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When an Indian politician pushed for an anti-communist alliance of Asian democracies
US President Donald Trump’s tenure has vindicated many in the Indian foreign policy establishment prone to reflexive anti-Americanism. However, the recent history of intensified engagement between India and the US, the ongoing bureaucratic collaboration, and the Indian ruling establishment’s cautious reaction to Trump suggest New Delhi’s receptivity to a turnaround in the relationship.
India’s continued insistence on better ties with the US provides an opportune segue to analyse the historical roots of the pro-American, liberal ideational strand of Indian internationalist thought.
Against the backdrop of the Cold War geopolitics, this particular vision offered an alternative to former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned, zone of peace approach to the Asian regional security order. Nobody represented the Indian liberal internationalist vision as forcefully as Minoo Masani, the founding leader of the Swatantra party (1959-74).
Based on previously unused archival sources, this inquiry into Masani’s vision for India’s place in the Asian security order highlights a crucial strand of Indian internationalism during the early Cold War years, motivated by a strong sense of both geopolitical and ideological assault by the communist movement.
His consistent advocacy of closer ties with the US reveals the diversity of Indian strategic culture beyond the Nehruvian non-alignment. The Masani case also points to the pitfalls of ideological excesses, demonstrating how entrenched dogmas lead to miscalculations and sub-optimal foreign policy choices.
Despite cutting his teeth in public life as an anti-colonial Congress Socialist, Masani turned toward liberalism, infused with Gandhian ethics, in reaction to the post-World War II superpower contest, communist China’s control over Tibet and a homegrown communist insurgency.
At first, he focused his attention on contesting the appeal of communism in the Indian public sphere, albeit with little durable impact. As the founding father and leading foreign policy expert of the Swatantra Party, his opinion on India’s place in its extended Asian neighborhood stood a better chance at positive public reception.
This was even more true in the first half of the 1960s, as deteriorating relations with communist China led to a brief border war and security cooperation with the US. Here, we focus on three peculiar aspects of Masani’s conception of the regional security order as emblematic of one strain of Indian foreign policy thinking from the 1950s to early 1970s.
By 1950, the nascent Indian republic was faced with two potential security threats along its continental border – Pakistan and communist China, which had invaded and annexed Tibet. Nehru was attentive to the potential for expansionist designs, driven in China by the twin forces of nationalism and communism.
But his preferred approach to handling bilateral ties and the wider Asian security order lay in a combination of building the industrial sinews of Indian power in the long run and promoting a zone of peace in Asia to dampen the zero-sum superpower conflict. In addition, Nehru also undertook a range of measures in the early 1950s to reassure China of New Delhi’s benign intentions.
Masani and his anti-communist and right-wing compatriots, however, were less sanguine about the nature of the Chinese threat. In his later recollections, Masani would sometimes admit his initial agreement with Nehru’s enunciation of the non-alignment doctrine in 1946-’47. The communist Chinese movement into Tibet in 1950 and the erosion of Tibetan autonomy, however, alarmed Masani enough to argue for a change in the Indian approach.
But Masani’s concern did not remain limited to frontier dynamics. Rather, he interpreted the Chinese communist regime’s motives in terms of an authoritarian threat to democratic freedom. In this reading, the Korean war, the Taiwan Strait crisis, tensions in Berlin, and the Indochina conflict were all connected in a grand communist design to systematically erode liberalism. The China challenge, thus, went well beyond the border. Rather, it penetrated the jungles of Telangana, factories in Bombay and Calcutta, university campuses across India, and legislative buildings in the provincial and federal capitals.
Such a hardened ideological approach translated into an acute sense of threat perception that invariably led to miscalculations. To Masani’s credit, it bears mentioning that the Chinese attack on India in 1962 vindicated the anti-communist foreign policy elites who sounded an alarm in the wilderness in the 1950s.
The poor status of military preparedness and infrastructure buildup in the border region necessitated external balancing to defend Indian national interest. As Masani would correctly surmise at the time, the strategic cultural fixation with bloc neutrality hardly made strategic sense in this context. But the pitfalls of ideological threat inflation were reflected in his take on Sino-Soviet alliance dynamics.
Since Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and advocacy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist bloc in the mid-1950s, the strain in Moscow’s ties with a more radical and unrelenting Mao opened up a potentially exploitable opportunity. In fact, the 1959 military clash between India and China itself contributed to the deterioration of Sino-Soviet dynamics. Chinese behaviour in the Second Taiwan Strait crisis and the Soviet withdrawal of technical assistance portended the growing schism in the communist bloc. Masani, however, remained impervious to the potential for a Sino-Soviet split and its implications for India throughout the 1960s.
In 1962, Masani acknowledged the existence of tensions within the socialist camp but argued that centripetal forces were exerting an even greater pull. Ignoring the signs of a continued schism, he contended that Nikita Khrushchev’s removal from power could potentially heal the intra-bloc rift, since the rivalry was partly driven by a personality clash. As the split became evident in the second half of the 1960s, Indian policymakers began to envisage an alignment with the USSR to counter China. Ever combative, Masani still argued in 1966 that the Soviets’ interest lay in a détente with China.
A year earlier, the ideological need for a cohesive and powerful adversary was reflected in his interview with political scientist Michael Brecher, whereby he explicitly hoped for Sino-Soviet rapprochement to negate the prospect of a New Delhi-Moscow alignment. As we see later, the rapprochement actually occurred between Washington and Beijing, which made Masani shift his views on India’s involvement with the Asian security order.
