II. Prelude: India, Independence and the Foundation of the UN

The ‘United Nations’ was initially a euphemism for the Allies during the Second World War. It was conceived in the Atlantic Charter, an agreement signed by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in July 1941, and coined as such by FDR in January 1942. Twenty-six states signed onto this ‘Declaration by United Nations’ to uphold the Atlantic Charter and to stand together against the Axis powers. In August 1944, representatives from the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), the Soviet Union and China met in Washington, D.C., and laid out plans for a post-war order. There, these four states also decided which countries to invite to a follow-up meeting to be held some months later in San Francisco where the outlines discussed in D.C. would be formalized. Fifty states were invited to participate, and their effort resulted in the official charter of the UN, signed in June 1945. After being ratified by the original founding states and a majority of the representatives in San Francisco, the UN ‘came into existence’ on 24 October 1945.Footnote ⁵

One of the most striking aspects of the San Francisco meeting was its exclusion of colonized people. While many argued at the time, and have argued since, that the UN was therefore in its very conception merely an instrument of Western imperial power, others saw in it great possibility.Footnote ⁶ Their hope stemmed from the Atlantic Charter itself, which stated ‘The President [of the US] . . . and the Prime Minister [of the UK] . . . deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world . . . . they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them . . .’.Footnote ⁷ Churchill clarified within weeks that this aspect of the Charter did not apply to the British Empire, but the US disagreed, and argued instead that it held true for ‘all peoples alike’.Footnote ⁸

This incongruity created lobbying space, and anti-imperial forces coalesced around the idea of using the San Francisco meeting to push their agenda. India had been invited to participate, though its representatives were British-appointed. Marika Sherwood has detailed how various groups and public personae joined together to use the new world forum to demand India's independence and justice and equality for all colonized people. The India League, the NAACP, the US Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party and various individuals all worked towards this goal to varying degrees.Footnote ⁹

From the outset, Vijaya Laxmi Pandit became the lightning rod for these efforts. Pandit had been in the US since December 1944, ostensibly to visit her daughters, who attended Wellesley College. But she had also been invited to serve as a member of an Indian observer delegation to an Allied-led conference to be held in Virginia on the post-war future of Asia. Though the British were against her travel, and had impounded her passport, Pandit managed to secure the necessary approvals thanks to high-level intervention from General Stratemeyer, the American Chief of the Allied Air Command in the Eastern Theater, and from the Roosevelts themselves.Footnote ¹⁰ Gandhi had asked Pandit to take advantage of the trip to help educate Americans about the situation in India.Footnote ¹¹ Upon her arrival, she thus scheduled a year-long lecture tour, during which she used every opportunity to indict the colonial system and to demand freedom for India. In the process, she charmed and was charmed back and aided by Mrs. Roosevelt, Paul Robeson, Henry and Clare Booth Luce, Fiorella La Guardia and Walter White.Footnote ¹²

During her talk in Virginia, she laid out some broad goals for the new world order, foreshadowing as we shall see over the course of this paper, India's larger aspirations for the UN: ‘We cannot think in terms of national issues; that has been disastrous in the past. In the future we need a wider vision, and international rather than national perspectives’.Footnote ¹³ Her electric presence, widely reported in the American and Indian press, and worried about by British intelligence services, excited members of those organizations preparing for San Francisco, notably the India League and a counterpart, the Committee for India's Freedom, both of which jointly asked Pandit to ‘spearhead the attack against the British-chosen delegation’ to the Charter discussions.Footnote ¹⁴

