Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  As for aid, India under Nehru sought to get as much of it as she could out of the West though for some time Nehru had been opposed to accepting it, fearing its effects on non-alignment or independence. His passion to push on with his plans, which could not survive without aid, ended his opposition. India, like Indonesia, soon learnt that she need do little in order to get the aid in huge volume, and that its flow would be neither diminished nor interrupted by policies of hers disliked by the West, because the West had so great a fear of communism that it would spare no effort which it reckoned on as keeping India away from communism. India became confident that even Belgium and Holland, two countries she had denounced unsparingly over colonialism, would in the end join the Aid India Club; as in fact they did by 1963.

  As regards the essential international problem, namely, how to replace the law of the jungle with the rule of civilised law, Nehru, like many Indians, was keenly aware of the need. In Indians in general there remains, as has been noted earlier, in spite of so many signs and so much activity to the contrary, not only an instinct for tolerance, for live and let live, but also another heritage left by the Buddhists, a dislike of force or violence. Gandhi’s doctrine of Soul Force was not an accident. Nehru himself, a Brahmin, traditionally a caste which had nothing to do with arms, had yearnings after pacificism. So long as he lived those Indians who wanted to embark on a programme of thermonuclear weapons would not have their way. But Indians, like most of mankind, also want things the getting of which means resorting to the law of the jungle. Their nationalism, more emotional than they usually allow, or we usually believe, predisposes them to courses which would ordinarily end in violence. Their tendency, too, to hold at the same time mutually incompatible propositions (for instance Nehru’s speeches on peace just before and just after the Goa affair) undermined, inevitably if unjustly, confidence in their sincerity.

  Nehru spoke much and often about the need for world peace, sometimes censoriously. Men of goodwill in all countries listened to him for years with respect and with hope. They knew he had negligible military power but they saw him as a representative of light, of moral authority, of Soul Force. Some of the more naif saw him through the roseate hues of notions about ‘the spirituality of India’—notions well advertised by swamis, commercially or otherwise, and by a few Indian diplomats. That was not Nehru’s fault. He did render practical service to the cause of peace. Thus he played a personal mediatory role between Russia and the West; a valuable service in Dulles’ days and prior to the time Macmillan broke the ice by his visit to Moscow; he kept world attention on the thermonuclear armaments race; he was a steadying influence in the Afro-Asian group at a time when it much needed steadying; he was a steadying influence on nationalist passion inside India; and, in particular, he insisted on a level of restraint and patience in dealing with small neighbours often acting unjustly to India, such as Burma, Ceylon, and Nepal, which is rare in foreign relations. Where he was mainly at fault was that in passing judgement on the international situation he often failed to offer any concrete plan for achieving world peace; and that was so because he had in fact mastered no basic intellectual analysis of this very difficult problem, and had no solution. Who has? Furthermore, as regards certain interests of India Nehru’s policy, whether unavoidably or otherwise, was founded on force; nor was it invariably innocent of double talk.

  Nehru’s unresting concern with international relations, damned by certain Indians as much as by Dulles, came not from eccentricity or vanity or any desire to shine on the world stage. It came from his interest in the total human situation, and from the fact that he had vision enough to distinguish the bigger things from the smaller things—for instance to see that if a thermonuclear or poison gas or bacterial war could befall us all other human endeavour is futile. This truth is not altered by any failure in himself to resolve the conflict between national interests and the international order. The dilemma faced by men of goodwill who acquire power and responsibility is remorseless. Speaking of Nehru’s imprisonment of Sheikh Abdullah, Toynbee has said, ‘It is more blessed to be imprisoned for the sake of one’s ideals than to imprison other people, incongruously, in the name of the same ideals. Nehru lived to have both experiences.’* This was the nemesis of his taking on the responsibility of governing India. What passed between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah during their talks a few days before Nehru died, and just after the Sheikh had been released from his eleven years in jail, is not yet known. It is a theme for great drama; and, if men will ever recover the art of poetry again, a theme for great verse. If only we could know what passed in Nehru’s mind, that strong yet emotional mind, during those hours!

  Anticlimax

  Nehru began his fifteenth year as prime minister with the Goa affair, in November and December 1961. He began his sixteenth year with the Chinese rout of Indian forces and the Chinese occupation of some thousands of square miles of territory hitherto occupied by India, in October and November 1962. Both events shook India’s standing in the world; the Chinese attack shook Nehru’s standing in India as well. His long prime ministership was thus brought to an anticlimax. By the time 1963 dawned there remained to him only a fraction of his former authority. His old inner self-assurance had been undermined.

  Goa

  Towards midnight on Sunday, December 17, 1961, Indian forces invaded Goa. Three columns of infantry, led by parachutists and supported by tanks and artillery, crossed the Indo-Portuguese border at three points, while the Indian Air Force bombed the one Portuguese airport and the Indian Navy, marshalled in strength along the Goa coast, shelled the only Portuguese craft in Goa, an old-fashioned frigate. Armed services attaches in the various embassies in Delhi later, after study, believed that there was no cause for either air or naval bombarding except to allow the air force and the navy to share in the glory of the conquest. At the same time as the attack on Goa was launched the two other, and much less important, Portuguese territories, Damao and Diu, were occupied.

