Far from being an ideology,non-alignment was a strategy devised by Nehru’

In November 1962,I shared a room with my senior colleague S Soundararajan,from whom I had taken over as deputy secretary (JIO) [in the Ministry of Defence. It was 9 pm on November 19,and a visibly shaken Soundararajan came and told me of this telegram which he had seen with [Vincent Coelho [then joint secretary (Americas) in the External Affairs Ministry. I did not see the text of the telegram and what Soundararajan told me at that time confirms Inder Malhotra’s (‘Letters from the darkest hour’,IE,November 17) rather than Sudhir Ghosh’s account. Nehru did not ask for an aircraft carrier. But the Americans did have an aircraft carrier (USS Enterprise) in the Indian Ocean and it did move into the Bay of Bengal.

This particular incident and what happened subsequently have very valuable lessons to non-alignment cultists on Nehru’s use of the concept as a strategy to safeguard India’s security and not as a third-worldist ideology.

What should be of interest here is the triangle of India,the US and the USSR. From 1963 to 1965,India was concluding major defence agreements with both the US and the USSR,with neither party objecting to our dealings with the other. Z A Bhutto used to say that India was bi-aligned and not non-aligned. The crux of non-alignment is that this country does not get involved in some other power’s antagonism and it does not mean that we sacrifice our national security by keeping away from other powers when our national security interest necessitates our dealing with them.