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Figures and Tables Figures
Abbreviations
BSF India’s Border Security Force
CDA Chargé d’affaires
CRO Commonwealth Relations Office
DMZ Demilitarized zone (demarcation line separating North and South Vietnam at the 17th Parallel)
DRVN Democratic Republic of Vietnam
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FO Records of the Foreign Office, the National Archives, London
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
IB India’s Intelligence Bureau
ICSC/ICC International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam
IR International Relations
J.N. Papers Unpublished Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, NMML
JAC Joint Action Committee
KMT Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party of China
MEA Ministry of External Affairs
NAI National Archives of India
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
NVA North Vietnamese Army
P.N.H. Papers P.N. Haksar Papers, NMML
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PRC People’s Republic of China
PREM Records of the Prime Minister’s Office, The National Archives, London
R&AW Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency
SWJN-FS Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series (pre-1946)
SWJN-SS Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series (post-1946)
UK United Kingdom
UNSC United Nations Security Council
USA United States of America
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Introduction
It is often argued that India’s foreign policy in the post-1991 period witnessed a dramatic break from past patterns, with fundamental changes in India’s conception of its interests and its international roles and behaviour.1 It is widely held that Indian leaders altered their international images, their ideas relating to national interest, the role of force and coercion in statecraft, and beliefs about how India ought to relate to its regional and global environment. But most of these notions of foreign policy change were not a new phenomenon at all. India’s statecraft during the Cold War period was infused by changing beliefs around precisely such themes. Mainstream historiography portrays India’s foreign policy as that of a postcolonial, non-aligned state standing apart from the Cold War struggle by resisting being drawn into the political–military embrace of one or other of the superpowers. Such a cursory and static interpretation of a key period of India’s foreign policy rests, it is argued in this book, on a neglect of more complex Indian worldviews that evolved to condition state action. Indeed, the dramatic shift in roles and behaviour from the Nehru period in the 1950s to the Indira Gandhi period in the late 1960s and 1970s suggests that the so-called ‘rubicon’ or seminal transformation in India’s strategic thought and action had in fact been crossed earlier.
1 C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Viking, 2004).
PowerandDiplomacy:India’sForeignPoliciesduringtheColdWar. Zorawar Daulet Singh, Oxford University Press (2019). © Zorawar Daulet Singh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489640.003.0001
If we seek to make informed assessments about India’s future foreign policy and possible contestations, we must revisit a much larger and earlier slice of its strategic past in order to discern prior policy patterns during times of inflexion and change. The Cold War period offers a rich and relatively untapped empirical reserve that can provide much needed depth to understanding Indian strategic thought and geopolitical practices. And, to truly understand Indian statecraft, one must go beyond the study of non-alignment and examine the more concrete ideas that have informed Indian geopolitics over the years. This book attempts to explicate some of these ideas and their application during some of the most significant events and crises in India’s immediate and extended neighbourhood over three decades during the Cold War.
The Argument
India’s foreign policy during the Cold War period from the 1950s to the 1970s was not simply an exercise in the preservation of its strategic independence. Analytical focus on a largely unchanging self-image of non-alignment has led scholars to downplay what was in fact a dramatic evolution in Indian foreign policy during that period. Specifically, from projecting itself initially in an extra-regional peacemaker role during the Nehru period, where India intervened in several crises in Asian high politics, India’s role dramatically contracted to that of a largely sub-continental security seeker in the Indira Gandhi period, with narrower conceptions of order and security. Importantly, this shift was not simply one of a change in geopolitical scope but also a change in the modes of regional policy behaviour. The central argument of this book is that this change in Indian statecraft resulted from a change in regional role conceptions from the Nehru to the Indira Gandhi periods. Role conceptions emerge from policymakers’ beliefs and images relating to their state’s interaction with its external environment. As discussed later, these include the appropriate scale of regional activity and functional goals, orientation to this defined external environment, and the preferred modes of behaviour. The behavioural shift between the Nehru and
Indira Gandhi periods should, therefore, be seen as emerging from different ideas that defined India’s regional role in each period.
