Nehru always claimed that the arrest happened without his knowledge. Yet the week before, he’d written with alarm to his closest confidant about how the “lure of American money to develop Kashmir” was encouraging Abdullah’s impulse toward independence. Shortly before sending that letter, he had set out his orders with clinical precision: “The members of Government should not speak in different voices” when it came to the policy of Kashmir’s place in the Indian Union; “it may be desirable to arrest one or two such persons, who are known to be corrupt.”
“I suppose one has to do some things for the greater good,” Nehru’s daughter, Indira, wrote to him on hearing of Abdullah’s arrest. She had just been to the USSR and was reminded of hearing news of the arrest of one of Stalin’s henchmen, Lavrentiy Beria—not, she reassured her father, that she was making a comparison!
Abdullah was released from jail only once in the subsequent ten years, but as soon as he began rallying his people toward independence, he was returned there. Though freed again just before Nehru’s death in 1964, he was exiled from Kashmir for another decade. Only in 1977, after the Emergency (see 46, Indira Gandhi), was Abdullah, now past seventy, permitted to stand for reelection. He then won the fairest election in the dismal history of Kashmiri democracy. Yet his resumption of power came at a cost: Indira Gandhi had forced him to surrender key elements of Kashmiri autonomy.
* * *
In the late 1980s, about seven years after the death of Sheikh Abdullah, an armed separatist movement began in Kashmir. Before long, tens of thousands of young men were trekking across the border to Pakistan and returning as trained fighters. Islamist militants from outside Kashmir also joined in—many of them mujahideen demobilized after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. By 2006 the Indian government was deploying some six hundred thousand military and paramilitary forces to control a population of around ten million. According to the Kashmir state government, the conflict left more than forty-three thousand people dead between 1990 and 2011; civil-society groups cite much higher figures.
The historian Chitralekha Zutshi, who is writing a biography of Sheikh Abdullah, says that many young people in Kashmir blame Abdullah for the conflict: “They see him as the reason why Kashmir is in the position it is today. He’s the reason why Kashmir allied with India in 1947. He’s the reason why autonomy was chipped away.”
For many Hindu nationalists, the problem remains too much autonomy. They argue for abolishing Article 370 and giving India full sovereignty over the state. Meanwhile, some secularists think that Kashmiris should be eager to forge a stronger link to India, with its economy growing at 7 percent, instead of turning to a dysfunctional Pakistan. But as Basharat Peer points out, Kashmiris today are well aware of the way India’s current governing party, the BJP, is eroding the rights of religious minorities, particularly Muslims. In such a climate, chains, even golden ones, are as likely to inspire resistance as allegiance.
During his imprisonment, Abdullah had tried to work on Nehru’s guilty conscience. Wasn’t it a travesty that Kashmir was receiving harsher treatment from independent India than from the Dogra regime they had once linked arms to oppose? After Nehru’s death, a weary Abdullah would try to work on the conscience of his begrudged countrymen, in ways that resonate even more today. The treatment of Kashmir was “an open book,” he said, one hardly hidden to history. “Let every Indian search his own heart.”
44
V. K. KRISHNA MENON
Somber Porcupine
1896–1974
From Independence until India’s 1962 military defeat by China ended his career, V. K. Krishna Menon, intellectual confidant and global troubleshooter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was one of the most reviled figures of the Cold War era. Beginning in the early 1950s, American administrations tried to force the “unpleasant mischief-maker” out of office. The British detested his “arrogant extremism” and, against all diplomatic rules, its domestic intelligence agency, MI5, tapped his phones and read his mail while he was India’s envoy in London: Britain thought he was in bed with the Soviets. The Soviets considered him “a lackey of the British.” As for the Chinese, they never forgave the condescension with which he tried to school them in international affairs.
To know Menon better wasn’t necessarily to like him. One of his lovers said he was a “sombre porcupine,” but “with the potential to evolve into a human demon.” Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru spoke of him as “our ‘problem child.’” The strong-featured, sharp-elbowed Menon was, in short, a full-tank drama queen, the kind of man whose finger you wouldn’t want on the nuclear trigger. Yet the country he represented had no such trigger. Recently freed from colonial rule, it had a vast poor population, a slow-growing economy, and a large army whose rifles malfunctioned and jeeps failed to start.
So why should the emotionally labile representative of an undeveloped, weapon-deficient country attract such animosity among the world’s great powers? Because, as the voice of India’s foreign policy for some two decades—a “dangerously persuasive” voice, in the U.S. State Department’s view—he prosecuted an agenda that deeply unsettled the superpowers but became one of independent India’s most important early achievements.
In a polarized Cold War world, India refused to ally itself with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Instead, with immodest ambition, it struck out on its own. Relying not on military weaponry but on diplomatic energy, it tried to build an international order in which weaker states could better resist the bullying imperatives of the superpowers. That policy acquired the name of “nonalignment” when Menon inadvertently used the term in the course of a UN speech. This ad-lib would come to define India in the world.