Pandit did just that, addressing the official delegates, as well as participating in a number of public meetings, all to broadcast an anti-imperialist message.Footnote ¹⁵ Gandhi also released a statement to the press just prior to the San Francisco meeting in which he spelled out his personal hopes for the future of the world. This statement reflected a broad outline, not specific to the UN organization per se, firstly since the UN did not officially yet exist and secondly because Gandhi was not at all sure what the intent of the powers behind the California gathering was.Footnote ¹⁶ He reiterated his conviction that war, and the fear and mistrust that lay behind it, could not and would not breed peace. As such, he called on the delegates to implement a 4-point plan that would guarantee a better future for the world: (1) independence for India, to reward its ‘true and non-violent struggle’, thereby making such methods the underpinning of the new world; (2) this independence would then signal to all exploited peoples that their oppression was at an end and that peace, justice and equality were to mark the new era; (3) the end of the war must make friends of Germany and Japan, and not seek retribution; and (4) all people must disarm, though an international police force should remain, not as an instrument of peace, but as reminder of and safeguard against human weakness. Again, Gandhi equates the independence of India with the foundation of a future just world, and the absolutely necessary basis on which any organization with that as an aim must be built. Additionally, Gandhi here reiterated his long-standing principles, that no ‘people’ could generically be blamed for the sins of a few, and that adversarial positions should not be mistaken for permanent enmity. In this sense, there is nothing particularly unique in Gandhi's statement, only the worldwide application of his personal philosophy which he had till that point brought to bear on Indian national matters. But his speech was remarkable for another reason, one inflected by Nehru, a point to which we shall return in the next section.

While on the face of it the efforts of Pandit and her allies to challenge the insiders' course pre-set for San Francisco were unsuccessful, and the charter that emerged did not end up backing independence for colonized people in writing, Pandit had nevertheless made an impressive list of allies, and had managed, with them, to link the independence of India, the principles of equality and justice and the idea of the UN together. Her efforts also awoke both Gandhi and Nehru, but more pertinently the latter, to the possibilities of the UN, and what it could mean for a future India.

III. The South Africa Question and the New Hope

By 1946, only a few short months after San Francisco, it became clear that there simply was no longer either will or way to maintain British imperial control over India. An interim government was formed by September, with Nehru at its head. Within days, Pandit was summoned from her home in Lucknow to Delhi, where she was informed that she was the unanimous choice of her brother, Gandhi, and the British Viceroy, Lord Wavell, to head India's delegation to the UN. Sir Girja Bajpai, a career civil servant who had been Britain's Agent General for India in Washington during her visit, made clear that her previous tour in the US was responsible for this turn of events. She recalls him telling her, over her protestations that she was unfit to lead such an international delegation, ‘You managed pretty well on your unofficial tour – I personally witnessed that!’

According to Pandit's memoirs, Nehru wanted her to head a strong delegation to best represent what he termed an ‘about-to-be-independent-India’.Footnote ¹⁷ Gandhi and Wavell had something more specific in mind. They wanted her to raise the issue of the treatment of people of Indian origin in South Africa. She quotes Gandhi telling her that the UN was not going to be a ‘debating society’, but rather a place to forge international amity. Typical of Gandhi, this was anchored in a rather mundane concern, rather than being an abstract project of wishful philosophy. Gandhi's old sparring partner in South Africa, Jan Smuts, was by that point Prime Minister. Though the Mahatma disagreed with Smuts then as he had many years earlier, he still considered the man his friend, and wished anyone who confronted him to maintain decorum and dignity in all dealings.Footnote ¹⁸

Nehru briefed the entire delegation, once they had been assembled. His comments, though, followed from the earlier statement by Gandhi. In his statement to the press just before the San Francisco meeting, Gandhi made a startling reference to a famous Congress Resolution from 8 August 1942, worth quoting here at length:

He then concluded that ‘the demand for Indian independence is in no way selfish. Its nationalism spells internationalism’.Footnote ²⁰

The 8 August Resolution was, of course, the Bombay ‘Quit India’ declaration. This is significant, because while Gandhi had introduced the draft of the resolution, it had been rejected in favour of a version submitted by Nehru. The resolution is as much a part of the Nehruvian vision as it is the Gandhian, therefore, and is worth parsing here. Militaries represented one of the cornerstones of national sovereignty based as they were on rights to national self-defence. To argue for their dismantlement in favour of a ‘world federation’ in which such power would subsequently be invested, therefore, must be read as an effort to reject this fundamental plank of the liberal state.Footnote ²¹ Gandhi's reference to ‘internationalism’ in this context is more radical than the contemporary context of that word would suggest, embodying not a communion of fully sovereign, self-interested nation-states, but rather a siblinghood of equal states answerable both to their people and to the larger world community. That the resolution also calls for the pooling of the world's resources for ‘the common good of all’ takes this notion one step further, locating capital not in the hands of nation-states, but in the hands of all the world's people.

