Bending our knees before insolent might

I have just been reading three books about the initial long decade of our Independence: JNU Professor Emeritus Aditya Mukherjee’s Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future;  Yale-NUS lecturer Swapna Kona Nayudu’s The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment; and Australian scholar Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy, and comparing our foreign policy when we were a newly independent sovereign nation with that 75 years later in the time of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.

While Prof. Mukherjee’s book is mainly about the complex domestic dimensions of building a new India in the immediate post-Independence period in the light of Nehru’s “Idea of India”, there is a paragraph that contains a couple of sentences that sum up the essence of the foreign policy devised for the first large country to secure its newly won sovereignty. He sees Nehru’s emphasis on “self-reliance” (now translated into high Hindi as “atmanirbharta” and into ungrammatical English as “Make in India”) as the quintessence of Nehru’s economic policy: “the un-structuring of the colonial order”.

The “colonial structure” that had impoverished India was part of Britain’s success in forcing India into a global order of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation for the best part of 150 years of colonial rule at a time when, after the collapse of Mughal rule, the Indian economy was too fractured to take advantage of such an international economic order. Britain, of course, thrived on international trade and, through its global Empire, had created the space where it would be the biggest beneficiary of such an order, but without a care for what the new order was doing to the de-industrialisation of its “sone ki chidiya” (golden bird, that is India).

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Also, agriculture, the staple of India’s rural economy, faced punishing taxation leading to repeated famines. Hence, the key need to dismantle the colonial economic order and replace it with an alternative economic strategy better suited to independent India’s needs and aspirations. Mukherjee says: “The policy of non-alignment was as much a function of the strategy of economic development chosen by India, as it was a product of the Indian national movement’s commitment to world peace and the sovereignty of nation states. Conversely, non-alignment became a viable strategy only as India began to gain economic sovereignty.”

‘Ekla chalo re’

How this operated in practice is well illustrated by Nayudu’s chapter on Korea. India was the only non-aligned independent country in the world when the Korean crisis broke out in 1946 and deteriorated into war by mid-1950. Nehru’s later non-aligned peers were still to emerge as international leaders: Josip Broz Tito (in Yugoslavia) was still to break from the stranglehold of the Soviet Union; Gamal Abdel Nasser was an unknown junior army officer in Egypt; Sukarno (in Indonesia) had just wrested independence from the Dutch; Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was ruled by the highly westernized Sir John Kotelawala; and Kwame Nkrumah was still in the colonial “Gold Coast”, not PM of sovereign “Ghana”.

The US was in a frenzy over the dropping of the “Iron Curtain”, the “rise” of the Soviet Union, and the “loss” of China, and was frantically looking for Reds under its domestic beds. And the Soviet Union under Stalin was so convinced that Nehru was a British surrogate that even Nehru’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, was refused a call on Stalin throughout her tenure as India’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Indeed, when her successor, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, called on the Soviet Foreign Minister to enquire why the Soviet Union was not supporting India in the UN on the Kashmir issue, he got the stinging reply: “No one has asked us to do so.” Such was the international situation when Nehru struck out on the path of non-alignment: “Ekla chalo re” (“Make Your Own Way”, Rabindranath Tagore).

Despite, or perhaps because it refused to join either bloc, India was asked to chair the UN Temporary Commission on Korea as early as January 1948. On the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, India’s role grew even though Nehru held the rather “sombre” view that “our opportunities and our power to influence events are very much limited”. A few days later, Nehru appealed to Stalin to end the war and received a reply, revealed to the Indian Parliament on August 3, 1950: “What is needed in Korea is a new mediator of world stature and repute. The one who measures up to that standard is Pandit Nehru.” While nothing came of this immediately as the UN forces crossed the 38th parallel drawing China into the conflict, the UN set up a Ceasefire Committee and, inevitably, asked India to chair the committee with Iran and Canada as members. The Committee failed to secure a ceasefire but clearly India had by then become a key player.

