Indian Defence Review

These rapid changes showed that precisely when Nehru’s diplomacy had lustre on the world stage – in international conference diplomacy in the Korean and Indo-China conflicts and in international peacekeeping, and in third world politics – where his message was to seek harmony and peaceful accommodation of international conflicts, India’s footprint was shrinking in her immediate strategic neighbourhood.

Nehru made some moves to buttress India’s position with the Himalayan kingdoms, and he made some military preparations in the border areas, he registered his disapproval of the US-Pakistan military pact and its consequences for regional and Indian security, and he was concerned about China’s approach to Tibetan affairs, but beyond these specific objections there was little change in the diplomatic posture. He struck to his ‘peaceful co-existence with China and the world’ narrative, and maintained his position against war with Pakistan as a tool of policy.

A pattern of extensive public declarations on world events and those which affected India, and limited policy actions, emerged. But these actions showed limited policy development and a lack of strategy – diplomatic and military – to engage the foreign powers who were pressuring Indian interests. ‘Engagement’ comes about by undertaking of actions which either attract or cause conflict that require the foreign powers’ attention. To engage is to stimulate either by persuasive encouragement or by creating a point of friction which requires the opposition to adjust its policies.

The Second World War was an extreme example of engagement because it led to the reform of the domestic politics and foreign policies of Germany and Japan and brought the two powers into a long term alignment with the West. In this case engagement was first a step to create a point of opposition and friction that was settled by warfare; the second step was to encourage change in the two countries policies that were irreversible. It appears that Nehru’s India could neither stimulate change by encouragement nor by opposition. Arguably the external events were beyond Nehru’s control but the Indian responses were in his control and in hindsight they showed a lack of diplomatic and military preparation.

The following chapters argue that even though the rapid changes in India’s environment in the early 1950s were no long possibilities or probabilities, they had occurred even though they were not foreseen by Indian practitioners. Their hopes for a new and prosperous India and a reformist world clashed with the hard rock of reality which was based on calculations of balance power and national advantage in the conduct of nations; these nations were operating according to the principles of geopolitics and national interest and not according to universal principles of social justice and world peace.

Moreover, these powers were acting with impunity with regard to Indian interests. As noted, Nehru’s global narrative did not change in the face of these events, but there were nonetheless incremental adjustments in Indian policies. They were meant to address the imbalances which had emerged as a result of negative foreign actions.

The first major adjustment was to align India with the USSR in relation to the issues of American military aid to Pakistan and the Kashmir dispute. Moscow’s willingness to use its vetoes to stop UNSC action against India stalled the international community and as well it created a tilt towards Moscow to balance the tilt towards Beijing. This was a major adjustment in Nehru’s approach to the foreign policies of the two major communist powers because Nehru’s public declarations revealed a mistrust of Moscow and Stalin in the early 1950s and an admiration of the Chinese people and their struggle against Western imperialism. As well, as noted earlier, Nehru believed in the idea of Asian unity and an Asiatic federation which had its foundation in China-India cultural and diplomatic unity. Although Nehru admired the Bolshevik revolution as a seminal event in world history and believed in the principles of socialism, and Indian leftists who were aligned with Nehru’s  party and supported his foreign policy drew their inspiration from the Soviet and Eastern European communists, Nehru did not articulated the idea of Indo-Soviet unity except in practical diplomatic and military terms.

The development of a shift in attitude from negative to positive in the Nehru-Stalin era stalemated the ill-effects of the Nehru-Mountbatten approach to Pakistan and Kashmir affairs in the diplomatic and the military spheres but they did not rollback the policy paradigm laid out by the two. With a continued military stalemate in Kashmir, the diplomatic sphere became the centre of intensified pressure by Pakistan and the international community to get India to make a concession to Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir. The Moscow tilt and the incremental development of Indian military strength in the Kashmir-Pakistan fronts reinforced the stalemate but this had economic costs – to mount a military defence of Kashmir against Pakistani interventions.

India’s military modernization required massive domestic resources whereas Pakistan had access to foreign aid from the USA, Saudi Arabia and her overseas remittances. It had diplomatic costs – to maintain Indian advocacy over her rightful position in Kashmir with third world and Muslim countries and here Indian practitioners were at best able to secure Arab neutrality on the Kashmir question. The stalemate between India and Pakistan over Kashmir had diplomatic costs with the West because their sympathies lay with the Pakistani claims on Kashmir and it required continuous effort by Indian practitioners to maintain the policy against third party mediation and intervention in a bilateral dispute.

The stalemate had domestic political costs as well because the India’s political elite was not convinced about the future of Kashmir under Indian rule and there were repeated debates within India about Kashmir’s future. Here the hardness of India’s public diplomacy on Kashmir contrasted with a softness in internal debates on the subject. Finally, the differences between China’s policy towards Tibet and its implications for the boundary question and the road building in Aksai Chin, and Nehru’s public stance about the importance of peaceful relations with China and the historical basis of Indian border claims, indicated a conflict and a stalemate in the making in India-China diplomatic and military relations. Here the first part of the 1950s appears to be the process by China to consolidate its frontier position; the second part was to bring out the controversy over the boundary alignment; and third part was to use war to try to settle the controversy.

Note that following the 1962 war the pattern of Chinese and Indian conduct was to settle for a diplomatic and a military stalemate because even though Chinese forces defeated the Indian military, the campaign was limited in scope, and in the absence of Indian acceptance of defeat, the ceasefire is a stalemate between the two. Diplomatic and military stalemate became the norm in India’s diplomatic and military behaviour which nonetheless shrunk India’s strategic footprint in the region because it made the Subcontinent a field of power politics for foreign powers and reduced India’s diplomatic and military manoeuverability and it raised the costs of maintaining her territorial defence and advancing her position in the world of powers.

I turn now to a discussion of the reasons why Nehru’s India acted the way it did in the area of diplomacy and military policy. The general philosophy, attitudes and experience with British colonialism has been noted in our previous discussion. Now I turn to specifics relating to Pakistan, China and the USA. One explanation is that Nehru and his peers – e.g. V.B. Patel lacked the administrative experience to deal with the aftermath of Partition and the future of relations with Pakistan.

Another explanation is that Nehru lacked the military experience or the inclination to deal with the invasion of Kashmir in 1947-48 and India’s policy was hijacked by Lord Mountbatten, India’s first Governor General and chair of India’s Defence Committee, and a military and diplomatic strategist. On China the explanation is that Nehru had two assumptions in his mind about the Chinese leadership and he did not make up his mind about these assumptions until the war in 1962 settled his inner (in Nehru’s mind) debate. In his conversations with Canada’s High Commissioner to India, Nehru on the one hand thought that China’s leaders were rational but on the other hand thought of Indians as inferior.

There was a debate of sorts within the Indian government that involved Nehru, his director of the IB, the MEA and the Army but this was not really an institutionalized debate but rather reflected the instincts and imperfect information and views of the various practitioners. The government debate (1950s-1962) did not resolve Nehru’s assumptions about the likely basis and pattern of China’s diplomatic and military conduct towards India on the boundary question and in the world of power politics and the hierarchy of powers.