Of course, many things were said in the early forties, and the general influence of leftist philosophy on Indian thought in this period is well known. I believe, however, that the Quit India Resolution best reflected Nehru's true dream, and which, thanks to Pandit's initiatives regarding San Francisco, he sought to see manifested in the formation of the UN. This reading is supported by Nehru's Discovery of India, a work compiled from 1942 to 1945, and published in 1946. Here, Nehru states bluntly, ‘We shall have to put an end to the national state and devise a collectivism which neither degrades nor enslaves’.Footnote ²² The UN represented this new collectivism.

As proof of this assertion, we can look back to the one point in history that offers similar, if different, circumstances, the so-called ‘Wilsonian moment’ of 1919. Erez Manela has argued that this moment at the end of the First World War served as a radical break with the old imperial order and marked the starting of the post-colonial possibility, the point at which it was now possible to imagine a real future without empire. That future, many thought, was to be structured around the League of Nations and a new internationalism. But this vision was soon blurred by the failures to get an effective new order off the ground. Nehru was explicit in his disappointment: ‘President Wilson's brave words have remained but words, and the “fourteen points,” where are they . . .? The great moment has passed and for ourselves it is again the distant hope that must inspire us, not the immediate breathless looking for deliverance’.Footnote ²³ Nehru's thoughts at this point, written when he was only twenty-nine, are incomplete and vague. But to us they are nevertheless meaningful. For one thing, we can now trace over three decades the Nehruvian faith in ‘world organization’ to bring about peace and justice. In an earlier chapter of Discovery of India, Nehru plots the Indian nationalist movement on this decades-long developmental course towards what he terms real internationalism:

Nehru was saddened by the failure of the first post-war moment to ‘[revolutionize] the fabric of human affairs’,Footnote ²⁵ and this, I argue, made him ever more sensitive to the second chance that the end of World War II represented. The UN was the new hope, the great salvation for humankind, and Nehru wished to tread carefully to see that old mistakes did not hamper the new body's chances.

As far as I have been able to uncover, Pandit's recollections of her brother's briefing of her delegation represent Nehru's first specific thoughts on his vision for the new global organization. Grounding his instructions in the Gandhian legacy, Nehru first exhorted the delegates to hold true to high ethics and morality, even as they faced the difficult challenge of using them to solve the demands and corruption of ‘practical problems’. Pandit then recounts that Nehru ‘reminded us of India's total acceptance of the UN Charter and her determination to work with other member nations to make it a reality. The preamble of the Charter was almost [India's] . . . personal pledge to the world: “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” He told us that in order to function effectively we had to keep ourselves acquainted with what was going on in the world, to stay clear of rival power blocs, and try to ease the tensions that such blocs generated’.Footnote ²⁶

The most eyebrow-raising point in Nehru's charge is, of course, the claim that India ‘totally accepted’ the UN Charter, a surprising concession given what had occurred in San Francisco and the Charter's failure to adopt the straightforward anti-colonial language of its Atlantic predecessor. A speech that Pandit gave at a January 1948 UN plenary meeting clarifies this issue. There she pointed out that the

Chapters XI and XII, of course, were dedicated to the colonies and trustee lands and were the areas of the Charter under dispute at San Francisco. In lieu of the Atlantic Charter's language, the new Charter instead said in Chapter XI, ‘Members of the United Nations . . . recognize the principle that the interests [of non-self-governing people] . . . are paramount, and accept a sacred trust . . . to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement’.Footnote ²⁸ During the San Francisco meeting, this idea of a ‘sacred trust’ had come under blistering criticism from the anti-imperial alliance, but nevertheless was made part of the Charter. Pandit makes clear that the colonized throughout the world acquiesced to the power of the UN simply by reading the terms of the Charter differently, at face value while denying the intent of the framers. India's full-fledged participation in the UN was crucial to this understanding of the Charter, for Indians and for all colonized people, since, as mentioned earlier, India's delegation now represented a post-colonial country.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, India was the physical manifestation of the true intent behind Chapter XI (and XII), and its very presence imbued the UN Charter with the anti-imperial ambitions of the original Atlantic Charter.

