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War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic
History of the Nehru Years. MOST Indians either praise Jawaharlal Nehru or castigate him as an outright, failed Prime Minister. So, it is refreshing to come across Srinath Raghavan, a budding historian who chose a complex period of India-in-the-making for his maiden book, which even proven authors would shy away from. Maybe the streak of deliberate application of mind and disciplined research were honed in Raghavan during the first five years of his working life as a Short Service Commissioned officer of the Indian Army.
The book’s chief merit lies first and foremost in the vast and meticulous archival research: sixty-one hitherto unpublished primary sources (manuscripts, official records, oral testimonies and interviews) and four times as many secondary sources from within and outside the country. A lessen person would have been awed by this gargantuan pile, but Raghavan has shown remarkable dexterity to pick the bare essentials and compose an unexceptionable political history (1947-62). Unlike the memoirs of Civil servants and military commanders who compartmentalise specific events into exclusive chapters, Raghavan has adhered to the year-wise chronology as a whole. This helps the reader to understand how the lessons learnt in tackling one challenge moulded Nehru’s thinking on strategy for the next hurdle. Unfortunately, a Prime Minister can ill-afford to learn-as-you-govern. For instance, what helped to rein-in the recalcitrant princely states like Junagadh and Hyderabad (openly incited by Jinnah) or for that matter the intransigence of Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir from 1947 to 51 was patently unsuited against China. Having said that, I do not for a moment think that under the given circumstances (and the burden of the British legacy), any other Indian leader could have prevailed better. Raghavan also shows how
the Deputy Prime Minister, Sardar Patel, and an astute bureaucrat, V.
P. Menon, ably served Nehru. The latter was a resolute field-operator
who cajoled and bullied the over 500 rulers of the princely states to
fall in line with the Indian Union. This was no mean contribution of
Nehru and his team to the making of modern India as a nation state.
However, the ideal of peaceful coexistence with the two neighbours,
Pakistan and China, was to elude Nehru and erode his stature and
perhaps even his self-confidence. Altogether, Raghavan has offered a
most absorbing history; his colleagues and mentors at the Defence
Studies Department, Kings College London, will surely applaud his
scholarship.
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At
first sight, the title of the book is nothing but intriguing because
Nehru was after all the "prophet of peace". But this riddle
is laid to rest in the first few pages of the book, as we find Nehru
being inexorably sucked into internal and external armed conflict by
the forces of unresolved historical legacies of our imperial past. No
doubt, Nehru was quick to learn the inter-play between diplomacy,
deterrence and armed forces to safeguard India’s national interests.
Yet, try as he may the ides of October 1947 could not be averted.