By Raju Mansukhani
“I see absolutely no danger, external danger to India from Communists or any other source. There is no danger whatever the internal position might, or might not be,” said Pt Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister during his first television interview to BBC in London on his visit in June 1953.
The studio interview brought the Prime Minister face to face with leading journalists, namely Kingsley Martin, editor of New Statesman, HV Hodson editor of Sunday Times and Donald McLachlan, foreign affairs editor of The Economist. The Prime Minister was introduced to viewers as ‘one of Asia’s most prominent statesmen whom they had the exceptional good fortune to meet’.
Communism, communist threat, establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and China’s expansionism were top-of-the-mind issues for the interviewers. Pt Nehru’s replies were forthright and clear when questioned about China’s expansion in Asia.
“I think that is a wrong view completely. I don’t think China ever since it’s this change over there (referring to the formation of the new People’s Republic) has had any desire to expand. They have got enough problems of their own. And then so far as India is concerned, we have the most friendly relations with them,” he said with a disarming smile.
Through the half-hour-long interview which Pt Nehru described at the start, as an ‘ordeal’, the statesman in him was eloquent and passionate about the rise of Asia. He said, “One of the biggest things that has happened and is happening, is this awakening or upsurge in Asia and to some extent in Africa. It’s a tremendous thing; it takes different forms, develops differently in different parts of Asia. But it has come to upset completely the old order in China. It has gone one way in India, another way we arrived at a peaceful settlement with Britain in Burma, at south-east Asia everywhere it has a different face. But the main thing is this enormous upsurge, in a sense after three or four hundred years of European domination, Asia is coming in into its own. Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly and one has to understand that, appreciate it, understand it and not merely get angry at it or dislike it. Of course, to some extent in a different way, the same applies to Africa.”
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Seventy years after the interview, one which has tremendous archival value, what is disturbing is the paradox of Pt Nehru’s assessment and analysis of the Communist presence, appeal, and threats to a newly-independent India. On the external front, it was both the Soviet Union and China who were dominating the geo-political landscape. In fact, from 1946 to 1950, Pt Nehru was often publicly voicing his fears and apprehensions about the USSR.
Noted S Gopal in volume two of the biography of Pt Nehru that “especially in south-east Asia, Soviet Union had adopted a wholly destructive line and seemed to be aiming solely at chaos in order to weaken the countries of the area and prevent them from serving as bases for the Western Powers; but China would probably be more inclined to prevention of conflict, at least until the People’s Government had stabilized themselves at home and gained some measure of economic strength.”
What Pt Nehru was advocating, well before the 1953 BBC interview was recorded, was an attitude of ‘cautious friendliness’ towards China. As early as 1950-51, he was determined that it should be made manifestly a friendly approach, and there should be no support of the enemies of China or formation of any bloc which could be regarded as anti-Chinese or anti-communist. In fact, he promptly rejected U Nu’s suggestions of a defence pact between India, Burma, Ceylon and Pakistan – which was anyway impractical.
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He termed it as an extension of the Truman doctrine to south-east Asia. But, although he saw at this time little danger of any Chinese aggression across the Indian borders, Pt Nehru intended to make it quite clear, when occasion arose, that the slightest attempt at such aggression, whether in India or Nepal, would be stoutly resisted. “As for aggressive communism, it could be best resisted in south-east Asia by removing every vestige of colonial control and strengthening the nationalist forces,” he shared these thoughts repeatedly, in meetings and interviews, during Commonwealth Foreign Ministers meeting in Colombo in early January 1950.
The paradox is more pronounced in Pt Nehru’s speeches, writings and media interactions on communism and threats from China, in his assessment of the Communist Party of India and its appeal. For Nehru the greatest enemy of communism in India was the Communist Party of India itself. At the same time, he kept writing to Chief Ministers to respect civil liberties and not function as a ‘police state’.
On 2 February 1950, Nehru’s correspondence with the Chief Ministers is noteworthy. He said, “The Communists had practically become terrorists, the communalists had the same mental attitude as the Nazis and fascists, and the capitalists and landowning classes were singularly lacking in a social outlook. We talk of capitalism and socialism and communism, and yet we lack the social content of all of these.”
