Why I blame Nehru for India's failure at NSG

The Seoul plenary session of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) ended on Thursday (June 23) without consensus on India's membership. China remained opposed to even considering India's NSG bid and managed to elicit the support of about a dozen countries.

This happened despite Prime Minister Modi urging Chinese president Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on June 23 to make a "fair and objective assessment of India's application on merit".

This setback has raised many questions about the management of Indian diplomacy. A section of analysts are of the view that the NSG fiasco is rooted in Jawaharlal Nehru's foreign policy blunders. They argue that if Nehru had accepted the US offer for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), India would not have had to struggle for NSG membership today.

Moreover, India today is eager for a permanent UNSC seat.

However, another group of people are not ready to accept that Nehru had such an offer, but spurned it.

Did Nehru have such an offer, and if so, why did he decline to accept it? Let's look at the documents.

In 1955, Nehru said in Parliament: "There has been no offer, formal or informal, of this kind. Some vague references have appeared in the press about it which have no foundation in fact. The composition of the Security Council is prescribed by the UN Charter, according to which certain specified nations have permanent seats. No change or addition can be made to this without an amendment of the Charter. There is, therefore, no question of a seat being offered and India declining it. Our declared policy is to support the admission of all nations qualified for UN membership."

Nehru made this statement in reply to a short notice question in the Lok Sabha on September 27, 1955 by JN Parekh on whether India had refused a seat informally offered to her in the United Nations Security Council.

However, there are documents which claim that India did get the offer of a permanent seat in the UNSC from both the US and USSR between 1950 and 1955. According to a report in The Hindu on January 10, 2004, the then UN under-secretary general Shashi Tharoor revealed that Nehru "declined a United States offer" to India to "take the permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council" around 1953 and suggested that it be given to China.

In his book Nehru: The Invention of India, Tharoor writes that Indian diplomats who have seen files swear that the country's first prime minister declined the offer about the same time as he turned down "with scorn" John Foster Dulles' support for an Indian Monroe Doctrine.

Nehru had suggested that the seat, till then held by Taiwan, be offered to Beijing instead. He wrote that "the seat was held with scant credibility by Taiwan".Talking of Nehru's legacy, Tharoor said that in Nehru's time, India had no foreign policy and it was correct to say "Nehru had a foreign policy".

On the other hand, S Gopal wrote in his book Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (volume two): "He (Jawaharlal Nehru) rejected the Soviet offer to propose India as the sixth permanent member of the Security Council and insisted that priority be given to China's admission to the United Nations."

In 1955, the then prime minister of USSR, Nikolai Bulganin, offered India permanent membership in the UNSC.

"Nehru showed sound judgment in rejecting it and in refusing to walk into the trap," wrote AJ Noorani wrote in Frontline.

"A moment's reflection would have exposed the fatuity of the 'offer'. It would have entailed revision of the UN Charter which is subject to veto by any of the five powers - the Soviet Union included. The Americans offered the seat to India in order to keep the People's Republic of China (PRC) out, leaving the KMT regime of Taiwan to occupy China's seat. India was invited to enter into this Faustian bargain," he added.

Again, a Wilson Centre report on March 11, 2015 titled "Not at the Cost of China: India and the United Nations Security Council, 1950", said both US and USSR offered India permanent membership in the UNSC but Nehru refused to accept it, and wanted to give it to China instead. Nehru's critics consider this to be as big a blunder as his "Kashmir policy", and allege that he sacrificed India's interests in the name of international morality.

If these documents are to be believed Nehru did commit an error in judgment in declining the offer to become a permanent member of the UNSC. But what was Nehru's compulsion to do so, and why did he mislead the Parliament on the issue? These questions unfortunately remain unanswered.