‘NON-ALIGNED’ WITH NATIONAL INTERESTS
Rather than having strong allies on its side to deter others, India, thanks to Nehru’s self-defeating foreign policy of ‘Non-Alignment’, remained non-aligned so that Pakistan (aligned with the West) and China (aligned with the USSR) felt free to attack India, knowing it to be a non-risky business as no country would come to the rescue of a non-aligned India in its hours of distress. Common sense dictated that till you became strong enough to defend yourself, have sensible pacts with some strong nations to take care of your security.
Non-aligned policy fetched no gains for India.{Swa3} If India had aligned itself with the US and the West, not only would India have been much better off economically, neither China nor Pakistan would have dared to attack India, and the Kashmir issue would have been solved in India’s favour long ago. By being apparently loosely aligned with the Soviets, India effectively chose to be on the losing side of the Cold War, with all its severe political and economic disadvantages and handicaps.
Pakistan was much smarter. After its creation, its first PM Liaquat Ali Khan accepted an invitation from Moscow—deliberately. The purpose was to alarm the opposite side in the cold war: the US and the UK. Expectedly, the US and the UK made a deal with Pakistan: in return for Pakistan joining the Anglo-American Military bloc, they would support Pakistan on Kashmir and other matters against India.
Wrote Walter Crocker: “As late as 1956, [John Foster] Dulles [the then US Secretary of State], who distrusted Nehru as much as Nehru distrusted him—as was not concealed when Dulles visited India in 1954—said that ‘the conception of neutrality is obsolete, immoral, and short-sighted’. For Dulles, neutrality in all forms, including non-alignment, was a refusal to choose between evil and good; that is to say, between communism and anti- communism.”
All that non-alignment did was it helped project the image of Nehru on the world stage. It let him play as the ‘Don Quixote of World Peace’ in international fora. It helped grant Nehru rhetorical leadership in non-aligned forums, but it did precious little for India. In fact India grievously suffered from that stand. In short, Nehru’s policy of ‘Non-Alignment’ was not aligned to the Indian national interests.
NON-ALIGNED WITH THE WEST, BUT ALIGNED WITH THE SOVIETS
Even the so-called ‘Non-Alignment’ was really not so; it was a subtle alignment with the Soviets: for details, please check the chapter “Nehru’s World View” (Blunder#106-7) further down. Wrote Sita Ram Goel then: “The Soviet Union, on the other hand, has enslaved vast areas and populations in East and West. The three Baltic States—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—have once again disappeared from the map and into the belly of the Russian Bear. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania and Albania are being ruled by Soviet satraps sustained by Soviet bayonets. Parts of Finland, Germany, Korea, Vietnam and Laos are under Soviet armed occupation. Mongolia, China and Tibet have been overrun by traitorous gangs armed by the Soviet Union. And the totalitarian terror of Soviet imperialism that now prevails in all these lands has had no parallel in the whole of human history.” “Yet, there is not a single resolution of the Indian National Congress or a single statement by any Indian Government spokesman which … denounces the dirty deeds of the Soviet warlords. On the contrary, India has joined her voice to every tirade which the communist parties and fronts have launched against Western ‘colonialism’. And India has patronised persistently and painstakingly the puppet regimes which the Soviet Union has set up in so many countries. It was only the other day that the Prime Minister of India declared in broad daylight that the East European Satellites of the Soviet Union were fully sovereign nations!”
“Similarly, India has been on the Soviet side in every single international tangle since the Second World War—Palestine, Korea, Tibet, Viet Nam, Hungary, Cuba, Berlin. And India has never failed to denounce whatever measures of self-defence the Western nations have adopted against the communist menace. All that has happened while the West has honestly tried to understand, appreciate, and accommodate our point of view, the Soviet camp has heaped foul abuse and slander upon us whenever we have strayed away from its stand even by a hair’s breadth.”
