¹ “India's Foreign Policy,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, January 27, 1957.

² Nehru's India, New Delhi, 1956, p. 75.

³ “India's foreign policy of non-alignment and friendly relations with all nations, as well as our general outlook about the freedom of all countries and anti-colonialism, started from that period.…” From an address given by the Prime Minister in New Delhi in 1955. See Moraes, “India's Foreign Policy,” op. cit.

⁴ Moraes, Frank, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, New York, 1956, pp. 465–66Google Scholar; with the permission of the Macmillan Co.

⁵ “Some Essentials of a Welfare State,” The Statesman (Republic-Day Supplement), January 26, 1957.

⁶ “India's Foreign Policy,” op. cit. See also Prem Bhatia, “Prestige Abroad,” The Statesman (Republic-Day Supplement), January 26, 1957: “In the conduct of foreign affairs the difficulties of pursuing a policy of objective non-alignment have never before appeared so enormous. If Suez tested several conflicting loyalties, Hungary proved an even more trying situation. … Our stand drew much justified criticism.”

⁷ Moraes quotes the Prime Minister as having said, in 1950: “The test of the independence of a country is that it should be able to have relations with other countries without endangering that independence. Nepal's foreign relations were strictly limited to her relations with the Government functioning in India at the time. That was an indication that Nepal's approach to international relations was a very limited one.” Jawaharlal Nehru, p. 463; with the permission of the MaCmillan Co.

The divergence between the voting records of India and Nepal in the United Nations debate on Hungary indicates that Nepal may have outgrown the exclusive relationship to which Mr. Nehru referred.

⁸ The present article had been written when A. D. Gorwala delivered a speech before the Indian Council on Foreign Affairs in New Delhi on August 12, 1957, in which he called for a thorough reappraisal of India's foreign policy on the ground that it had not “served our national interest.” Calling attention to the failures of the government's policy implicit in the new status of Tibet, the hostility of Nepal, and the alienation of sympathy in Great Britain and the United States, he concluded with the statement that the government's most solid achievement in the realm of foreign affairs was to be found in the fact that it had made international communism respectable in the world. For a report on this address see The Statesman, August 13, 1957.

⁹ These “problem” areas could be designated as non-self-governing territories if the nomenclature used in the United Nations were applied objectively to all areas in the world.

¹⁰ Nehru, Jawaharlal, Independence and After:A Collection of Speeches, 1946–1949, New York, 1950, p. 201.Google Scholar

¹¹ Islam reinforced certain significant political traditions of Hinduism; but since it did not suggest to India essentially new points of departure in the field of international relations, it will not be considered here.

¹² “Indian Doctrines of Politics,” First Annual Lecture at the Harold Laski Institute of Political Science, pp. 2, 3.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 2–3.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 4.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 8.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 12ff., for an elaboration of this thesis.

¹⁸ Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, New York, 1951, p. 115.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Kautilya's, Arthasastra 7Google Scholar; see Zimmer, , op. cit., p. 115.Google Scholar

²⁰ “Indian Doctrines of Politics,” p. 4.

²¹ Warren, Henry Clarke, Buddhism in Translations (Cambridge, Mass., 1922, p. 397)Google Scholar, lists the Commandments as: abstinence from destroying life, from theft, from fornication and all uncleanliness, from lying, from fermented liquor, spirits, and strong drinks which are a hindrance to merit.

²² Pratt, J. B., The Pilgrimage of Buddhism, New York, 1928, pp. 178, 715.Google Scholar

²³ In Mr. Nehru's view, as reported by Moraes in Jawaharlal Nehru, p. 214, any activity is religious in quality, if it is pursued on behalf of an ideal and against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss, because of a conviction of its general and enduring value. Mr. Nehru's deep commitment to the cause of modernizing and industrializing his country may, in this sense, be termed “religious,” even though its corollary is a pronounced impatience with all manifestations of India's ancient religious traditions that seem to obstruct the goal of modernization. This is, perhaps, the context in which one should understand the Prime Minister's rather startling reference to the new Hirakud Dam as one of modern India's temples in which he worships. The occasion for the reference was the opening of the dam in January 1957.

²⁴ Moraes, , Jawaharlal Nehru, p. 149.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ibid., p. 467.

²⁶ This conclusion is borne out by Nehru's, writings, in particular The Discovery of India, New York, 1946Google Scholar; Glimpses of World History, New York, 1942; Independence and After: A Collection of Speeches, 1946–1949, New York, 1950; Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru, New York, 1941. It is confirmed by Moraes, , Jawaharlal Nehru, especially p. 215.Google Scholar

²⁷ Quoted in Moraes, , Jawaharlal Nehru, p. 113Google Scholar; with the permission of the Macmillan Co.

²⁸ Nehru, Jawaharlal, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru, New York, 1941, pp. 389–90.Google Scholar Italics added. Copyright 1941 by the John Day Company.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 390. See also p. 348: “As between fascism and communism my sympathies are entirely with communism”; and p. 359: “The challenge of fascism and Nazi-ism was in essence the challenge of imperialism.”

