11-13-2004, 12:51 PM
<b>Dangerously misunderstanding Nehru </b>
- By Bharat Karnad
At a recent Cabinet-level meeting to approve certain expenditures on strategic systems, <b>senior military officers present were reportedly shocked to hear Natwar Singh, the minister for external affairs, scoff at such spending with his stock Nehruvian-sounding criticism.</b> With the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, remaining noncommittal, it was the defence minister Pranab Mukherjeeâs steely insistence that won the day. It is hardly surprising that those, like Natwar Singh, who make a great show of being uncompromising followers of Jawaharlal Nehru, understand him not at all. In the main, because they stress what Nehru wrote rather than what he actually did during his long tenure as Prime Minister. <b>Natwar Singhâs bookish take on Nehru would not matter very much were it not for his ministerial post, in which case it is a policy liability</b>.
There is no dearth of people who are muddled about Nehruvian precepts because they take these more seriously than they do his practice of foreign affairs, which was at complete variance. When these worthies talk about "Nehru, the statesman," Jawaharlal emerges as something of a naïve and doltish character who went about spouting Third World-ist inanities and proposing disarmament and "peace initiatives" at every turn when he was not whining about the inequitable world order. <b>These faux Nehruvians are found in the press, in places like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and in government mainly in the ministry of external affairs (MEA) where the foreign service officers are now required to reinforce the half-baked institutional understanding of Nehru by poring over his many books.</b>
Two generations of Indian analysts and analyses have come up since Independence divided between the many who hail Jawaharlal Nehru as an "apostle of peace" and a Third World leader non pareil, and the few from the "realist" school of political thought and those in the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, who excoriate him for his alleged "woolly-headedness." Both have mis-read Nehru.
It must be conceded that hagiographical writing about the founding fathers of a new state helps in nation-building and in firming up national identity. To that extent, the mainstream uncritical appraisals of Jawaharlal <b>Nehru served a purpose. But, carried too far it can seriously disable a countryâs foreign and military outlook and policies. That point may now have been reached.</b> In the post-Cold War world of dominant power strategies of active counter-proliferation, preemption and preventive war and devoid of the Soviet-American rivalry that provided third countries protection, the soft-options available to India are no more and its margin of safety is much reduced. In this milieu, it is prudent to dress up US appeasement policies in Nehruvian raiment.
The real Nehru, it turns out, was an arch-realist and a world-class strategic visionary who was motivated less by morality â "Gandhian" or any other â than by principles of realpolitik. He saw India as a great power that needed in the government domain, principally, to acquire the matching military wherewithal. Strengthening the countryâs economic muscle could be left, he believed, to public and private sector cooperation. Hence, Nehru made two vital decisions. Calling it a "Janus-faced policy," he imparted a weapons thrust to the countryâs nuclear energy programme from its inception but kept it secret from the rest of the government, including the MEA â the reason why diplomats like Natwar Singh who were never in the decision loop, have no stake in nuclear security. And, he seeded a broad-based defence science and industrial capability comprehensively to service the needs of the armed forces and also to earn export revenues to amortise the vast investments. <b>Every means and opportunity were exploited to build up nuclear and defence industrial competence and capabilities â from the United Statesâ "Atoms for Peace" programme to hiring one of Hitlerâs leading fighter plane designers, Dr Kurt Tank, to produce a modern combat jet aircraft.</b>
In the interim period when Indiaâs strategic self-protection gear was not in place, Jawaharlal Nehru, given his ideological and cultural affinities, sought security for India under the US nuclear umbrella and enrolled as a virtual member of the western alliance. Declassified detailed Pentagon plans drawn up in the mid-Fifties reveal the aim to defend India, where possible, jointly with the Indian military against the Chinese communists as well as against internal revolution engineered by the Communist Party cadres. A Carrier task force, an Airborne Division, a composite Air Strike Force, nuclear demolition teams were among the American units tasked for this expeditionary mission. In 1962, the Western nuclear umbrella, in fact, partially opened over India.
The US and the UK were complicit, moreover, in making Nehruâs seemingly anti-West non alignment policy successful. Their logic was that by attracting many developing countries to it, this grouping would curtail the number of Third World states available to the Soviet Union to poach on. Apparently, the returns from such a policy were enough for London and Washington to tolerate the downside â Nehruâs "socialist" rhetoric and policies at home. Further, keeping his eye on the power politics involved, Nehru first proposed "general and complete" disarmament (meaning both nuclear and conventional military disarmament) that he knew would be unacceptable and then warned the great powers in the First Committee of the United Nations that if progress towards such disarmament was not forthcoming, India would obtain a nuclear arsenal at tenth the cost incurred by them. This was an example of an extraordinarily agile and complex diplomacy at work.
