time, it would create some resentment among newly-emergent indepen-
dent ‘nations’ who felt that Nehru was claiming a dominant role wholly
unwarranted by the mere fact that India was the earliest country to achieve
independence from colonial rule. India, and Krishna Menon, played a
crucial role at the Geneva Conference in July 1954 that ended the fighting
in Indo-China and recognised the successor states of Cambodia, Laos
and Vietnam (the last of which was partitioned along the 17th Parallel).
Non-alignment, an idea of which Nehru had come to be regarded as
author, was gathering to itself a number of adherents: Indonesia, Burma,
Laos, Cambodia, Egypt, Nepal, Ceylon, a number of Arab states, and soon,
newly independent African states; but ‘non-alignment’ was less a clear
policy decision than a residual category that could comfortably accom-
modate those that did not or would not, for a variety of reasons, fit in
the superpowers’ blocs (Yugoslavia’s non-alignment, for instance, was an
accident of its leader’s heresy against Stalin). India’s sometimes implicitly
assumed leadership role emanated, probably, more from Nehru’s person-
ality and his tendency of patronising those he felt to be his intellectual
inferiors than from any genuine attempt by India to dominate the emer-
ging ‘Third World’; the presumption on Nehru’s part that he was entitled
to scold ‘junior’ politicians for their failings was a potential cause of
diplomatic tension.
The two Asian powers who were most likely to come into conflict by
virtue of size and of that tricky question of vanity, unfulfilled national
aspirations, were of course India and China. But for the time being,
this seemed unlikely. Their interests did not seem likely to come into
conflict. A potential conflict was avoided in 1950, when Chinese troops
entered Tibet and claimed what successive Chinese governments regarded
as theirs by right. Vallabhbhai Patel had wished to denounce this as
communist expansionism; Nehru had not been particularly concerned,
even though India had become the heir to British interests in Tibet (the
British Mission in Lhasa had in fact been converted in 1947 into the
Indian Mission in Lhasa without so much as a change in personnel). Tibet,
which had been a part of the late Qing empire, but had from 1913
effectively been under British control, had never been acknowledged
as independent even by the government of Republican China, which
was too weak to assert effective control over the region even if it claimed
de juresovereignty over it. (There is, of course, an inherent tension between
a legalposition and the right to self-determinationand consequent claims
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 203