In 1947, Jewish leaders around the world drafted Albert Einstein to write an extensive personal letter to Jawaharlal Nehru. The United Nations was set to vote on the creation of Israel. In his appeal to Nehru, the world’s most famous scientist pointed out that the Jewish people had been victims of persecution for centuries. Much like the masses of India. India was the most influential among the newly decolonising nations in Asia and Africa. In order for Israel to be accepted among the countries of the world, the Jewish state would need India’s support.
For the record, India voted no, along with a dozen other members of the UN. These were mostly Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but also Cuba and Greece. The UN resolution passed with 33 votes in favour and 13 votes against, with 10 abstentions.
This episode brings some perspective to the forever unfolding “Nehru vs Modi” war on social media and public discourse today. Look how Prime Minister Narendra Modi is raising India’s prestige, BJP supporters say. They point to India’s growing stature on international forums such as the Quad, meetings of the G-7 and the G-20 countries, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the World Economic Forum, and so on. Recently, The New York Times began speculating on whether Prime Minister Modi would take the initiative in bringing both sides to a final settlement in the war on Ukraine. Such an article would never have appeared without sanction from the highest levels of the US military industrial complex.
Look at the crowds that turned out to hear Nehru at Hiroshima in Japan in 1957, the Congress supporters sneer right back. Or watch this video of Nehru being welcomed at the White House by president Eisenhower in 1956. It is just after he has concluded his meeting with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Do you now see the towering statesman that Nehru was? But then, the question is this. If India had all this power and prestige, what happened to it?
Oddly enough, the Congress supporters might have a point. But for the worst possible reasons. To understand this, we offer a hypothesis that is both painful and provocative. From 1947 to the present day, India did not always trend upwards. Instead, our trajectory was more like a “V.” For over 40 years, Nehruvian principles made India move steadily down the global order. The bottom was reached around the crisis of 1991, when these principles were finally abandoned. After that, India began its rise.
As a result, most Indians do not have a memory of ours being a powerful country. When India is celebrated on the world stage today, it feels like something that has never happened before. But it used to happen. Then, we sabotaged ourselves.
Sounds unbelievable? Consider this. In 2021, India became the world’s fifth largest economy, and it was the sixth largest in 2020. What was the rank of India’s GDP in the 1950s? Also sixth! In between, India’s rank dipped as low as 12th in 1991! That is the stark “V” shape we were talking about.
India’s economic decline in the Nehruvian years
Looking at the arduous efforts of the government to internationalise the rupee today, it is difficult to imagine a time when entire foreign countries used the Indian rupee as their currency. But in the 1950s and the 1960s, the Indian rupee was used all over the Middle East. As central banker, India enjoyed enormous power over the economies of all these countries where millions of Indian workers now toil for a pittance. In 1959, the Reserve Bank of India introduced the Gulf rupee specifically for these countries. Initially, a Gulf rupee was worth exactly one Indian rupee.
But as India’s economy weakened under the weight of Nehruvian socialism, other nations no longer wanted to be under India’s umbrella. Kuwait left in 1961, and Bahrain in 1965. As India’s economic crisis deepened, the RBI was forced to devalue the Gulf Rupee in 1966. The Saudis stopped trading in Indian currency. One by one, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Oman gave up on the Gulf Rupee and introduced their own currencies.
By 1966, famine-like conditions prevailed in India. And our economics took an even harder left turn. In 1969 and 1970, India nationalised all banks. But forex reserves continued to decline. By 1974, India imposed the harshest possible capital controls, forcing foreign firms to flee. India had shut its door upon the world. And the world did not look back.
If India’s economic disaster under Nehruvian socialism can be captured in a single data point, it is this. In 1947, India’s per capita GDP was 18 per cent of that of the world. In other words, the average Indian earned only 18 paise for every rupee that the average person around the world earned. By the 1991 crisis, this collapsed to one-third of that, to just 6 paise for every rupee. In other words, India actually became 3 times poorer in the first four decades after independence! After the 1991 reforms, India began inching back upwards again. By 2014, it rose to 14 paise. Where is the average Indian today? We have climbed back to 18 paise. That is where we used to be 75 years ago!