The rest of Nehru's charge seems an incipient form of what would become his famous foreign policy: non-alignment. Non-alignment eventually resulted in a ‘tilt’ towards the Soviet Union, and for Nehru, as much as anyone else, proved to be a failure following the Sino-Indian War of 1962. But here at the dawn of the UN is where I think we can see Nehru's hopes for this policy most clearly laid out. We'll return to this point in the final section of this paper.

For now, the most significant element of Nehru's remarks was his call to abide by the Preamble, ‘to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom’. If Indians could read the very lines of the Charter meant to shield colonialism as being anti-imperial in nature, was it possible that they were here investing this line from the Charter's preamble with a different connotation as well? Based on Gandhi's reminder of the Quit India Resolution, what precisely did ‘larger freedom’ mean? We shall return to this point later in the paper, but Pandit's comments during her subsequent UN debate over the South Africa question are telling.

The South African Parliament, under the leadership of Prime Minister Smuts, had earlier that year passed the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, also known as the Ghetto Act. The law in effect segregated the Indian community in South Africa and denied them a variety of basic rights and privileges. The community there was outraged and rose up against it.Footnote ³⁰ India supported their cause and used the first session of the UN to raise the issue. According to Pandit, the debate that followed, lasting several days, was also widely considered ‘the most important item of that session’.Footnote ³¹ In the course of her public remarks, Pandit declared, ‘For us this is not the mere assertion of certain rights and privileges. We look upon it primarily as a challenge to our dignity and self-respect. India has resisted every attempt to divert the debate to a consideration of the legal aspects of the issue . . . . What the world needs is not more charters, not more committees to define and courts of justice to interpret, but a more willing implementation of the Charter by all governments [italics added]’.Footnote ³² This was an odd statement, certainly, since any written document necessarily was vague in many ways, and was open to interpretation and application. But we have here an open admission that India is not interested in fine, legal nuances – recalling Gandhi's wish for this not to be a ‘debating society’, they were not interested in scoring points through rebuttals. Rather, India appeared to appeal to the higher, moral ground. Naming the Charter only made this tactic more clear, since as we saw there was considerable disagreement over what the Charter called for. For Pandit, there was something larger at play, a movement towards a more just, equal world. To create such a space, to bring it into being, that aim, that goal, was the sole purpose of the UN.

Nehru himself ultimately came forward to make this point somewhat explicit when he addressed the UN General Assembly at its third session, on 3 November 1948. ‘The Charter of the United Nations has laid down . . . the principles and the purposes of this great organization . . . . The objectives are clear; our aim is clear; and yet, in looking at that aim, we lose ourselves often . . . . We have got into a cycle of hatred and violence, and not the most brilliant debate will get you out of it, unless you look some other way and find some other means’.Footnote ³³ Thus, Nehru again warned against the seductive power of debating victories and pleaded for the world organization to strive for the creation of the objective he saw embodied in the Charter, which involved not just ‘other means’ but another way altogether. Nehru gives no further indication in this speech as to what those other ways and means were, but he spoke on the eve of the General Assembly's vote on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as drafted by a commission headed by Eleanor Roosevelt with input from India. It is in the issues related to that commission that I believe we see the Nehruvian Indian vision most clearly laid out.

IV. The Making of the ‘Universal’

Pandit led the Indian delegation to a resounding victory on the South African question, winning a two-thirds majority in the Assembly. She had ended her pitch by claiming that ‘Mine is an appeal to a conscience, the conscience of the world, which this Assembly is’.Footnote ³⁴ The event was immediately read as an ‘Asian’ victory, the triumph of the world's dispossessed and aggrieved, and it was significant for setting the tone of what the new UN could and should be. It was, evidently, something above the reach of individual governments, something to which they were answerable, ‘the conscience of the world’.

