Toward universal relief and rehabilitation: India, UNRRA, and the new internationalism
6 Toward universal relief and rehabilitation
India, UNRRA, and the new internationalism
Manu Bhagavan1
- Indian internationalism and the idea of One World
- Relief and rehabilitation during World War II
- The end of UNRRA and the birth of a new internationalism
- Conclusion
“India” had been involved in the United Nations even in its wartime incarnation, inasmuch as the British Crown brought the colonized territory into World War II and, in turn, voted to support various institutions created to deal with the challenges wrought by the conflict. Among the most prominent of these was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the mission of which was to aid countries suffering from the military campaigns. The British government of India strongly signaled its support even as the subcontinent weathered the effects of one of the worst famines ever encountered in the region.
UNRRA was based in the United States and led by several men who considered themselves friends of India, most notably famed New Yorkers Herbert Lehman and Fiorello LaGuardia. Over several years, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration pushed to create an Indian office and to incorporate Indians into its administration based in the United States, in a good faith effort to circumvent charges of imperial complicity. So the agency’s leadership was especially surprised when they ran into resistance from India’s anticolonial icons. UNRRA was too blind to the pernicious stranglehold of imperialism. The encounter thus exemplifies colonial India’s efforts to challenge and undo great power or global North or Western control of UN bureaucracies from the outset, and to reset both the tone and the substance of international relations by insisting on shared responsibilities and mutual respect.
Indian internationalism and the idea of One World
As World War I drew to a close, US president Woodrow Wilson released his blueprint for renewing the world and ensuring a lasting peace. His Fourteen Points argued for a League of Nations, a global forum for debate, decision making, and the resolution of conflicts. Wilson was never able to sell his plan to his own people, and the United States rejected participation in the nascent international union. Without full great power support, the League withered on the vine, its roots of support too shallow to give the structure meaningful strength, and too tangled in competing interests to provide clarity of direction for growth. Yet the League ultimately did bear fruit, for Wilson’s proposals found fertile reception in many parts of the non-Western world, which saw in it the seed of a postcolonial future.
Among those most enthused by Wilson’s initial grand scheme was Jawaharlal Nehru, scion of an illustrious Indian political family, educated at England’s Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and ally to Mohandas Gandhi, who had made a name for himself challenging the British in South Africa on matters of race and in India on matters like indigo. Wilson seemed to speak to these very issues, and quickly came to be associated with egalitarian ideals. His failure to make the dream a reality was disappointing, and the ineffectual League was found wanting. However, Nehru saw the potential. Over the coming years, he and Gandhi would agree that the idea of the international was key to fundamentally changing the existing colonial order.2
In the immediate moment at the end of World War I, Gandhi channeled his energies into the Non-Cooperation Movement, which also gained propulsion from several other outcomes of that war: the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire into mandates that led to the Khilafat Movement; bitterly received Janus-faced (and -bodied) reforms delivered by secretary of state for India Edwin Montagu and Viceroy Lord Chelmsford; wartime powers of sedition that continued to restrict people’s freedoms; and the infamous Amritsar massacre. When the killing of police in the town of Chauri Chaura led Gandhi to call off the campaign, Nehru realized that they needed to play a long game. He brooded over the twin failures of the Wilsonian vision, or what was understood to be his vision, and Gandhi’s activism, and pondered on the best way forward.
By the 1930s, Gandhi and Nehru were in agreement that India’s nationalism had to conform to what they called “progressive internationalism.” Their ideas were hazy yet, but were rooted in a firm belief that all of humankind was connected, as were structures of power. Disassembling those structures required humans working together across what they perceived to be artificial boundaries.
The lightning takeover by Axis forces of many parts of Europe and the subsequent German assault on the Soviet Union in 1941 had the Western Allies on the back foot. British and American planners were centrally concerned with the fate of India, which served as a strategic bulwark against Japanese forces, an oasis for displaced European refugees, and a source of men and resources to aid the military effort. Planners also feared that another Indian anticolonial campaign might distract from the war.
So in early 1942 a group of American leaders came up with an innovative, even daring plan. With the blessing of Britain’s US ambassador, Lord Halifax, the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walter White, proposed that the United States send a delegation to India to assure Gandhi and others of American transparency and good intentions. Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential challenger to Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, would lead a team that would talk openly of American racial problems, and declare support for an end to imperialism of all kinds. The idea had support from many writers, intellectuals, and politicians, including the Roosevelts themselves. British prime minister Winston Churchill eventually vetoed Willkie’s trip to India, on the grounds that it might legitimize Gandhi and Nehru and their cause.
Instead, Willkie boarded a plane called The Gulliver and traveled around the world. When he returned to the United States in August 1942, he made a radio address indicating that India had been on everyone’s mind, and that the world had to find a way to come together, end racism and imperialism, and create a system free of political despotism and economic exploitation. His remarks became a sensation, sent Churchill into an apoplectic rage, and were turned into a bestselling book called One World.