The undermining of India’s military
When Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the leader of Egypt in 1967, began the moves that culminated in the Six Day War, he first had to contend with the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) that was stationed in the Sinai desert. The commander of the UNEF was Maj Gen Indar Jit Rikhye, a World War II veteran of the Indian Army. Similarly, when the first Indochina war ended in 1954, it was decided to have an international commission to hold free and fair elections in Vietnam. Who would be in charge of this commission? Canada, Poland and India! It has been a long time since India enjoyed such clout in international affairs.
In 1962, the Indian Army fought a hopeless battle, with World War I vintage .303 bolt action rifles against the Chinese who used AK-47s. It was the result of fifteen years of stagnation in the Indian military. The sense of urgency advocated by generals such as KS Thimayya was ignored by the duo of Nehru and defence minister VK Krishna Menon, who promoted their own favorite commanders. Security threats were systematically neglected. And perhaps worst of all, for ideological reasons. “Our policy is non-violence. Scrap the army! The police are good enough to meet our security needs,” Nehru is reported to have said.
Such thinking was perhaps at the root of decisions such as the premature ceasefire in 1948, choosing to take the Kashmir issue to the UN. Or the decision to not put the Indian army in charge of the frontiers with Tibet until 1959. The Chinese had occupied Tibet in 1950, and by 1957 they had built the Tibet-Sinkiang highway through Aksai Chin. The highway remained undiscovered for nearly two years. Under the terms of the 1948 ceasefire, Nehru did not allow Indian fighters to carry out reconnaissance missions from the airfield at Srinagar. It was a sad state for a military that had served with distinction in two world wars, from the capture of Haifa in 1918 to the liberation of Italy in 1943.
If the Indian military received much needed attention after 1962, most of the gains from the military victory of 1971 were lost at the negotiating table. India handed over 90,000 prisoners of war back to Pakistan, but the Kashmir issue was left untouched. In the east, the chicken’s neck remained narrow as ever. The north-east remained tantalizingly close to the Bay of Bengal, but without sea access, cut off by a strip that is only 50 km wide.
Nehruvian idealism as foreign policy
The simplistic argument, that India’s international clout was simply due to its stature at the time and not because of Nehru’s statesmanship, can be made easily. After all, foreign policy has always been the favorite punching bag for Nehru’s detractors, since they believe that this was the front on which he made his Himalayan or “Nehruvian” blunders. However, his checkered legacy on this front, and how it can be reconciled with his undeniable statesmanship, must be examined in a more mature manner.
The answer lies with the approach that Nehru adopted when it came to dealing with the world. His statement at the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1961 best sums up his perception of the international stage and how he believed it should be acted upon. “The time, the place, the occasion are now and here to take up the question of war and peace and make it our own and show to the world that we stand for peace… The power of nations assembled here is not military power or economic power; nevertheless, it is power. Call it moral force,” he said.
With the end of the second world war and the process of decolonisation, a new world order had begun to take shape. Nehru was perhaps the only important world leader of the time who, with the advent of the United Nations and other such phenomena, whole-heartedly bought into the idealist myth that this world order was propounding. This, despite the discrepancy between the words and the actions of the order’s leading powers from the very onset.
The term “moral victory” has now become a joke. Take a moment to imagine how one of the important powers in the world actually functioned for decades on the international stage with the objective of scoring one moral victory after another. The fundamentals driving Nehru’s foreign security policy, would be considered liberal or idealist (a disparaging term) in the study of international relations, based on the theory that an international system with no conflict or competition is a real possibility. This is normative theory, meaning a theory that does not describe reality as it is but prescribes or tells you how anything should ideally be. India was perhaps the only power of any consequence at the time which was naive enough to actually walk the talk on such an approach, an approach which according to most scholars, continued till the end of the Cold War with certain deviations. Naturally, like anybody chasing one moral victory after another, India’s fortunes on the international front began to sag.
