India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale in his new book Crosswinds offers a fascinating account of India’s diplomacy in four specific events during 1949 through 1959: the formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Indochina War, and the two Taiwan Strait crises. India’s diplomatic role was encouraged by the British and Chinese, but mostly disdained by the Americans who came to view India as too partial to China and unappreciative of the US goal of containing communism in Asia. Gokhale believes that the events of that decade can shed some light on the current US-China confrontation in the South China Sea, and India’s role in today’s geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific.
Gokhale writes that India’s foreign policy in this era was shaped by a complex dynamic involving Britain, the United States, China, and the Cold War. India had achieved its independence from Britain in 1947, while China was in the midst of its civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, and the United States was implementing, albeit unevenly, the policy of containment in both Europe and Asia. Both Indian and British leaders viewed a Communist victory in China as likely but viewed China’s Communist leaders as being motivated more by nationalism than by ideology. And when the Communists came to power on the mainland in October 1949, both India and Britain attempted to persuade US leaders to recognize the new government, believing that it was the best way to counter Soviet influence in China. The United States refused.
India’s perspective was shaped by its colonial past and its geographical proximity to China. India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru hoped to develop a partnership with China that would transcend the emerging Cold War bipolarity and develop into a “third force” in global politics. Britain, led by Prime Ministers Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan, looked to its imperial interests in Hong Kong and South Asia—its empire was fading but its leaders clung to the belief that they could still play a significant role in global politics. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations in America continued to side with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime (which had fled to Formosa, ie Taiwan, after the Communists’ victory), and US policy reflected the fear of an ostensible world-wide communist enterprise headquartered in Moscow that sought world domination.
Although Britain feigned a “special relationship” with the United States, Gokhale points out that on the issue of formal recognition of the PRC, the resolution of the Indochina War between France and Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces, and during the two Taiwan Strait crisis, Britain and the United States were rarely in agreement. And British leaders and diplomats frequently used India and its leaders’ perspectives to explain, and in some cases as an excuse for, their differences with the Americans.
Gokhale gives high marks to India’s leaders for their “strategic clarity”, their readiness to mediate the US-China disputes, and their refusal to take sides in the intensifying Cold War, at least during this first decade. And despite, or perhaps because of, the colonial history, India and Britain usually saw eye-to-eye in Far Eastern geopolitics. Indian leaders and diplomats believed they understood Asia better than the Americans or the British—and they were probably right. Britain, though it often opposed US policies in the Indo-Pacific, was always mindful of the importance of Anglo-American cooperation.
India, Gokhale writes, “contributed to the final outcome of the Geneva Conference” that ended the Indochina War, and “Nehru’s personal stature also helped India secure a post-conference role in Indochina,” but despite Nehru’s claims it was not Indian leaders but Eden, Zhou, Russian Foreign Minister Molotov, North Vietnamese leader Pham Van Dong and French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France who were mostly responsible for the Geneva accords. US leaders had contemplated military intervention on France’s side in the war, and after Geneva, both Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promoted the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a bulwark against communism in the region. The US sought India’s membership, but Nehru refused. Gokhale writes:
The anti-Cold War mentality was deeply embedded in Nehru’s thinking, and the conviction that China would play a positive and beneficial role in Asia had also set in with the concluding of the agreement between India and China on trade and intercourse with the Tibet region.
The Geneva accords did not bring lasting peace to Indochina, and meanwhile the US and China faced-off with each other twice in the mid- and late-1950s in the Taiwan Strait.
The Taiwan Strait crises involved China’s bombardment of offshore islands (Quemoy and Matsu) occupied by Nationalist forces. Both India and Britain, Gokhale notes, regarded those islands as belonging to the PRC, while the United States saw China’s attacks as preliminary to an invasion of Taiwan. China viewed the signing of the US-Republic of China Mutual Defense Treaty in December 1954 as, in Zhou Enlai’s words, a “serious war provocation”. China’s leaders then, as now, viewed Taiwan as part of China and sought its “reunification” with the mainland. During the first Taiwan Strait crisis, Gokhale writes, India and Britain worked in tandem to reduce tensions and avoid war between the US and China. In the second Strait crisis, however, Britain served as the intermediary between the US and China, while India’s relations with China deteriorated due to border clashes between Indian and Chinese forces and India’s relationship with the Dalai Lama.
Though Gokhale largely praises India’s foreign policy and diplomacy during this period, he is critical of what he calls Nehru’s “preference for personal diplomacy over process-driven foreign policy”. There was a lack of “mechanisms for consultation within the government” and China and Britain sometimes “took advantage of this to serve their purposes.” And too often, Gokhale writes, India became a mouthpiece for China instead of an honest intermediary.
Gokhale concludes the book with a look at the East Asia of the 2020s, where once again China and the US are squaring-off in the western Pacific and in the wider Indo-Pacific.
India today, he writes, is a much more important global player than it was in the 1950s. Gokhale calls it a “swing state” that “balances against China and maintains strategic independence from the US”. Yet he writes that a “broad-based and intensive dialogue between Washington and New Delhi must become the cornerstone of Indian foreign policy.” India, which leaned toward China in the 1950s, leans toward the US in the 2020s.