THE AFRO-ASIAN CONCERT

By Dr. B. PATTABHI SITARAMAYYA

Never has India’s foreign policy been so full of interest as during the end of the year 1954. Any reference to the subject during these seven years at once brought to the fore the names of the four great Powers,–the U.S.A., Britain, France and the U. S. S. R. And of these the first three, generally in agreement with one another, have been equally in disagreement with the fourth. Then again, of the three, the first two, though in essence and in conclusions agreeing together, have arrived at their conclusions by traversing different routes and pursuing different planes of thought. France has been like a younger brother to the two, except lately on the question of the Geneva Conference, and that for a passing time. All these years, India had been marking time, watching and observing until, finally, she took courage in both hands, and embraced its opportunity on the Korean problem which earned former an equal place with the first four, so making four into five. India has now become an important consultant of position and authority even as between Britain and America; and by entering into discussions at critical times, acted as a pasang in the diplomatic scales, balancing the two sides just by her timely thought, suggestion or even solution. That was how the Prime Minister of India has had to visit Colombo, Burma, China, Indonesia, and bring together the important Asian countries and ensure for them a voice in the counsels of peace.

The Prime Minister declared in Calcutta on the New Year’s Day that “the New Year held out better chances of peace than before, despite the complexities of the problems confronting the world today.” This was the observation he thought fit to make soon after his return from Indonesia, after attending the preparatory conference of the Colombo Powers to pave the ground for the Afro-Asian Conference. He added, “There is an increased realisation of what I call an almost impossibility of having major wars now, because of the terrible consequences.” The world situation, following two world wars and rumours of a third of the series, is like the digging of a well deeper and deeper when a stage will come when the circular margins of earth, in spite of the conical inclination given, threaten to fall on the workers below; the diggers may come upon a rocky bottom which baffles the strokes of our crowbars and pick-axes and spades. Deeper down you can certainly go, provided the protection is by means of planks vertically fixed and held in position by side pegs of iron driven into the earth horizontally at different levels. These pegs must be represented by understandings between nations on ‘peaceful co-existence’. You may go ever so deep but protect the marginal earth from getting loose and falling upon the diggers. Russia may go ever so deep into her own communistic philosophy, but let her not meddle with the texture of politics of her neighbours. That is the only protection to the peace of the world. If the twenty- two Asian and African Powers consolidate their own internal structure and let mutual friendliness ripen into genuine friendship, and if thereafter Australia and New Zealand join them, there can be no power on earth that can disturb the world’s peace.

It may be broadly known that this peace, seeming and superficial in the past two years, was perilously near a break, “during the critical period in December 1950 and January 1951 of defeat in Korea, when Mr. Attlee flew to Washington to confer with President Truman, and when the French were suffering defeat in Indo-China and Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden flew to Washington to confer with President Eisenhower. On each occasion distinguished members of the United States Government and of the American Armed Forces publicly demanded a more aggressive American policy in the Far East and publicly advocated the extension of the fighting by sea-blockade and bombing from the air”.¹ If the Korean war remained localised, the credit must be, as indeed it was, passed on to the Prime Minister of India, who boldly faced the situation and warned America, for the second time, against proceeding further in Korea. It was bad enough that they had not heeded his well-timed warning, when they re-crossed the 38th parallel, that they should not proceed further, a warning for disregarding which the Americans found themselves in a kind of Trisanku Swarga. Fortunately the Korean war became circumscribed and the truce in Indo-China became an accomplished fact. The hasty statements of American officials and even Ministers are, it is stated, to be regarded only as their individual opinions, which neither bind nor even voice forth the views of the President, unlike the utterances of British Ministers and officials who always echo the voice of Her Majesty’s Government. Fortunately we are saved from the calamity of a third world war, and few of us knew how near we were to it. Having averted that great calamity, the world is hard put to it to discover or to devise measures by which the peace that has been saved may become a permanent feature of the world’s affairs. This is being planned and wrought–in the umbras and penumbras of world politics–by an Asian statesman and seer, not by mobilising a third bloc by any means, as people glibly put it sometimes, but by holding together nations who might involuntarily and inevitably be drawn into the coils and toils of global intrigues. The Colombo Powers had met at the instance of the Prime Minister of India and almost taken the wind out of the sails of the Geneva Conference, by confirming the five principles that had been earlier agreed upon between the Chinese Prime Minister and himself. The same Colombo Powers who have met in order to concert measures for convening the Afro-Asian Conference, are apt to strike America as political parvenus that are suddenly emerging from their long established and long deserved obscurity into political fame; and when they ripen into a two-continent organisation planning measures to eliminate war altogether, they are apt to be regarded as officious and meddlesome. There is a section of American opinion which is apt to be favourably inclined towards extreme views leading up to “so much support for extensive military action in the Far East that the course of

the United States will be determined by it.”²

We may wonder why this should be so, but we shall not when we remember that, “America, a modem industrialised nation, was most sympathetic and helpful towards China, an ancient, undeveloped country, from the time of the Boxer rebellion to the rise of the Communists in China, by building hospitals, schools and Universities and manning them with hundreds of devoted American men and women.”³ If after all this service, the Chinese Communists treated the Americans who had been for half a century their best friends, as their worst enemies, and killed many American troops in Korea to boot, is it any wonder that the Americans should be angry” and “feel that these evil men should not go unpunished. This is the passion which gives support to violent action in the Fast East”⁴ It may be true that, Americans are by temperament men of action. It may be that, “Time for them is an enemy to be overcome, not, as we British tend to think, as ally to work with”. ⁵ Yet the Americans, it is said, are not likely to be misled by temperament into action, unless the Chinese embark on reckless action.

It is not therefore likely that the new Afro-Asian Concert will have irresistible forces to combat. The American, despite his antipathy to the Chinese Communist regime, works in the long run to increase the prospects of peace. Sir Oliver Franks in his third Reith Lecture says: “The Americans believe this object is furthered if lines are drawn, and it is made clear to friend and foe alike that aggression across these lines will be resisted, if necessary, by war. That, I take it, is the significance of the Atlantic Pact. A line has been publicly drawn from Norway to Turkey. The Pacific Pacts with Japan, the Philippines and Australia and New Zealand, draw a line between the Islands of the Pacific and the mainland of Asia. The U.S.A. supported the South-East Asia Treaty of Collective Defence as a first step of the same sort.”

While thus the Americans and the British have been ardently trying to evolve agreement out of differences of political trends and temperament, while they are now at one and now at variance but, in differing, are friendly, even as they, in friendliness, have points of disagreement, a new factor and force has come into the field which has been these seven years waiting and watching, observing and studying until, at last, it gave a peremptory suggestion on the question of Korea and made the Powers in embarrassment seek India’s advice, intervention and initiation. But India is not a single nation. She has at first become the mouth-piece of four other sister nations, and has found nearly twenty other countries willing to follow her lead in Asia and the African Continent, ready to share all woes and struggles with her. A new cell is thus forming itself, with India as the primordial nucleus, which presents every prospect of playing a vital part in shaping the foreign politics of Asia.

¹ Sir Oliver Frank, in the third of his Reith Lectures: The Listener, November 25, 1954.

² Sir Oliver Franks.

^{3 4 5} Ibid.

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