Indian Foreign Policy in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, 1947-1964

By D.R. SarDesai

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520323827

D.R. SarDesai

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INDIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN CAMBODIA, LAOS, AND

VIETNAM, 1947-1964

D. R. SarDesai

Indian Foreign Policy in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam 1947-1964

1968

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS • BERKELEY & LOS ANGELES

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Cambridge University Press London, England © 1968 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-18379 Printed in the United States of America

To My Parents and Uncles

Preface

In the preparation of this study, I received generous assistance and cooperation from a number of individuals and institutions. The major part of the research work was conducted in India and Southeast Asia in 1963-1964 and was supported by substantial grants from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Philadelphia. I am greatly indebted to Professor W. Norman Brown, President of the American Institute of Indian Studies, for his personal interest and encouragement. I am also thankful to the Watumull Foundation for a special grant during 1961-1962 and to the John R. and Dora Haines Foundation for a research fellowship in 1964-1965, which enabled the work to be completed in the United States.

I used the facilities of a number of libraries and institutions whose staff personnel has been most helpful in the location of materials. In particular, thanks are due to Cecil Hobbs of the Library of Congress and Joseph Buttinger of the Library for Political Studies, New York; Gir ja Kumar of the Indian School of International Studies, C. Biswas of the Library of the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs, Dr. V. G. Dighe of the National Archives, S. Mirchandani of the Parliament Library and P. Sharma of All India Congress Committee Library, all in New Delhi; C. G. Ambekar of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East Library, Bangkok; and the authorities of the New York Public Library, and the United Nations Library in New York, as also of the libraries of the embassies of Canada and India in Washington, D.C.

A number of individuals in India and elsewhere gave their time liberally to the author, answered some original enquiries and made fruitful suggestions. Only a few of them are listed at the end of this volume in the Interviews and Correspondence section of the bibliography, whereas many others, no less helpful than those listed, have expressed their desire to remain anonymous. To all these persons, I am immeasurably indebted. I am specially obliged to Dr. B. V. Keskar, former Minister of Information and Broadcasting; Mrs. Lakshmi Menon, former Minister of State, External Affairs; the then Foreign Secretary, Y. D. Gundevia and Dr. B. K. Basu, Director, Historical Division, Ministry of External Affairs. Among the numerous Indian friends who helped in a variety of ways, Dr. S. P. Aiyar, Dr. V. D. Rao, and Dr. K. C. Vyas deserve special thanks.

I am most profoundly grateful to my mentor, Professor Stanley A. Wolpert, for assistance at various stages of planning and writing of this book. He was instrumental in helping me come to the United States for doctoral studies, and ever since our arrival he and Mrs. Wolpert have placed us in their debt by their acts of friendship, guidance, and hospitality, all too numerous to mention here. An earlier draft of the work has benefited from the thoughtful criticisms of Chancellor John S. Galbraith of the University of California, San Diego, and of Professors Robert A. Wilson, Yu Shan-han, and H. Arthur Steiner from the University of California, Los Angeles, all of whom I owe a large debt of gratitude. I am indebted to Mr. Alain Hénon, Mr. James Kubeck, and Mr. Vincent Ryan of the University of California Press for assistance at the various stages of publication of the book. My thanks are also due to Miss Ellen G. Cole and the Central Stenographic Bureau Staff of the University of California, Los Angeles, for the final careful typing of the manuscript for publication, and to Mr. Oliver Pollak and Mr. Thomas Giancoli for their valuable assistance in the preparation of the index. Finally, I acknowledge my wife’s close collaboration in research and her constructive criticism on many points. Her own training in history and library science has proved an invaluable asset to me.

D. R. S.

Los Angeles, California

April zy, 1968

Contents

Contents

Introduction

I India and the Nationalist Movement in Indochina

II Collective Peace or Collective Defense?

III India, SEATO, and Bandung

IV India and the Two Vietnams, 1954-1958

V India and Cambodia, 1954-1958

VI India and Laos, 1954-1958

VII The Sino-Indian Dispute and Indo-Vietnamese Relations

VIII The Indian Role in the Laotian Crisis, 1959-1962

IX The Aftermath of the Chinese Invasion

Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

No single aspect of the Indian political experiment since the country’s independence in 1947 evoked so much world attention as her role in international affairs, which was certainly disproportionately large when compared with India’s economic and military strength. The major reason, of course, was Jawaharlal Nehru, who, as prime minister, steered the infant ship of state for the first seventeen years of independence, and presided over the formulation and direction of his government’s foreign policy. Preoccupation with world events had always been a matter of passion for the Indian leader since the early days of his life, when he jumped into the country’s fight for political freedom. After India’s emergence as an independent nation, the imprint of his views was evident on every aspect of governmental activity, but on none so clearly and exclusively as in the field of external relations. Not only were the philosophy and style of foreign policy molded by Nehru, but even the daily direction of it became the prime minister’s preoccupation.