Pandit then recounts how she met with Smuts after his loss: ‘He took my hands in both of his. “My child . . . you have won a hollow victory. This vote will put me out of power in our next elections, but you will have gained nothing”. He was proved correct. The Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act became apartheid’.Footnote ³⁵ This fact revealed, ultimately, the complexities and potential limitations of the new world organization, or at least the hazards of seeking recourse through it. But those shortcomings, and any counter-measures that were subsequently taken, were not the concern of any involved at this point, and the defeat of the Ghetto Act, the restriction of a nation's sovereignty through the meta-institution of the UN, was seen at that time, and should be seen historically, as a great moment of possibility, when older paradigms could be rejected and the world could be fashioned anew.

The formation of the Human Rights Commission (hereafter HRC) by the UN, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, then served India as a specific engine through which to drive such hope. The extensive details of the committee work that went into the declaration will not concern us here.Footnote ³⁶ Our focus instead will be on the Indian delegation's agenda, the dream it sought to make a reality and its feelings on the outcome of the declaration.

The first full session of the HRC met at Lake Success, New York, on 27 January 1947.Footnote ³⁷ In remarks made to open the session, Henri Laugier, Assistant Secretary-General for Social Affairs, ‘stated that no one part of the action undertaken by the United Nations to make peace more secure had more power or a wider scope than this . . . . The action taken in the case of South Africa established a precedent of fundamental significance in the field of international action . . . . It should be remembered . . . that out of these debates the general impression had arisen that no violation of human rights should be covered up by the principle of national sovereignty . . .’.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, it was India's actions regarding South Africa, in conjunction with several other debates, that gave the HRC a mandate to think beyond the limits of national sovereignty, a real possibility given that the commission had ‘more power and wider scope’ than any other arm of the UN at that time.

India's representative on the Commission was Hansa Mehta, who had the year before served on the UN Sub-Commission on the Status of Women.Footnote ³⁹ Five days before the Commission held its first meeting, Nehru sent an official letter to Mehta through the Indian Embassy in D.C.:

The Embassy added, ‘The Government of India . . . [says] that you have discretion to deal with questions as they arise but important matters should be referred to the Government of India for advice’.Footnote ⁴¹

This letter is significant in many ways. First, it makes clear that we can safely associate Mehta's major actions in the Commission with the will of the Government of India, and particularly that of Nehru. Indeed, in the second meeting of the first session of the HRC, the first in which any substantial business was discussed, Mehta openly stated that ‘she hoped that all members would have sufficient opportunity to refer to their respective Government on the highly important and intricate questions involved. This was a vital point of procedure . . .’.Footnote ⁴² The seriousness with which Mehta took the Indian Embassy's letter to heart is not, therefore, in any doubt. What is unclear is what, precisely, Nehru was asking her to do. He, for instance, on the one hand says that the rights of Nationals and non-Nationals must necessarily be different, then states that they should be treated alike. Nehru also explicitly states that all persons should have one nationality.

But I believe that a careful reading of the letter produces a clear subtext. Right after saying that people should have ‘one nationality’, he goes on to mention that too much detail should be avoided and that broad principles should be applied. He then ends by stating that no group should be denied rights granted others. And he concludes that India could not be opposed to transformative legislation, even if it might overturn those very rights, provided that it was applied to all in the pursuit of greater justice. We should not ignore that he was specifically calling for the possibility of communal property, an element of the national-sovereignty-defying world federation called for in the Quit India Resolution of 1942. In the case of his letter to Mehta, I believe that Nehru was again hinting at the idea of going beyond national frames, to borrow a contemporary phrase from Sumit Sarkar, at the notion that the HRC might make this meta-national framework manifest.

That this is not an over-reading of the letter in question, which in any event we shall return to at the end of this paper, is made apparent by a speech that Nehru delivered before India's Constituent Assembly on the very same day: ‘The only possible real objective that we, in common with other nations, can have is the objective of co-operating in building up some kind of world structure, call it “One World”, call it what you like. The beginnings of this world structure have been laid down in the United Nations Organization. It is feeble yet; it has many defects; nevertheless, it is the beginning of the world structure. And India has pledged herself to cooperate in that work’.Footnote ⁴³ Thus Nehru in the confines of the Constituent Assembly reveals his true hope for ‘a world structure’. Taken together with his letter to Mehta, and the original contents of the Quit India Resolution that Gandhi cited in the context of the San Francisco meeting, I argue that Nehru saw in the UN, and specifically the HRC, the possibility of a progressive global body whose reach would supersede that of sovereign nation-states.