All of the above and many other equally startling revelations regarding Indiaâs foreign, military and nuclear policies, based entirely on hitherto unused declassified documents available in the official British and American archives and on extensive first-hand interviews, were published in my book, Nuclear Weapons & Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (Macmillan, 2002). (The government of India does not believe in declassifying official documents, despite the 30-year rule but, fortunately, its UK and US counterparts do and the workings of the Indian policy are now rendered transparent.) It is a comprehensive and original analysis and a substantive and irrefutable revisionist history of free Indiaâs foreign and conventional military-cum-nuclear policies. It includes my prescription that India should acquire a consequential thermonuclear deterrent with intercontinental ballistic missile reach to consolidate its great power status, strategic security and "autonomy," and political leverage. Pray, how did the self-appointed guardians of Nehru-viana react?
In a review of my book published in the fortnightly Frontline, A.G. Noorani, for instance, who apparently hates a nuclear weaponised, dismissed the work as "polemical" â "controversial argumentation" according to the Oxford Dictionary â on the astonishing plea that would discredit an undergraduate that my study had relied principally on official documents and correspondence between the Indian and US and British governments, on extensive interview research, and on oral history typescripts (little heeded by Indian scholars) available in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library rather than on the "published record" â meaning, presumably, the stuff featured in newspapers and periodicals of the day! It is clear that for those who have made a career out of flogging a patently flimsy, uni-dimensional Jawaharlal Nehru that they have conjured up, definitive evidence to prove that the great leader was out to secure for India in the shortest possible time the military qua diplomatic heft of a great power, is anathema.
Natwar Singh (who sought a copy of my book on the pretext of reviewing it, but never did), like Noorani, is in the same denial mode about Nehru. At the Hindustan Times Leadership Initiative conference, "(Nuclear) deterrents," he declared grandly, "are not a sign of progress." This, of course, is to turn Jawaharlal Nehruâs hard-boiled strategy of acquiring nuclear weapons to steer India towards international recognition as a world power, which in any case he believed was owed it, on its head. Worse, the minister boasted that "We did not let the change in government disturb the tempo of our engagement with the US" and that "it is our government which were able to move decisively to conclude the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP)."
Considering that NSSP is a product of the previous BJP-led regimeâs naiveté, cupidity and rank bad strategic sense, advancing it amounts to the Congress party-led coalitionâs kick-starting a process that will end in formally reducing India to a sub-strategic security dependency of the US, like, say, Pakistan! Poor Jawaharlal Nehru! <b>How ironic that India, on the cusp of genuine strategic capability he seeded, is forsaking its position of advantage and, under the direction of those who swear by Nehru, is settling down as a second-rate American camp follower. The decline of India to a client state will no doubt be tracked and Indian leaders responsible for it identified when historians get hold of official US documents three decades hence</b>.
Bharat Karnad is Research Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
- By Bharat Karnad
At a recent Cabinet-level meeting to approve certain expenditures on strategic systems, <b>senior military officers present were reportedly shocked to hear Natwar Singh, the minister for external affairs, scoff at such spending with his stock Nehruvian-sounding criticism.</b> With the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, remaining noncommittal, it was the defence minister Pranab Mukherjeeâs steely insistence that won the day. It is hardly surprising that those, like Natwar Singh, who make a great show of being uncompromising followers of Jawaharlal Nehru, understand him not at all. In the main, because they stress what Nehru wrote rather than what he actually did during his long tenure as Prime Minister. <b>Natwar Singhâs bookish take on Nehru would not matter very much were it not for his ministerial post, in which case it is a policy liability</b>.
There is no dearth of people who are muddled about Nehruvian precepts because they take these more seriously than they do his practice of foreign affairs, which was at complete variance. When these worthies talk about "Nehru, the statesman," Jawaharlal emerges as something of a naïve and doltish character who went about spouting Third World-ist inanities and proposing disarmament and "peace initiatives" at every turn when he was not whining about the inequitable world order. <b>These faux Nehruvians are found in the press, in places like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and in government mainly in the ministry of external affairs (MEA) where the foreign service officers are now required to reinforce the half-baked institutional understanding of Nehru by poring over his many books.</b>
Two generations of Indian analysts and analyses have come up since Independence divided between the many who hail Jawaharlal Nehru as an "apostle of peace" and a Third World leader non pareil, and the few from the "realist" school of political thought and those in the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, who excoriate him for his alleged "woolly-headedness." Both have mis-read Nehru.
It must be conceded that hagiographical writing about the founding fathers of a new state helps in nation-building and in firming up national identity. To that extent, the mainstream uncritical appraisals of Jawaharlal <b>Nehru served a purpose. But, carried too far it can seriously disable a countryâs foreign and military outlook and policies. That point may now have been reached.</b> In the post-Cold War world of dominant power strategies of active counter-proliferation, preemption and preventive war and devoid of the Soviet-American rivalry that provided third countries protection, the soft-options available to India are no more and its margin of safety is much reduced. In this milieu, it is prudent to dress up US appeasement policies in Nehruvian raiment.