Even so, studies of Indian diplomatic history constitute a very small part of the scholarly literature on India published in the past two decades. And of these, most works have concerned themselves with foreign policy in general, or with India’s diplomatic relations with the West, notably with Great Britain and the United States, and, more recently, with the subject of the strained relationship between India and Communist China. The present study covers one of the areas of relative neglect: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, comprising the states of former French Indochina. The only book that includes this area as part of a larger region is Ton That Thien’s India and South-East Asia, 1947-1960 (Geneva, 1963). This work, which has the distinction of being a pioneering study, covers a wide region, embracing nine countries of Southeast Asia, in a general survey, based entirely on published material. Detailed studies of India’s relations with the various countries of the Southeast Asian region are still required to understand the deep and varied currents motivating Indian policy toward that neighboring region. Further, any work that stops short of the cataclysmic confrontation with China in October-November, 1962, would have to be considered out-of-date. Things have never been the same in India, whether in the economic, military, or diplomatic field, since the Sino- Indian hostilities in the fall of 1962. Indian prestige in world councils suffered thereafter in the remaining two years of the Nehru era, although not to the same extent as in the period following his death in May, 1964. The present study is coterminous with the end of Nehru’s direction of Indian foreign policy.

Indian interest in Indochina since 1954, as contrasted with lack of interest in the region before that date and comparative Indian inattention toward other countries of Southeast Asia, appears somewhat extraordinary. On the eve of Indian independence in August, 1947, India’s contacts and knowledge about Southeast Asia in general and Indochina in particular were vague, illusory, and uncertain. Except for a handful of area specialists and those closely related to the Indian immigrants in the area, very few Indians knew as much about their neighbors in Southeast Asia as they knew of Europe or America. A proud memory of Hindu colonies established in some dim historical past, a vague impression of Indian immigrants’ trading activities, and a recent reminder of a region in which the Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose had organized a movement and an army for India’s independence—these summed up an average educated Indian’s awareness of this region. The colonial interlude referred to by a noted Indian author-diplomat, Sardar K. M. Panikkar, as the Vasco da Gama epoch in Asian history,¹ had effectively separated India from a region long styled Greater India.² The divergent political, territorial, and economic ambitions of the colonial powers, with attendant tariff and travel barriers and varying administrative and educational patterns, made the colonial peoples more closely oriented toward their respective metropolitan powers than toward one another. Indochina, under the French rule and at the extreme end of the region, was even less in touch with India than was Burma or Malaya. If the historical ties with the region were to be restored in the new era of emergent nationalism and decolonization, imaginative bridges of vital common interests in various fields would be necessary to surmount the barriers erected in colonial days. In a bid to become the pivot of Asia, India and China could be expected to enter a diplomatic race to woo and win over the smaller countries.

The intensity of Indian interest in the countries of Southeast Asia has, however, varied from time to time. The periods of closest attention were 1947-1949, 1954-1955, and 1959-1961. An attempt is made here to analyze and explain the factors determining such intermittent interest in a region so close to India. It may be suggested at the very outset that part of this neglect is owing to deliberate deemphasis in Indian foreign policy on local or regional problems and a corresponding stress on global issues affecting Communism and anti-Communism, coexistence and confrontation, peace and war. But even in this wider context, Communist China has loomed large in the mutations of Indian thinking on world affairs. This study is the first attempted analysis of Indian policy in a region of interest to both India and China. It deals, therefore, with the changing canvas of Sino-Indian relationship from 1949 to 1964, more specifically from 1954 onward, and its impact on Indian attitudes toward the problems in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

At the same time, the Indochinese states, particularly Laos and Vietnam, have provided for more than half a decade a bafning battleground for all the major rivalries in the world—Sino-Soviet, Franco-American, and between the Communist and free worlds. Friends and enemies have been counted based on their attitudes toward this conflict, on which have been imposed considerations perhaps disproportionately larger than they deserved. But since such considerations have weighed in the minds of policy makers in the Kremlin, Peking, Washington, and other capitals of the world on subjects that have no direct bearing on Vietnam, examination of an individual country’s attitude toward the Vietnam question assumes importance. I would suggest that in this complex context there could be no better area than Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam for the analysis of Indian behavior in the international field.

