164. Letter From the Ambassador to India (Galbraith) to President Kennedy0
Dear Mr. President: I learn in the newspapers of your long summer evenings in the White House and it occurs to me that I should help you out with some good reading.
Politically things remain in a repulsive state. Nehru is still in indifferent health although he has picked up strength during the last few weeks while parliament has been in recess. (It assembles again today.) For years the reins have been nearly all in his hands. Now he neither drives nor relinquishes. The other ministers, with the exception of Menon—and to some extent Desai—are so completely accustomed to passivity that they cannot change.
Menon continues his drive and, I am sure, has considerable plans for an autumn campaign in New York and perhaps elsewhere. He got a large boost out of the Kashmir debate and has certainly considered ways and means of getting another lift including the possibility of some shooting along the Pakistan border. This would also have the merit of taking attention away from China where his sympathies and fellow-travelling instincts make him vulnerable. (He is also I think worrying considerably lest the China border flareup give the Soviets second thoughts on MIG’s with the slap at China thus implied.) The snow closes off any danger from the Chinese around the middle of November. Until then last year the Chinese had been dominating the headlines; Menon completely cured that by going into Goa. I would be surprised if the notion of a [Page 320] repeat performance has entirely escaped him. However there are also more risks this time.
I continue to feel fairly clear on the policy we should follow which involves a careful triangulation between Menon and his supporters, his opposition here and your opposition in Washington. We must do everything possible to avoid building Menon up as we have in the past. This includes, to replay a record, denying him the highly emotional issues at UN and concerning Pakistan that we have given him in the past and making it clear that we consider him a kind of antique radical whose tactic of alienating everyone in sight is a diplomatic novelty that does more harm to India than anyone else. In a curious way he is the Hindu Dulles—alienating people as he goes. (Give the phrase Hindu Dulles to someone.)
For Menon’s opponents our basic policy is the aid program. It makes them the responsible people who hold the country together.
I am also persuaded that it would have a good effect here and a good ultimate effect in Washington if we were to be cooler in our general technical, economic and cultural assistance to India than in the past and I have been moving along this line. In past years we have sometimes been so eager to help and so anxious to explain ourselves that the Indians have forgotten both how to ask or be grateful and they have come to conclude that it is the business of the world to understand them. Even our friends do not get credit for help that is too eagerly offered—and which the opposition hastens to say the Americans will provide anyway.
I have been making it clear that I think Indian reaction to our problems in getting them aid is exceedingly curious. I am taking up the subject in suitably broad, bland terms in a speech to Indian M.P.’s this week.
Some of this bears on my own role here. Our original conception of Indian policy now going on two years ago was that by aid and the right kind of representation we could get considerable help from the Indians. We haven’t got much and I doubt that my high-minded salesmanship of the New Frontier has been at fault. I am enormously admired up to the very moment when I make a request. I will go into my future, a topic which crosses even my totally selfless mind, sometime in the future.
As you will have seen, I have put the MIG discussion on ice. I think it served a useful purpose. We raised the threshold against buying Soviet equipment and we let our friends in the Armed Services here know there was an alternative. However I must say that Menon, with his control of all channels of technical knowledge, shot down the Lightning with appalling ease. In the end I began to develop a few reservations, which I gather you shared, about the cost (in overseas dollars) of this package.
I am still far from certain that the MIG deal is going to come off. I have been spreading the idea that they are useless toys with some success, and I continue to think that the Soviets will be reluctant to arouse [Page 321] Chinese passions at a time when they are pressing the Chinese and Indians to stop playing war with their elbows on the northern border.
[Here follows discussion of issues unrelated to India.]
Yours faithfully,
- Source: Kennedy Library, President’s Office Files, Special Correspondence, John Kenneth Galbraith. Confidential.↩