Conference, at which Britain’s strategic attempt to contain communism
by developmental and technical assistance was inaugurated).
The USA for its part disliked Indian attempts to organise international
diplomacy without reference to metropolitan interests, bringing together
countries of the periphery; the rhetoric of Asian solidarity was disturbing.
The independence of Burma in January 1948, of Ceylon in February 1948,
and the anti-imperialist struggles in Indonesia, Indo-China and Malaya
had made the Western bloc extremely nervous about communism in
Asia; neutralism of the Nehruvian variety was disturbing. In January
1949, following Dutch attempts to recapture the Indonesian republic,
Nehru intervened (in 1946 he had in similar circumstances, as head of
the Interim Government, been unable to do so). Tiring of the Security
Council’s handling of the question for the previous six months, where the
Western bloc had persistently blocked the demand for the Dutch to
withdraw their forces, he called an Asian conference of twenty countries
in New Delhi. This included Pakistan and several Arab states, as well as
Australia and New Zealand. In the case of Indonesia, Nehru was willing
to stick his neck out and provide actual support (there might also have
been personal reasons for this; Nehru had first met the then prime minister
of Indonesia, Mohammed Hatta, at the Brussels Congress in 1927). The
Interim Government in 1946 had demanded the withdrawal of Indian
troops from Indonesia; later, Indian aircraft had broken the Dutch
blockade of the Indonesian Republic and carried food, medicines and other
supplies (perhaps not excluding arms) to republican forces, All-India
Radio in Delhi functioned as the official radio station of the Indonesian
republic, and Nehru had even offered Delhi as a base for a government in
exile if the need should arise. Politically, this was not entirely unsafe, as
the Dutch were relatively isolated internationally and the Indonesian
republic was not communist. The 1949 Conference in Delhi asked the
Dutch to withdraw troops from occupied areas, to release Indonesian
leaders from prison and to allow the formation of an interim government,
but did not ask for sanctions against Holland.
As far as Cold War India-watchers were concerned, however, the more
disturbing trend was that Nehru appeared to be bringing into being a
separate bloc, outside of Soviet or US control; the invitation to Australia
and New Zealand raised the suspicion that Nehru was trying to detach
them from the ‘West’. Both the USA and the USSR were suspicious, the
USSR because it felt that this was a second anti-communist bloc in the200 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55