equality be added to the Panch Sheel; this suggestion made it to the
‘ten principles’ that were adopted by the Bandung Conference as a whole- but the conference members did not find time to discuss it adequately.
This was a strange outcome, given that Nehru had on several occasions
condemned racism in the colonial policy of British and other European
powers, and in South Africa. It reflected, perhaps, the deflections from the
anti-colonial agenda that had occurred at Bandung and the self-assertion
of the Cold War agenda.
The ten Bandung principles were variations on a number of principles
thrown up by various participants: among them were Nehru’s five and
Zhou’s seven. All of them were open to various interpretations. The best
that could be said of Bandung was that a stalemate had been achieved
between aligned (with the West, since Nehru and the other ‘Colombo
Powers’ premiers had kept out all the communists except China) and
non-aligned powers. The lack of agreement did not seem to affect the
‘Bandung spirit’, that mythical entity that was to be periodically invoked
in the years to come, for it had been a great achievement to get so many
countries together. Bandung’s ‘psychological impact’ was therefore praised
by Nehru.^4 Among those who came along to observe proceedings was the
Yugoslavian leader, Josip Broz Tito, who was interested in a grouping
of states that could end Yugoslavia’s isolation from both blocs; he was
photographed along with the leaders of the non-aligned countries, the sole
white man present at the gathering. (There were, it might be noted, no
women among the 340 delegates present at Bandung.)
Bandung was in many ways a culmination of Nehru’s idea of bringing
the non-European world together, although the Burmese and Indonesian
governments could also lay claim to have desired such a meeting. In a
limited way, a triumph for Nehru had quietly been achieved before and
at Bandung; only at Bandung itself, it had not quite been publicly
acknowledged by all present. Peaceful co-existence, based at least loosely
on the Panch Sheel, had been endorsed, notably, by the USSR and China.
In this way, a shift in the Cold War itself had been facilitated, at least as
far as the Eastern bloc’s attitude to non-alignment was concerned.
If one were to see this instrumentally, the Soviet assumption that the
USSR could be friends with India without requiring India to detach itself
from all its other diplomatic connections, in the spirit of ‘peaceful co-
existence’, was immensely important for India and by implication for the
emergent ‘Third World’, who could now expect Eastern bloc assistance
220 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63