Yet Nehru clearly did call for ‘sovereign nation states’ in many places.Footnote ⁴⁴ I think Nehru's letter to Mehta, however, is illustrative of his true intent. Nehru wanted independence from colonialism and wanted free, autonomous, national states in that context, just as he was willing to argue for everyone to have the right to private property. That is, he believed no one should be denied the right to a modern nation-state, as was the case in all colonized territories. Yet he also understood, as with private property, that such rights were themselves limiting, even as they might liberate people being treated unequally. The only solution, then, was the ultimate pursuit of change, once equality had been achieved. In other words, for Nehru, modern, sovereign nation-states were merely stepping stones to the larger end, the larger freedom discussed in the previous section. This larger freedom was from the totalitarian power of the unlimited state, which would be countered by a world body – the UN – the sole purpose of which was to uphold and defend the fundamental rights and the common good of all humanity. We need only look to the actions of the Indian delegation to the HRC to see the validity of this conclusion.

The HRC met for three sessions during early 1947, late 1947 and mid 1948, each session lasting for a lengthy number of daily meetings. Mehta was active in all three sessions, and indeed tried from the outset to shepherd the Indian agenda to reality. By the seventh meeting of the first session, she casually dropped the first indication of the true power she hoped the ultimate product of the Commission's deliberations would wield: she ‘considered . . . that this bill should eventually become an integral part of the Charter and a fundamental law of the United Nations’.Footnote ⁴⁵ She then submitted her own draft resolution on human rights for discussion by the committee, and gently but forcefully pushed for its consideration. The last line of her draft was the most striking: ‘The Security Council of the United Nations shall be seized of all alleged violations of human rights, investigate them and enforce redress within the framework of the United Nations’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This, of course, was a radical redefinition of ‘security’, and of the role of the Council meant to defend it. Mehta wanted to empower the UN to have broad-based powers to enforce human rights everywhere, in effect granting the organization the power of a government designed around a constitutional bill of rights. But Mehta's scheme did not get much traction, and Nehru, half a world away, worried that she may have revealed her hand too soon and impoliticly: ‘Our delegation to the Human Rights Commission last week sent in a long Declaration of Human Rights for discussion and, if I may just mention it, I was not anxious that it should be presented. In fact, I cabled them to delay its presentation but they had already presented it’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Mehta recovered quickly and recalibrated, and it was in the Second Session that she played her most significant role. She chaired the Working Group on Implementation. This sub-committee was empowered to give the product of the HRC teeth – the power to implement and defend as necessary human rights. This was a tall order, most especially because it was not at all clear at that point what exactly the product of the commission would be, though several draft proposals, including Mehta's, had been discussed. This problem was actually raised not illogically in the first few meetings of the Working Group by Klekovkin, the Ukrainian representative to the commission, who thought that the task of implementing human rights must necessarily come after the commission had defined what the concept of ‘human rights’ meant.Footnote ⁴⁸ The committee nevertheless pressed on with its work. The central question before the committee was how human rights might best be enforced throughout the world. The framework proposed and championed by Mehta and eventually adopted by the committee was to grant a special UN committee on human rights, in conjunction with an International Court, the power to hear cases by individuals, associations and (potentially against) states.Footnote ⁴⁹ This power would then be applied by the General Assembly, and possibly by a special attorney general.Footnote ⁵⁰

The true significance of the Indian-proposed implementation framework adopted by the Working Group was exposed when the full Commission reconvened to discuss it. Bogomolov, the delegate from the Soviet Union, vociferously opposed the implementation plan, in a lengthy speech explaining that ‘[t]his was yet another attempt to interfere in the domestic affairs of a State. Under the terms of these recommendations, the Working Group required States to accept a number of organs which would play the role of referee between nationals and their respective governments, elected in accordance with democratic principles . . . . The Soviet delegation could not accept these recommendations . . . since they violated the sovereignty of the various States’.Footnote ⁵¹

