numbers by British ‘special forces’ while a battle for the ‘hearts and minds’
of the population was to be undertaken at the same time. For this to
continue, British policy had to tread carefully. According to the British
view, the USA was too unsubtle in its approach to Cold War problems:
a little more subtlety and a little less rhetoric worked far better. Nehru
had recognised the People’s Republic of China; he would nonetheless
refrain from interfering in Malaya. British sources believed that Nehru
would recognise that they had a mutual enemy in communism, given that
he had communist problems at home himself, and believed that with
proper steering he could be relied upon to let them deal with the Malayan
Emergency without making too much noise.AUTHORSHIP
The normative significance of the ‘Nehruvian model’ can with some
justification be seen as a central feature of the political culture of post-
independence India. The question is whether the vision fully deserves the
qualifying adjective: how far was Nehru its author? The answer we might
provide points to the fact that he was, to a large extent, its author; it may
have been his most enduring achievement. But it may also never have been
an effective vision, capable of being fully implemented.
The Congress, after the departure of the socialists, was a centrist party
with a leftist rhetoric, dominated by right-wingers but fronted by
a moderate left-winger with relatively little power to deliver major
changes. This was a situation partly of Nehru’s own creation; he had failed
to win the confidence of the left due to years of prevarication, and he did
not have the goodwill of the right. In the first few years after the formal
transfer of power, both the Hindu right and the capitalist right were in
the Congress as well as outside it, although for the time being neither
of the two rights, nor the rights inside and outside the Congress, were
identified with each other. Minorities tended to cluster round the
Congress because it was publicly committed to social equality and to
the protection of their rights. The population’s expectations, after
two hundred years of colonial rule, rested upon the new government,
expectations stirred up by the revolutionary rhetoric of the left wing of
the nationalist movement. But a commitment to major social change
was notably lacking on the part of that government. The Congress’
cautious left rhetoric in the ‘Nehruvian period’ worked on the vaccination166 INTERLUDE – ENVISIONING THE NEW INDIA