The admixture of geopolitical and ideological threats led Masani to advocate for an anti-communist regional alliance of democracies in Asia. This counterbalancing coalition against communist China was to involve all the democracies between India and Japan, alongside Australia and New Zealand.
Even though Japan and India were expected to take the lead, any viable regional security alliance required the US backing to be effective against the communist power. Masani’s account of the exact contours of the anti-communist alliance remains frustratingly short on details. We can still reasonably surmise that the Asian coalition would have coordinated diplomatic signaling to deter Chinese threats and provided material aid in the case of aggression. Finally, Masani would also have been comfortable with the framing of the coalition as a coordination device to counter the communist infiltration of domestic politics across the region.
The border conflict with China in 1962 provided a propitious moment for Masani to push his agenda within the Indian foreign policy establishment. With the approval of Masani, the Swatantra leader PK Singh Deo brought up the idea of a collective Asian security venture at an all-party meeting in August 1962. Nehru, however, rejected the suggestion on the grounds of the inadequate material capability of such an anti-China coalition.
While archival sources in Australia and New Zealand vindicate Nehru’s pessimism, the real value of the initiative lay in sending a strong signal of a concerted diplomatic front against China to deter military adventurism. Any meaningful shift in the Sino-Indian military balance had to be contingent on the external intervention of the US, though. India’s military modernisation efforts after the winter 1962 debacle again brought the issue to the fore.
As the Indian government largely preferred internal balancing, Masani complained about the creaking economic burden of military modernisation efforts with deleterious implications for national morale. He preferred New Delhi to accept the military aid offer from the US and other democracies to bolster national security without breaking the budget.
In Masani’s anti-communist collective security plan, both the Republic of China in Taiwan, run by an authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek, and illiberal Pakistan under the dictatorship of Ayub Khan were misfits. But Masani overlooked such discrepancies in the name of the necessity of a joint anti-communist front. He regularly criticised Nehru’s rejection of the offer of joint defense from Ayub Khan in 1959. Much like American and British strategic elites, Masani understood well that any plausible anti-Chinese strategic initiative in South Asia remained contingent upon solving the Kashmir issue. Thus, both Masani and fellow Swatantra leader C Rajagopalachari argued for a conciliatory policy approach toward Pakistan.
As Pakistan grew closer to China and the Vietnam war intensified in the late 1960s, however, the falling dominoes assumption led Masani to fear a potential encirclement of Indian frontiers by communist satellites from Karachi to Singapore. A potential reliance on a US-led coalition remained the only plausible solution, as reflected in Masani’s support for the US offensive in Vietnam.
Unlike Masani’s dogmatic insistence on the continued endurance of the monolithic communist bloc, US President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger recognised and sought to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1970s. Masani’s initial reading of Nixon’s China visit recognised the balancing imperative behind the rapprochement, but took Nixon to task for betraying Taiwan’s cause in the joint communique. Reflective of the fluid geopolitical dynamics spurred by Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy, he even speculated that Washington’s abandonment of Taiwan might lead the latter to join Brezhnev’s Asian collective security initiative directed against China.
On the other hand, Masani relentlessly critiqued India’s growing affinity with the USSR. The 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty, in his understanding, turned India into a handmaiden of Brezhnev’s plan for collective security in Asia. Ironically enough, his criticism of the growing Soviet influence in the Indian Ocean was approvingly cited by the Chinese News Agency Hsinhua. Masani’s immediate reaction to the Chinese media report in September 1973 underscored the need to avoid engagement with both communist powers.
In the years following the Nixon-in-China moment, however, Masani significantly shifted his thinking on New Delhi’s dynamics with the competing communist states. The immediate spur for Masani’s reconsideration might have been Brezhnev’s November 1973 visit to India. But the trendline of a seemingly durable Sino-US détente and the growing Indian dependency on the USSR more plausibly explains the shift.
By the early 1970s, Masani did not evince a strong and immediate threat perception vis-à-vis China. Consequently, in his understanding, New Delhi should have recalibrated its approach in response to the evolving “multipolar” world. More clearly, he wanted India to normalise ties with China at this juncture instead of acting as a pawn in the Soviet collective security arrangement for Asia. The Indira Gandhi government, however, perceived a greater degree of threat from the Washington-Beijing-Islamabad nexus. Accordingly, New Delhi’s policy response in the 1970s ignored Masani’s protests at inching closer to the USSR and testing its own nuclear device.
The veteran liberal ideologue might not have had many takers in his time. But, as India seeks closer cooperation with the US and Asian partners to balance against China, Masani’s international thought could serve as the historical anchor for New Delhi’s strategic posturing. Masani’s forgotten vision of an Asian alliance and US ties points to a particular strand of Indian foreign policy that now holds wider purchase in New Delhi’s strategic circles.
China’s geopolitical assertion, the proliferation of Asian regional minilaterals, the uptick in India-Taiwan relations, and a strong alignment with the US render relevant Masani’s vision. At the same time, any applied history exercise requires due caution in drawing analogies across different contexts. New Delhi’s strong disapproval of an Asian NATO architecture, steadfast adherence to strategic autonomy, and continued rivalry with Pakistan show the limits of drawing from Masani’s preferred strategy.
Sanjeet Kashyap is a doctoral candidate in international politics at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
This article is the second in a two-part series focusing on research that sheds light on key personalities in India’s diplomatic history, based on work that was first presented at the Ashoka-LSE Diplomatic Studies Workshop.
This article was first published on India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.
Source: Scroll
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