| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

S. Mahmud Ali. Cold War in the High Himalayas: The USA, China and South Asia in the 1950s. New York: St. Martin's. 1999. Pp. xxxviii, 286. $59.95.

S. Mahmud Ali reinterprets South Asian international relations between the partition of British India and the Sino-Indian Border War of 1962. He reassessess the foreign policy of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, which, on the surface, combined nonalignment in the Cold War; cultivation of China's friendship as based on panschil (five principles of coexistence) in their 1954 treaty, and insufficient attention to China's threat to Indian security. When a later prime minister, Moraji Desai, told the Indian Parliament in 1978 that India and the United States had collaborated "at the highest political level" in covert operations against China, he shattered the complacency of the Indian body politic, which had a long history of criticizing America's anti-Indian intrusions in the subcontinent, most notably its military alliance with Pakistan and its "tilt" toward Pakistan during the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. Making extensive use of U.S. documents, some recently declassified, and, to a lesser extent, Indian sources, Ali traces Indo-American covert cooperation to 1947, when Nehru permitted the United States Air Force to use bases in India for missions in support of Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang. 1

China's seizure of Tibet was the most important issue that pulled Washington and New Delhi into collaborative containment. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) march into Tibet in 1950 convinced Nehru that the newly established Communist government in Beijing threatened India's security and led to the first formal military assistance agreement with the United States, which brought joint support of Tibetan resistance. Backed also by Taiwan and Pakistan, the Tibetan guerrillas continued their struggle throughout the 1950s and 1960s, despite the PLA's superior size and firepower. Nehru thus emerges as a skillfull practitioner of realpolitik, a leader who recognized the Chinese threat and balanced nonalignment and panschil with a clandestine alliance with the United States. . . .

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