Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru on China and India’s Foreign Policy

Nehru by Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh is a highly-researched account examining Jawaharlal Nehru‘s intellectually combative side that made him a key figure in the debates that defined India. Read an excerpt: 

The catastrophic military disaster of 1962 – when Chinese forces overwhelmed the ill-equipped and ill-prepared Indian Army in the Himalaya and nearly swept down to the plains of Assam – has loomed large over the public imagination in India, its ghosts resurrected whenever a crisis erupts on the frigid heights of India’s northern frontier. Coming after a decade where the defining objective of Indian foreign policy was friendship with China – immortalized in the oft-quoted slogan ‘Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai’ – the conflict has also cast a long shadow over the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who presided over India’s foreign and defence policies throughout the 1950s and had been the architect of the country’s policy vis-à-vis China.

In the words of his critic and parliamentary colleague H.V. Kamath, the debacle not only ‘shattered Nehru physically and weakened him mentally but, what was more galling to him, eroded his prestige in Asia and the world, dealt a crippling blow to his visions of leadership of the newly emancipated nations’. It was a blow from which he never recovered. Accused of cravenness, vanity and negligence, his foreign policy in a shambles, his illusions of ‘Asianism’ shattered, his self-appointed mantle of leadership of Asian nationalisms in tatters and his policy of friendship towards China at all costs shown to have been a dangerous misjudgement, the shock of the defeat is said to have precipitated his death in 1964 – though not before he had been forced to jettison his much vaunted ‘non-alignment’, swallow his pride and beg US President John F. Kennedy for direct military intervention. Kennedy, having just stared down the nuclear abyss during the Cuban Missile Crisis, concluded that Nehru had ‘lost both his nerve, and with it, his sense of reason’.

Since then, the defeat – and the supine policy towards China that preceded it – has hung over his reputation. Blinded by his idealism, it is said, Nehru’s miscalculations left India diplomatically isolated and militarily unprepared. In his failure to appreciate the Chinese threat, Nehru is juxtaposed with Sardar Patel, his one-time deputy who had warned him of the dangers that China posed and cautioned him against Chinese duplicity in a pointed letter in November 1950. Written shortly after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Patel’s letter has since enjoyed a long afterlife, being regularly reproduced in newspapers, quoted by columnists and celebrated for its prescience. In public discourse it is now used to graphically illustrate Nehru’s strategic naivete and disregard of good counsel; and cast Patel as a rare dissenting voice against Nehru’s foreign policy prescriptions, whose advice was ignored by the Prime Minister.

Yet, contrary to public perception, Patel’s letter was not simply a one-off, sagacious warning to Nehru. It was grounded in, and the culmination of, a long-running disagreement between the two men, and indeed within the Nehru Cabinet, on the direction of India’s foreign policy. As the two sets of letters reproduced here demonstrate, this was a critical debate that spanned much of 1950 and is deeply entwined with the story of Indian foreign policy. Nehru responded to Patel’s famous letter with a detailed note for his Cabinet, and the resolution of this debate set the terms for Indian diplomacy for the next decade and more.

As early as 1927, when he accepted a position on the executive committee of the League against Imperialism alongside Albert Einstein and the Labour leader George Lansbury, Nehru had emerged as the Congress party’s primary spokesperson and thinker on external issues. Given a free hand by his Congress colleagues, he prepared for policymaking two decades before he gained executive power. Many of his worldviews were formed in the crucible of Congress-led nationalist agitations. As one of the few Congress leaders interested in and conversant with world affairs, which he primarily interpreted using a progressive anti-imperialist lens and his own inclination towards socialist internationalism, he developed a deep interest in the broader anti-colonial struggle in Asia – particularly Southeast Asia and China, which he saw ‘at once as peer, comrade and soul mate’ and of which he seemed to consider himself a patron. Both his interest and his leanings were in full display at the Asian Relations Conference, which he hosted in New Delhi in March 1947 as an assertion of Asian solidarity against European domination, and where he called China ‘that great country to which Asia owes so much’.

