Word: nehru
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Jawaharlal Nehru works hard at the role of bellwether. He grows furious when Western powers ("these people who try to run Asia without us") refuse to accept India's judgment as the final word on Asian problems. And under his leadership India has become a Mecca for the increasing number of Asian nations whose foreign policies rest on the twin foundations of "anticolonialism," i.e., anti-Westernism, and "nonalignment," i.e., no commitment in the worldwide struggle between Communism and freedom...
...partisans go further and claim that Nehru speaks for all Asia. This is manifest nonsense. Nehru does not speak for Mao's China, for Japan, for the Philippines, for Formosa, for Korea, for Thailand, for North or South Viet Nam, for Afghanistan, for Pakistan. His influence is principally felt in Ceylon, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya and Indonesia...
...influence that is often confused with views he does not represent. In Nehru's name it is argued that Asians possess a spirituality of nature that is superior to Western materialism. But Nehru himself, admired as he is by many Hindus and Buddhists, holds to no spiritual beliefs, and only last week in West Germany said: "As for myself, I believe in no religion or dogma or faith." He berates the world for its use of force, but he holds Kashmir by force; he talks of the rights of people, but he denies Kashmir a plebiscite; he resents...
Lost in the Desert Sands. Nehru's increasing influence in Southeast Asia has been matched by a growing disenchantment with him in the U.S. In the beginning, the U.S. greeted Indian independence in 1947 with pleasure. Thoreau and Jefferson, cried the cheerleaders, had inspired India's rebels. Nehru, said Pundit Walter Lippmann, is "certainly the greatest figure in Asia...
What finally and perhaps irrevocably ended unquestioning U.S. admiration of India was India's role in the Korean war, where Nehru showed himself neutral in favor of Communist China, which he fears as he does not fear the U.S. It was possible to understand Indian neutrality during the fighting. It was all but impossible to forgive the fact that as the pivotal member of the Korean Armistice Commission, India, at Nehru's personal insistence, abandoned the traditional impartiality of neutral arbiters. In an apparent attempt to win the confidence of Mao Tse-tung, it tried to force...