New Delhi. Vijay Gokhale’s upcoming book, ‘Crosswinds: Nehru, Zhou and the Anglo-American Competition over China’ released on 21 January 2024.
The book is a deep-dive into how India crafted its China policy in the first decade after independence amidst the crosswinds of clashing American and British approaches to developments in Asia, and especially their competing visions of communist China at the early Cold War years. Based on material in the National Archives of India and the United Kingdom and the State Department archives of the United States of America, as well as from other primary and secondary sources, Vijay narrates the trajectory of policy making in India through the medium of four seminal events that shaped the Indo-Pacific order after the second world war, namely, the recognition to the newly established People’s Republic of China, the Geneva Conference in 1954 that was intended to end the conflict in Indo-China, and the first two Taiwan strait crises in 1955 and 1958.
The book contains interesting anecdotes on how great personalities of that period interacted, including US Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, four British Prime Ministers from Churchill to MacMillan and the two main protagonists in India and China, Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai. These insights uncover not just how India shaped its relations with the People’s Republic of China, but also with the United States, and the influence that Britain sought to exercise on Indian policy-making in this regard.
Vijay has also tied the learnings from those early years to the current developments in the Indo-Pacific region. The book holds valuable lessons on how India could avoid the pitfalls of the early Cold War years as the Indo-Pacific again becomes both an arena for global competition and a space that holds vast potential for India’s future development and influence.
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