V. Ribnikar, the delegate from Yugoslavia, and an ally of Bogomolov,Footnote ⁵² was even more explicit, calling the implementation framework ‘a new attempt to transform the United Nations into a kind of world government, placed above national sovereignty’.Footnote ⁵³

That the Working Group's plan for implementation – that is, basically, the Indian plan – was not outside the realm of possibility is made clear by the fact that the representatives from the UK and France both supported the proposal. Additionally, Toni Sender, a visiting observer from the American Federation of Labor, declared that the Working Group had ‘brought a ray of hope to the working masses . . . . If in the important issue of implementation, national sovereignty were to become the [fundamental] principle, as some delegations seemed to wish, it would then follow that the Security Council and even the International Court of Justice should be abolished, since all their work might be construed as interference in the domestic affairs of States. However, the International Court of Justice and the Security Council had been accepted by all the Members of the United Nations’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together, it seems unequivocal that the Indian agenda in the working committee would have extended supra-sovereign authority to the UN, empowering the initially ‘feeble’ organization as Nehru termed it himself to defend ‘larger freedoms’. Keeping in mind the Indian Embassy's injunction that Mehta had to act on matters of importance in accord with the will of the Government of India, I think we can then safely conclude that the working committee's plans were part of an overall strategic Nehruvian vision to refashion the world at this moment when such grandiose ambition seemed possible. Nehru provides evidence to reinforce this conclusion:

The HRC is thus specifically mentioned in the context of developing the UN into a republican world government, and of the South Africa question and its sovereignty-busting resolution.

The entire issue became moot, however. In order for the Working Group's framework to have purpose, the HRC would have had to adopt ‘justiceable’ rights – rights that would have the status of international law, in the form of a Covenant of Human Rights. Though this was an option championed by the UK, the Commission ultimately chose for the short term to first produce a ‘declaration’ of rights, principles that would set a bar for human action everywhere, but which would not be actionable by law.

V. Localizing the Universal

That the HRC did not adopt the implementation framework proposed by Mehta does not at all imply either the irrelevance or the failure of the Indian vision. Instead, the implementation framework pressed the Nehruvian idea of supra-sovereignty and won some new converts to its cause. It is important to remember here that Mehta was successful in getting unanimous votes in favour of the principles of her plan in her sub-committee, and had picked up strong allies, generally, even in the larger Commission. The reason the implementation plan went no further, as stated earlier, was that the Commission decided, for strategic reasons, to move forward with the non-justiceable ‘declaration’. But many at the time, and most important for our argument, India as well, saw the declaration as only the first part of the making of universal human rights, with a justiceable covenant to follow. Mehta made this explicit in 1949, just a few short months after the passage of the declaration: ‘the General Assembly of the United Nations at their Session in Paris, passed the first part of the International Bill of Human Rights viz. the Declaration of Human Rights prepared by the Human Rights Commission . . . . The Human Rights Commission have still to prepare the Covenant of Human Rights which will be a legal document’.Footnote ⁵⁶

India thus remained committed to making universal human rights actionable by law, in turn keeping their framework for implementation a possible reality. Mehta continued to work doggedly on the International Bill of Human Rights, though it quickly became apparent that the geo-political environment had changed considerably, and that the hostilities of the Cold War had made the air significantly more acrimonious. The Bill, as a result, bogged down, and it would be several more decades before any further meaningful progress on this front could be made.