³⁰ Quoted in Deane, Herbert, The Political Ideas of Harold Laski, New York, 1955, p. 154.Google Scholar

³¹ Ibid., p. 158.

³² “There is poverty, there is intellectual error, there is grave moral wrong; but there is also unlimited hope” (quoted in ibid., p. 213); “there has been more realization of personality under the Soviet regime than in any comparable epoch in history” (quoted in ibid., p. 212); “When the last word has been said against Russian bureaucracy, against the hindrances to the political self-expression we know in Britain and the United States … the solemn truth remains that in the Soviet Union, since the October Revolution, more men and women have had more opportunity of self-fulfillment than anywhere else in the world” (quoted in ibid., p. 246; italics in original).

³³ See pseud., Vivek, India Without Illusions, Bombay, 1953, pp. 112Google Scholar ff., for a critique of the Prime Minister's attitudes: “Quite a number of people, by no means unfriendly to the government of India or its Prime Minister, Indians, as well as foreigners, have been greatly perturbed by the references in Mr. Nehru's recent speeches to the merits of communism and the likelihood of its eventual adoption by most countries of the world.”

³⁴ Moraes, , Jawaharlal Nehru, p. 110.Google Scholar

³⁵ See Deane, op. cit., for an account of the evolution of Laski's views in the late 1930's.

³⁶ Moraes describes Nehru, as “a Marxist by intellectual conviction who wishes to bring in the socialist millennium by democratic means and methods” (Jawaharlal Nehru, pp. 216–17).Google Scholar

³⁷ Nehru, , Toward Freedom, p. 126.Google Scholar

³⁸ Nehru's misconception of the place which Marxism assigns to the Communist Party is similar to that revealed in Laski's writings.

On some interesting aspects of the relationship between Nehru and the Communist Party of India, especially the efforts of the latter to woo the Prime Minister, see Vivek, , op. cit., p. 116.Google Scholar The conclusions reached by Vivek are borne out by a reading of the Indian Communist press in 1956–57.

³⁹ Compare Mr. Nehru's inability to understand the U.S. with that of Laski.

⁴⁰ Mr. Nehru's comments on the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and Communist China make it clear that he does not choose either to measure their present policies or to gauge their future intentions by the Marxist-Leninist standards which he applies to an analysis of politics in the democracies. Instead he seems to assume, much in the manner of the Communists, that Communist countries are peace-loving by definition. At any rate, as Vivek, (op. cit., p. 35)Google Scholar points out, Mr. Nehru has never given any reasons for his certainty that Russia wants peace and that China has no aggressive designs. In Nehru, and Cousins, , Talks with Nehru (New York, 1951, p. 42)Google Scholar, the Prime Minister notes that Tsarist Russia was imperialist but that Soviet Russia is not. A question about his reaction to the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 elicited a lengthy reply on the evils of the Nazi coup in that country in 1938 (ibid., p. 55). Asked to comment on China's invasion of Tibet, Mr. Nehru replied: “I am not afraid of any external threat to India [from that direction]. … The real reason and the basic reason is that I do not think that India and China are going to function in that way toward each other” (ibid., p. 44).

⁴¹ Moraes, , Jawaharlal Nehru, pp. 93Google Scholar, 233, 482. In commenting on Mr. Krishna Menon's role in the shaping of India's foreign policy, Moraes suggests that it is Menon's ”ability to rationalize Jawaharlal's instinctive, often emotional ideals” which makes him a particularly valuable advisor (ibid,. p. 331).

The deep understanding between Mr. Nehru and Mr. Krishna Menon which baffled many observers during the United Nations debates in 1956–57 is no doubt partially due to the fact that both think in identical Marxist terms when they analyze foreign affairs.

⁴² “What many people do not realize is that Nehru's ideas on most political, economic and social matters have been fixed and consistent for at least a generation” (ibid., p. 136).

⁴³ Irving Kristol's review of Conversations with Mr. Nehru by Mende, Tibor in Encounter (VII, NO. 3, November 1956, pp. 76–78)Google Scholar contains the following succinct analysis: “When Mr. Nehru says that he approves of Communism ‘as an ideal,’ many a Western liberal could say the same thing in all good faith; but it would not, in fact, be ‘the same thing’ at all. For what Mr. Nehru intends to express by this commonplace is a fundamental hostility to the liberal capitalism of the West, both as an ideal and working system—a hostility that has its own specific roots deep in Indian attitudes. … It is clear that Mr. Nehru's ideal communism is very different from the Soviet ideal, which dreams with an American fervour of motor-cars and washing-machines. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how, paradoxically, he could be impressed by the very failure (in its own Western terms) of Russian Communism and offended by the very successes of American Capitalism” (p. 78).

⁴⁴ This term is used uniformly in India in order to denote the Asian character of the region known in the West as the Near East and the Middle East.

⁴⁵ See, e.g., an address in Ernakulam, Kerala, on February 24, 1957, which dealt with “the projection of the Baghdad Pact on the Kashmir issue”; and statements made by Mr. Nehru in the Lok Sabha on July 23, 1957, as reported in The Statesman, July 24, 1957.

⁴⁶ Nehru, the Lotus Eater from Kashmir, London, 1953, p. 20.