Years before, Menon had speculated that if India overthrew British imperialism, it might change the planet by “transform[ing] the power relations of other countries and cutting at the root of the causes of international rivalry.” After Independence, he tried to realize this vision. Shuttling frantically and often uninvited among world capitals, snatching rest with the help of Luminal, a barbiturate that was a regular part of his otherwise meager diet, he kept himself at the center of virtually all the diplomatic engagements that shaped India’s international identity. The Korean War, the Indochina peace talks, the 1955 Bandung Conference, the Suez and Hungary crises, nuclear disarmament, the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, the Congo Crisis—Menon was there, a lambaster of colonialism and a defender of Indian interests in Asia and beyond. While insisting on India’s right not to be subservient to other nations, he cared little for diplomatic niceties. In early 1962, when Henry Kissinger first encountered him in Delhi, he was surprised when Menon attacked the American ambassador at the time, J. K. Galbraith, as too pro-Indian. “Don’t embrace us,” Menon bristled, characteristically. “We pick our own friends.”
* * *
As the postwar era turned nuclear weapons into the currency of global affairs, India’s leaders invested instead in words. International deliberative assemblies—the British Commonwealth, gatherings of Asian and African leaders, and above all the United Nations—became their natural habitat. While the United Nations may have been an attempt by the great powers to legitimate and maintain their dominance after the Second World War, Nehru and Menon took the institution seriously from its inception. They thought it might actually be used to constrict the influence of the great powers and slowly alter the international balance in favor of the poorer states then emerging from colonial subjection.
As India’s most persistent voice at the United Nations, Menon could be a self-parodic embodiment of the country’s commitment to resolving conflict and shaping public opinion through discussion. Once, during a 1957 Security Council debate on the Kashmir conflict, he delivered a speech, punctuated by fits of fainting, that lasted either seven, eight, or nine hours, depending on which account you accept. The performance reflected his belief in his own persuasive capacities, a belief bearing the imprint of the Bari Memsahib Anni
e Besant (29). From his teenage years, Besant had groomed him to shine in an international parliament that she envisaged would one day govern and save the world.
In his wealthy, high-achieving family on Kerala’s Malabar Coast, Menon hadn’t been considered so promising. It’s a region where many family systems are matriarchal, and his mother, an accomplished Sanskritist and musician in the town of Calicut, expected her children to excel. His sister had published a book by the age of fourteen; his brother was a sports champion. The young Menon, however, was prickly and given to sulks—qualities he’d never outgrow. Afraid of evil spirits, he went to bed with the lights on (and was a chronic insomniac for the rest of his life). When his worried father sent him to Madras to train in his footsteps as a lawyer, Menon happened to hear Besant speak. Soon he was making an alternative home on the Theosophical Society’s grounds at Adyar, a wooded sanctuary for Western spiritual seekers and the promising young Indians whom Besant was bringing into her movement.
After law school, Menon was enthusiastically performing Theosophy-inspired social service when Besant sent him to England. He was to become an educationist and to propagate, back in India, the teachings of her most famous protégé, Krishnamurti. But soon after his arrival, Menon discovered that he wasn’t an esoteric after all. Instead, he enrolled at the London School of Economics, where he became a star pupil of the political theorist and Labour politician Harold Laski. Warmly welcomed into Bloomsbury salons, he mixed with the likes of Kingsley Martin, Lytton Strachey, the Woolfs, and, unknowingly, informers for British intelligence. In 1927, three years after his move to London, Scotland Yard opened its first file on potential seditionist V. K. Krishna Menon. Over the years, British intelligence and police files on him would expand to fill many boxes.
“Our work here should have the moral force of India behind it,” Menon wrote in 1930 as he converted an old-time London theosophical offshoot into the India League, which became a rousing advocate of Indian independence. Following a research tour around India, where he was appalled at the colonial authorities’ repression of both nationalists and ordinary citizens, he spread his anticolonial message in British newspapers and from Hyde Park Corner soapboxes. His arguments began to bring British left intellectuals and Labour politicians around to the cause of Indian independence. Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, and Michael Foot lent India their public support, as did American radicals such as Paul Robeson.
Menon’s quickfire intelligence constantly sought places to settle, and in the second half of the 1930s, he and the editor Allen Lane helped to create one of Britain’s most beloved publishing institutions, the Penguin and Pelican paperbacks. Handling the nonfiction side, he published authors such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, until he and Lane fell out (temperamental differences). So Menon must have felt immense relief when, just out of the hospital following a breakdown prompted by a failed love affair, he found a wider channel for his energies. Jawaharlal Nehru, another Indian who had passed through Theosophy before finding socialism and politics more compelling, was visiting London.
* * *
The relationship between Nehru and Menon is one of the curiosities of twentieth-century Indian history. Like the partnership between Nixon and Kissinger, it brought both glory and stain to their country’s international reputation. But, unlike the Americans’ records, Menon’s vitally important papers remain in disarray and largely inaccessible to scholars. Once, thinking I was settling in with some important Menon files, I opened an archive box and found an old hairbrush of his. It seemed fitting: under the radar was Menon’s style. In British secret files of the pre-Independence years, there’s an entry, referring to a Congress decision in 1937, that describes his method in a way that holds true for many other instances in his career: “There is also evidence that though [Menon] handed on the idea to Nehru, he was most anxious it should pass for Nehru’s own in order that it might thereby carry greater weight.”
