The shocking resurgence of anti-Americanism in India

Three years later, President Kennedy endorsed that rhetoric when the Indian military was battling a Chinese attack in the 1962 war. As Bruce Riedel wrote in his brilliant book JFK’s forgotten crisisThe President’s daily brief of October and November 1962, unclassified six years earlier, shows that Kennedy was closely following the Sino-India War, as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis. “For two months these two issues dominated the daily coverage of top secret information that JFK was looking into,” writes Riedel. In response to Jawaharlal Nehru’s request, the Kennedy administration appeared ready to send a squadron of American bombers to fight on the Indian side.

Preparing for war, Kennedy sent a White House delegation to New Delhi. “An aircraft carrier was sent to Madras, but later recalled when the crisis subsided.” China’s sudden ceasefire was at least partly due to the speed of the White House response in Riedel and Nehru’s assessment. A footnote to history is that a delegation of two dozen officials arrived in India on the American holiday of Thanksgiving Day. Then Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith joked in his memorable memoir of his time in India that the delegation was so large that he accompanied Nehru. Considered renting a church for the meeting. ,

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a wide spectrum of Indian commentators, from belligerent TV anchors to pulp-fiction writers, have shown a rare unanimity in supporting Russia’s claims of acting in defense of its ‘sphere of influence’ . A song is always recited for Russia’s support for India during the 1971 war amid threats from the Nixon administration. The well-known American double standards in the handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are highlighted, while Soviet/Russian brutality in Afghanistan and supporting the Assad regime in Syria is overlooked, as are the targeted killings of many Russian journalists.

It appears that selective amnesia stems from the strong US support for India’s economic reforms since 1991 and the extraordinary camaraderie caused by the US-India nuclear deal. On state visits to India, presidents from the charming Bill Clinton to the more reserved Barack Obama appeared to have bonded with Indians and Indian leaders: Clinton, impressed by a woman sarpanch in Rajasthan, said she would go anywhere in the course of a decade. Will win the election. Later Michelle Obama dances with schoolgirls rang De Basanti, And, who can forget President Obama’s repeated use of “guru” when referring to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at global climate summits?

This hatred of America among our commentary is thus shocking, given that the 4-million-strong Indian diaspora in the US is well above its weight, as our business press breathlessly reminds us. From the late Sunny Mehta at Knopf to Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Sundar Pichai at Alphabet and Google, Indians are improving their respective industries and their global companies. Since 1991, American companies have taken the lead in foreign direct investment in India. In the early 1990s, Jack Welch, then chief executive of General Electric, seemed like an unpaid cheerleader for India; Fortune and Forbes Have Huge Photos of Made-in-Bengaluru GE CT Scanners Being Exported to France. The cover story I wrote for Fortune on India Reforms in 1992 began with the cliché that once socialist India was “making its best Kashmiri carpets” for foreign investors. I tried unsuccessfully to remove that lame sentence after the article went to press. Even then I knew that India will always be a country of dual personalities (proudly socialist/shamelessly elite) and this was a case of our notorious bureaucracy tying up with multinationals. But, my editors in New York were very excited about India’s transformation. To grab headlines.

There is something in our multidimensional personality that is widely believed to justify the Russian sphere of influence to attack Ukraine. Hopefully, Beijing will not extend this support and feel encouraged to attack Taiwan, cut our supplies from the global leader in semiconductors, or prove to be even more aggressive on our borders.

Inconveniently for people of this view, Russia hates the countries that were ruled by the Soviet Union. The haunting story of Warsaw set in August 1944, amid the man-made famines and destructions wrought by the Soviet Union. Polish patriots stood up against the German occupiers. Joseph Stalin not only refused to help the Poles, he also ignored US appeals to allow Allied planes to refuel at Ukrainian bases. In two months, the Polish Home Army was destroyed and 225,000 civilians were killed. Half a million Poles were sent to concentration camps. Stalin had apparently waited long enough for the German elite to end any potential Polish opposition to Soviet rule at the end of the war. If Poles have been welcoming thousands of refugees from Ukraine in recent weeks, this grim event in history probably explains why.

Rahul Jacob is a Mint columnist and a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times.