some circles as Nehru’s victory over Dulles; but the pacts were still enough
of a concern for Nehru to seek to address the danger. Bandung, for Nehru,
had at least in part been prompted by the desire to mobilise separately, or
at least differently, from SEATO.
Another significant victory of Nehru’s, even before Bandung had taken
place, was the announcement on February 8, 1955, by Foreign Minister
Molotov on behalf of the USSR that the Soviet government accepted
Nehru’s ‘five principles’ or Panch Sheel. This was probably a feeler to
encourage Nehru to invite the Soviet Central Asian republics to Bandung;
at any event, the Soviets were not churlish after the event. The USSR was
clearly warming to the idea that non-alignment was not necessarily
support for imperialism. Those who wished to read the policy of the
Communist Party of India as a direct reflection of directives from Moscow
could with satisfaction note that the CPI decided to back Nehru’s foreign
policy from August 1955, after Bandung, and after the Soviet Union had
accepted the Panch Sheel.
The Bandung Conference itself, however, had little success in passing
even elementary resolutions, such as that condemning colonialism.
Divergences quickly appeared with aligned countries such as Ceylon and
Pakistan wishing to discuss Soviet ‘imperialism’ in Eastern Europe and
including Soviet Eastern Europe in a definition of colonialism. Pakistan
was quick to clarify to its powerful neighbour that this definition did not
apply to China, which, Pakistan averred, had no expansionist tendencies
and did not suppress any other nationalities. Nehru opposed this broader
definition of colonialism: Russia’s influence in Eastern Europe was not the
same thing, he argued, although he did not clarify exactly why not.
As Bandung’s pre-eminent personality, Nehru deliberately stayed
in the background and would not play too prominent a role in the pro-
ceedings. This was intended to be diplomatic; but since his importance
was widely recognised, there were times at which his silences came across
as patronising and his interventions as abrupt. The space he graciously
vacated was best filled by the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai. Zhou did
not always win friends, but he did influence people, paradoxically by
casting himself as mediator in conflicts between the aligned pro-Western
and non-aligned countries. At what was the People’s Republic of China’s
first large conference on an international scale, Zhou came across as
reasonable and unaggressive. Amongst the quibbling on definitions of
‘colonialism’, it was Zhou who proposed that the principle of racial
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 219