India: Dilemmas of Power Politics:
PALMER, NORMAN D.
India: Dilemmas of Power Politics New Patterns of Democracy in India. By Vera Mickeies Dean. Harvard. 226 pp. $4.75. The Diplomacy of India. By Ross N. Berkes and M. S. Bedi. Stanford. 221 pp....
...The book throws little light into the depths of Indian life...
...Dean provides...
...Some knowledge and understanding of both India's past and present is essential for anyone interested in India's future...
...Communism is a genuine threat in India, as it is throughout the world...
...It has a tantalizing impersonal quality: India is, after all, the land of Nehru and some 400,000.000 other human beings...
...Necessarily, her treatment is highly selective...
...As Michael Brecher has so ably perceived, "the crucial fact is that democratic processes are not yet rooted in Indian soil...
...it is even more surprising that she overlooks the profound differences between Hindu and Western attitudes...
...The authors find that India's policies in the United Nations have generally been shaped by "the dictates of the climate of war thesis," "the particularization of general subjects" and "a monolithic preoccupation with nurturing the environment of negotiations...
...She also refers to "the remarkable affinity between the ideas and attitudes of the English and the Indian peoples...
...and some evidence that "the Indian leaders themselves have begun to realize that they must take more firmly in hand the strategies of a Power with general responsibilities, as well as those of a Power with particular interests...
...In 10 clear, concise chapters Mrs...
...While it is true that, officially speaking...
...As Mrs...
...5.00...
...He has called attention to the historical irony of the meeting, if not the mingling, in the Indian subcontinent of Western Christian...
...Arnold Toynbee has stated that of the five surviving civilizations, the Hindu is the most alien to the "Western Christian" civilization...
...India is making a significant effort to make independence meaningful...
...but, in addition, more detailed studies are needed of specific phases of foreign policy...
...but this is an extraordinary and rather ill-advised way to attempt to explain a phenomenon that has more direct and more obvious causes...
...Reviewed by Norman D. Palmer Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania SURROUNDED BY states which are ruled by various forms of authoritarianism—from the monolithic totalitarianism of Communist China to the relatively mild military regimes of Burma and Pakistan—and beset with what seem to be all the tribulations of mankind...
...In light of the penetrating analyses of Toynbee, Percival Spear and others, it is surprising that she raises no question about the extent to which an "Anglo-Asian synthesis" was actually achieved...
...The volume on Indian foreign policy in the United Nations by Berkes and Bedi is a good example of a more specialized study which requires a broader background of the kind which Mrs...
...Such an introduction, one set against the background of the past and the current world environment, is provided in a new book by Vera Micheles Dean, a competent student of world affairs who for several years has followed developments in India with intense and sympathetic interest...
...In India the Western impact on Asia was the most intimate, and probably the most disturbing...
...Dean suggests that the crucial question is "whether the eventual choice in India will be democracy or communism...
...Dean might have pointed out that, even under the British, many Indians had experience in foreign affairs and international activities and that the Indian National Congress, for more than two decades prior to 1947, had a kind of foreign policy of its own, with Nehru in the role of unofficial foreign minister...
...Yet thev also detect some interesting changes in India's attitudes: from the position of a "detached, nonpartisan mediator to entering the lists as a party to the issues," reflected most clearly in India's position on disarmament questions ("On disarmament questions, there is a new India") ; "a growing cautiousness on colonial issues...
...Dean shows how independent India came into being by "peaceful revolution" and what new patterns have emerged since then...
...Let us hope her optimism proves to be justified...
...Progress to date has been remarkable in light of the resources available, but tragically inadequate in terms of the needs of the large and growing population, whose standard of living is one of the lowest in the world...
...Dean believes that India achieved "a synthesis, unique in modern history, of West and East — an Anglo-Asian synthesis...
...The Indian volume touches on more issues in which India is concerned in the UN, and it is naturally less critical of India's role than the Berkes-Bedi study...
...Incidentally, the Indian report gives a fair amount of attention to the Kashmir question in the UN, which is strangely neglected by Berkes and Bedi...
...Inevitably the Berkes-Bedi volume will be compared with a book on the same topic published a few months ago prepared by the staff of the Indian School of International Studies and the Indian Council of World Affairs, with the assistance of a distinguished study group set up by the Council...
...The great questions of the future for India relate to its prospects for survival as a nation and for dealing with the basic problems of existence for one-seventh of the people of the world...
...Islamic and Hindu civilizations...
...For the human side of the story one must turn to other volumes...
...This is a common way of posing the question, at least in the Western world...
...The two volumes supplement each other admirably...
...Apologists of authoritarian trends in the newer nations of the world should give heed to her timely reminder that "in a newly developing country even a modest measure of growing democracy represents a resounding victory over the temptations of totalitarianism...
...India's involvment in "the dilemmas of power politics" may be "a direct result of its as yet unadjusted relations with Pakistan," but it is surely, in a more basic sense, a result of many other factors in the present world situation...
...The Berkes-Bedi study is based almost wholly on UN records, especially the Official Records of the General Assembly...
...Unfortunately, India's prospects for survival as a democratic state are much bleaker than that...
...Her discussion of the community development program and the hazards arising from "the dangerous unbalance in the ratio between food and population" is particularly good...
...Dean points out, India is also faced with "the danger of disunity leading to disintegration which proved so ruinous in the country's past history" and with the danger of the "usurpation of overweening power by authoritarian leaders or groups...
...A brief chapter on India's foreign policy can hardly do justice to India's role in the international community...
...The outcome of this great experiment cannot yet be foreseen: predictions range from the most gloomy to the most optimistic...
...The chapter on "New Patterns of Diplomacy" is notable for the clear analyses of Indo-Pakistan relations, the nature of Indian "neutralism," and the "sharp reassessment of India's foreign policy . . . precipitated by the March 1959 events in Tibet...
...The United Nations, of course, is deeply concerned with such problems, but India's future will be shaped more directly by conditions inside the country and by the general course of world events than by the activities of any international organization...
...Hence the proper approach to the study of any major phase of India's foreign policy is the kind of comprehensive review of the current scene in India which Mrs...
...There may be a few grains of truth in the assertion that "what happened in Tibet stirred Asians far more than events in Hungary, because the Hungarian revolt was regarded as a struggle between two white peoples...
...She finds that "both the Hindu majority and the Moslem minority . . . have long possessed the ingredients of democracy," and that India is "a genuine democracy functioning under non-Western conditions...
...Dean essays...
...She realizes that India has "no easy task," but she believes that "the omens for the future are on the whole favorable...
...India had no foreign policy of its own" prior to independence...
...A product of library research, not of field investigation, it is within its limits a useful volume...
...But it seems fairly certain that if India cannot find some means of dealing with its great human and political problems in a generally democratic way, the prospects for freedom in the world are dim indeed...
...but it is a most unfortunate and probably a most misleading phraseology...
...It has little meaning in the Indian environment, and suggests a stark choice which is probably not a real choice at all...
...Less satisfactory in her analysis of the prospects for democracy in India...
...but it is only one of the many perils with which the Indian people are confronted in their struggle to achieve more tolerable living conditions...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 19
