14
the Indian nationalists eschewed great power rivalry, and during the
Second World War, for example, the mainstream nationalists even refused
to seek the help of imperial Japan in their fight against the British (Basu
et al. 1999 ; Puri 1977 ).
To quarantine India from the Euro-centric bloc politics, Nehru con-
sciously sought to steer the non-aligned path. Far from being neutrality as
practiced by countries such as Switzerland, Nehru’s non-alignment did
not imply merely the rejection of military alliances but a nuanced response
to the power struggle between the US and USSR. Though appreciative of
the US and its liberal democracy, Nehru was opposed to Washington’s
strategy of containment of communism through military blocs and alli-
ances (Gopal 1991 ). On the contrary, he sought to bring in the newly
independent and decolonized countries under the umbrella of Afro-Asian
solidarity to ward off colonialism, external interference and domination.
The Western response to Nehru’s non-alignment was anything but
sympathetic (McMahon 1996 ). Preoccupied with the East-West tension
in Europe and the Korean crisis, the US adopted a narrower view personi-
fied by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In his address to Iowa State
College on 9 June 1955, he declared “neutrality has increasingly become
an obsolete and except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an
immoral and short-sighted conception” (The New York Times 1959 ). This
if-you-are-not-with-me-then-you-are-against-me approach largely ended
India’s hopes of an enduring partnership with the US based on mutual
respect and understanding and resulted in Nehru gravitating towards
Moscow. This was concretized during the month-long visit of Nikita
Khrushchev and Nicholai Bulganin in late 1955 and paved the way for a
greater Soviet role in India’s developmental agenda (Singh 1989 ) and
military modernization (Conley 2001 ). This process eventually culmi-
nated in greater foreign policy convergences, with India emerging as a
significant partner, if not an ally of the USSR, on major international cri-
ses such as Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1966), global disarmament
debates and above all non-aligned foreign policy.
In the process, Saudi Arabia became an unintended casualty of India’s
approach towards the Cold War and was adversely affected by its priorities.
Despite the century-old religious, cultural and commercial exchanges and
contacts, India’s engagements with modern-day Saudi Arabia have been
influenced by the regional upheavals over which both the countries
adopted different and even diametrically opposite stands.
P. R. KUMARASWAMY AND MD. M. QUAMAR