The core question that drives this study—What explains the transformation in Indian geopolitics during the Cold War?—has certainly been acknowledged before. Michael Brecher, for instance, noted the shift from ‘an active, dynamic involvement in world politics’ under the ‘Nehru–Menon conception, to a more passive role, almost a withdrawal from conflicts external to India’s narrowly-conceived national interests’.2 Yet this dramatic shift in the scope and modes of India’s foreign policy behaviour between the two periods has not been examined in any depth, and is usually portrayed either in terms of a reductionist contrast between an idealistic and naive Nehru versus a hard-nosed and insecure Indira Gandhi, or in terms of the structural deterministic argument that a changing external environment made India’s foreign policy shift all but inevitable.3 These popular images juxtaposing the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods have not received the detailed study they deserve—both conceptually and empirically. More broadly, there seem to be two basic weaknesses in how we study India’s foreign policy. First, much of the existing body of work is unable to confront the amorphous nature of non-alignment, and is thereby unable to account for the variations in India’s foreign policy during the Cold War period. Indeed, the focus on non-alignment has led to a prolonged neglect of the more complex worldviews and strands of ideas that also conditioned Indian geopolitics during the Cold War. Second is the dearth of archival-based work on India’s foreign policy more generally, and the absence of a detailed empirical examination of regional statecraft during the Nehru and Indira Gandhi
2 Michael Brecher, ‘Non-alignment Under Stress: The West and the India–China Border War’, Pacific Affairs 52, no. 4 (1979–1980): 629.
3 Sumit Ganguly, Indian Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015); David M. Malone, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012); J.N. Dixit, Makers of India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2004); Surjit Mansingh, India’s Search for Power: Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policy, 1966–1982 (New Delhi: SAGE, 1984); Raju Thomas, Indian Security Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Power and Diplomacy
periods within a single research frame.4 The result of these gaps in the literature appears sufficient enough to warrant a more extensive comparative foreign policy analysis of these two periods.
Despite a recent wave of eclectic scholarship on India’s Cold War foreign policy, especially on the Nehru years, India’s regional policies have been relatively neglected. Not only is there a dearth of serious work on Nehru’s regional policy in the 1950s, the nature of interpretations of Nehru are either ‘hagiographic’ or polemical critiques that ‘have not delved deeply enough into the material, to explore the reasons behind his choices’.5 Typically, the periodic focus is either on the pre-1950 Dominion period on India’s norm shaping at multilateral settings such as the UN,6 pre-1950 statecraft and national consolidation,7 or on the outbreak of bilateral problems with China in the late 1950s and its escalation in the 1962 war.8 A study of Nehru’s foreign policy in geopolitical
4 As Narang and Staniland suggest, ‘There is enormous room for further research on the making of India’s foreign policy’ both in terms of ‘deeper historical studies of the roots of strategic worldviews’ as well as ‘detailed studies of the inner workings of the Indian foreign policy apparatus’. Vipin Narang and Paul Staniland, ‘Institutions and Worldviews in Indian Foreign Security Policy’, India Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 91. In a similar vein, Raghavan observes that historians have mostly ‘ignored research’ on independent India’s foreign policy, ‘preferring to toil on the British and earlier periods’. Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010), 3.
5 Jivanta Schottli, Vision and Strategy in Indian Politics: Jawaharlal Nehru’s Policy Choices and the Designing of Political Institutions (London: Routledge, 2012), 21.
6 Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012).
7 Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India; Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947–48 (New Delhi: SAGE, 2002).
8 Steven A. Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); S. Mahmud Ali, Cold War in the High Himalayas: The USA, China and South Asia in the 1950s (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999); Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970); Steven A. Hoffmann, ‘Rethinking the Linkage Between Tibet and the China–India Border Conflict: A Realist Approach’, Journal of Cold War Studies 8, no. 3 (2006): 165–94; Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India.
terms—that is, in the realm of high politics and security—remains understudied. The year 1962 so dominates mainstream historiography that the decade of the 1950s is merely taken as a prelude and build-up to that climactic event. Much of the work into India’s foreign policy in the 1950s, hence, invariably tends to be overshadowed by the retrospective historical knowledge of an impending debacle.9 As a consequence, a whole interregnum, if it can be called that, has been left unexplored or perfunctorily treated in mainstream historiography. For the Indira Gandhi period, the lack of detailed historical work is even starker. That a 1984 study remains the only notable contribution on this subject exemplifies the point.10 Given the recent, if partial, accessibility of new archival material for the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years, it is now a fruitful moment to re-engage with that wider period. This book offers another lens to interpret and understand the shift in India’s foreign policy during the Cold War, in order to illuminate the continuity and change from the Nehru to the Indira Gandhi periods, which often gets obscured under the rubric of non-alignment or simplified in the binary of idealism versus realism.