Little wonder then, that when he finally ascended to the position of Prime Minister, Nehru believed himself to be especially qualified to also occupy the position of minister of external affairs where he proceeded to carve out foreign policy as his exclusive sphere; a turf he guarded jealously from any interference and over which he exercised vast, unchecked power. It was a position that he had greatly coveted right from when the interim government had been proposed in 1946. In this role, from 1947 to his death in 1964, Nehru almost single-handedly demarcated and interpreted India’s goals and interests to come up with a foreign policy defined by its moral concerns, a commitment to anti-colonialism and international cooperation, and non-alignment ‘on the merits’. These goals and interests were underpinned by many of Nehru’s own beliefs and assumptions: an exaggerated sense of India’s importance as ‘the cultural fountainhead of the new Asia’, an instinctive affinity for the notion of ‘Asianism’ that he axiomatically assumed was shared by China and Southeast Asia, a sentimental and cultural Sinophilia, a sympathetic attitude towards communism and an ambivalence about (if not active distrust of) the United States. These beliefs, in turn, informed Nehru’s conception of his own and India’s place in the global arena: as the self-appointed leader and spokesperson of Asia (and the Third World more broadly) against European imperial domination with a self-anointed obligation to mitigate conflict on the Asian continent, and as a big brother helping and guiding smaller brothers (i.e., the countries and leaders of Southeast Asia).

To live up to this role, its (and Nehru’s) culturally manifest destiny, however, India lacked both the military might and the economic resources. To make up for this shortfall, it relied on the stature and moral authority that Nehru had acquired through his self-sacrifice for the nationalist cause and his position as the first Prime Minister of independent and democratic India. The effectiveness of its diplomacy and its support of Southeast Asian nationalism was thus inextricably tied to Nehru’s reputation and personal prestige, as well as the normative power of Nehruvian India’s independence and its democratic credentials. In other words, the collective projection of a superior moral standing. Nehru’s ideas, then, were as prescriptive as they were descriptive, perhaps even more prescriptive than descriptive.

Conversely, one of the major functions of Indian diplomacy then became the projection and protection of Nehru’s image as the champion of the Third World and his self-declared role as the leader of Asian nationalism and anti-colonialism, since doing so allowed it to punch above its weight in global affairs and assume that it would play a significant role in Southeast Asia. This was a role that Nehru himself greatly prized, and refusal to acknowledge it, or even indifference towards it almost always produced a prickly reaction – as, for example, Nehru’s reaction to the American invitation to Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan for a state visit. The demolition of this cherished role and the conceptual plumbing behind it was, in truth, the chief reason that made 1962 such a debilitating blow – described by Shashi Tharoor as ‘Nehru’s grand international pretensions’ being cut down to size.

Inevitably, this fusion of the personal and the political often skewed perceptions, lending credence to the belief in certain quarters that moral grandstanding aside, this stoking of the Prime Minister’s vanity was indeed the primary goal of Indian foreign policy – an opinion exemplified by the scathing remarks of the then American vice-president, Richard Nixon, in 1954: ‘Mr Nehru does not like the United States, Great Britain, Communist China or the USSR; he only likes Mr Nehru, and India.’

All of the above-mentioned factors contributed to making Nehru the undisputed czar of India’s foreign – and by extension defence – policies. To quote the political commentator Inder Malhotra, he was ‘its inventor, interpreter and executor’. These factors also ensured that the moral concerns and presuppositions, in the words of the scholar Paul F. Power, ‘of a complex and remarkable man prevailed over a wide spectrum of diplomatic, ideological and strategic considerations’. These concerns and presuppositions, and the policies they engendered – such as the ‘Panchsheel’ doctrine23 for example – collectively came to comprise the ‘Nehruvian consensus’.

The extraordinary life of this foreign policy consensus, its intellectual and institutional architecture only partially dismantled in 1962 has, however, obscured its heavily contested origins. Three views dominate common perception – first, that Nehru remained unchallenged in the foreign policy domain, allowing no alternative paradigms to be put forward, second that this was due to a paucity of colleagues who could inform foreign policy25 and third, that the flaws in Nehru’s approach and resultant criticism of it only became visible after Sino-Indian clashes first erupted in the bleak Himalayan heights in 1959. All are far from the truth.

Much before it became a consensus, Nehruvian foreign policy constituted a decisive fault line within democratic India’s first Cabinet, and a vital point of contention between the Prime Minister and his deputy, Sardar Patel. Few realize how perilously close the consensus came to falling apart in its earliest years. It split the Cabinet right down the middle, forcing Nehru to mount a strenuous defence of his position against his critics. Despite this, the short life of the provisional parliament (1950–52) saw four high-profile resignations rock the government: those of Rehabilitation Minister K.C. Neogy, Industries Minister Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Finance Minister John Matthai and Law Minister B.R. Ambedkar. Alongside other factors, all four pointed to deep misgivings over the direction and orientation of India’s foreign policy as a key reason for their departure from the Cabinet, Ambedkar going as far as calling it a cause ‘not merely for dissatisfaction, but for actual anxiety and even worry’.

It is in this context that the Patel-Nehru tussle in 1950 over the direction of India’s foreign policy unfolded.

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