How Nehru doctrine undermined India
The Nehru Doctrine’s prescriptions on every front, therefore, were in line with these idealist fundamentals. “There is also no doubt at all in my mind that it is inevitable for India and Pakistan to have close relations – very close relations – sometime or the other in the future,” Nehru had said about Pakistan in a speech at the Indian Council of World Affairs. In his mind, it was not the peace but the hostilities that were the aberration. When it came to China, Nehru’s position prior to the war is well-known. On many occasions, he alluded to how similar China was to India- an ancient civilisation, a victim of colonial occupation, a backward country trying to uplift its large population. On the floor of parliament, he flayed the UNO for choosing to recognise Taiwan as the Republic of China instead of Communist China, calling it a breach of the organisation’s charter and spirit. India even supported Hong Kong and Macau’s “reintegration” with China. And according to many sources including Shashi Tharoor, diplomats have claimed that India turned down an offer for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Nehru believed that China should have the seat.
Such was the faith in the idealist world order that Kashmir, which was a domestic issue since the treaty and terms of accession were no different from any other Indian princely state, was unnecessarily internationalised. After its unnecessary internationalisation by India, the internationalisation itself was used to justify why India could not integrate the state fully. “The accession is complete. Accession, however, must be distinguished from integration. Jammu and Kashmir State acceded first and then integrated, as the other states had done… but in the nature of things, we could not follow a similar policy in Kashmir where a war, which had almost become an international issue, was going on,” Nehru told the Indian parliament in 1953. On the question of nuclear weapons too, Nehru used the same idealistic framework to conclude that the world was on the brink of peace since everyone wanted it, and that amassing large armies and nuclear weapons was detrimental to this movement. “The whole course of history of the last few years has shown a growing opinion spread in favour of the concept of non-alignment. Why? Because it was in tune with the course of events; it was in tune with the thinking of the vast numbers of people, whether the country concerned was non-aligned or not, because they hungered passionately for peace and did not like this massing up of vast armies and nuclear bombs on either side,” he said in 1961.
Therefore, as he went about preaching from this moral high-horse, the rest of the world did not mind. In fact, the rest of the world quite welcomed it. Yes, they were lectured about non-violence, non-alignment, how the US-led bloc and the Soviet-led bloc were infringing on the independent foreign policies of other countries and how they were creating instability all over the world. But lectured by whom? Not only was he harmless, he was buying into their idealism and systematically undermining the substantial clout that his own country enjoyed. So long as his ego could be fed by accepting the moral certificates he liked to issue, at least a major power would be kept in check.
This is not merely a theory, for how the world perceived India and its idealism became evident in the wake of Goa’s liberation. Here too, Nehru’s India had followed an idealist approach, trying to convince Portuguese dictator Salazar to give up on his colony for more than a decade. In 1961, perhaps upon realising that the strength of its moral argument was proving to be ineffective, the Indian military walked into Goa and sent the Portuguese packing. Now remember, this was a period when the erstwhile colonial powers were still supposedly repenting for their actions, and Salazar was the kind of brutal authoritarian who would get “elected” with a vote-share of hundred percent. But what was the revolutionary rules-based liberal democratic world order’s reaction to India liberating Goa? “India, the Aggressor,” screamed a headline from The New York Times. “With his invasion of Goa Prime Minister Nehru has done irreparable damage to India’s good name and to the principles of international morality,” the article said. “Goa, of course, is the former Portuguese colony that preachy, “nonviolent” India grabbed in 1961 in what still lives as a world-class instance of post-colonial hypocrisy. It would have taken a special perversity for Commonwealth dignitaries to relax at the scene of India’s permanent conquest…,” The Washington Post wrote. When President John F Kennedy met the Indian ambassador, he is said to have told him, “People are saying that the preacher has been caught coming out of the brothel.” Instead of replying that the Americans would know best about this, India quietly swallowed the insult. Those were not the days of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and perhaps somewhere, our policymakers really believed that they had sinned by strongly asserting India’s interests.
