Making of new global order
In the summer of 1945, San Francisco was pulsing with a paradox of peace. While global powers set out to forge a new world order built on justice, peace and equality, colonialism's violent tentacles dug deep into the very conception of what was to be called the United Nations. In the post-League of Nations world, the ideas of thinkers, like Immanuel Kant, for a lawful international order began to take shape, yet their full potential was thwarted by imperial oppression.
After the 1942 Atlantic Charter, where Roosevelt and Churchill championed self-determination against the Axis, the US, UK, Soviet Union, and China met in Washington to plan a post-war order. Yet, when 50 nations gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to sign the UN Charter, colonised peoples were denied a seat at the table. In a display of British arrogance and hypocrisy, Churchill despite espousing self-determination, refused to extend these rights to Britain’s colonies.
Appointing its own delegates to represent India, the empire had expected nothing less than their mouthpieces to perform on cue. However, by October 30, 1945, when India formally joined the UN, certain ‘Nehruvian interventions’ had changed the script.
Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit had landed in the US in December 1944 to visit her daughters at Wellesley College. She was also invited to join an Indian observer delegation at an Allied conference in Virginia on Asia’s post-war future. Though the British had sought to block her travel by seizing her passport, she secured approval with backing from General Stratemeyer, the American Chief of the Allied Air Command in the Eastern Theater and the Roosevelts. Encouraged by Gandhi and Nehru, she had then launched a year-long blazing lecture tour to denounce colonialism, rallying for the freedom of India and of all oppressed worldwide.
Her charisma captivated the American press, who were enraptured by the sari-clad 'sister of India’s great nationalist leader' as a US daily described her. Her charm captivated even the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and famed bass-baritone Paul Robeson. Hence when the India League and the Committee for India’s Freedom called on her to lead the charge against the British-appointed delegation, she was ready.
Her anti-imperialist message rang through conference halls into the dawn of post-colonial India. It structured the international idealism of Nehru into the idea of India, a nation in the making. For Nehru, the UN became a platform to dismantle colonialism, resist Cold War divides, champion non-alignment and redistribute resources so disastrously scattered in the frenzy of imperialism.
India quickly became one of the UN’s most outspoken critics of apartheid and racial discrimination, and the first nation to raise the issue of South Africa’s racial policies at the UN in 1946. It led the charge to establish the Sub-Committee against Apartheid and co-sponsored the landmark 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. As India chaired the first UN Decolonization Committee, it cemented its role in the struggle against colonialism, embodying Nehru’s vision of a dynamic, independent nation committed to international peace.
On the home front, however, troubles brewing in Kashmir were yet to reveal the full extent of their ghastly violence. Despite UN interventions and attempts to bring peace to the region, it has been blighted by conflict. As Kant says, ‘With men, the state of nature is not peace, but war’— perhaps another paradox of peace is that it must be crafted, not simply found.
