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Essentially Right. The start of his serious animosity toward the U.S. came in 1954 when the U.S. agreed to supply arms to Pakistan—the only nation India regards as an enemy. To Nehru, this was bringing the cold war to India's door. He was also discomfited by Red China's seizure of Tibet, just across his northern border, but has been noticeably quieter about that. At the Bandung Conference last year, Nehru led the fight against inclusion of any denunciation of Communist imperialism in the official communiqués. Early this year during the Bulganin-Khrushchev visit to India, he listened unprotestingly while the Russian leaders vilified the U.S. and other Western powers. In private conversation later, an acquaintance expressed dismay at the Russian falsifications, and Nehru replied blandly, "After all, they were essentially right."
The cast of mind that made possible such a remark (as well as the B. & K. visit) has helped to create in India an ideological climate which may in time constitute Nehru's one great disservice to his country. Russian aid to India, which so far has consisted chiefly of a promise to build a 1,000,000-ton steel plant on an $80 million-$95 million loan, has been received with a fanfare of publicity. U.S. loans and gifts, which during the first five-year plan amounted to $538 million, have been accepted grudgingly. The posters everywhere greeting B. & K. with "India and Russia are brothers" were Nehru's doing. By this kind of "impartiality" Nehru has not only instilled in many Indians a deep suspicion of the .U.S., but has also failed to alert his people to the danger of Soviet imperialism. Simultaneously, he has aroused in much of the U.S. Congress and population an almost irresistible desire to cut off aid to India and leave her to her own devices. This is the more regrettable since many Americans have long felt a deep sympathy for India and Indians, and in the end, U.S. policy hopes for India only what India hopes for itself: that it be healthy and free.
The Measuring Rod. History has not yet balanced its books on Jawaharlal Nehru. If, despite his Caesarism and his ill-conceived sponsorship of Bulganin and Khrushchev, India survives as a unified nation without going Communist, Nehru's vanities and eccentricities will become merely a playground for biographers. Even his role in international affairs will seem neither so mischievous as his critics now think, nor so important as his admirers believe. History may not judge Nehru by his foreign policy, which, because it is essentially negative, may loom less large as time goes by.
It will give him high marks for doing as much as he has to lessen his people's poverty, cure their diseases, school them and make a nation of them. It will recognize, too, that Nehru, like China's Sun Yat-sen and Turkey's Kemal Ataturk, has had a difficult and frustrating role to .play in bringing his people into democratic nationhood under tutelage. In these pursuits, Jawaharlal Nehru has his high place, even though he will not be an ally, and is not particularly a friend.