1947: India's engagement with Asia

 In his famous ‘Tryst with destiny’ speech welcoming India’s Independence on 15 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru noted that “Peace is said to be indivisible, so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments”.

His remarks should remind us that the current ideas of globalisation and regionalism are not something that suddenly appeared in post-1990’s as India liberalised its economic regime but were an integral part of Indian nationalism. Indian Independence, in its formative years, was grounded in a vision that saw India as inextricably linked to the Asian region, an Asia not narrowly conceived in cultural or geographic terms alone but one that included the wider de-colonising world. It was really a liberated space that countered the Euro-American domination of the world. Are we closer to that goal sixty-seven years later?

Nehru’s thinking about an inextricably linked global order and the need for an Asian unity had led him to call, months before Independence in March 1947, an Asian Relations Conference.

The same month that the US President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine to oppose the USSR and its allies, laying the basis for the divisive Cold War alliance system. The search for Asian unity that this meeting laid, and which was best symbolized by the ‘spirit of Bandung’ did not last long before divisions surfaced but it nevertheless laid the basis for an open nationalism that was defined by its solidarity with the those who wanted to change the world.

It is also important to recall that the conference was called in a
period of violent change. India was caught in the carnage of Partition, and much of the Asian region was still fighting for national liberation from Western colonial powers. The Chinese civil war would end in 1949, the Dutch were fighting to regain control in Indonesia, Korea would be divided and Vietnam locked in a war for decades. Trans-regional solidarity provided a non-violent way to realize the promise of independence.

Importantly, Nehru recognized that with the defeat of ‘fascist Japan’ a democratic Japan was a necessary part of a newly emerging Asia. Asian socialists, who met in Rangoon in 1953, were of a similar mind, noting “The tensions where Asian people are being sucked into camps is represented by Japan. All Asia must guarantee the freedom of Japan to decide her future, independent of the two camps and should take active steps to prevent the exploitation of the country by either or both the camps.” 

I think the Indian attempt to think of an alternative world order was not just a foreign policy instrument, but represented a critique of Eurocentric ideas questioning the nature of nationalism and the world order. This is perhaps one of the more important legacies of the attempt, an attempt that speaks to the current challenges that we face in an even more inter-dependent world than it was then.

Looking back to that time there were two other ways of building a new world order in our region — Japan sought security and development within a US military alliance and China through revolutionary transformation. Japan in the Sixties and Seventies was not just about ‘miraculous’ growth but it offered an ‘alternative capitalism founded on a harmony of interest between worker and capital’. Today each element of that system has been undermined and, since the 1990s, it has been in the economic doldrums.

Industry has moved to China and other places, the birth rate is declining and a growing number of ‘working poor’ have emerged as the pension system has failed. And a greater number of foreign immigrants live and work in Japan. The ‘consensus’ society is in disarray.  

The present government, under prime minister Shinzo Abe, has come to power with the promise of restoring the economy but it rides on the social frustrations of a society under pressure. His strident nationalism calls for restoring ‘Japanese spiritual values’, restriction of the rights of permanent foreign residents, but he continues to see Japan at the forefront of the US strategy to contain China.

The debates within Japan underline that the ‘national’ cannot be something eternally defined by a set of core values. The Japanese path of an ‘alternative capitalism’ lacks credibility and its continued reliance on the US in its foreign policy points to a failure to respond creatively to the changing regional environment.

The Chinese revolution liberated the people from poverty and class discrimination but exacted a terrible price. The reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping led to a massive transformation with double digit growth, so that today 51 per cent of the people live in the cities compared to only 19 per cent at the start of the reforms.

But state sponsored capitalist growth has brought regional imbalances, growing inequalities, and increasing gender discrimination. The Chinese path of economic growth has been environmentally destructive and politically authoritarian. To synopsise one critic, the artist Ai Wei Wei: China is like a long distance runner with a heart condition.

I think that the growing democratization of the region (1986 in the Philippines, 1987 in South Korea, and Taiwan in 1987) has laid the basis for a complex popular interaction through the media, cinema, art exhibitions, music and travel.

India’s current ‘Look East’ policy is narrowly focused, has been laggard in developing area expertise, promoting student and scholarly exchange, and in general supporting the development of a wider public awareness of the region. This needs to change.

Nehru, in the midst of an upheaval saw that Indian Independence was crucially linked to a new Asia. We need to creatively recover this vision.

The writer is professor of modern Japanese history (Retd), University of Delhi