only place for Hindu sectarians to continue to operate was under the
protective umbrella of the Congress itself, where Nehru’s leadership and
their paying lip service to the ideals of Nehruvian secularism provided the
legitimising cover of political correctness. These problems were perhaps
aggravated by the fact that Nehru was becoming an iconic figure in his
own lifetime. Although an adulation of Nehru was not incompatible with
a few electoral defeats for the Congress, there was a tendency, as there had
been with Gandhi and the (then) Congress right, of making excuses for
Nehru himself while attacking the Congress.
But there was a definite space to the right of Indian politics that called
out for someone to occupy it. Once again, it was Nehru’s early victories
that prevented this space to the right from being taken up by explicitly
Hindu sectarian positions. (Nehru always acknowledged that there were
Muslim sectarians in India as well; but for reasons of their lack of strength
of numbers, he did not take them as seriously.) The right had to organise
outside the Congress in terms of secular politics – most conventionally, as
expected, around the interests of capitalists, and around that staple of
Cold War rhetoric, ‘freedom’.
THE EMERGENCE OF ASIA? COLD WAR BREEZES AND
NON-NON-ALIGNMENT
Two conventional views of the Cold War have shown a remarkable
resilience that a wealth of historiography has been unable to decentre:
that the Cold War was not really fought except diplomatically and that
‘non-alignment’ or ‘neutralism’ was a way of keeping out of it. The first
is a product of a Eurocentrism that saw Asian wars as less important,
Great Power intervention in anti-colonial struggles as logical, and Asian
communists or suspected communists murdered on an unimaginably large
scale in countries like Malaya and (later) Indonesia as no more than
a problem of counter-insurgency. The second promotes the myth that a
country like India was not really involved in the Cold War. But it was
impossible not to be involved; even the mere act of trying to keep out
of the way was a very active process. And for Nehru, who in many ways
led the battle for the right of countries not to decide their external and
internal policies purely with reference to the Cold War, the process was a
very active one. (Those who criticised Nehru for the attention he paid to
foreign policy probably either chose to ignore, or were ill-informed about,
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 215