the offensive, after a fashion: the Congress’s ‘Avadi Resolution’, at its
annual conference, declared its goal to be a ‘socialistic pattern of society’
(parliament had already endorsed this goal in late 1954) – the word
‘socialism’ was avoided. The realignments among oppositional forces,
meanwhile, had to a large extent strengthened the Congress, and Nehru’s
position in it: if everyoneclaimed some form of ‘socialism’, then Nehru
could safely claim the same, with the clear understanding that those in
his party who opposed him had no publicly legitimate basis on which to
oppose him; there was as yet no organised right outside the Congress.
Rhetorically, at least, Indian politics had an overpopulated left, a sparsely
populated centre and an almost empty right, as religious and sectarian
parties had successfully been cornered and contained in a delegitimised
zone.THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER
‘We have talked,’ Nehru had said in the Constituent Assembly, ‘so
much about British imperialism that we cannot get out of the habit of
it.’^34 He was presenting to the House the need for political realism and a
practical as well as a principled foreign policy. But of course he knew that
British imperialism was not dead – it had nonetheless to be downplayed- at first if the objective of joining the Commonwealth was to be carried
through, and thereafter to sustain some delicate negotiations in which
Britain was considered the lesser evil to the greater evil of the USA. Nehru
was far from enamoured of the American approach to world politics;
in private, he observed that President Truman was a mediocre man who
ought not to be trusted and who could not carry out his international
responsibilities as the man in charge of a superpower. It is possible to see
the Commonwealth link as important to Nehru: the Commonwealth was
a compromise that prevented political isolation, without implying a
corresponding commitment to the Western bloc.
But there were moments, with the pressures of world politics
apparently getting to him, at which Nehru contemplated temporarily
breaking his principles, quietly and without fanfare. There was an explicit
element of opportunism in this. In 1948, Nehru speculatively asked
Krishna Menon, ‘why not align with the USA somewhat and build up
our economic and military strength?’^35 Menon firmly refused to let his
colleague take that route. The Soviet Union was already suspicious of
198 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55