General Thimayya, the charismatic Chief of Army Staff in the 1950s, once recounted how he'd first met Jawaharlal Nehru. They were both at the cinema in Allahabad sometime in the early 1930s. Nehru, seeing Thimayya wearing his army uniform, strolled up to him and asked, “So, how does it feel to be wearing a British uniform?” Thimayya replied: “Hot”.
That small, snappy exchange would seem to contain the essence of a prickly relationship that many observers believe unfolded between Nehru and the Indian military in post-Independence India: a relationship based on the notion that Nehru had little respect for the military, or indeed its role in his liberal new republic, and that in the ultimate put-down he appointed the arrogant, sneering, left-wing intellectual, Krishna Menon, as Defence Minister to keep the military leadership perpetually in their place. Srinath Raghavan works hard to dispel that latter notion.
Not so woolly-headed
Raghavan's credentials are impressive. He's a former Indian army officer who obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, and now lectures there on defence studies. In addition, he's an associate fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.
Raghavan has managed to uncover a great deal of valuable, so-far unknown archival material, in India, as well as from Britain, the U.S., Pakistan and China. And he uses this body of material to illustrate how Nehru responded to a series of series of conflicts that faced the country between 1947 and 1962: carefully exploring all the options, diplomatic as well as military, before arriving at his strategic decisions; working, always, toward the soft outcome that went with his own personal philosophy and worldview, yet ending up, too often, with a hard, military outcome (which, of course, caused sniggers among his critics around the world). Thus Raghavan seeks to present Nehru as not the woolly-headed philosopher-king of popular perception, but a sophisticated realpolitik player, whenever that particular role needed to be played.
The book begins with the author briefly but incisively outlining Nehru's personality, his outlook of liberal realism and his soaring foreign policy ideals. He then goes on to present the challenges that collided against those ideals, one after the other, over a period of a decade-and-a-half: Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir, East Pakistan, and ultimately, of course, China. Reading the book is like watching a series of great chess matches, where Raghavan gives you insights into Delhi's thinking, as well as that of the players on the other side of the table, and you can watch the strategic moves being played out, one by one; the strategy for each game being informed by those of all the preceding games. In the process, you also catch fascinating glimpses of Delhi's foreign policy establishment as it was in the 1950s, with its remarkable dramatis personae, its distinctive world-view and its sophisticated style of diplomacy.
“Big-stick” diplomacy
One chapter that makes especially interesting reading today is the long-forgotten near-war in Bengal in 1950, when escalating, tit-for-tat communal violence on both sides of the border had brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a major armed conflict. There was wide-ranging domestic pressure on Nehru to go to war against Pakistan — from everybody, from Syama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha at one end to the Gandhian Acharya Kripalani at the other — but Nehru was convinced that war made no strategic sense under the circumstances; in fact, war would be directly counter-productive to the very interests of the Hindu minority in East Pakistan for which it was being advocated. Back-channel diplomacy involving the British and Americans was tried, and failed. Ultimately, it was skilful “Big-stick” diplomacy by Nehru — speaking softly, while carrying a big stick, as Theodore Roosevelt prescribed — that led to the Nehru-Liaqat Pact, and a defusing of the situation. And that is the irony: the wars are long remembered; the peace pacts soon forgotten.
One episode that seems conspicuous by its absence in this book, however, is Goa. Raghavan's explanation is to say of the Goa campaign and the Congo operation of the early 1960s, “that is not to say these historical events were trivial; merely that they are marginal to the analytical contents of this study”. What? Equating the Goa campaign, which dented Nehru's international credentials so badly, with the Congo operation, which was essentially a UN-sponsored peace-keeping mission? It's an explanation that seems a little disingenuous.
Cool, professional eye
One of the things that makes War and Peace in Modern India so refreshing is the fact that that in today's world, where Nehru draws sharply — and unnecessarily — polarised reactions, Raghavan views him with a cool, professional, dispassionate eye, praising or slamming him as the moves on the strategic chess-board warrant. The book, with its body of well-argued and thought-provoking content, will no doubt be well-received by academic and strategic circles. But its somewhat austere style and presentation will perhaps exclude the general reader — which is a pity, for, it deserves a wider readership.
One small, final point: in an unintended touch of irony, the book's cover shows a photograph of Nehru with Pakistan's President Ayub Khan, who had proposed a Joint Defence pact in 1959, after China's invasion of Tibet — as Mani Dixit reminds us in his India-Pakistan in War and Peace — to which Nehru had famously retorted, “And who is this Joint Defence aimed at, pray?” It was something Nehru may have recalled with rue a couple of years later, when China revealed itself as India's dominant strategic threat, rather than the temperamental friend he had taken it for all along. Which, of course, was ultimately his strategic Waterloo. Or his strategic Bomdila, if you prefer. It was here that Nehru's realist instinct finally failed him — although Raghavan has an interesting alternative theory to offer. But for that you will just have to read the book.
War and Peace in Modern India, A Strategic History of the Nehru Years,Srinath Raghavan, Permanent Black, price not stated.