  On the following day, Monday, December 18, the Security Council of the United Nations was seized of a Portuguese complaint of Indian aggression. Soviet Russia vetoed discussion of the subject.

  Nehru had been back only a few weeks from a peace tour which had taken him to Belgrade, Moscow, Washington, Mexico and the UN. At the UN he had proposed a year devoted to peaceful cooperation.

  Goa, with an area of about 1,500 square miles, and lying about 200 miles south of Bombay, had been under Portuguese sovereignty for four and a half centuries. Nearly half the population of Goa were Catholics of long standing; a large proportion of the non-Catholics were of immigrant stock from India. The standard of living was higher, and taxes were lower, than in India; for which reason Indians liked to migrate there. Life was easygoing and relaxed in the Portuguese way; there was no self-government of the British kind but government was paternalistic as well as more efficient than in India, and, except for a handful of malcontents, most of whom had migrated to Bombay, and, in spite of Indian money or other support given to the agitators among this handful of malcontents, there was no appreciable discontent and no appreciable demand for absorption into India. The Portuguese governor-general was respected, and by all accounts deserved to be. Portugal’s retention of Goa might have been an anachronism but it was not resented by most Goans. India’s claim to Goa was never stronger than that she had a right to the whole peninsula (saving Pakistan); by which logic Spain has a right to Portugal or the Irish Republic has a right to Ulster. This is simply the claim of I want it.

  The Indians had worked for a coup d’état in 1954; but their plans had failed. Indian propaganda about an uprising inside Goa for joining India had been exposed at the time. The reports of the Times correspondent exemplify the position. As is usual in Portuguese colonies, race and personal relations were good. Nehru appears to have had little or no part in the 1954 affair, but he did break off diplomatic relations with Portugal. Since 1954 considerable effort had been made from time to time to whip up a pro-India mov
ement. Among the people in Goa the movement met with indifference when not with hostility; just as throughout India as a whole there was no interest in Goa. The only success was in Bombay amongst the Goanese migrants, mostly professional people; and it was difficult to know how sincere their agitation was. One of these people, a medical man, for instance, gained Nehru’s attention in the 1950s and got a good medical appointment, though he was not well regarded by leaders of the medical profession in Delhi. Agitating inside India and amongst Indians against Portugal gave such Goanese a certain standing which they would not otherwise have had; an escape from anonymity. Now that Goa has been taken over they have relapsed into a few hundred or thousand amongst 500 million Indians and count for nothing.

  In the last week of November 1961 the Indian press, on information supplied by government, reported an incident of what was officially described in headlines as ‘Portuguese firing on an Indian passenger ship’. (It later turned out, though this was reported in only a few papers, that ‘the passenger ship’ was a ‘country craft’ sailing-boat of yawl size, and that it was in Portuguese territorial waters apparently flouting warning signals.) This was followed by what was played up, on government prodding, as ‘another Portuguese firing incident’, this time an Indian fishing boat. This incident was blown up enough to awaken the ever-acute nationalistic sensibilities in India. It was not revealed that the boat was poaching in Portuguese waters. Some missions at Delhi believed (but as far as I know produced no evidence for their belief) that the boat had been sent there by the Indian authorities as an agent provocateur. Next came a series of reports, blown up more and more, about what were described, again in headlines, as ‘Portuguese attacks on Indian villages’. The information was highly coloured, but also highly vague; as were the accompanying allegations about ‘Portuguese troops massed on the Indian border’. Some of the Indian newspapers, presumably not by accident, published articles on the Inquisition in the Goa of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries at the same time as they published the reports alleging Portuguese aggression. By the beginning of December troop movements from all over India towards the Portuguese territories, more particularly towards Goa, were on such a scale that they could not be concealed. Passenger and ordinary freight services were cancelled by the railways for some days on end. Around Delhi itself we could see the trains moving troops and material to the south, day after day.

  Nehru made many statements from late November. As was not unknown with him, the statements could mean several things; the blankets of verbiage wrapped up his meanings so thickly that they were hard to unravel. But two points were repeated. First, there is a crisis. The crisis was indicated only vaguely. Second, and more boldly, if Portugal does not renounce sovereignty over Goa in favour of India, and do so forthwith, there can be no peace. The time for negotiation has passed.

  Foreign governments, receiving reports from their missions in Delhi, began to sense that something untoward might be afoot. Diplomatic efforts were therefore initiated from several quarters to forestall violence. Several Latin American governments, notably Brazil, offered help and suggested mediatory courses. The British government also offered its services, asked Nehru to give an assurance that India would not resort to force (which he refused), and pressed for a diplomatic solution. U Thant on behalf of the UN, like the United States, also asked India not to resort to force, but with more perfunctoriness than the British or the Latin Americans. U Thant did offer to send UN observers to the Indo-Portuguese border; Nehru rejected the offer.

