without aligning with it – and there were fewer strings attached to
Eastern than to Western assistance. The USSR’s new respect for India
quickly translated into economic assistance and technical collaboration.
Negotiations had begun in November 1954 for a steel plant to be set up
with Soviet help; the agreement, envisaging a plant with an annual
capacity of one million tons, was agreed in February 1955. In the summer
of 1955, after Bandung, Nehru was given a very warm reception in
Moscow, comparable to the heroic reception he had received in China –
retrospectively, it might have been said that the USSR and China were
competing for Nehru’s favour.
In December 1955, the Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev
visited India, to great public interest and popular acclaim – and also to
great apprehension from anti-communists and pro-capitalists (the two
were not entirely the same in India, we should remind ourselves). Nehru
used the opportunity to ask for assurances that the USSR would not
support the Indian communists against his government. Khrushchev
agreed, claiming that the USSR had no connections with the CPI and
pointing to the dissolution of the Cominform as proof that the Soviet
Union was not intent on fomenting world revolution. The USSR would
also proffer tactical support for India on the Kashmir issue and on the
tricky issue of Goa remaining a Portuguese colony (in 1954, the French
had amicably agreed to hand over Pondicherry and other remaining
territories in India that still were their colonies; Nehru had hoped that
Goa would similarly be handed over, and he even appealed to the British,
the USA and the Vatican for intervention; but this did not materialise).
The USSR now quickly became a major trading partner and devel-
opmental collaborator of India’s. At the Twentieth Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev’s famous
de-Stalinisation speech also praised new nations such as India. Soon the
USSR had admitted the possibility of other routes to socialism than
the Soviet model. They were to be extremely interested in the Indian
planning project – as of course were Western scholars, for whom in the
new discipline of development economics, nothing as exciting and
ambitious was being attempted anywhere else – what was more, this was
within a democratic and non-communist framework. Non-alignment
seemed to have won a great victory; but of the two cows seemingly about
to present themselves for milking, the Eastern cow seemed far more
forthcoming.
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 221