As the nation celebrates Mr Nehru’s 83rd birth anniversary, it can be said without the slightest exaggeration that recent events have assured him a permanent place in history as one of the most perceptive men of the post-war era.
The late Prime Minister was perhaps the first leading public figure to compare the east-west ideological competition with the religious feuds between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 16th century and to draw the inference that it, too, would soon pass into history. Surely, after the dramatic improvement in Soviet-US and Sino-US relations, the four-power agreement on Berlin and the initialling of the “basic” treaty between the two German states, no one can possibly dispute his foresight.
Similarly, it is self-evident that the acceptance of the communist ideology by China has strengthened rather than subverted its sense of separate identity, indeed uniqueness, and its determination to establish itself as a great power. In fact, it can be said that more than any other single factor, Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s fears regarding the Soviet Union’s ability to influence the course of developments in his country by virtue of a common ideology account for his domestic programmes – like the big leap forward in the late fifties and the cultural revolution in the sixties – his fierce polemics with Moscow and his decision to normalise relations with the United States.
It is also now almost universally accepted that the basic division in the world in the seventies will not lie so much between the east and the west as between the industrialised north and the poor and predominantly agricultural south.
World Order
This is not to suggest that the capitalist and communist economic systems have already begun to converge in accordance with Mr Nehru’s forecast but that, as “have” countries, the Soviet Union and its east European allies are acquiring as much stake in the ‘status quo’ as the United States and its western European and Japanese allies. Both groups want to ensure in their own different ways that the world’s poor countries do not upset the international order they are trying to establish and consolidate. That the latter are too weak, too divided and ill-organised to be able to do so in the near future is a different matter.
Moscow and its local supporters, of course, still use revolutionary phrases. But it will not be easy for them to cite a single instance where the Soviet Union can be said to have subordinated its policy of extending the area of co-operation with the United States to the cause of revolution. On the contrary, Mr Brezhnev received Mr Nixon in Moscow last May soon after the latter had mined approaches to North Vietnamese ports and has since done all in his power to persuade Hanoi to end the war on terms which do not hurt American prestige.
The irony of all this, however, is that the more accurate Mr Nehru’s understanding of the forces at play has turned out to be, the more difficult it has become for India to make itself felt in the comity of nations. The United States, for instance, could not have adopted so cold and indifferent an attitude towards this country as it has done now in the fifties when it was haunted by a fear of a monolithic communist bloc on the move, or in the sixties when it was possessed by the alleged threat posed by “one billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons.” It may in course of time revise its list of priorities to this country’s advantage. But there is not much New Delhi can do to compel such a revision.
Conclusion
On this reckoning, it is not unfair to Mr Nehru to draw the conclusion that the policy of non- alignment as he shaped it at the height of the cold war in the early fifties has lost much of its effectiveness. It was as much a product of the unrestrained east-west rivalry as, for instance, Pakistan’s decision to join the west-sponsored alliance system. Two other central features of Mr. Nehru’s policy – anti-colonialism and Afro-Asian co-operation – have also lost much of their shine in recent years, partly because the ruling elites in many third world countries have found it more useful and natural to cooperate with former imperial powers than with one another, partly because disputes among them have proved stronger than memories of a common struggle against the west, partly because the bargaining position of the producers of primary commodities has deteriorated rather than improved in the post-war period and partly because the capacity of the Soviet Union and its allies to meet their economic requirements has turned out to be more limited than was generally thought in the fifties. In fact communist states are tacitly giving up the claim that they are building a rival economic system as they themselves are seeking accommodation with, if not within, the dominant world capitalist system.
But even a greater irony is that while India can no longer hope to take advantage of great power rivalries which, with the exception of the Sino-Soviet one, are now conducted in a much more controlled manner than before, it has no serious option but to return to Mr Nehru’s policy of having a balanced relationship with all of them as soon as possible. In plain words, though non-alignment has lost a great deal of its dynamism in the new context of the Soviet-US ‘detente’ and the Sino-US dialogue, it retains its validity in the old sense of neutrality. This distinction is important in view of the fact that we in India have often in the past treated the two terms as synonymous.
This does not mean that India has to downgrade its friendship with the Soviet Union in any way. As far as this is concerned, it only means that our policy-makers should be willing to resist the temptation to think and talk in such grandiose terms as the dovetailing of the two economies and to interpret the Indo-Soviet treaty in conformity with the context in which it was concluded. In concrete terms it means they should make it clear that they are not interested in any scheme of Asian collective security or containment of China that the Kremlin may still be trying to float and that, not to speak of waiting to join in an encirclement of Peking, they are on the contrary keen to normalise relations with it immediately.
It may be only a matter of academic interest to recall that Mr Nehru did not take much time to get over the resentment provoked by the US decision in 1954 to enter into a mutual security pact with Pakistan, that he visited America in 1956 to confer with President Eisenhower when Mr John Foster Dulles was still in control of US foreign policy and that after the Chinese attack in 1962, when he was forced to seek and accept military assistance from the west, principally America and Britain, he managed to avoid long-term entanglements with them. The late Prime Minister was not in the best of form then. He was already an ailing man when the Chinese onslaught took him by surprise and shook him rudely. But once he became aware of the long-term consequences of an indirect alignment with one of the two blocs and the Chinese pressure eased, he got out of arrangements like the Voice of America deal and the joint air exercises which had been negotiated in panic. Similarly, it may also be only a matter of academic interest to recall that Mrs Gandhi, too, did not allow the country’s dependence on massive food imports from the United States to avoid a widespread famine in 1966 and 1967 to deflect her from a policy of balanced relationship with the super-power. But the fact remains that India’s interests necessitate an adherence to this approach if for no other reason than that the politics of alignment also cannot yield much dividend in view of the thaw in the cold war.
More Complex
The need to differentiate between Mr Nehru’s central vision of future India and his concrete actions, which had of necessity to be designed to cope with the given situation, is equally urgent in respect of domestic policies, economic and social. The task is also infinitely more complex and difficult if only because the temper of the ruling elite has changed greatly since his death more than eight years ago. It is symptomatic of this transformation that the Congress President, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, should have objected to the use of the word “pragmatism” in the statement of objectives of the recently formed Nehru Study Forum by MPs belonging to his party and insisted on its deletion as the price of his agreement to inaugurate it. But hopefully it may not yet be too late to reverse this process of interpreting the multi-faceted life and philosophy of that remarkable individual in a narrow and dogmatic manner, specially because the Indian reality itself is too variegated and complicated to be shaped in accordance with such doctrines.
The Times of India, 14 November 1972