While Willkie never made it to India, Roosevelt reached out through other ambassadors, most notably the Chinese Kuomintang’s Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, who established warm relations and good rapport with the anticolonial leadership. Nonetheless, the Chiangs were rebuffed in their attempt to keep the Indians from launching another anticolonial campaign. Gandhi and Nehru both agreed that the British needed to quit India, but the famous August 1942 declaration was the latter’s, adopted in favor of a version put forth by the former.
Nehru’s Quit India Declaration was one that broadly laid out his internationalist vision. Arguing that the Axis had to be defeated at all costs, Nehru urged that India be made free, for a free India, he pledged, would stand with the Allies in their fight, and would invest real meaning and power into their rhetoric of liberty and justice for all. He called for a world federation, pooled resources for the common good, and a new global defense force meant to keep the peace.
Gandhi, Nehru, and most anticolonial leaders were immediately imprisoned for challenging British authority in a time of war. It was in his cell in 1943 that Nehru first read Willkie’s book and saw in it tremendous symbolic power. One World encapsulated many of Nehru’s own hopes, and Nehru embraced the concept.
Over 1944 and 1945, Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, went on a lecture tour of the United States, arguing forcefully for India’s independence and challenging imperialism in all its forms. She made many friends and allies during this time, especially in New York City, where everyone from Roger Baldwin (first executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union) and Pearl Buck (Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author), to power couple Henry and Clare Booth Luce (he the publisher of Time and Life magazines and she one of the first women in the US Congress and a Republican star) and Fiorello LaGuardia (the city’s larger-than-life mayor) was won over by her charm, beauty, and intellect. As part of her efforts, she debated with Churchill’s former parliamentary secretary Robert Boothby on the radio, emerging the clear victor and a national celebrity. Shortly thereafter, with all the clout she had accumulated thanks to her impressive performances, she led a counter-delegation of race-conscious internationalists to San Francisco where the new United Nations Organization was being born. There she charged that there was a wide gap between the idealistic and inclusive rhetoric used for public consumption and the more shadowy shenanigans taking place in backroom deal making. Specifically, moves were afoot to use language like “trusteeship” to allow the new institution to perpetuate the old imperial order while making it sound as if it were not.
While she attracted much attention, Pandit ultimately failed to alter the text of the new United Nations Charter. The British government saw the UN as a body that would allow colonialism to continue. By 1946, however, Pandit, Nehru, and Gandhi decided that the United Nations was too important to dismiss, and indeed they saw it as the first step to One World, still a broad euphemism for an internationalist order that went beyond the old Westphalian system. Pandit returned to New York where, in one of the UN’s first orders of business, she led the General Assembly by a two-thirds majority to condemn the state of South Africa for its racist discriminatory policies. This victory established that Article 2(7) of the Charter, the domestic jurisdiction clause, did not prevent the UN from affecting internal matters of member states if universal questions of justice were involved.
This set the stage then for the development of the international human rights instruments, conversations for which began mere weeks after Pandit’s victory. For Nehru, and for India, it meant two things. First and foremost, it meant that the UN could be made to serve larger ideals. The Indians decided to take the Charter at face value, using the very rosy language that the imperialists had successfully inserted into it against them. Second, the UN was a good that had to be defended even as it had to be de-imperialized. Such a UN would then serve as a stepping stone to the now clarified ultimate objective of One World: federal, democratic world government.3
Relief and rehabilitation during World War II
Just as Nehru was reading Willkie’s book, considering its significance, half a world away the US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was shepherding through an agreement between 44 nations to provide relief and rehabilitation to those impacted by the ongoing war. Roosevelt’s actions were part of a larger strategy to secure a lasting world peace, a strategy that he had begun to lay out in January 1941 when, in his State of the Union speech, he argued that all people everywhere were entitled to four basic freedoms: freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from fear and want.4 This was further developed in August of that same year when the president and Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, agreed to an Atlantic Charter that promoted cooperation and equality and served as a broad statement of principles for what purpose the war was being waged.5
The Atlantic Charter was received rapturously by many in the colonized world, who saw in its calls to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” a dramatic challenge to authoritarianism in all its forms, including its imperial incarnation.6 Churchill blanched at the very idea that the Atlantic Charter would have any negative impact on the idea of empire, and hastened to clarify that its application was limited by context. Roosevelt did not agree with his companion from across the pond, and he continued to chide Churchill for his stale views. Indeed, it was American insistence on the universal applicability of the Atlantic Charter that informed Willkie’s worldview and served as a foundation for his antiracist and anti-imperialist conception of One World.
Several months before Willkie found himself in conversation with the NAACP and others on a world tour, on 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, and the Americans officially entered the war. On New Year’s Day in 1942, those who stood against the Axis regimes signed the Declaration by United Nations, entering into a new, global alliance.7