Nehru’s anti-imperialist credentials, which had not been improved by his
decision to keep India within the Commonwealth, seemingly indicating
a leaning to the Western side; non-alignment could better be sustained by
inviting the suspicions of both sides rather than only one.
Meanwhile, Britain, increasingly dependent on and therefore sub-
servient to the USA, was able to use its ‘Commonwealth’ commitment to
argue that it had to tread softly in matters of foreign policy: it could not
afford to annoy or alienate key allies such as India. That this was less out
of respect for the Commonwealth as a partnership of equals and more
out of a need to find space to manoeuvre and to behave less like the global
bull-in-a-china-shop than the USA did was quickly apparent to Nehru.
He was unwilling altogether to rely on the British as an ally – the Kashmir
issue at the UN was a good example of why this would have been unwise
- but found the British to be more reasonable than the Americans.
There was, of course, the crucial issue of anti-communism. Indian anti-
communism had its own concerns and genealogy, and it was irritating
to have it appropriated by the USA’s spurious rhetoric of ‘democracy’,
which many Indian anti-communists did not for a moment take seriously,
given the pro-imperialist causes that the USAs was willing to defend
internationally. Domestically, Nehru’s own views, at least publicly,
tended towards opposing what he saw as the undemocratic or adventur-
ist nature of some communist activities, while refusing to condemn
communists per se. Internationally, Nehru, despite his insistence on non-
alignment, had professed his own anti-communism in various ways to US
and British sources, perhaps a little more strongly than he might have to
other audiences. In October 1949, on his first trip to the USA, he had said
that in China nationalism would emerge stronger than communism (in
effect, that the CCP was more nationalist than it was communist), thereby
amplifying a trend in US China policy that hoped for a Chinese ‘Titoism’
along the lines of Yugoslavia’s staying aloof from the Soviet bloc. Nehru
also assured the Americans that the communist strategy in India of first
aligning with the left wing of nationalism and then attempting to control
it had failed. At the same time, Nehru managed to deflect the issue
of aligning with the USA: ‘the most intimate ties,’ he told journalists in
New York, somewhat mystically, ‘are ties which are not ties.’^36 (India was
among the first powers to recognise the People’s Republic of China,
established October 1, 1949 – India recognised the PRC on December 30,
1949, and Britain on January 6, 1950, shortly before the Colombo
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 199