ABSTRACT
During the period of the Cold War, India had followed the policy of nonalignment and had tried to maintain ‘equidistance’ from both superpowers.
Its attachment to democracy actually made India more akin to the US. Initially, India had regarded the US as a friend, because President Roosevelt had tried his best to foster the advance of Indian independence. But in 1949 the US missed a chance to help India at the time of a serious food crisis and Nehru’s first visit to the US in that year proved to be a mutual disappointment. When John Foster Dulles subsequently organised the global pact system, which India regarded as a threat to its own security since Pakistan had joined it wholeheartedly, Indo-American relations were at a low ebb in spite of American economic aid for India. The short-lived administration of President Kennedy was a ray of hope. India was considered to be a major partner, the world’s greatest democracy, and thus an asset to the free world. But soon after Kennedy’s untimely death Indo-American relations deteriorated once more as the Indochina war escalated. After American disengagement in Vietnam, President Nixon wooed China and alienated India at the time of the liberation of Bangladesh. The enthusiastic reception of Brezhnev in New Delhi in 1973 and the explosion of India’s nuclear device in 1974 could be interpreted as deliberate acts of defiance by Nixon, whose ‘tilt’ towards Pakistan was well known. Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ of 1975 received wholehearted support from the Soviet Union and silenced American friends of India who had praised the subcontinent as the world’s greatest democracy.
