, the preacher has been caught coming out of the brothel.” Some also questioned the timing of the operation, given that it coincided with the reelection campaign of Nehru’s embattled Defense Minister Krishna Menon (more on him below). You can read more about the Portuguese Raj in this article. 

With regards to the incorporation of the Princely States and colonial holdovers, Nehru was decisive in his use of the military when peace did not work. While South Asians continue to debate the legacy of the incorporations of Kashmir and (to a far lesser extent) Hyderabad, Nehru had given Portugal ample time to cede its colonies peaceably (France had ceded its colonies years earlier), and the resulting military conflict was entirely predictable if suspiciously timed.

Anti-Colonialism

Beyond concerns about India’s borders, India’s foremost foreign policy concern was the end of colonialism in Asia and Africa. Nehru fashioned himself as the leader of the global anti-colonial movement. To that end, he convened the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947 (five months before Indian independence). Representatives from India’s vicinity, Southeast Asia, China, Tibet, the Asian republics of the Soviet Union, South Korea, and the Middle East talked on issues of Asian integration, Western imperialism, and racism. This was followed up by the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, which also included delegates from four free nations in Africa. 

These conferences would lay the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which still exists today. This movement mostly consisted of former colonies and sought to temper the passions created by the Cold War. In practice, the NAM could not do much: the communists sought to export their revolution everywhere while the West sought to crush anything that remotely suggested communism, including social democracy, leading to devastating conflicts and coups from Vietnam to Iran to the Congo to Argentina. Nonetheless, India’s vigorous anti-colonial (and anti-apartheid) stand has given it a strong moral standing and significant soft power in the Third World, as evidenced by the fact that the Third World largely supported India’s annexation of Portuguese territories.

Tensions with the West

Naturally, protestations against Western imperialism (while morally commendable) did not sit well with NATO. Relations between the US and India were strained during Nehru’s premiership. Nehru had never been particularly taken by American culture. Perhaps due to the influence of British culture (and the persistence of Jim Crow in the South), he viewed Americans as hopelessly materialistic, uncultured, and racist. While Nehru’s India was nominally non-aligned, in practice, Nehru’s government tended to side against the West more often than not. Much of this had to do with the persistence of colonialism in Asia and Africa after independence. While America dragged its feet in pressuring its European allies to end colonialism, the USSR publicly remonstrated against imperialism. While America was concerned about whether a colony would become communist, India was concerned about whether a colony would become independent. 

Thus, Nehru insisted on the People’s Republic of China being given China’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council instead of the US-backed Taiwan. India was also irked by US military aid to Pakistan. While US support was meant for Pakistan to combat communism (Pakistan was separated from the USSR by a 12-mile strip of land in Afghanistan), India argued that Pakistan was more likely to use that aid and weaponry against India. To be fair, the US also gave significant economic aid to India, which irked the Pakistanis. 

That said, there were incredibly shocking moments of hypocrisy on Nehru’s part when it came to communist aggression and imperialism. When Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal (which was at the time under the control of the British), the British, the French, and the Israelis launched a military operation to seize the canal. The plot was exposed by poor planning, and the world was furious. India openly condemned the Western powers. The crisis was resolved when US President Eisenhower forced the British and the French to withdraw. 

However, in the same year, the Soviet Union crushed a popular anti-communist uprising in Hungary, and India said nothing publicly. India, then represented by V. K. Krishna Menon, abstained from a vote of condemnation in the UN Security Council, causing great consternation in the West (and indeed in India as well). Nehru was actually very unhappy with the Soviets and privately (and later publicly) urged the Soviets to withdraw from Hungary. But he refused to renege on Menon’s abstention.

Menon and Mao

Nehru’s reliance on Menon was frustrating for the Americans and inexplicable to his contemporaries. Menon would become Nehru’s Defense Minister. Menon’s influence on Nehru would lead Nehru into a disastrous policy vis-à-vis China. This would prove to be profoundly significant for India’s foreign policy and military policy because of the lessons it provided to Indian leaders on what not to do. We will explore Nehru’s fateful China policy next week.