Politics, domestic or international, is hardly a field where one should look for consistencies. The history of international relations is full of shifting alliances, where yesterday’s bedfellows are today’s enemies. Yet many countries covetously claim consistency in their foreign policies, conveniently placing their pragmatic policies on the high pedestal of immutable principles. India has been one such country, boasting lack of variations in its basic approach to world affairs. With the solitary exception of October, 1962, when Nehru confessed his Himalayan blunder in trusting China and living in an artificial atmosphere of our own creation, the principal aims of Indian foreign policy have been repeatedly stated as nonalignment, peaceful coexistence, anticolonialism, and antiracialism. Yet one can divide Indian diplomatic history into several periods based on the extent of Indian involvement in world affairs. Thus, the first two years after independence, 1947-1949, were noted for anticolonial emphasis. Indian initiative led to the convening of the Asian Relations Conference in 1947 and of the Conference on Indonesia in 1949. Yet it was a period when India combated internal Communism and maintained a friendly attitude toward the West, particularly Great Britain, agreeing to continue membership in the reconstituted Commonwealth of Nations. But in late 1949, with the advent of the Communists to power in China, began a period of relative isolation and circumspection, which lasted until early 1954. With the exception of Korea, Indian policy seemed to be aimed at cautious neutrality, a plague on both houses in the cold-war dispute. Nonalignment posture became more rigid. Caution marked India’s relations with Communist China, particularly after the latter’s march into Tibet in 1950, thereby establishing a common border with India. During this second phase, neither the East nor the West—the United States, China, and the Soviet Union—accepted India’s third path of nonalignment. The third phase in Indian diplomatic history began in 1954 with Indian efforts toward achievement of a settlement on Indochina, and ended with the holding of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in 1955. Indian diplomatic intervention had come in the wake of alleged Chinese military intervention in behalf of the Vietminh and American determination to step up aid to the French, which together threatened escalation of a conflict in Asia. Indian efforts at Colombo and Geneva for the settlement of the Indochinese impasse paralleled another development, which became the most important element in Indian foreign policy until almost the close of the decade. This was the Sino-Indian agreement over Tibet, in which the Panchasheel or the five foundations of relationship between the two countries were spelled out for the first time. Bandung marked at once the zenith and the beginning of the slow decline of Indian involvement in Southeast Asia. Nehru and Chou En-Iai shared the limelight at that Asian-African conference. A period of normalization and complacency ensued, which lasted until 1959. During this period India had reason to be happy because her nonalignment position was accepted by the Communist countries and by the United States. In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union moved closer as the Camp David talks between Khrushchev and Eisenhower promised an era of coexistence between the superpowers. But even as the latter attempted to bridge their gulf of differences, Sino- Indian relations began to cool. The Dalai Lama’s flight to India and Nehru’s disclosure of Chinese incursions along the Himalayan border began a new period of caution in foreign policy and of guarded hostility toward China. By early 1962 it became clear that the dispute would not be settled through bilateral talks. Hostilities on a major scale in late 1962 inaugurated a period of open hostility toward China. At the same time, disclosures of Sino-Soviet rift brought forth fresh possibilities of continuation of a policy of nonalignment.

It is in this wider context of Indian aims and commitments that the Indian role in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam needs to be examined. In the present study I attempt an analysis of India’s attitudes toward the states of Indochina on two levels: first, the study of the Indian diplomatic role, where Indian national interests could be legitimately pursued; and second, India’s performance as chairman-country of the International Control Commission (ICC), theoretically a nonpartisan body, charged by the Geneva Conference on Indochina in 1954 with the supervision of a truce in Indochina. And yet the two roles were complementary to each other. Indian diplomatic intervention in the crisis in Laos, for example, was partly based on India’s position as chairmancountry of the ICC, while the Indian officials on the ICC took their directives from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

For India, the Indochinese settlement was a great experiment in the Panchasheel, a doctrine that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru hopefully thought should govern relations among nations throughout the world. Indochina was a test case. The International Control Commission itself was a trial ground for international amity. The commission, representing the three major strands in international politics—Western, Communist, and nonaligned Afro-Asian—dealt with countries that were in a sense to be isolated or neutralized from cold-war affiliations. For nonaligned India, the chairmanship of so balanced a commission, charged with the preservation of peace and neutrality, was a challenge and an opportunity. How far was the Indian attitude in the ICC influenced by the changing needs of Indian foreign policy over the period? The present study largely represents an examination of the Indian role in the deliberations and investigations of controversial issues by the ICC and is based on the proceedings of that body. It is clear that an inquiry of this kind would be germane to India’s peacemaking role in other areas of the world.

The International Control Commission represented a new kind of peace preservation agency. This was not the only instance of India’s participation in a mission of this kind, for India had provided the chairman of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in Korea, and later was an important factor in the United Nations International Force in Gaza, the Congo, and Cyprus. But the unique factor in the Indochinese situation was that the settlement there was reached outside United Nations auspices and involved a major country, which was not a member of the world organization. The sanction of the International Control Commission was granted by the Geneva Conference of 1954, which did not have a permanent secretariat, and indeed no enforcing authority. As a matter of expediency, Sir Anthony Eden, then British foreign secretary, and M. Molotov, then the Soviet foreign minister, had acted as chairmen at alternate sessions of the Geneva Conference. When the conference ended, the foreign ministers of Great Britain and the Soviet Union continued purely by practice rather than by any statutory or agreed devolution of authority as links between the International Control Commission and the Geneva powers. The study of the working of the International Control Commission throws some light on the efficacy of a settlement reached outside the United Nations, through such a nebulous organization.

The end of the Nehru era in Indian politics marks the limit of this study. Mid-1964 was also almost exactly the end of a decade of Indian involvement in Indochina. In Laos, an attempted coup cTétat in May, 1964, and the subsequent merger of the neutralist faction with the rightists brought about a qualitative change in governmental arrangements envisaged in the Geneva Agreements of 1962. In Vietnam itself, the dimensions of the conflict have qualitatively differed from those in July, 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the extension of the war beyond the seventeenth parallel. Mid-1964 was, therefore, considered a convenient terminal point for this study.

