Or am I misreading something?

Thanks.

And Hey Atanu arent you a US citizen?

Excellent post—and I say this not because I agree with everything you write, but because it’s internally consistent and allows one to extrapolate. And I also agree with the primary conclusion: that America will call the shots.

The problem I have with your thesis is at the beginning. While I hold no brief for Nehru’s socialism nor the naivete underpinning his foreign policy there are two factors you must consider:

(a) John Foster Dulles and his early with-us-or-against-us logic. Quite obviously a newly independent India was unlikely to sign-up to dance to another pipers’ tunes. Then also the bit you mentioned about democracies not being too biddable. You must read the accounts of Chester Bowles, the first ambassador, and the cold warriors at the State department. The United States itself cannot escape responsibility for the estrangement.

(b) That non-alignment was a realist response in the beginning. In the early days it was really non-alignment. But things began to go downhill when non-alignment became unsustainable—first for other smaller, non-aligned states, and then for India itself. That Nehruvian naivete and Krishna Menon’s madness was driving day-to-day affairs didn’t help; for non-alignment, by definition is a tightrope. In time ossification and dogmatism converted the policy for the time to a policy for all times, and India began to embrace non-alignment as a foreign policy religion.

So, the point is not so much that US preference for Pakistan was driven by India’s closeness to the Soviets but because it was inevitable.

The geopolitics of the time required a Pakistan to be created to act as a counterbalance to India. From the acts of British officers in what is now Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Nagaland to Britain’s conduct over the Kashmir issue during and after it was taken to the UN suggests that they wanted a Pakistan that could hold up their interests in the region (especially after India would break into several smaller states).

Such is the tragedy of realpolitik that this outcome was inevitable given (a) the creation of Pakistan (b) India’s commitment to an independent foreign policy. Cold Warriors could not accept a neutral player without hedging against the neutral turning hostile (by creating counter weights). But in many ways, cold warriors were justified in doing what they did. The risk of a large, geopolitically important state like India falling into the Communist sphere could not be dismissed—not least after Nehru had chosen a socialist path for the economy.