Why is focusing on non-alignment as the main explanatory framework for India’s foreign policy of limited analytical value? The idea of non-alignment is ‘entrenched in the vocabulary of India’s past, present and future’.11 Yet, even a cursory observation of India’s foreign policy practices reveals patterns of variation and change through the decades, despite a seeming continuity of non-alignment. For instance, Nehru himself observed that
9 S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume 2, 1947–1956 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979). This is also exemplified in Wolpert’s biography, which chronicles the period from 1950 to 1956 in ten pages. Stanley Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Even memoirs by senior officials on this period are typically afflicted with the same problem. T.N. Kaul, Diplomacy in Peace and War (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979); Subimal Dutt, With Nehru in the Foreign Office (Calcutta: Minerva, 1977); C.S. Jha, From Bandung to Tashkent: Glimpses of India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Sangam, 1983).
10 Mansingh, India’s Search for Power.
11 Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis: India and the United States since 1947 (Noida: HarperCollins, 2014), 253.
non-alignment ‘in itself is not a policy; it is only part of a policy’.12 P.N. Haksar, a key advisor of Indira Gandhi, clarified, ‘nonalignment was not the essence and substance of India’s foreign policy. Non-alignment is not, in a Kantian sense, a thing in itself. Non-alignment was the means, at a particular time and in a particular place….’13 What such reflections suggest is that beyond the rubric of non-alignment there were additional beliefs and images that shaped the conduct of foreign policy in each of these periods. By itself, non-alignment is essentially an identity or a self-image with a ‘universe of possibilities for action’.14 But if non-alignment is deemed to include several broad forms of statecraft, then it arguably explains little.15 As this book examines, there was a fundamental distinction between the interpretations of non-alignment
12 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1961), 79. Elsewhere Nehru observes, ‘strictly speaking’, non-alignment ‘represents only one aspect of our policy; we have other positive aims also….’ Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Changing India,’ Foreign Affairs 41, no. 3 (April 1963): 456.
13 P.N. Haksar, India’s Foreign Policy and Its Problems (New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1989), 32.
14 Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 8.
15 Note, for example, what the editors of a study on Indira Gandhi’s foreign policies have to say about the Cold War period: ‘India’s record of fidelity to past policy and practice is unusual.’ India is ‘sui generis, as far as foreign policy strategy and tactics are concerned. Successive leaders in the same party and different parties have found it difficult to depart from the Nehru line…. Against this general background of continuity, stability and decorum, India’s relations with the outside world can be appreciated as basically rational….’ It would be extraordinary if the authors were actually unaware of the different approaches in Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s statecraft. Rather, the problem here seems to be one of conceptualizing the variation in India’s foreign policy after the Nehru period despite continuity in India’s self-image in international politics. A.K. Damodaran and U.S. Bajpai, eds, Indian Foreign Policy: The Indira Gandhi Years (New Delhi: Radiant, 1990), ‘Introduction’: xiv–xv.
in the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods. It is, therefore, a misunderstanding to assert the analytical primacy of one of these facets of non-alignment and hold that as the default one. Rather, it is necessary to identify the international images of policymakers and the roles they construct for their state if we seek to understand India’s foreign policy.
To typologize India’s foreign policy in terms of the binary ‘idealism’/‘realism’ does not take us too far either.16 For instance, after contrasting an ‘idealistic’ Nehru with a ‘realistic’ Indira Gandhi, Mansingh observes: ‘Realism is most simply defined as the practice of accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to deal with it pragmatically.’ Indira Gandhi ‘responded to changes in the international environment in the 1970s and 1980s realistically’.17 But as others emphasize, the two categories of idealism and realism ‘are too vague, too broad, too open-ended, too normative … to be of much use as a guide to social scientific theory and research’.18 Moreover, there is little evidence to suggest that policymakers during the Nehru period perceived themselves as unrealistic actors. Nehru perceived traditional realism as ‘the tactical small stuff’, and felt his role conception for India ‘was more strategic’. The ‘tactical’ approach had proven to cause more global problems and incessant conflict.19 Nehru actually viewed his philosophy and statecraft as highly pragmatic and based on a realistic appraisal of India’s external environment. ‘Idealism’, he argued, was ‘the realism of tomorrow. It is the capacity to know what is good for the day after tomorrow … and fashion yourself
16 Sumit Ganguly and Manjeet S. Pardesi, ‘Explaining Sixty Years of India’s Foreign Policy’, India Review 8, no. 1 (2009): 4. Also see, Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, 3rd edition (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), 104, 112; Dixit, Makers of India’s Foreign Policy.
17 Surjit Mansingh, ‘Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policy: Hard Realism?’, in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, eds David M. Malone, C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 112.