I

India and the Nationalist Movement in Indochina

One of the most significant events since the end of World War II— certainly the most important from the viewpoint of Asians and Africans —has been the attainment of political independence after the overthrow or withdrawal of alien authority. India and Pakistan led the way to independence in August, 1947, quickly followed by Ceylon and Burma. The removal of British power from the Indian subcontinent aroused justifiable hope among other dependent peoples that the Indian nationalist leadership would spearhead the drive against colonialism elsewhere. Even before India became formally independent, Ho Chi Minh dispatched an emissary to the Indian capital to seek assistance against the French, and Indonesia’s Sukarno appealed to Nehru for help against the British occupation forces. And indeed, four months before India gained independence, nationalists from twenty-five Asian states met in New Delhi, at the invitation of India, to explore avenues of further cooperation. This was one of many efforts¹ to forge Asian, and later Afro-Asian, unity in the hope of solving common problems. Asian nationalism, identical aspirations of freedom, and a common struggle against Western colonialism provided a common denominator to the assembled delegates.

Anticolonialism was natural to a new nation, recently freed from foreign domination. To the Indian leaders it was a creed, a commitment of long years to their brethren under colonial yoke elsewhere. British authority in the East had sheltered the smaller imperial systems in the area;² consequently, its withdrawal from India was expected logically to be followed by similar action on the part of France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. As early as 1927 the League against Imperialism and for National Independence, meeting in Brussels, had recognized the importance of India as the central problem in the struggle of the Asiatic peoples for their national freedom.³ Mahatma Gandhi described India as the key to the exploitation of the Asiatic and other non-European races of the earth.⁴ Through India’s freedom he sought to deliver the so-called weaker races of the earth from the crushing heels of western domination.⁵ Gandhi’s assurances were reiterated by his followers, including Nehru, who offered fullest cooperation to those who stand for human freedom and the breaking of political and social bonds, in their struggle against imperialistic and fascist reaction, for our struggle is a common one.⁶ Yet, despite all the expressed sentiments of cooperation and solidarity, there was little communication between Indian nationalist leaders and their counterparts in Southeast Asian countries. The closest communication was with the Indonesian leadership; the least, with the Indochinese. Occasionally nationalists from other countries attended the annual sessions of the Indian National Congress. In 1928, for example, Doung Van Gieu,⁷ a Vietnamese nationalist whom Nehru had met the preceding year at the Brussels Congress, attended the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress.

Many factors were responsible for this lack of communication between nationalist movements in India and in Southeast Asia. The existence of different colonial masters, particularly in Southeast Asia, raised international complexities impeding the formation of an active common front against colonialism. Physical communications between the colonial empires were not easy. Added to such difficulties were passport restrictions and linguistic and other barriers. Second, the Indian struggle itself consumed most of the Indian leaders’ energy and time, which was even further reduced by long periods of incarceration in British prisons. A third factor was the ubiquitous presence of Indians throughout Southeast Asia, where they had gone as laborers, merchants, and moneylenders, encouraged to immigrate by the colonial powers concerned. To the antipathy usually aroused in an indigenous population by immigrants who undercut them in jobs and trade were added the nefarious, usurious practices of the moneylending chettiars, who fattened themselves at the expense of the local people and earned a bad name for India. In Indochina, an additional dimension was provided by the French authorities, who preferred to employ in the national administration Indians from the French Indian colonies, giving these Indian employees the higher status of citoyens as opposed to the low legal status of the colonial Vietnamese. The indigenous suspicion and hostility toward these immigrant Indians were factors against easy communication among nationalist leaders of the Southeast Asian states. An exception was the Japanese-supported revolutionary movement for Indian independence led by Subhas Chandra Bose during World War II, when indigenous people in Burma, Malaya, and Thailand offered help.⁸ The goal of the movement, begun in Singapore, was to march a volunteer army to New Delhi through Malaya, Thailand, and Burma. Besides being off the main route, Indochina could not figure prominently in this movement; the area contained relatively few Indians, and these few were hindered in their nationalist activity by the puppet French regime, which feared repercussions on Annamite nationalism.⁹

Yet India had incomparably greater sympathy in Southeast Asia than China, whether Nationalist or Communist, had. The nearly twelve million overseas Chinese, spread throughout most countries of the region, had been more hated by the indigenous people for their economie strangulation of the area than had the one and a half million Indian immigrants concentrated in Burma and Malaya. Aggressive and fiercely loyal to their motherland, the overseas Chinese sought administrative and other immunities through their own administrative infrastructure of secret societies, whose chiefs regulated the relations of their communities with the local governments and functioned as an imperium in imperio. All this was especially true of Vietnam, where the memory of Chinese domination of Annam (Chinese for pacified south) for a thousand years had been recently revived by looting, rape, arson, and other atrocities perpetrated by Nationalist Chinese forces¹⁰ sent in 1945 in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, to occupy Vietnam above the sixteenth parallel.¹¹ On that occasion Ho Chi Minh even welcomed French reoccupation of Tonkin, if only to expel Nationalist Chinese troops from Vietnam. India, by contrast, had no record of political conquest of any part of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. To be sure, India’s expansion in Indochina predated the Chinese, but its character was predominantly cultural and commercial and its progress rarely buttressed by political authority from the mother country.¹² Historically, China established its hegemony periodically over the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, which sent grudging tributes to the Heavenly Emperor as long as the Chinese central authority remained strong, lapsing into independence when it became weak. In the cultural sphere, however, the Southeast Asian kingdom preferred to adopt Indian ways, with the exception of Tonkin and Annam, which Sinicized their educational and administrative system and adopted the Chinese calendar, court-system, civil service examination, script, and other aspects of life not so much to show their love for the Chinese as to equip themselves better to avoid if not to overthrow Chinese political domination. Laos and Cambodia came under Indian cultural influence, adopting Brahmanism and later Hinayana Buddhism, which came to them via Ceylon and Burma; Annam accepted Confucianism and Mahayana Buddhism from China. The Indian centers of learning and culture at Nalanda, Taxila, Vallabhi, and Kanchipuram became the Hellas’ of the Eastern world. Scholars from Funan (roughly including South Cambodia and Cochin China, from about the first to the seventh century A.D.), Kambuja (roughly corresponding to modern Cambodia but having an empire extending over most of peninsular Southeast Asia, from about the seventh to the fifteenth century A.D.), and Champa (former Annam, from about the first to the fifteenth century A.D.) flocked to India to draw inspiration for their works of art, architecture, and literature. The ruins of Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia and around Phanrang in Vietnam testify to the excellence of architecture and sculpture reached by the indigenous peoples, whose basic inspiration was Indian. The Khmers of Kambuja extended their political and cultural domination over vast regions from Burma to Vietnam before they suffered severe reverses and were confined to Cambodia by the advancing tide of Thais in A.D. 1431. The Chãms, exhausted after centuries of struggle with the Annamites, were finally defeated and decimated by the latter in 1471. Thereafter the Annamities established authority over most of Vietnam, extending their Sinicized culture among the vanquished peoples.

