Intelligence Bureau from 1950 to the year of Nehru’s death, 1964. Mullik
was an advocate of alignment with the USA in the Cold War, trained
under him large numbers of anti-communists as Indian intelligence
agents, and worked closely with the CIA to sponsor Tibetan guerrillas
in India. Intelligence sources’ warnings to Nehru of the ‘Chinese danger’
seem to have been in keeping with their anti-communism, and may have
eventually turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Regardless of
whether Nehru approved of these activities, that he knew of at least some
of them and acquiesced in them is in itself significant: what were the
pressures that made him accept the situation? The entire strategy of
non-alignment can only have been irrevocably compromised by these
activities.
Nehru’s foreign policy interventions in the late 1950s may provide a
clue to his recognition of failure: the tone of upbeat optimism that marked
his early years as prime minister was notably absent from the later period.
In 1958, asked by the USA to mediate over Soviet-American disarmament
talks (the USSR had rejected Western inspections of its nuclear sites
but was willing to accept Indian inspections), Nehru refused, on the
grounds that neither side was serious about disarming or limiting nuclear
tests. Nehru more or less kept his head down even when maintaining his
‘progressive’ and anti-colonial line in foreign policy. At the 1961 Belgrade
Conference of non-aligned countries he said to the gathered delegates,
even as he condemned further Soviet nuclear tests, ‘we must not over-
estimate our own importance’.^12 Nehru, at Belgrade, was out of joint with
a movement that was in large part his creation, and also with the new
African states, clustering around ideas of the ‘African personality’ and
pan-Africanism, and led by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, who consciously
cast himself as a counter-Nehru, even as he modelled himself on him. For
the new African states, Nehru’s studied intellectual approach seemed
strangely patronising. The grandeur of Nehru’s principles sounded
strangely hollow to Nehru himself: ‘co-existence’ was interpreted entirely
differently by each member-state, and the increasing number of border
skirmishes between India and China from 1959 had made Nehru himself
quietly shelve the Panch Sheelfrom his political vocabulary.236 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63