At the time, Nehru was, along with Bose, the modern, international face of the Indian freedom movement. He was also on the lookout for someone who could help convey sophisticated political opinions to the West. Almost immediately, Menon became his spokesman abroad, his back channel to international developments during his frequent imprisonments, and his friend. “There is hardly anyone here to whom I can speak with frankness about myself,” Nehru wrote to Menon in 1939, as events in India and Europe, and at home, brought him close to a breakdown himself.
The view from the intelligence files in the years leading up to Independence was that Menon was working quietly with the Communist Party to turn Nehru into one of its puppets. Many British officials were eager to catch this “extremist of the worst possible kind” in an illegal intrigue with the Soviets, and to jail him. That they could never nail him probably had to do with something one of their analysts had noticed: “Menon has no genuine Party loyalties: he is first and foremost anti-British and thereafter, only, an extreme Socialist.”
Menon was chronically incensed at the primitive image of the Indian people that the British promulgated to the world, and he harbored a special animus for the promulgators, “men who draw their incomes from India and spend the evenings of their lives in maligning her and her people.” As Independence neared, he began to sense the role he could play in changing the world’s idea of Indians.
In 1946 he became the chief emissary between Nehru and the British, applying his knowledge of British political and constitutional procedure to the intricate negotiations over the transfer of power and independent India’s membership, as a republic, in the British Commonwealth. Meanwhile, he and Nehru fell into what would become a habit of their friendship: staying up half the night at Nehru’s home, arguing over politics, philosophy, and India’s future.
* * *
Visiting New Delhi in the early 1960s, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin met Nehru and his left-wing “gadfly,” Menon. Ever the aesthete, Berlin decided Nehru was the T. S. Eliot to Menon’s Ezra Pound—“the same beliefs at much lower tension, milder, more compatible with respectable life, but deriving from the same constellation of values; gently, firmly, tolerantly, decently anti-Western.”
It was perhaps not Nehru’s safest idea to assign his Pound to a newly independent India’s most important foreign mission, in London. Menon’s tenure there laid bare his flaws: administrative incompetence, erratic management of staff (including affairs with their spouses), and bouts of depression and mania, during which he wrote long letters back to New Delhi threatening suicide if forced to resign. Yet his relentless pursuit of Indian interests made him essential to Nehru, who felt his friend generally bore his personal difficulties with admirable fortitude. Had he shared Menon’s “highly strung” nature, Nehru once wrote, he probably would have committed suicide.
In early 1951, not long after presiding over a financial scandal involving faulty jeeps procured for the Indian Army, Menon staggered unkempt into a private meeting with Nehru. “Obviously very far from well…,” Nehru wrote later that night. “He had the appearance of a person on the verge of going off his head.” It attests to the depth of his belief in Menon’s abilities that, instead of retiring him, he made him India’s face to the world. In 1952, Menon joined India’s delegation at the United Nations and, soon after, became its chief representative. Almost immediately, he and Nehru embarked on a furious period of international diplomacy, much of it focused on Asia.
Menon’s arrival at the United Nations coincided with America’s first successful hydrogen bomb test, a particularly ominous event for Asia given the situation in Korea, where the two-year-old war between the U.S.-supported South and the Soviet- and China-backed North had reached a parlous stalemate. To Menon and Nehru, the Korean crisis threatened to transplant the Cold War into Asia and to subordinate the continent to American and Soviet interests. It also threatened to extend Chinese influence. Ensuring that Asian conflicts did not spiral into atomic confrontation became a priority for the two men,
and a vital test case for India’s nonaligned policy.
The Korean impasse centered on the repatriation of prisoners of war, and Menon took the lead in trying to unblock it, putting forward a series of bold proposals based on giving the prisoners freedom to decide their own fates. Menon’s principle offended the Chinese, his style annoyed the Americans, and his plan was rejected at first. Yet in June 1953 he helped break the deadlock. Further diplomatic interventions followed as Nehru and Menon waded into matters far above India’s power grade. As Nehru put it, “When the scales are balanced, even a little makes a difference.” Both men shared the belief that small, skilfully chosen, independent moves were a better way to secure India’s interests than pursuing big alliances.
This diplomatic precept guided Menon when, in 1954, he barged into negotiations over the conflict in Indochina. For Eisenhower, Vietnam was the “domino” whose fall would ineluctably spread communism, and in May 1954, against the background of France’s defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the four major powers (America, Britain, France, and Russia) convened in Geneva, along with China, the northern Viet Minh, the South Vietnamese, and the Laotians.
The United States saw no reason for India’s involvement, and Soviet Russia and China actively maneuvered to keep India out. Turning up uninvited in Geneva anyway, Menon plunged into a hectic schedule of diplomatic speed dating. He worked corridors and side rooms, hotel lobbies and bars, holding some two hundred meetings with the assembled delegates. The conference’s outcome, which he played an important role in securing, was an uneasy armistice that would nevertheless last almost a decade.
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