18 Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’, International Security 24, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 54.
19 Personal interview with Shiv Shankar Menon, New Delhi, 11 November 2014.
Power and Diplomacy
accordingly … the realist, looks at the tip of his nose and sees little beyond.’20 Indira Gandhi, too, exhorted her own realism when she insisted that foreign policy ‘must be allied to an astute, hardheaded analysis of international affairs and events. At all times this analysis has to be devoid of emotion and sentiment.’21 Clearly, realism cannot be a useful explanatory theory if its meaning is so broad as to include diverse forms of choices, preferences, and actions.22 Indeed, it is for this reason that most ‘contemporary realists’, while continuing ‘to speak of international “power” … have subtly shifted the core emphasis from variation in objective power to variation in beliefs and preferences of power’.23
In recent years, a growing scholarship has made use of the vast published collection of Nehru’s papers and confidential correspondence, as well as unpublished documents and diplomatic cables of senior officials from the Indira Gandhi period.24 Although admittedly limited, such archival material does enable us to enter into the decision-making ‘black box’, and try to connect Indian interventions and foreign policy responses to the inner thinking and beliefs of the policymaking apex. This book hopes to add to this small but growing body of work on India’s foreign policy. By going beyond the idea of non-alignment and attempting to reconstruct
20 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 51.
21 Indira Gandhi, The Years of Endeavor: Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi, August 1969–August 1972 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1975), 685.
22 Indeed, neorealist assumptions, expressed by Kenneth Waltz and others, impose ‘almost no constraint on state behavior, because it subsumes the entire spectrum of possible motivations of states from pure harmony to zero-sum conflict…. Only outright self-abnegation is excluded.’ Legro and Moravcsik, ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’, 22.
23 Legro and Moravcsik, ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’, 34–5.
24 Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India; Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2013); Andrew B. Kennedy, The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru: National Efficacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis; Priya Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (New York: Routledge, 2012); Bhagavan, The Peacemakers.
the foreign policy worldviews of two different national leaders and their close advisors, this book offers fresh insights into how policymakers related to their region and neighbourhood during some of the most tumultuous events of their time.
This book questions the notion of an unchanging Nehruvian image of power, which has entrenched itself deeply in mainstream historiography on India’s foreign policy and which continues to shape the nature of contemporary conversations and foreign policy debates. We have been living with many sweeping generalizations and interpretations of India’s regional statecraft during the Cold War. There is an interesting dichotomy between the interpretations of the first wave of scholarship, that is, contemporaneous of the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods, and retrospective evaluations of Indian strategic thought and behaviour. Ironically, while the former could glean subtle aspects of Indian strategic thought despite the lack of confidential archives, the later generation of work has offered diverse accounts that are not always consistent with a careful study of the documentary evidence. Part of the reason for this is we seem more interested in abstract theorizing rather than paying careful attention to the empirical record. Chacko’s indictment that theorizing of ‘Indian thinking on international relations at a highly general level’ has usually not succeeded in being ‘analytically illuminating’ is, hence, largely accurate.25 This book builds upon and extends the first generation work by scholars such as Michael Brecher and A.P. Rana as well as more recent work by Andrew Kennedy.26 Yet, this is not just an esoteric historical study. All the six crises examined in this book will resonate with the present because they each also speak to contemporary dilemmas and debates regarding a specific facet of India’s foreign policy. Whether it is about crafting a sustainable set
25 Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy, 3.
26 Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon’s View of the World (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968); A.P. Rana, ‘The Intellectual Dimensions of India’s Nonalignment’, Journal of Asian Studies 28, no. 2 (1969): 299–312; A.P. Rana, The Imperatives of Nonalignment: A Conceptual Study of India’s Foreign Policy Strategy in the Nehru Period (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976); Kennedy, The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru.
of equations with competing great powers, formulating an intelligent policy towards Pakistan, finding the appropriate approach in managing India’s special ties with its smaller neighbours, dealing with China’s rise and the attendant power flux in Asia, responding to a Sino-American crisis or their broader competition in Asia, or developing a sustainable Indian role in the extended neighbourhood, the chapters that follow will strike at the heart of today’s policy conversations.