The Sino-Indian cultural demarcation of interests persisted through the succeeding centuries in peninsular Southeast Asia,¹³ although communications between that region and India and China were uncertain at best and usually nonexistent. The genius of the indigenous peoples built cultural superstructures on the Sino-Indian bases. Despite superimposition of a Western political, economic, and cultural veneer, the old dividing line of Sino-Indian cultural influence in Southeast Asia persevered. Such cultural affiliations have been invoked by visiting heads of state and delegations from Southeast Asia to India and China in modern times, and have been exploited to buttress relations on the political level. At the Geneva Conference of 1954, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden referred to the cultural boundary between China and India in Indochina¹⁴ in support of his argument that Laos and Cambodia should be treated separately from Vietnam. And when Nehru visited Indochina in 1954, Indian officials particularly emphasized cultural spheres of Sino-Indian influence to bolster their urging better political relations with Laos and Cambodia.¹⁵

Such distinction was not, however, made by Indian leaders after World War II in regard to components of former French Indochina. The binding force at that time was that of Asian nationalism. Indian nationalists welcomed the establishment of republics by their Vietnamese and Indonesian counterparts, who had taken advantage of the time gap between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of Western troops to proclaim their freedom. Under the Potsdam Agreement, Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command was charged with the task of disarming the Japanese and maintaining local law and order. In Indochina, British responsibilities extended to the region south of the sixteenth parallel, for whose implementation General Douglas D. Gracey was sent to Saigon, on September 12, 1945, at the head of the 20th Indian Division. The general overstepped his instructions, which were strict and specific: Sole mission: disarm the Japanese. Do not get involved in keeping order.¹⁶ Instead, he rearmed the interned French soldiers, detained the leftists among Vietnamese nationalists, imposed curbs on the native press, and restricted freedoms of movement and speech. In Indonesia, too, nationalists battled with British forces and Sukarno appealed to fellow nationalist Nehru to visit his country.¹⁷ The plight of the Indonesians and the Indochinese struck a responsive chord in the Indian nationalists, who complained that, under the pretext of disarming the Japanese, the British were restoring the country once again to decadent French imperialism.¹⁸ The resentment that the suppression of neighboring nationalist movements aroused in Indian minds was aggravated by the knowledge that Indian troops were being arrayed against the Indochinese and Indonesian patriots. The Congress Working Committee was indignant over the mischievous misuse of the Indian forces by the British Government.¹⁹ Nehru, who was denied travel privileges to Indonesia,²⁰ voiced the general Indian sentiment in one of his strongest condemnations of Britain. Drawing a parallel between British intervention and the war of intervention which Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany waged in Spain, he said, We have watched British intervention there [Indochina and Indonesia] with growing anger, shame and helplessness that Indian troops should thus be used for doing Britain’s dirty work against our friends who are fighting the same fight as we. …²¹ Three months later the All India Congress Committee demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops from Africa and Asia, notably from Indonesia, Manchuria, Indochina, Iran and Egypt, and warned that the continuation of imperialistic domination under whatever name or guise … would sow the seeds of future wars.²²

The Indian leaders were at this time in the midst of historic events that were shortly to lead India to freedom. With the Labour party in power in Great Britain, chances of India’s independence brightened immeasurably. On February 19, 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the appointment of a cabinet mission to proceed to India to promote, in conjunction with the leaders of Indian opinion, the early realization of full self-government in India.²³ Protracted negotiations with the cabinet mission fully engaged the Indian leaders’ energies and attention, particularly as the Hindu-Muslim struggle came to the fore. On September 2, 1946, an interim government was formed, with Nehru as vicepresident of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, member for external affairs, and virtual head of the Indian government. But the transition of power from British to Indian hands was far from peaceful; the subcontinent, especially the provinces of Punjab, Bengal, and Bihar, was submerged in the bloody Hindu-Muslim conflict, for which Indian history has no parallel. The final independence of India, on August 15, 1947, achieved at the cost of partition into the dominions of India and Pakistan, was further threatened with disruption by violent elements that let loose an orgy of murder, rape, and looting that took a toll of almost a million lives and left ten times that many persons homeless.

