Vengalil Krishanan Krishna Menon established a reputation as one of the most controversial and divisive figures in Indian and broader Cold War politics. Under Nehru’s patronage, Menon experienced a meteoric rise to political power. In 1947, he was appointed to the prestigious post of Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. However, his abrasive personality and readiness to listen to and, on occasions, publicly endorse, Soviet and Communist Chinese positions on a range of international questions ruffled feathers in London and Washington. In the United States, officials characterised the Indian diplomat as ‘venomous,’ ‘violently anti-American,’ and ‘an unpleasant mischief-maker’. Many British diplomats echoed such sentiments. This chapter examines the British government’s response to Krishna Menon’s appointment. It explores the nature of Menon’s relationship with the CPGB, the risk that communists working for him posed to British security, and the strategy that MI5 developed to meet it. It illustrates the Attlee government’s conviction that India, and more particularly, Krishna Menon, represented a weak link in the Commonwealth security and intelligence chain.

During the first two decades following India’s independence, the CIA had a complex, and often conflicted relationship with the ruling Congress party and the Indian media. Despite public and private criticisms levelled at the Agency by Jawaharlal Nehru, a number of CIA covert operations in the subcontinent were undertaken with the full knowledge and support of India’s intelligence service and senior figures within the Congress Party: In Kerala, in the late 1950s, the CIA worked with the Congress Party to destabilise a democratically elected communist administration; following an abortive Tibetan uprising in 1959, India’s Intelligence Bureau chose to ‘look the other way’ as CIA aircraft transited through Indian airspace in support of Agency sponsored resistance operations in Chinese-controlled Tibet; and CIA operatives spirited the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa and into northern India. This chapter probes the genesis and evolution of the CIA’s relationship with India during the Agency’s so-called ‘golden age’ in the long 1950s, when a series of major US covert operations were conducted across the globe, in places such as the Congo, Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and Tibet.

This chapter constructs a picture of the struggle waged by Indian leaders to negotiate the seemingly contradictory demands of national security and upholding popular conceptions of state sovereignty. Attention is given to the strategies adopted by New Delhi to co-opt the assistance of MI5 in containing Cold War threats, in the guise of indigenous communist movements and external pressures from China and the Soviet Union. Britain’s intelligence agencies made an effort to transition from a role centred on subduing nationalism to that of a trusted and valued supporter of the ruling Congress Party. Establishing strong security and intelligence links with India, British governments rationalised, would help to preserve their considerable national interests in South Asia; keep India ostensibly aligned with the West; act as a barrier to communist penetration of the subcontinent; and demonstrate to the United States that Britain remained a useful post-war partner. However, ideological tensions and differences produced uncoordinated bureaucratic responses that allowed the forces of internal and external communism to claim political and geographic space in the region.

On 20 October 1962, a border dispute between India and the People’s Republic of China erupted into open warfare, leaving the Indian Army reeling and the country’s political leadership in a state of panic. A State of Emergency was declared, a National Defence Fund established, and recruiting stations for India’s armed forces were flooded with eager volunteers. This chapter dissects the impact of joint covert action operations undertaken by India and the United States in the wake of Sino-Indian hostilities. It examines how and why the CIA assisted the IB in equipping and training a clandestine warfare unit tasked with monitoring Chinese military supply routes into Tibet and oversaw the insertion of nuclear-powered surveillance equipment on two of India’s Himalayan peaks to collect data on Chinese atomic tests. Coming at a point when new mechanisms for the implementation of covert action where being introduced by Whitehall, including the Counter Subversion Committee and the Joint Action Committee, the chapter also analyses how the border war was approached by Whitehall as an opportunity to test new British covert capabilities and to roll-back communism in South Asia.

Why did Nikita Khrushchev send missiles to Cuba? This chapter argues that Cuba was important to him for two reasons: it bolstered his self-perception as an equal to the United States and addressed his concerns over a potential US invasion of Cuba, which would affect his reputation in the revolutionary world. He faced a challenge from Mao Zedong, who wanted to wrest the mantle of revolutionary leadership from the Soviets. Yet, having come to the brink over Cuba, Khrushchev backed off, understanding that reputational concerns were not as important as the imperative of avoiding a global nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis provides not just a useful window into understanding Khrushchev's American policy, with its perennial fears of humiliation and sensitivity to slights, but also a crucial snapshot of Sino-Soviet relations on their downward slide towards an outright confrontation.

Chapter 5 examines debates around the drafting of India’s independent constitution between 1946 and 1950. It focuses on a group of socialist thinkers who criticized the nationalist commitment to parliamentary government.

The chapter sees India as a stain on Churchill’s reputation. As a young officer, Churchill spent twenty-two months in India, representing his longest concentrated stay outside of Britain, but his prejudice against Anglo-Indians meant that he engaged only with the elites of British India and remained isolated. The Empire and its permanence became the bedrock of a deep-seated conviction just at the time of India’s nationalist upsurge for self-rule and independence. He condemned the Amritsar massacre but thereafter opposed all ideas for Indian political evolution. The fact that he held no responsibility for India affairs apart from May 1940 to July 1945 did not stop him speaking about the subcontinent. His campaign against the India Act of 1935 was conducted at enormous political cost to himself and left the leaders of the Indian independence movement embittered, contributing to Hindu–Muslim polarisation. During the Second World War Churchill manipulated Britain’s response to the Indian independence movement, titling policy in favour of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. His response to the Bengal Famine has to be framed in terms of race.