  Nehru announced to the Indian public, with more frequency and in increasingly bellicose tones, that India’s patience was coming to an end. With diplomats, however, he was indirect. Although shifting his ground with them more than once, certain points did recur. These were:

  (a) Goa was a threat to India’s security. There was ‘a tremendous military build-up’ there; it had become ‘an armed camp’; ‘aggressive manoeuvres’ were going on which India could not ignore. (After, but, so far as I could find out, not before, the Indian invasion, Nehru spoke darkly of ‘NATO weapons’—which the Indian public took to mean nuclear weapons—in Goa, and of a ‘tie-up with Pakistan which made the problem more urgent than the border dispute with China’.)

  (b) Inside Goa law and order had broken down because of a nationalist uprising of the people against the Portuguese. The ‘white Portuguese’—another significant phrase—after trying to crush the uprising with ‘a reign of terror’, ‘mass imprisonment’, ‘torture atrocities’ and ‘massacres’, which Nehru characterised as ‘gruesome’, were fleeing the country to escape from their overwrought subjects. At one stage the governor-general was announced to have fled; untruthfully. Further, at Belgaun, near the border, there were said to be between 15,000 and 20,000 volunteers and ‘Goa commandos’ waiting to rush in to relieve their martyred compatriots. The Indian Army could not hold back these volunteers much longer. When the invasion was at last announced the Order of the Day to the Indian troops said that they were going in to liberate the people in Goa and to restore law and order, which ‘the colonialists can no longer maintain’. On the following day, the 18th, heads of mission in Delhi were given a note on the invasion in which it was stated, inter alia, that the Indian Army was taking over Goa ‘to end the holocaust and massacres’, as well as to end the threat to Indian security.

  (c) The pressures on the Indian government to take over Goa were ‘irresistible’, ‘unbelievable’; all the parties in India, ambassadors and foreign pressmen were told, wanted India to take over; if Nehru did not acquiesce he would have to resign as prime minister.

  (d) India had exhausted all her efforts for peaceful settlement and now had no alternative than to use force. (Some months before that he had said that India would never use force to solve the Goa problem.) India would not negotiate except over matters to be settled after Portugal had handed over Goa to India. But Portugal must quit, and at once.

  Certain foreign newspapers of standing, like the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Daily Telegraph, and the Times, happened to have had their correspondents, responsible and trained observers, in Goa at this time; two of them there for a fortnight before the invasion as well as during it. What struck them all were the lies—‘fantastic lies’ was the term used to me by two of them—about the internal situation in Goa being poured out over the Indian radio and in the Indian press prior to and during the invasion. Some of the correspondents doubted if there were any volunteers at Belgaun at all. One thought that there might have been a handful there, mostly clerks and minor political types brought down from Bombay and dressed up for the occasion, for photographic propaganda purposes. As for ‘the tremendous military build-up’, a senior general concerned with the operation told me months later, by which time volunteers and ‘the Goa commandos’ had been forgotten (and were never heard of again), that it would have been criminal on the part of the Portuguese authorities to have resisted the Indian invasion as they had only about 2,500 troops; and they were poorly trained and without proper equipment, and they had no armour or artillery worth speaking of, no air support, and only one naval vessel, the old-fashioned frigate already mentioned.

  The Times representative, some weeks after the invasion, and after collecting and collating the facts, wrote a long objective article; but his editor, in the interests of good Anglo-Indian relations, decided not to publish it. The plain facts were not agreeable.

  For against the exiguous Portuguese forces the Indians sent in an invading force estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, trained, highly equipped, and with support weapons. Most of the Indian newspapers did their best to glorify the invasion, including spreading misinformation about the Portuguese, such as that they had carried out ‘a scorched earth policy’. Indian journalists in fact were not allowed into Goa for nearly a week after the invasion. The truth became available only because some foreign journalists happened to be there when the invasion took place.

  Not that the Portuguese authorities wer
e above criticism. There is little or nothing to be charged against those on the spot but the government in Portugual persisted right to the end in an unrealistic attitude, as well as in the legalism about Goa being no colony but an integral part of Portugal, years after warning had been given. Confronted with the claims of the Indian government, and with the position in the UN, Portugal should have offered to hold a plebiscite in Goa, under UN supervision if possible, otherwise under any ad hoc international supervisory group, for or against the status quo. It is doubtful if India would have won the plebiscite.

  The reaction in India to the Goa affair surprised most foreign diplomats. Some it astounded, as did the whole affair. They had not expected, on the one hand, such a conformist acceptance of what was so manifestly a put-up job, or, on the other, such an outburst of nationalism of the crude tribal sort. Very few Indians at any level protested against it. J.P. Narayan was one of the leaders who did. Rajagopalachari, great and greatly courageous once more, after so many great occasions, denounced it squarely for what it was. This was only a few weeks before the general elections; he knew that it would cost votes to the party he was leading, but he did not hesitate.* Various other people of importance, including at least two cabinet ministers, deplored it, but only in private. Krishna Menon, not Gandhi, was now the guide for policy. For whether, as was thought, Krishna Menon conceived and launched this aggression or not it was surely in his spirit. Prior to the invasion he, in his role of minister of defence, proclaimed to the Indian forces that they were ‘going to help the people of Goa following on the collapse of colonial administration due to the liberation movement of the local people’.