The problems of stability and security that the new government faced were staggering indeed. Added to the strains and stresses on administrative personnel and finances caused by partition were burdens imposed by refugee rehabilitation. The withdrawal of British paramount authority had legally given independent rights to 562 native states that could Balkanize India in the worst manner. The Hindu-Muslim situation escalated into war in Kashmir, and serious clashes occurred in Hyderabad. The most tragic victim was the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated on January 30, 1948, depriving the new government of his valuable counsel in its hour of peril and need.

Indian attitudes toward, and participation in, the freedom movements of neighboring countries must be seen against the backdrop of these domestic difficulties. In the midst of such exciting, exulting, and anx ious moments in the country’s history, Nehru did not lose his Asian perspective. Despite its own problems, India did react to the distressing developments elsewhere in Asia, particularly in Indonesia and Indochina. Yet the responsibilities of high office required a certain amount of refrain and restraint, which Nehru could afford to dispense with earlier while in opposition to the government. The necessity of reviewing a decision in the context of national interests and international repercussions restricted his freedom of action. This was particularly seen in Nehru’s attitudes: toward renewed repression in Indochina at the end of 1946; toward Sarat Chandra Bose’s proposal of January, 1947, to send Indian volunteers to help the Vietnamese freedom fighters; and toward the Vietminh pleas for assistance and recognition at the Asian Relations Conference in the following March.

In November, 1946, the Vietminh resumed hostilities with the French after the latter’s bombardment of Haiphong, killing an estimated six thousand persons, mostly civilians. Earlier, the French had recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), established by the Vietnamese nationalists²⁴ under Ho Chi Minh’s leadership in September, 1945, as a free state with its own government, parliament, army and finance, forming part of the Indochinese Federation and the French Union.²⁵ In exchange, the Vietminh permitted the temporary return of the French to Tonkin and North Vietnam. The agreement was primarily the work of the first French commissioner in Tonkin, Jean Sainteny, who had personal regard for Ho and who believed in peaceful coexistence with the Vietminh. But the agreement was torpedoed by the French high commissioner, Admiral d’Argenlieu, who in June established and recognized another provisional Vietnamese government in Cochin China. Even so, Ho signed a modus vivendi with the French government at the Fontainebleau Conference in July, whereby both sides agreed to cease hostilities. The uneasy truce that followed was rudely broken by the French bombardment of Haiphong on November 23, countered by the Vietminh, on December 19, 1946, with an attack on the French positions in Hanoi and on all French garrisons in north and central Vietnam. The Vietminh retired into the jungles, leaving the cities to French control but retaining authority over the countryside, beginning an eight-year guerrilla war that ended with their victory at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva settlement of 1954.

As soon as the hostilities broke out, Ho Chi Minh’s unofficial representative in India, Mai The Chau, appealed to the Indian government and people for help in his countrymen’s fight to death.²⁶ He approached Sarat Chandra Bose, a member of Nehru’s interim cabinet and elder brother of the more famous Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian National Army in Southeast Asia during World War II. Bose called on his countrymen to think of the Vietnamese struggle as part of the larger Asian struggle for freedom from Western domination, and therefore to consider it their duty to rush in thousands and tens of thousands to help the brave Vietnamese.²⁷ He announced plans to raise a volunteer brigade, to collect funds, clothing, and food, and to organize a medical mission to be sent to Indochina. The general Indian reaction was sympathetic to the Vietnamese cause. Acharya Kripalani, president of Nehru’s own party, the Indian National Congress, accused the French authorities of Hitlerism in repressing the nationalist struggle in Vietnam, warning that if the legitimate urge of the peoples of Asia for freedom is suppressed by force of superior arms,… the world will be caught in a conflagration worse than the last world war.²⁸ The All-India Students’ Congress, an organization dominated by the Socialist wing of the Indian National Congress, called upon students throughout the country to observe January 21 as Vietnam Day, the Communistled All-India Trade Union Congress asked its regional councils of Calcutta, Bombay, and Pondicherry to boycott French transport to and from Indochina.²⁹ In Calcutta, the processions on Vietnam Day, in defiance of the existing ban on assembly of more than four persons, ended with the police wounding about two hundred, killing one, and arresting more than five hundred.³⁰ The students dispersed only after Bose’s personal appeal to conduct themselves peacefully and not to fight the battle of Vietnam in the streets of Calcutta.³¹ More positively, Bose received responses: from Bombay, where J. K. Bhonsle, formerly of the Indian National Army, organized a Vietnam Brigade; from Pondicherry, where the local Congress recruited volunteers; from Karachi and Delhi, where N. Parsram and Brij Bhushan Kashyap provided leadership in the campaign for recruitment. From abroad came Colonel Yan Naing, son-in-law of Ba Maw, Burma’s premier during the Japanese occupation, to meet with Bose in order to coordinate the Indo-Burmese efforts to help the Indochinese nationalists.³² The Singapore Vietnamese, led by Ngo No Vy, and Ceylonese former cadets, under P. Samarakode, also approached Bose for leadership in a joint expedition.