The Introduction lays out the argument of the book and the political stakes of economic planning for the Indian state. It illuminates how crucial planning was to the Nehruvian state’s self-definition, and how the experiment of Plans and Parliament was meant to represent a distinct path in the superpower-divided Cold War. Seen from western capitals, the Indian experiment offered a path for Asia that was in stark contrast to the communist totalitarianism of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. It opens with a brief, but broad, history of the ideas of economic planning and national development in India between the late nineteenth century and the establishment of the Planning Commission in 1950. Surveying the spread of these ideas, it reveals the surprising support planning had across the political spectrum. There is also a short description of the international context of central planning and state intervention in the economy (ranging from the Soviet Union, to post-war Britain and New Deal America) in order to situate the Indian path within it. Along with an engagement with the secondary literature on the subject, the introduction lays out the key themes that the rest of the book will pursue.

The Epilogue traces the factors that caused a steady diminishment in the role and influence of the Planning Commission from the mid-1960’s onward—a combination of economic setbacks and changes in key players. After briefly tracing the fortunes of planning through the following decades, until its ultimate dissolution in 2015, it will conclude with a discussion of how the Rahul Gandhi—leader of the Congress Party, and Nehru’s great grandson—revived the specter of the Planning Commission on the 2019 general election campaign trail in order to contrast himself with Modi. It also discusses the current controversy over India’s statistical system, and why observers describe it as dismantling “the house that Mahalanobis built.” Planning Democracy concludes by underlining the key themes that emerged in the preceding chapters and underscore why understanding independent India is impossible without understanding planning.

In this chapter, we examine how, less than forty years after accession to the Indian Union, the Sikhs’ uneasy accommodation erupted into armed conflict. The chapter begins by reviewing the post-independence constitutional framework by focusing on religion and the rights of religious minorities. It then assesses how Nehru and his daughter, Mrs Indira Gandhi, managed ethnic tensions in the Punjab. We examine how opposition to the Centre’s policies was sustained by the SAD by the campaign for a Punjabi Suba (a Punjabi-speaking state), that was conceded in 1966 without the state capital of Chandigarh and some Punjabi-speaking areas. The chapter then evaluates the Centre’s policies in the Punjab and the SAD’s response in adopting the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (ASR), which called for autonomy and sovereignty with radically reduced powers of the Centre. It concludes by reflecting on the autonomy movement in 1982–4 that ultimately led to Operation Blue Star.

This chapter examines the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan after the passing of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 and the drive for independence by the Congress – processes which turned the Sikh world upside down. It examines Sikh leaderships’ opposition to the division of the Punjab and its articulation of a minority nationalism that accommodated a multicultural, consociationalism governance in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic (resized) province. It assesses how the failure to reach an agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League, and the determination of the British government to cede power to only two dominions, led the Sikh leadership to then demand a Sikh state, and then, as violence engulfed the province, to ensure the ethnic consolidation of the community in East Punjab. The partition holocaust revived memories of persecution and massacres in the eighteenth century, permanently dividing the Sikhs’ homeland and holy land. It would also shape profoundly the outlook of the community in post-independence India and abroad after 1947.

Autobiography and life-writing have been popular genres and were frequently used by writers as a vehicle to create political impact. Building on the scholarship of Bart Moore-Gilbert and Javed Majeed, this chapter compares the political autobiographies of two well-known global public figures, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Whilst such works may not routinely be located as part of the trajectory of black and Asian British cultural production, both Gandhi and Nehru spent many formative years in Britain and both books were first published prior to Independence in 1947 when Nehru and Gandhi were British colonial citizens. Moreover, despite their respective political differences with the British as they fought for Independence, they often portrayed themselves as being both ‘of’ and ‘not of’ the place. The chapter also makes reference to autobiographical writings by other well-known colonial citizens of empire, including poet turned Gandhian activist, Sarojini Naidu, and Kenya’s and Ghana’s future prime ministers, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah.

Taking its title from Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s puzzling claim that the “Genius of India is to divide,” Chapter 6 tracks the career of linguistic difference in the making of modern India. I show how the effacement of adivasi pasts in the imagination of Odisha was mirrored in the way linguistic difference was managed through the language based division of Indian territory. I analyze writings on multilingualism by three influential leaders of the Indian nationalist movement–Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Representing three radically different perspectives on the question of language and nation, these writings allow me to track the passions, ideologies, and anxieties inherent in imagining a nation with multiple mother tongues. The chapter ends with a short discussion of the adivasi critique of linguistic provinces through a reading of speeches given by Jaipal Singh, the leader of the movement for the formation of the adivasi majority province of Jharkhand. The effacement of adivasi difference became established in both the imagination of modern Indian citizens and in the physical, territorial divisions of the emerging Indian nation. As vernacular languages became the foundational category for understanding representation and subjectivity in India, the concomitant exclusion of aboriginal peoples and the downplaying of alternative political possibilities were institutionalized into the very definition of the modern Indian community.

Critical literature on the history of developmentalism in the Global South has so far laid emphasis on the authorising force generated by the future telos of attaining the status of a ‘developed country’, by various developmental institutions and their violently transformative programmes for well over the previous century. Much like other significant utopias of the twentieth century, this promised telos was very rarely (if ever) actualised – its persistent quest has, instead, generated several monumental calamities. But, this is where the similarities between developmental futures and ‘mass Utopias’ come to an end. For while these other dreamworlds have, under the burden of their catastrophes, become ‘futures past’ in a ‘post–Cold War’ world, developmentalism has only tightened its grip, seemingly impervious to the vast catalogue of failures of its promises in this ‘age of catastrophe’.