United States-India Relations 1947–1962: Stresses and Strains Over Communist China

Abstract

The United States had an inbuilt constituency in India, a constituency that had its origins in the pre-independent period. Although the British were under fire, they enjoyed a certain amount of respect for their commitment to justice and law. The Indian elites were the products of English education. All these resulted in a love-hate relationship between the Indians and the Anglo-Saxon groups in general. Besides, the amount of importance the Indian nationalist leaders gave to the mediatory role of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the liberal American Press in bringing about India's independence bears testimony to this formulation. Thus in 1941 when India won independence, the United States enjoyed considerable goodwill in India. The United States was willing and far abler than Stalin's Soviet Union to help in the economic betterment of India. The US launched the Point Four Programme, a politico-humanitarian package.1 Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, was consciously warm towards it because, apart from other reasons, he found it good tactics to use against domestic communism, and the collapse of the Telengana rebellion in Southern India proved him right. During his first visit to the United States in 1949, Nehru and President Truman seemed to have achieved a reasonable desire of mutual sympathy in genera! outlook on. world affairs. What alienated India's diplomacy from that of the United States most was the difference in their views of the nature of Chinese Communist threat and what approaches could be made about it. The United States had not yet given in to Dulles's pactomania, nor had the dreadful McCarthy era started. Yet guided by their different experiences, the two countries began to choose their different paths which did not converge until the Communist Chinese massive invasion of India's north-eastern border in October 1962. So conflicting were the approaches of India and the United States that they found themselves ranged on opposite sides on many issues regarding China. This worked clearly to the disadvantage of both. The differences discouraged economic assistance to India while the United States lost the sympathy of the emerging Asian nations. My paper examines the various aspects of these Indo-American differences over Communist China in order to define the impact on their political relations. It establishes that the ‘China Question’—the non-recognition by the United States, non-admission to the United Nations, the status of Formosa, etc., created bitter differences between India and the United States till the China War of 1962. This provided cause for an unparalleled deepening of the Indo-US involvement.