The real Nehru, it turns out, was an arch-realist and a world-class strategic visionary who was motivated less by morality â "Gandhian" or any other â than by principles of realpolitik. He saw India as a great power that needed in the government domain, principally, to acquire the matching military wherewithal. Strengthening the countryâs economic muscle could be left, he believed, to public and private sector cooperation. Hence, Nehru made two vital decisions. Calling it a "Janus-faced policy," he imparted a weapons thrust to the countryâs nuclear energy programme from its inception but kept it secret from the rest of the government, including the MEA â the reason why diplomats like Natwar Singh who were never in the decision loop, have no stake in nuclear security. And, he seeded a broad-based defence science and industrial capability comprehensively to service the needs of the armed forces and also to earn export revenues to amortise the vast investments. <b>Every means and opportunity were exploited to build up nuclear and defence industrial competence and capabilities â from the United Statesâ "Atoms for Peace" programme to hiring one of Hitlerâs leading fighter plane designers, Dr Kurt Tank, to produce a modern combat jet aircraft.</b>
In the interim period when Indiaâs strategic self-protection gear was not in place, Jawaharlal Nehru, given his ideological and cultural affinities, sought security for India under the US nuclear umbrella and enrolled as a virtual member of the western alliance. Declassified detailed Pentagon plans drawn up in the mid-Fifties reveal the aim to defend India, where possible, jointly with the Indian military against the Chinese communists as well as against internal revolution engineered by the Communist Party cadres. A Carrier task force, an Airborne Division, a composite Air Strike Force, nuclear demolition teams were among the American units tasked for this expeditionary mission. In 1962, the Western nuclear umbrella, in fact, partially opened over India.
The US and the UK were complicit, moreover, in making Nehruâs seemingly anti-West non alignment policy successful. Their logic was that by attracting many developing countries to it, this grouping would curtail the number of Third World states available to the Soviet Union to poach on. Apparently, the returns from such a policy were enough for London and Washington to tolerate the downside â Nehruâs "socialist" rhetoric and policies at home. Further, keeping his eye on the power politics involved, Nehru first proposed "general and complete" disarmament (meaning both nuclear and conventional military disarmament) that he knew would be unacceptable and then warned the great powers in the First Committee of the United Nations that if progress towards such disarmament was not forthcoming, India would obtain a nuclear arsenal at tenth the cost incurred by them. This was an example of an extraordinarily agile and complex diplomacy at work.
All of the above and many other equally startling revelations regarding Indiaâs foreign, military and nuclear policies, based entirely on hitherto unused declassified documents available in the official British and American archives and on extensive first-hand interviews, were published in my book, Nuclear Weapons & Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (Macmillan, 2002). (The government of India does not believe in declassifying official documents, despite the 30-year rule but, fortunately, its UK and US counterparts do and the workings of the Indian policy are now rendered transparent.) It is a comprehensive and original analysis and a substantive and irrefutable revisionist history of free Indiaâs foreign and conventional military-cum-nuclear policies. It includes my prescription that India should acquire a consequential thermonuclear deterrent with intercontinental ballistic missile reach to consolidate its great power status, strategic security and "autonomy," and political leverage. Pray, how did the self-appointed guardians of Nehru-viana react?
In a review of my book published in the fortnightly Frontline, A.G. Noorani, for instance, who apparently hates a nuclear weaponised, dismissed the work as "polemical" â "controversial argumentation" according to the Oxford Dictionary â on the astonishing plea that would discredit an undergraduate that my study had relied principally on official documents and correspondence between the Indian and US and British governments, on extensive interview research, and on oral history typescripts (little heeded by Indian scholars) available in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library rather than on the "published record" â meaning, presumably, the stuff featured in newspapers and periodicals of the day! It is clear that for those who have made a career out of flogging a patently flimsy, uni-dimensional Jawaharlal Nehru that they have conjured up, definitive evidence to prove that the great leader was out to secure for India in the shortest possible time the military qua diplomatic heft of a great power, is anathema.
Natwar Singh (who sought a copy of my book on the pretext of reviewing it, but never did), like Noorani, is in the same denial mode about Nehru. At the Hindustan Times Leadership Initiative conference, "(Nuclear) deterrents," he declared grandly, "are not a sign of progress." This, of course, is to turn Jawaharlal Nehruâs hard-boiled strategy of acquiring nuclear weapons to steer India towards international recognition as a world power, which in any case he believed was owed it, on its head. Worse, the minister boasted that "We did not let the change in government disturb the tempo of our engagement with the US" and that "it is our government which were able to move decisively to conclude the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP)."
Considering that NSSP is a product of the previous BJP-led regimeâs naiveté, cupidity and rank bad strategic sense, advancing it amounts to the Congress party-led coalitionâs kick-starting a process that will end in formally reducing India to a sub-strategic security dependency of the US, like, say, Pakistan! Poor Jawaharlal Nehru! <b>How ironic that India, on the cusp of genuine strategic capability he seeded, is forsaking its position of advantage and, under the direction of those who swear by Nehru, is settling down as a second-rate American camp follower. The decline of India to a client state will no doubt be tracked and Indian leaders responsible for it identified when historians get hold of official US documents three decades hence</b>.
Bharat Karnad is Research Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi