Mukerjee’s spirited defence of Nehru in the Lok Sabha and his profession
of loyalty and patriotism had been one of the central features of the China
crisis. Now, in what was both a holding operation, given the rightward
drift of Indian politics at the time, and a survival tactic, given the
aspersions cast on the CPI’s patriotic credentials during the China crisis,
the CPI seemed Nehru’s most loyal support base in Parliament.
The China War and the patriotic frenzy that followed cast Nehru, the
idealist, as one whose idealism had betrayed the country. Nehru – trying
at times to hold the balance and find a rational way forward – eventually
realised this was not possible. Not too long before, he had written to the
philosopher Bertrand Russell pointing out the usefulness of nationalistic
feelings in producing in India some of the solidarity required to carry
through economic policies that would eventually lead to self-sufficiency.
But this attempt at an instrumental use of nationalism had as a result of
the China conflict been amplified ‘to such an extent that it is quite out
of hand’.^27 It had also been diverted in directions that were no longer
conducive to the uses to which Nehru wished to put it. The Swatantra
party had turned the China war into a propaganda call – a war between
communism and democracy. Nehru’s foreign policy and domestic policy
could be attacked – non-alignment, planning and socialism. Nationalism,
in this scheme of things, belonged at least for the moment to those who
opposed communism, and Nehru’s policies could now be associated with
communism. This was, for the time, completely paradoxical given his
surrender of non-alignment and his effective alliance with the Western
bloc; if anything, he could now be more realistically accused of being the
‘running dog of imperialism’ that some Chinese voices had claimed he
was. A return to non-alignment from this position would be difficult. The
effective independence that Nehru had made the central plank of his
domestic and foreign policy looked more damaged and impossible of
achievement than ever before.
Nehru, on his part, had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a
position in which – however, we may assume, reluctantly – the sceptic and
rationalist found himself trapped and carried onwards in a cycle of
aggressive, patriotic fervour to a disastrous policy of confrontation with a
neighbour who desired no such confrontation, and which confrontation
could only damage his policies and greatly ease the agenda of his enemies
within and outside his party. Non-alignment; the social concerns of plan-
ning; Nehru’s command over Parliament; his international reputation: all250 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63