and correct and – in a mystical flourish that would pander to nationalist
sentiment – ‘ancient’ and ‘cultural’: from the time, as Nehru put it, of the
Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, when India had sent
out the first Buddhist missionaries to China.
The apparent success of Nehru’s policy of refusing to align with the
superpowers, and particularly his refusal to submit to US pressures,
needs to be connected to another, related, story: that of outside influences,
secret and behind the scenes, seeking to lend a directing hand to Indian
political developments. The extent to which the Cold War actually
reached Indian soil and affected everyday domestic politics is as yet largely
unknown. A few fragments are known, however, and they are in them-
selves worth noting. The United States’ encouragement, at least from the
early 1950s, of opponents of communism in India – the US definition of
‘communism’ was notoriously broad, with Nehru himself not being above
suspicion in this regard – was in part organised through its CIA-funded
‘cultural front’, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF’s promotion
of the Western side of the Cold War in the domain of culture consisted
mainly in funding academic and cultural activities, acting as a showcase
for Western ‘freedoms’. This organisation was headed, in India, by Minoo
Masani. As a skilled propagandist, Masani was an excellent choice for
the job. He had made an effortless transition from socialism within the
old CSP – where he was its most strident anti-communist voice – to
the capitalist camp. During the Second World War he joined Tata Sons,
a shift facilitated by communal and family connections with the Parsi
community, among whom the Tatas counted, and was an extremely useful
presence in their public relations department, even dressing up the
industrialists’ ‘Bombay Plan’ of 1944, a set of proposals that sought to
direct a post-independence Indian political economy towards preserving
‘the essentials of the capitalist system’, as ‘socialism’, and persuading
Oxford University Press to publish a version of it as a children’s picture
book.
The CCF, however, operated without divulging its source of funding,
which was important to its success in a country like India: to many people
the acknowledgement of taking CIA money was tantamount to declaring
that one had betrayed the nation’s independence (when in 1967 the CIA’s
‘cultural’ game was revealed to the world, many who had worked under
the CCF banner were acutely embarrassed; others, it would seem, had
known all along – Masani certainly had). The CCF did not necessarily
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 205