COLD WAR DILEMMAS
Francine Frankel has written a thoughtful and perceptive study of India-US relations until the 1962 war with China, analysing the early causes of the deep and abiding suspicions between India and the US. The book reflects Frankel’s lifetime of deep scholarship on India, and draws on documents that have now become available from all the relevant official archives—the US, UK, Soviet Union, non-aligned countries like Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and even briefly China—except India’s. It is consequently rich in fact and follows the evidence, as good history should.
The book concentrates on three main themes: India-US relations, India’s policy of friendship with China, and V.K. Krishna Menon’s role in the formulation of India’s early foreign policy. Frankel argues convincingly that India-US relations were stunted by mutual suspicion, the causes of which ran much deeper than conflicting policies of collective security and non-alignment. She says India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, saw the US as a threat to the newly independent countries of the Middle East and Asia, but did not see China and the former Soviet Union as threats. She further argues, less convincingly in my view, that Nehru worked to deny allies to the US and to contain its influence in Asia. That Nehru after 1954 saw the US as working at cross-purposes to his policies in Asia is without doubt. But whether Nehru really thought India could contain the US is moot and not borne out by the official record, or by his work alongside the US during the Suez crisis, the Formosa Strait crisis, in Tibet and elsewhere during the later Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. But this is a question that will only be settled when India chooses to open its official archives.
As for China, Frankel shows that Nehru saw Chinese nationalism as expansionist when united under a strong central government and recognised a potential Chinese threat on the border.
But she finds it hard to explain why, instead of working with a great power—in effect, the US—to deal with the overpowering threat of a China with a five million man battle-hardened PLA, Nehru chose Asianism and accommodation, and did not modify non-alignment to deal with this new reality.
For Frankel, the fundamental issue was the contradiction between Nehru’s idea of India as a great power, the pivot of Asia, and the reality of India’s shrunken geopolitical reach and power after Partition, reinforced by the Chinese occupation of Tibet. She believes that Nehru, whose ideas were formed well before independence, never really came to terms with the new situation after Independence. Hence his suspicion of the US, the reliance on Asianism, and the misjudgement of China. Frankel is equally sharp about the US contribution to the growth of the suspicion—resenting India’s role in Korea, following the British lead on Kashmir at the UN and applying the parity principle to India and Pakistan. Once US diplomat George F. Kennan’s successors adopted a militarised form of containment of the Soviet Union requiring defence pacts throughout Asia, the die was cast for the US to enter into defence arrangements with Pakistan in 1953 that affected India-US ties for decades.
Woven through this account of the formative years of Indian foreign policy is an object lesson in the perils of personal diplomacy and of decision-making by small groups of the like-minded. Frankel describes in detail Krishna Menon’s role in embittering relations with the US, in assuming that China would never take military action against India and in reinforcing Nehru’s prejudices.
In sum, this is a highly readable and balanced work of serious scholarship, written for both academics and the general public. One might argue with some of Frankel’s conclusions, but for the most part they deserve serious study and respect. Read with the other excellent books on early India-US ties that we have been fortunate to see recently by Tanvi Madan and Srinath Raghavan, we today have a much clearer picture of India’s role and dilemmas during the early Cold War years.
For a work on early Cold War history, Frankel’s book has considerable contemporary resonance. Today, as India-China relations once again worsen and the US sees her relationship with China as increasingly antagonistic, India and the US again look to each other in a changing Asian landscape. This time, India and the US have gone much further in building up their understanding and cooperation. Frankel reminds us that India-US relations, like China’s push for dominance, will shape a new Asian balance. ■
There is an object lesson here in the perils of personal diplomacy and of decision-making by small groups of the like-minded