Only by Purging his Nehruphobia Can Modi Grow up

Prime Minister Narendra Modi while replying to the discussion on motion of thanks for President’s Address to the budget session displayed another instance of his proclivity to denigrate India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He did so by telling leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi he should read a book JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War in which, he falsely claimed, author Bruce Reidel gave details of what games Nehru played in the name of foreign policy at the time of the 1962 Chinese aggression towards India. 

He described Reidel as a foreign policy scholar of the USA when he was, in fact, a former CIA official and advisor to several US presidents. Reidel also served as a senior fellow and was director of the Brookings Intelligence Project for 30 years after his retirement. Modi made a deliberate decision to disregard Reidel’s description of Nehru in the book as a great leader. Reidel lauded the deft manner in which he handled the crisis caused by China initiating the war on India and in its aftermath, by summoning support from American president J.F. Kennedy, Britain and other countries. 

In fact the author whose book Modi cited in Lok Sabha to point to Nehru’s “failure” is in fact someone who offers a nuanced picture of the first prime minister. His account is tempered with appreciation for Nehru’s role as a leader of the non-aligned movement, of which he was one of the key founders.

In 2015, in a discussion on this book with Tom Putnam, director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Reidel acknowledged that India under Nehru faced humiliation because of the losses suffered by it on account of Chinese aggression. He quoted Kennedy who, among others, said that the US government was not strictly anti-communist, recognised that the world was not black and white, and thought India was probably at the single-most important place, and its leader Nehru, even though not a fellow traveler, was not naive and had the stature of a great leader. 

Reidel referred to a letter Nehru wrote to Kennedy in November of 1962, asking him to send 250 combat aircraft and other necessary military support to deal with Chinese incursion deep into Indian territory and a possible Pakistan design to attack India. 

Reidel wrote that Kennedy on the advice of John Kenneth Galbraith ordered an American aircraft carrier battle group to sail into the Bay of Bengal as a sign of American support for India. He also tripled the size of the air flow and hundreds of tons of equipment were flown to India. 

He also revealed that in 1963, much after the Chinese side declared unilateral ceasefire and withdrew from some territories of India, the United States carried out, with the assistance of the British Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Royal Australian Air Force, an air exercise in India, which was exactly what Nehru had requested in that letter in November. In other words, he said, Kennedy decided to at least send a message that the USA would come to the defence of India in the event of a future Chinese invasion.

What Modi did in parliament amounted to a complete distortion of the contents of the book which Times of India noted had painted a nuanced portrait of Nehru, depicting both his visionary ideals and the strategic miscalculations that contributed to India’s unpreparedness for the 1962 war. 

Modi negated this nuanced picture of Nehru in Reidel’s book by simply misinterpreting it.

By now it is clear that Modi’s agony is multiplied if world leaders say anything positive about Nehru. In July 2024 when he was visiting Austria, he spoke yet again about the prevalence of despondency, despair and hopelessness in India till 2014 and how the situation changed for the better only after he and his party, BJP, got the mandate that year to rule the country. In his presence the Austrian Chancellor Nehammer acknowledged how Nehru played a key role in 1954 in restoring his country’s freedom and sovereignty.

Modi who in Austria ignored Nehru’s phenomenal contribution to that country is now committing the same offence in deliberately omitting a nuanced picture of Nehru in Reidel’s book. Only by purging his Nehruphobia can Modi grow up. 

S.N. Sahu served as officer on special duty to former President K.R. Narayanan.