Leader of the Non-Aligned Movement

Although Nehru’s India was flayed on all sides through 1950-52 for continuously advocating peace—with the belligerent parties variously describing India as “a beggar in a bumper year, which has decided to live off its two masters, the United States of America and Britain” (North Korea); the “parent of evil” (China); being at best “dreamers and idealists” and at worst “instruments of horrible American policy” (USSR Foreign Minister); and an “anti-Indian bias (which) was pervasive within the US at this juncture”—Nehru” stood up to this onslaught, “insisting that India follow what he considered ‘the right path’, that of not appeasing either side”.

In consequence, in April 1953, the Indian and American draft resolutions on a Korean armistice were merged into one, sponsored by Brazil, and unanimously voted by the UN. And Nehru’s India was invited to chair the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission to untangle the vexed question of repatriation of prisoners of war on either side. It was a moment of triumph for non-alignment; indeed, it might be considered the turning point that set the course for the Afro-Asian gathering at Bandung (in Indonesia) in 1955 and lit the spark for the Non-Aligned Movement proclaimed in Belgrade (in then Yugoslavia) in 1961, that was eventually joined by two-thirds of the UN’s member-States.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesian President Sukarno in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955. The Bandung Conference foreshadowed “the awakening of Africa and the arrival of Asia on the international stage”. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

Thus, notes Benvenuti, Nehru arrived in Bandung in April 1955 “at the pinnacle of his influence in international affairs”, “a living symbol of the anti-colonial struggle”, and “the voice of a resurgent Asia”. The Bandung Conference itself foreshadowed “the awakening of Africa and the arrival of Asia on the international stage”.

Multi-alignment vs non-alignment

Now, compare this record with Modi/Jaishankar’s “multi-alignment” as against our traditional “non-alignment”. Apart from coining the phrase “This is not an era of war”, what has been India’s contribution to the ending of Russia’s war on Ukraine beyond both Putin and Zelenskyy yielding to Modi’s hug in succession? Is there a single practical initiative or resolution that India has sponsored which marks out “multi-aligned” India from the parties to the conflict? On Israel and Gaza, has India not merely abstained on every important UN resolution, while making clear its preference for the Israeli aggressor over the Palestinian victim?

And now that India is directly threatened by Trump’s “tariff war”, are we standing up as Nehru always did for an India that was then much weaker economically and militarily than Modi’s India of today? While much of the rest of the world is rising against the dismantling of the international economic order to the detriment of all world economies, India’s US policy is marked by abject concentration on the Prime Minister, Trump’s “very good friend”. Nothing is trumpeted more than Modi being among the first to be received at the Trump White House.

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Did Prime Minister Modi dare to tell Trump that India’s economic policies are sovereign decisions based on a careful weighing of Indian interests and international commitments, and modified in response to felt pressures from a variety of sectoral economic interests that are aimed at accelerating growth and democratically resolved through due parliamentary process? Did he point out that with imports from India constituting just about 2 per cent of total US imports, what possible damage could Indian tariffs do to the US economy? Did he suggest that India not be subjected to “collateral damage” from America’s economic problems with China? Did he underline that India could not simultaneously be a member of the Quad and an incidental victim of a US economic offensive against China? Could he not have drawn a smile from Trump by asking why India’s peacock’s feathers were being plucked in a battle between the US elephant and the Chinese dragon?

No, because our “multi-alignment” amounts to no more than a thin covering for Modi’s naked quest for personal prestige, above all with Donald Trump and then, in descending order, everyone else. Rendering our nation’s foreign policy hostage to his personality cult has turned the India of yore from a courageous crusader into an abject petitioner now. How long are Modi/Jaishankar going to persist in transgressing Tagore’s lasting injunction to never “bend your knees before insolent might”?

Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009. He has published nine books, the latest, A Maverick in Politics, the second part of his memoir.