The comparison that is drawn between Nehru and Modi today is for obvious reasons- no Prime Minister has enjoyed such a clout on the international stage since Nehru, and no Prime Minister since Nehru has advocated for non-alignment or strategic autonomy as strongly either. The comparison is instructive, for the approach that Modi has adopted better illustrates the shortcomings of the Nehruvian approach. Today non-alignment is pursued not for some hippy ideal like world peace but for India to emerge as a pole in a future multipolar world order. Non-alignment is pursued not by keeping away from great power politics, but by leveraging great power politics to advance Indian interests.
Under Modi, India has signed foundational military agreements with the United States, and at the same time, it maintains ties with Russia, especially on the defense equipment and energy security fronts. India has gone all-in on the QUAD with the United States among others to restrict China’s influence, and at the same time, it is all-in on initiatives like BRICS and SCO, which seek to dismantle a US-led world order. Never have both China and the West’s bluffs been called out by India at such regular intervals, and without it affecting their relations. India has thriving relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and every other important Middle-eastern power, and is reaching out to regions like Southeast Asia through Act East, completely independent from any other great power. Today, articles praising Modi’s statesmanship in the international media are rare, but the red carpet is rolled out for Modi across the globe. Whether it is the vaccines or Ukraine, he is increasingly the man they turn to. But the red carpet is rolled out for a different reason- because they need India, not because they need a moral certificate from Modi personally.
The Nehru supporter’s sleight of hand
Remember how we talked about India’s exalted role in world affairs in the 1950s? Unable to explain where all this power went since then, the Nehru supporter uses a clever sleight of hand. In the Nehruvian myth, the power and prestige of India in the 1950s was due to Nehru’s supreme personal qualities. According to them, we have not had a leader of Nehru’s caliber since then. And therefore, we lost prestige.
That makes little sense. Because the real reason was India’s sharp decline in the first four decades after Independence. You cannot gain prestige in the world, nor hold on to it, when your people are getting three-times poorer! The respect that the leader of a country gets has only to do with the power they have. A fumbling Biden, however senile, is still the President of the United States.
The other sleight of hand is calling the Nehruvian years a ‘foundation’ for modern India. But what kind of foundation building makes a country three times poorer and internationally irrelevant in the process?
Yes, India had a lot of nation building to do in the 1950s. The British had left India devastated and poor. But the question is compared to what? In 1947, India was the largest economy in Asia. It had railways and ports better than anywhere else on the continent. India had a manufacturing base, and universities where knowledge was being produced. China was entering a bitter civil war. Japan had been bombed out.
Now pick up a globe and have a closer look at the Indian Ocean. Run your finger along the entire east coast of Africa, to the Middle East, and then all the way to Indonesia, formerly called the Dutch East Indies. All those countries were decolonising in the 1950s and 60s. India lies at the heart of this region, with the potential to control all those trade routes in the Indian Ocean. India’s factories could have fed the demand in those newly independent countries, all of which were less developed than India at the time. India could have fed the Middle East oil boom, or the rising demand in the ‘tiger’ economies of South-East Asia. To think what India could have been!
India has just finished its first full year as the world’s fifth largest economy. That is one rank higher than 1950, when we were sixth. By all accounts. India will become the world’s third largest economy by 2030, and quite likely several years before that. But we must remember that constant rise is by no means guaranteed. And therefore, while we must honour the patriotism, intent and contributions of Nehru and his heirs, there can be no myth-making regarding their policies or their persona. The tragedy of India’s V-shaped trajectory should therefore be well known and widely acknowledged. If myths take hold, we risk falling back into the abyss of the same V.
Abhishek Banerjee is an author and columnist. Ajit Datta is an author and political commentator. Views expressed are personal.
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