Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
United Nations as the real forum for sorting out conflicts. It was this faith in, or at least an
urge for, a set of multilateral institutions and the development of international laws as the
basis for a new world order, that coincided with the 'whiff of idealism,' says Bajpai, who
was a young Ministry of External Affairs official in the 1950s and so is reflecting the view
of diplomats at the time.
Nehru shunned a 'quest for dominance' - a phrase that prime minister Rajiv Gandhi
used in the 1980s to illustrate India's limited ambitions, according to Mani Shankar Aiyar.
'Such an India was not content to merely not be non-partisan in the Cold War. It also had
something different to tell the world. And it was precisely because India had something
to say which no one else was saying that the world paused to listen. Thus, an asymmet-
rical foreign policy gave an asymmetric influence hugely disproportionate to the material
strength of an India which, in conventional terms, would have been paid little heed to if
it were merely parroting the words and postures of others,' Aiyar said in a foreign affairs
lecture in Melbourne in 2011.
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Jaswant Singh, who held three top portfolios as external affairs, finance and defence
minister in the 1998-2004 NDA government, talks about a 'mentality of separateness' that
gestion from America in the mid-1950s that India should join the United Nations Security
Council when it was formed. In practical terms, Nehru's reply avoided India upstaging and
upsetting China, which was being left out in favour of Taiwan, but it also fitted with his
approach, especially at a time when the world was splitting into two Cold War camps. The
result, of course, was that India was excluded from the inner workings of the UN, which it
is now trying to rectify with embarrassingly persistent cries to become a permanent mem-
ber of the Security Council.
Nehru did not want an alliance with any single country or power block, but he did want
India to play a leading role in a large constituency, which NAM provided when it was foun-
ded in 1961. For a time Nehru's voice was heard, and India had a significant influence on
major international issues in the first decade of independence. Aiyar summed this up in his
Melbourne lecture: 'On the major international issues of the first decade of India's inde-
pendence - Palestine, Korea, Indo-China, Suez - so influential was the differential Indian
voice that India was included in both the UN committees set up in 1947 to bring about
asymmetrically refused to see right as belonging only to one side or the other, she was
invited to become the chairman of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission without
which the Korean War could not have been brought to an end.'
Although not invited to the Geneva Conference on Indo-China in 1954, writes Aiyar,
Krishna Menon installed himself in the Hotel Beau Rivage on the banks of Lake Leman and