In fact, through the 1940s, and especially after 1945, there were series of communist uprisings in parts of West Bengal, Tripura, Manipur, Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra, Telangana in Hyderabad, Travancore-Cochin, and Malabar. For Nehru, the committed socialist, it was a severe test of governance and ideology. “The way the communists are carrying on in India in the shape of the most violent activity and writing is enough to disgust everyone. There is a complete lack of integrity and decency,” he had written to Lord Mountbatten on August 4, 1948.
In Hyderabad, the Indian Army’s action to annex the Princely State in September 1948 was condemned by the Communists as ‘an occupation of the State’; while Nehru continued to term the mass movement of Communists as ‘anti-national’. Telengana remained a disturbed area from 1946 to 1951, with Nalgonda district being the heart of the uprising in which 4000-5000 peasants and labourers were killed; over 10,000 communist sympathizers were detained and jailed. The Indian Communists hailed Telangana as their ‘biggest armed struggle’.
It was Rajni Palme Dutt, the veteran Communist leader from England, whose intervention led to calling off the Telengana armed struggle in October 1951. The chasm between Nehru and the Communist parties and leaders grew over the years. Yet in the BBC interview of June 1953, India’s friendly relations with the People’s Republic of China were a distinguishing factor in the country’s foreign affairs vis-à-vis the Western powers whose apprehensions and fears were apparent.
Stepping back to September 1949, a booklet titled ‘Communist Violence in India’ was published by the Government of India in order to bring together and give publicity to the lines on which the Communist Party of India had decided to work, and was actually working, in certain parts of the country. This publication was considered necessary as isolated accounts ‘in the Press failed to present a comprehensive picture of the strategy and tactics of the Communist Party’.
The aim of the booklet was to demonstrate that ‘individual instances of violence (of which a far from comprehensive list was given at the end) are linked, together by an overall plan. Extracts from Party documents—secret as well as publicly circulated—were given, and the justification for such preventive action as the different Governments in India have been compelled to take from, time to time was abundantly established. The booklet evoked very great interest within the country and abroad, and received worldwide publicity, as the Annual Report of Home Affairs Ministry 1948 noted.
It was BT Ranadive, the new general secretary of the Communist Party of India, who, during the Second Congress of the CPI held in Calcutta in February-end 1948, changed the party’s political narrative and strategy. He characterised the Congress government as “the national government of national surrender, of collaborators and a government of compromise Thus, in place of our former wrong characterisation about the government as one of national advance with which we should have a joint front, we have now the characterisation that it is a government of national surrender and collaboration.”
Ranadive’s speeches, archived in the ‘Documents of History of Communist Party of India’, pointed out: “The Congress leaders and the government are following, the policy of propping up landlordism in a new way instead of abolishing it altogether, the policy of screening and protecting feudal autocrats behind the veil of accession and mergers, the policy of aiding big business to act as tools of Anglo-American imperialists to place the ever-growing burdens on the heads of the workers and the common people – all these policies are further deepening the crisis and transferring the burden onto the shoulders of the masses.”
Communist leadership in India was to Nehru’s mind devoid of any moral standard or even any thought of India’s good; and, during these 1947-51 years, he openly criticised, “There is little difference between communism and communalism.” In a press interview, reported in Hindustan Times dated August 6, 1949, when asked “between communism and communalism, which is the lesser evil? Nehru replied: An extraordinary question to ask. Which do you prefer, death by drowning or falling from a precipice?”
It was not mere rhetoric too by Prime Minister Nehru. He wanted to counter the distortion of leftist ideology, of which he thought the Communists guilty, with a higher idealism. The real problem was something deeper than the killing and violence of the Communists; it was the need to deal with the economic distemper at a time when expectations had been aroused and a political consciousness had spread among vast masses of the people.
Towards the end of the BBC television interview, Prime Minister Nehru said, “Politicians are always compromising they have to… but there is a tendency if I may say so for a leading statesman in Europe and America to look at the world from Europe and America. Well, if we look at the same world or the same principles from, let us say, Delhi or Karachi, the world looks slightly different. Geography counts…”
Today, seventy years after the landmark ‘first’ interview, what is being counted are the paradoxes of the Nehruvian era.
(Videograbs: Raju Mansukhani)
(The author is a researcher-writer on history and heritage issues, a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya.)
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