Images and Roles
A useful way to approach the Indian case is to attempt to conceptualize and categorize the hierarchy or levels of ideas that together shape foreign policy.27 Nearly all the attention in India’s foreign policy literature has been on the idea of non-alignment. But as alluded to earlier, focusing exclusively on this single idea is of limited analytical value because the linkage between non-alignment and behaviour is often indeterminate. To explicate this point, let us explore the notion of ‘national images’, as this helps to identify the appropriate level and types of ideas that will be engaged in this book. An ‘image’ is defined as
the total cognitive, affective, and evaluate structure of the behaviour unit, or its internal view of itself and its universe … a decision involves the selection of the most preferred position in a contemplated field of choice. Both the field of choice and the ordering of this field by which the preferred position is identified lie in the image of the decision-maker…. The images which are important in international systems are those which a nation has of itself and of those other bodies in the system which constitute its international environment.28
27 It has been argued that ‘attitudes on specific foreign policy issues are constrained (or predicted) by, first, foreign policy postures, and those, in turn, by a set of core values’. See Jon Hurwitz, Mark Peffley, and Mitchell A. Seligson, ‘Foreign Policy Belief Systems in Comparative Perspective’, International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (September 1993): 246.
28 Kenneth E. Boulding, ‘National Images and International Systems’, in International Politics and Foreign Policy: A Reader in Research and Theory, ed. James N. Rosenau (London: Macmillan, 1969), 423. Emphasis added.
As we can notice, a complete image has a ‘self-image’ as well as an ‘international image’ component. Both these components are related in the sense that a change in self-images might also change the images of the external environment. This distinction is helpful in explicating the two inter-linked levels of images in the case of India and it is where this book will focus its attention in the overall ideational explanation. The highest-level belief that underpins a state’s psychological setting is the self-image of a country’s leaders, that is, how national leaders view and identify their own state in the international system.29 For India, such a core selfimage during the Cold War was described as non-alignment. ‘It is through negative terms’ that Indians ‘have expressed positive and affirmative ideas of profound significance and critical importance for their social evolution’.30 Non-alignment is one of those ideas. Krishna Menon explained the origins of non-alignment:
Even if nobody conceived it, non-alignment was more or less a residue of historical circumstances. In 1945, immediately before India got her independence, it was all ‘one world’; by 1947 it was ‘two worlds’, and we, for the first time, had to make up our minds on the issue…. We would not go back to the West with its colonialism; and there was no question of our going the Soviet way…. And with the attaining of our independence we desired not to get involved in foreign entanglements…. There were two blocs. Both the Prime Minister (Nehru) and I exclaimed or thought aloud simultaneously, ‘why should we be with anybody?’31
In essence, non-alignment was ‘merely independence in external affairs’. It was the ‘logical extension of nationalism’ and ‘the conflict between nationalism and military blocs, the fact that we had little in common with the raison d’être of the blocs’.32 An
29 Noel Kaplowitz, ‘National Self-Images, Perception of Enemies, and Conflict Strategies: Psychopolitical Dimensions of International Relations’, Political Psychology 11, no. 1 (1990): 39–82.
30 K.P. Misra and K.R. Narayanan, eds, Non-alignment in Contemporary International Relations (New Delhi: Vikas, 1981), 198–9.
31 Brecher, India and World Politics, 3.
32 Brecher, India and World Politics, 4.
enduring self-image presumes shared representations of a state’s view of itself across generations. Since the mid-1940s, India’s leaders have espoused a consistent self-image of nonalignment, which also became part of the state’s discourse. In his first broadcast as head of the interim government on 7 September 1946, Nehru defined India’s core self-image: ‘We propose, as 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.’ 33 And, in March 1947, while inaugurating the Asian Relations Conference: ‘We propose to stand on our own 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.’ 34 Given the incipient but palpable outbreak of the Cold War in Europe, Nehru was expressing an impulse shared by most Indian leaders and a large section of the assembled Asian leaders who were wary of losing their newfound autonomy in another great power struggle.
This conviction in preserving India’s sovereignty was reinforced by the experience of an unexpected and tumultuous division of the subcontinent. In December 1947, four months after Partition, Nehru stated, ‘We have proclaimed during this past year that we will not attach ourselves to any particular group. That has nothing to do with neutrality or passivity or anything else’. Rather, at its core was that India ‘had an independent policy’. 35 Non-attachment was desirable because ‘joining a bloc’ as Nehru explained in March 1948, could ‘only mean one thing: give up your view about a particular question, adopt the other party’s view on that question’. 36 By the mid-1950s, India had witnessed twenty years of intense Asian inter-state conflicts involving all the major powers. The pressures to conform to bloc politics had become severe and these factors impelled Nehru to strengthen India’s core self-image. He now identified
33 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 2.
34 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 251.
35 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 24–5.
36 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 36.
