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April 1, 1949

Letter, Jawaharlal Nehru to All Provincial Premiers

Nehru briefs the Provincial Premiers about internal and external developments. Nehru highlights the situation in China and states that the communists could soon take power in the whole of China. He speculates how this will affect other regions.

June 13, 1938

Jawaharlal Nehru, 'A Letter from the Mediterranean'

In June 1938 Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), a Indian National Congress (INC) leader, one of the earliest INC members calling for full independence in 1927, and the main responsible for INC’s foreign relations, took a ship to Europe. This trip was not a first for India’s inaugural prime minister (1947-1964) to be. Already in 1905 he had left India to enroll at the elite British boarding school of Harrow, going on to study at Cambridge and work as a lawyer in London before returning home in 1912. And the last time he had sailed was in 1935, staying until 1936 as the INC representative in meetings with fellow Asian and increasingly also African anti-imperialists in Britain and Europe. Sure, by then the League against Imperialism (LAI), whose Comintern-organized foundational conference Nehru had attended in 1927, was defunct. (For the LAI see the 1927 document on Messali Hadj in this collection.) Even so, Nehru continued to see his secularist Indian nation-statist goals within an international leftist-anti-imperialist and now anti-fascist framework and web, as Michele Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2020) argues.

Hence, when on the ship en route to Europe in 1938 he received an invitation from Egypt’s leading nationalist wafd party and agreed to meet their leaders. Having been in contact with Egyptian nationalists before, a story told in Noor Khan’s Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011), and having detailed their anti-imperialism in Glimpses of World History (1934), he saw the wafd as INC’s appropriately leading anti-imperialist counterpart in Egypt. Sure, in confidential INC memoranda, he criticized the wafd’sinsufficient attention to the masses, especially the peasants, which cost them an election in early 1938, he thought; indeed, the wafdistswere liberal nationalists whereas Nehru was a leftist nationalist. Nonetheless, sitting down with the wafd and exchanging views about world politics and anti-imperialist strategies was called for, in his and the wafd’s view,at a time when fascism was rising and Britain continued to rule India and be very present in Egypt. Reproduced in the massive compilation Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, this text is a letter by Nehru, the first to the INC while he was on the ship en route to London.

January 14, 1962

Ambassador Reis Malile, ‘Information on the Meeting of the Government-level Economic Delegation led by Comrade Abdyl Kellezi with Comrade Mao Zedong’

Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Abdyl Kellezi discuss revisionism, relations with the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of the USA.

April 2, 1965

Record of Conversation between Premier Zhou Enlai and Pakistan's Foreign Minister Bhutto

Zhou and Bhutto discuss the Second Asian-African Conference, as well as the potential for a rapprochement between China and the Philippines.

May 14, 1964

Research Memorandum INR-16 from Thomas L. Hughes to the Secretary, 'Indian Nuclear Weapons Development'

An intelligence report that the fuel core of the Canadian-Indian Reactor (CIR) at Trombay was being changed every six months raised questions about India’s nuclear objectives: a six-month period was quite short for “normal research reactor operations,” but it was the optimum time for using the CIR’s spent fuel for producing weapons grade plutonium. According to INR, India had taken the “first deliberate decision in the series leading to a nuclear weapon,” which was to have “available, on demand, unsafeguarded weapons-grade plutonium or, at the least, the capacity to produce it.”

October 19, 1954

Minutes of the First Meeting between Premier Zhou Enlai and Nehru

Zhou Enlai and Nehru discuss French and Portuguese colonialism in India and China, the Sino-American conflict, conflict in the Taiwan Straits, and the China issue at the United Nations.

October 21, 1954

Talking Points from Premier Zhou Enlai’s Third Meeting with Nehru

Zhou Enlai and Nehru discuss Sino-Indian relations, as well as China and India's views toward Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

November 14, 1954

Jawaharlal Nehru, 'Note on Visit to China and Indo-China'

Nehru gives a detailed report on his visit to China and Indo-China. He first gives a summary of the issues and topics he covered in discussions in China with Zhou En-Lai and Mao, which covered a broad range of subjects including China's Five Year Plan, and various foreign policy issues. Nehru then describes his visit to Indochina, where he speaks with Ho Chi Minh (five days after he takes control of Hanoi) in North Vietnam, and also tours South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

November 15, 1957

CDS Report No. 63 from Choi Duk Shin to the President (Syngman Rhee)

Choi Duk Shin reports on President Diem's return from India, Japanese Prime Minister Kishi's upcoming tour of Southeast Asia, and recent Vietnamese events.

April 24, 1963

Secret Telegram from Maneli (Saigon) to Spasowski (Warsaw) [Ciphergram No. 5295]

Report from Maneli, a Polish official in Saigon, to Warsaw, on the Indian opinion of the situation in Vietnam. According to him, the Indians believe the NLF to be finished and Diem's position to be strong, while they see Diem as the one lobbying for American withdrawal.

Pagination