MINOO MASANI (Bombay, India)

MOSCOW'S HAND IN INDIA

Peter Sager has done outstanding work by organizing and developing the Swiss Eastern Institute in Bern, together with the Swiss Press Review and News Report published by it, during all these years. I entitle my pre- sent piece "Moscow's Hand in India" in tribute to the book he published on that subject some two decades ago. In it he described Soviet disin- formation operations in India very well, and it has left its mark on my country. , When the British were here, the Indian government adopted a cau- tious policy towards the Soviet dictatorship, which had taken over the aims of the Tsarist empire, particularly the desire to reach "the warm wa- .. ters of the Persian Gulf." However, Indian ideas about the Bolshevik Revolution were extremely elementary. Lenin and even Stalin were con- sidered to be idealists, great liberators and lovers of freedom. The extent of ignorance of the facts and the damage this ignorance has done was il- lustrated when Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Communists in 1948 and Jan Masaryk killed himself or was murdered. I was having breakfast with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and observed that these developments showed that we still had something to learn about Stalin. Nehru lost his temper, banged the table and accused me of being "per- verse" because I had dared to mention Stalin critically. According to Nehru, Stalin was "progressive," and he would not stand any criticism of the man he admired. This was the result of one year of . being flattered by sycophants in Delhi. Another result was that Nehru and I did not speak to each other for fifteen years. On a much later occasion Nehru told me in all seriousness that when World War III broke out it was "axiomatic" that the United States would be the aggressor. This was because the Soviet Union would want to ex- pand peacefuly in the direction of human progress and the USA would try to block this happy development. Even Khrushchev's famous 20th Congress speech in 1956 did not cure Nehru of his blind admiration for the man who, according to Gorbachev, killed 14 million Soviet citizens. The disastrous result of Nehru's blindness was his acceptance of Stal- in's planning and state capitalism, which he thought was "socialism." To- day, although the whole of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union itself have all turned their backs on this kind of socialism, the dead hand 334

of the past makes Indian politicians pamper government monopolies a la Stalin which eat up the capital of the country and have pushed India to bankruptcy. Similarly, Jawarhalal Nehru tried to brainwash the people of India into admiration for Stalin and dislike for the United States of America. He was himself a racist, but he said that Russians were not "white." The effects of this brainwashing have still not been altogether erased in India. There was little genuine reason for Nehru's attitude. The Soviet dicta- torship had earlier been very unfriendly to the Indian National Movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi. The laxter was attacked repeatedly as a reac- tionary and a stooge of capitalism. During World War 11, Moscow per- suaded the Indian Communist Party to support the war as "a people's war." sin'ce the Soviet Union and Britain had become allies in 1942. The result was that the Communist Party of India supported the British war effort, and some of its members even served as informers to hand over "Quit India" activists to the British police in India. Much later, the Soviets turned a somersault and pretended that they had always been admirers of Mahatma Gandhi. After independence Moscow exploited Indian creduiity by persuad- ing the government to enter into a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in which all transactions were m rupees, the Indian currency. The result was that Moscow paid India in rupees, then sold Indian goods in West- - ern markets for-hard currency and pocketed the difference. In 1944, when .I was Mayor of Bombay, I wrote a book called So- cialism Reconsidered, in which I described the Bolshevik Revolution as "a false dawn." This book brought Nehru's wrath on to my head. Fifty-one years later all that I wrote then has been confirmed by none other than Gorbachov himself. It is also interesting that during the period of British rule, the Cornintern in Moscow dealt with the Indian Communist Party through London-thereby tacitly accepting India's position as part of the British Empire. Philips Spratt, an accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, had been sent to India by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to organize the Indian Communists. He admitted as much, and also that he received money and instructions from Moscow through London for this purpose. The CPGB was treated as a supervisory party to look after Moscow1s affairs in India. Since independence Moscow has functioned in 4India through its paid agent, the Communist Party of India. This was used to flood the country with Soviet books and other literature in order to spread disinformation. For instance, when I published Lenin's Testament about Stalin, it was de- nounced by the Communist Party of India as a forgery. I have told the whole story of the Soviet fifth column in lndia in my book, The History of