With such popular support in men and material, Bose wrote to Nehru and his cabinet members requesting transport facilities and passports for the journey to Indochina for his volunteer force. He made it clear that no request would be made to the government of India for either financial assistance or equipment. He reminded Nehru that the freedom of Asia is one and indivisible, and that his token force would demonstrate that the heart of nationalist India beats in unison with the Indochinese people.³³ Nehru refused the requisite travel arrangements for Bose’s volunteer force. Infuriated, Bose retorted that if the government of India for reasons of its own wished to adopt a policy of nonintervention, it should at least allow Indian Lafayettes to proceed to Vietnam.³⁴

Similar restraint characterized Indian official attitude to the Vietnamese question at the Asian Relations Conference in the following month, from March 23 to April 12, in New Delhi. This conference was attended by delegations from twenty-five Asian countries. Indochina was represented by two delegations, representing Ho Chi Minh’s DRV and the French-backed regimes of Cambodia, Laos, and Cochin China. Both delegations had been invited by India, indicating that country’s uncertain and noncommittal attitude toward the rival regimes in Vietnam. The acceptance of the invitation by both Vietnamese delegations demonstrated their desire to avail themselves of the opportunity of ventilating their grievances to the Asian world. The DRV delegates attracted considerable curiosity and sympathy from other delegates, particularly as victims of recent French brutalities. They grimly told how the DRV messengers carrying the delegates’ credentials were killed on two different occasions before the documents could be successfully smuggled to Bangkok, where the delegates awaited them.³⁵ Mai The Chau, the DRV representative in New Delhi, gave an up-to-date account of the Indochinese freedom struggle at the Round Table on National Movements of Freedom. He complained that insufficient help had been given his country when the French set up a puppet government in Cochin China, and that some Asian countries had even helped the French perpetuate colonialism by selling them arms and ammunition. He was grateful for the sympathy of Asian peoples, especially India, but added that sympathy and mere verbal support were not enough.³⁶ We have used enough words about Asian unity, he admonished the delegates; now let us act.³⁷ The DRV delegation asked the Indian government to help the Indochinese movement in at least three positive ways: by recognizing the government of the DRV, by using influence at the United Nations to take up the Indochinese issue, and by taking practical steps to stop French reinforcements.³⁸ The DRV joined the Indonesian delegation in making the following requests to the assembled delegates.

Place the issue of colonialism, and particularly the issue of Vietnam, on the Security Council agenda.

Immediately recognize the Indonesian and the Vietnamese republics.

Provide joint Asian action to force the withdrawal of foreign troops from all parts of occupied Asia.

Provide joint Asian action to prevent Dutch and French reinforcements from going to Indonesia and Vietnam.

Send Asian medical aid and volunteers to Asian battlefields.³⁹

The appeals of neither Bose nor the DRV delegation could convince Nehru, who then handled undivided India’s portfolio of external affairs, of the propriety of intervention of Indochina by outside countries, even on the grounds of a common struggle against colonialism and for Asian freedom. Nehru emphasized the legal aspect of such intervention in his reply to Bose, pointing out that so long as the Government of India is not at war with another country, it cannot take action against it,⁴⁰ and adding that in matters involving foreign relations the government of India must observe rules and decorum. Replying to the charge by the Vietminh delegation that India’s support to countries of Southeast Asia was more moral than material, Nehru said he did not see how the government of India or, for that matter, that of any other Asian country could be expected to declare war on France. His government had already taken steps to limit the number of French aircraft that might fly across India.⁴¹ He promised, however, to bring sufficient pressure to bear on France, which could not obviously be done by governments in public meetings.⁴²

This was not the whole truth. What were the other reasons,⁴³ referred to by Bose in his rejoinder to Nehru, for India’s reluctance to assist the Indochinese nationalist movement? Certainly, as pointed out by V. K. R. V. Rao at the Asian Relations Conference, there were various degrees and methods short of a declaration of war by which a country could help another.⁴⁴ And Nehru himself soon demonstrated how potent such methods could be in another situation. When the Dutch attacked the Indonesian republic on July 20, 1947, Nehru thundered: No European country, whatever it may be, has any right to set its army in Asia against the people of Asia. The spirit of the new Asia will not tolerate such things.⁴³ Nehru persuaded British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to take action in the matter. Failing to activate Whitehall sufficiently, India and Australia brought the subject to the United Nations Security Council.⁴⁶ India’s delegate, Pillai, described foreign armies on Asian soil as an outrage against Asian sentiment, and warned that if such acts were tolerated, then the United Nations would cease to exist. The Security Council passed a cease-fire resolution and offered its good offices for settlement of the dispute by arbitration and other peaceful means. India supported the Indonesian republic’s cause throughout 1948 in the United Nations deliberations. When the Dutch renewed their attacks in December, 1948, an enraged Nehru, in a spectacular move, called a conference on Indonesia to meet in New Delhi in January, 1949. India denied facilities to all Dutch aircraft and shipping, and successfully persuaded Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq to apply similar sanctions. India sent a Red Cross medical unit to Indonesia and granted asylum to Sjahir.⁴⁷ The Indian government extended de facto recognition to the Indonesian republic, which enabled her to characterize the Dutch police action as an act of war against Indonesia.⁴⁸ The Conference on Indonesia, attended by eighteen countries from Asia and Africa, heard Nehru describe the Dutch attack as an affront and challenge to Asia itself:

We meet today because the freedom of a sister country of ours has been imperilled and dying colonialism of the past has raised its head again and challenged all the forces that are struggling to build up a new structure of the world. That challenge has a deeper significance than might appear on the surface, for it is a challenge to a newly awakened Asia which has so long suffered under various forms of colonialism.⁴⁹

In a bitter and outspoken attack against Western colonialism, the Indian prime minister promulgated an Asian Monroe Doctrine:

Our foreign policy is that no foreign power should rule over any Asiatic country. The reaction of the Dutch action will be heard soon over all the Asiatic countries and we will have to consider what we will have to do under the circumstances.⁵⁰

Nehru sent the conference speeches, resolutions, and recommendations to the United Nations, where five days later the Security Council adopted a resolution urging a cease-fire, the release of political prisoners, and the reestablishment of the republican government in Jogjakarta.⁵¹ These recommendations were substantially identical with the demands made by the Delhi conference.⁵² The negotiations that followed between the Netherlands government and Indonesian leaders led to the ultimate transfer of sovereignty to Indonesian hands on December 27, 1949.

India did not take any comparable measures in regard to the Indochinese nationalist movement, despite direct appeals from the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for joint Asian action to compel withdrawal of foreign troops and to take the issue to the United Nations. Instead, Nehru cautioned the Asian Relations Conference delegates against any outside interference. He advocated that the area of conflict be limited,⁵³ in the interest of the Vietnamese themselves.⁵⁴ Had India’s views changed enough in the period between March, 1947, and January, 1949, to justify Asian intervention in the Indonesian conflict? If so, would India be equally prepared to espouse the Indochinese cause on similar lines after 1949? When some members of Nehru’s own party contrasted the Indian attitudes in the two instances and urged Nehru to convene a conference⁵⁵ on Indochina as well, he parried the suggestion; his deputy, B. V. Keskar, indicated that he doubted that many Asiatic nations would attend if such a conference were summoned.⁵⁶ Nehru ruled out intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that it would only be theoretical⁵⁷ and that the nationalist sentiment of the Vietnamese people would resent foreign interference even if it came with the best of motives. He added that such well-meaning interference could be used by colonial powers to discredit a nationalist movement as not being independent and indigenous but controlled by external agencies. It is superfluous to point out that each of these arguments was equally relevant in the Indonesian context and that they did not prevent the Indian government’s willing intervention in Indonesia’s favor in January, 1949.

Among the real reasons that restrained Nehru’s enthusiasm for the Indochinese struggle were the character of the nationalist leadership in Vietnam and the continued French hold over five small possessions in India itself. After 1949 a third and more decisive factor was the emergence of a Communist regime in China, sharing a common border with a Communist-led movement in Vietnam. The resulting attitude was one less of indifference or neglect than of calculated circumspection.

Of all the anticolonial movements in Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese struggle for freedom was probably the most complex. The movement was substantially dominated by the Communists, who had, however, officially dissolved their party and established a front with representa- tives of most nationalist groups. The French made minor concessions, based on their concept of the French union, which did not satisfy even such archenemies of the Communists as Ngo Dinh Diem, who had refused to jump on Ho Chi Minh’s bandwagon. A Vietnamese scholar, Ton That Thien, has characterized his country’s freedom struggle as between "two ideologies, one imported via China, and the other via France.⁵⁸ Although it is doubtful that during this early phase of their freedom struggle the Vietnamese nationalists were aware of the global ideological conflict between Communist and anti-Communist forces, it is certain that they were united in opposition to colonialism and that Communism remained an issue of subordinate importance. As William B. Dunn, an American Foreign Service official with long experience in Vietnam, observed, what mattered to the Vietnamese nationalists was not resistance to ‘communism,’ but the gaining of ‘real independence’ and this later phrase has no meaning except in reference to independence from France."⁵⁹ Only after the liquidation of French rule in Indochina in 1954 did the Vietnamese turn to the ideological conflict between Communism and anti-Communism, while the ancient fear of, and antipathy toward, the Chinese hegemony revived.

The general attitude in Asia toward Communism was not the same as the Western postwar dichotomy of Communism versus anti-Communism. Asia, including India, was committed to fight against colonialism and to eradicate it from Asian soil. Most Indians, for whom the colonial experience was recent, either failed or refused to see the international trend of aggressive and expansive Communism and the bipolar division of the world. For most Asians, freedom from the colonial yoke was an immediate and irreconcilable goal, even if its pursuit led to lack of freedom under Communist society.

The natural preference in India, however, was in favor of the establishment of democratic institutions in newly emerging states, as in India itself. However, the concept of self-determination was, from India’s viewpoint, to include not only self-government but the choice of form of government as well. Accordingly, if a nationalist movement were dominated by Communism, and if the only choice lay between perpetuation of colonial rule and the rise of national Communism, India would consider it a duty to support the latter, although in practice her enthusiasm in such circumstances would be restrained.

In the Vietnamese situation, Ho Chi Minh had disclaimed any Communist affiliations and was hailed as a nationalist hero by the majority of his countrymen. Even so, Nehru offered Ho verbal support but uttle active assistance. Nehru’s attitude toward