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India in the world

These essays, despite omissions, are each worth reading for themselves but do not frame any discussion with reference to the book’s title, and even as a festschrift, could have been better selected… A review

India in the world

India and the World in the First Half of the 20th Century By Madhavan K Palat (ed) Routledge, New Delhi.

This is a compilation of essays, a festschrift for a former director of the Nehru Library. All are by males and all are Indians save one Indian-origin German, whereas some foreign writers may have offered a usefully different optic.

Thus we have six essays based on previous lectures, of about 30 pages each, with different themes and objectives, usually having little or no connection with the title of the book.

The stated purpose of “India and the world and the world and India, how India placed herself in the world as she mobilised herself for the new role …as an independent nation” is not met and purchasers of the book on the basis of its title will be sorely disappointed.

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While “India was utterly marginal to global strategists”, this does not emerge from the chapters, and the assertion that the US during World War II “understood…that colonial rule had had its day” is not borne out by its post-war activities in South-east Asia or Southern Africa — where it supported South Africa well into the late 1980s.

Similarly, the assumption that Indian nationalism was limited to itself is not evidenced by the activities of Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru and many others from the 1920s onwards. Stalin “looked on Indian natio-nalists with suspicion” is correct but so did Mao and for the same reasons.

The first chapter is by Palat, undoubtedly a towering intellect of the first order, but his essay on geopolitical theory is irrelevant to the book’s title.

He states that the USSR “did not compete for world domination and challenge the US” but a few pages later there is reference to the “universalism that the Bolsheviks imagined themselves to embody.”

The post World War II Kennan theory of containment was predicated on the perceived Soviet challenge to the US and the “European submission to America to carry out the same mission of protecting their civilisation from a Russia and communism rearing its double head”.

Srinath Raghavan’s chapter on the US and India covers well-known ground but is rich in detail. The US wanted to prise India from the imperial preference system and join the allied war effort.

The US wanted India to have Dominion status, be a full member of the UN and for the (somewhat ambiguous) provisions of the Atlantic Charter to apply, though Churchill was determined to push back and restore the prestige of the British Empire.

“US officials were not familiar with the problems of India. Nor did the issue mean very much to public opinion at home,” added to which Gandhi’s tactlessness about the US , its racial attitudes and involvement in the war had to be smoothed over by the pro-Indian writers Louis Fischer and Edgar Snow.

Pradip Kumar Datta’s chapter on Tagore’s global views from 1890s to 1920s also covers known territory; the bard dismissed cosmopolitanism as “colourless”, a view echoed by UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you belong nowhere”.

Datta does not inform us why Tagore’s views on nationalism, which were in striking contrast to Okakura Tensin’s strident Asian nationalism, Japanese imperialism and expansionism, never created a rift between the two men.

AR Venkatachalapathy covers EV Pramaswamy “Periyar” Naicker’s year-long visit to Europe, based on a diary covering barely 78 days. The radical activist for social justice would have been an oddity anytime anywhere, frequenter of nudist colonies and all — but this is a travelogue, incomplete and fragmentary. ACN Nambiar, Padma Bhushan, intimate of Nehru’s and India’s ambassador to Scandinavia and Germany after World War II is described as a “diehard communist”.

Amit Das Gupta’s essay in fragile English on the ICS and the formation of the Indian Foreign Service reveals his unrestrained admiration for GS Bajpai, agent-general in Washington during World War II and subsequently first secretary- general in the Ministry of External Affairs.

Bajpai has left little in the way of documentation or memoir, but Das Gupta credits him with the only analysis of foreign policy options for independent India, which ignores the Nehru Foreword to Lohia’s 1938 pamphlet The Foreign Policy of the INC and the British Labour Party.

Bajpai’s advice of an “alliance” with the Commonwealth was rejected by Nehru. Das Gupta astonishingly claims that Bajpai was the de facto foreign minister from 1946 till 1952, which ignores Nehru’s towering occupancy of that role.

Rakesh Ankit covers again a well-known narrative of India-USSR relations from 1946 to 1949 when Stalin eventually modified his view of Nehru’s government to admit its independence from Britain.

It is interesting that as early as 1946, Foreign Minister Molotov assures Krishna Menon that “Russia will support India in the UN”. India’s objectives seem to have been limited, before Radhakrishnan’s arrival as ambassador in Moscow, to the purchase of food grains.

Ankit is agnostic as to whether or not Mrs Pandit, the first ambassador, ever formally sought an appointment with Stalin, which in any case she never got, which Radhakrishnan did in short order. Radhakrishnan was also the first Indian diplomat to seek Soviet help in the UN with regard to Kashmir.

These essays, despite such omissions, are each worth reading for themselves but do not frame any discussion with reference to the book’s title, and even as a festschrift, could have been better selected.

The reviewer is a former Foreign Secretary

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