But the International Bill was only part of a multi-pronged effort, I argue, a fact which is seen most clearly in Mehta's role in the Constituent Assembly of India, the body charged with framing a constitution for the newly independent, post-colonial Indian state. Here, Mehta served on the Fundamental Rights Subcommittee, the powerful organ empowered to delineate the rights and duties of individuals and of society. Writing in 1949, Mehta made clear that the Universal Declaration was the benchmark against which rights provisions of the Constitution had to be measured. While the Constitution as a whole was still under discussion, the ‘fundamental rights’ chapter had already been approved by the entire assembly.Footnote ⁵⁷ Importantly, in comparing the Indian provisions with ‘the International Standard as laid down in the Declaration . . .’, Mehta noted that ‘The Declaration of Human Rights is not a legal document so that no legal action can be taken on the violation of any of its provisions. It certainly has a moral sanction behind it . . . . The chapter on the Fundamental Rights in the new Constitution on the other hand, is a legal document. The rights as defined in that chapter are justiceable rights’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, while the international efforts to create a legally binding covenant were still ongoing, India took the immediate step of embedding the declaration into its national synthesis, creating actionable rights along the international standard. I think this should be read as an attempt to streamline the notion of the post-colonial state with the idea of supra-sovereign, international authority.

Mehta points us towards this conclusion by ending her point-by-point comparison of the Fundamental Rights provisions of the Indian Constitution with the Universal Declaration by declaring that ‘Article 40 in the constitution is very important. It deals with the promotion of International peace and security and covers part of the preamble of the Declaration. It says “The State shall endeavor to – (a) promote international peace and security; (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations; (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised people with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration” [italics added]’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Article 40 (what would become Article 51) was part of a chapter in the constitution on ‘directive principles’, non-justiceable rights separate from but relational to the fundamental rights chapter. Mehta points out that the provisions of the ‘directive principles’, according to Article 29 (what would become Article 37), ‘shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws’.Footnote ⁶⁰ According to Granville Austin, in what is considered the classic and most authoritative work on the Indian Constitution to date, the only real criticisms of the directive principles were from members of the assembly who felt that they should be justiceable; in the end, however, there was general consensus that the principles carried significant weight and that politicians and parties would be held accountable if they failed to implement them.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, in the context of what we have uncovered regarding Mehta's push for the implementation framework, and the overall Nehruvian vision of One World, I think that this move to weave the Universal Declaration into the fabric of the new country, to make the declaration actionable by law and to hold the state accountable to international authority by directive should be seen as part of the overall push to obligate the post-colonial state to the larger world community.Footnote ⁶²

VI. Globalizing the Local

That this remained the ultimate goal is made surprisingly clear in a speech Nehru delivered to the UN in December 1956, titled rather straightforwardly ‘Towards a World Community’. In this particular talk, Nehru spells out in quite specific language his great hope for the world, and is therefore worth parsing in some detail. Nehru began:

Here, at last, Nehru lays his ambitions bare. One World is revived, previously discussed in the Constituent Assembly on the day Nehru had instructed Mehta on how to proceed in the HRC. The UN is seen as the means to achieve this One World. And most significantly, Nehru's hoped-for ‘world community’ is something that has been and must continue to evolve. In other words, as this paper has argued, Nehru saw the achievement of his sought-after goal, One World, as dependent upon small, progressive steps. One World is also seen as the paramount goal, in the way of which nothing should be allowed to stand.

Nehru went on: ‘The one big thing that has emerged is that world opinion represented in the United Nations Assembly, and elsewhere, is today a strong enough factor not to tolerate what it considers wrong . . . . Every country, weak or strong, will have to think twice before it does something which enrages world opinion. That itself shows the development of some kind of a conscience for the world’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The ‘conscience of the world’ was the higher authority to which Pandit had appealed, successfully, in the South Africa intervention, which subsequently went on to become the milestone precedent for the exercise of supra-sovereign power welded solely to the global consensus on rights and justice. Nehru's use of that vivid phrase in the context of the UN's ability to deter ‘wrong’ recalled his sister's famous victory and bound it to his call for an activist world body.

After tying the successful elements of the UN's past to its future, Nehru stated, ‘It is of the greatest importance that the United [N]ations, all of us, should keep in mind the Charter, which is its basis. It may be that we cannot give effect to the Charter quickly because the world is imperfect. Nevertheless, we should move in that direction step by step’. Footnote ⁶⁵ With the ultimate goal, One World, already made explicit, Nehru rationalizes that such a utopian ideal could not be brought to fruition instantaneously given the flawed nature of political reality. Humanity must hence march in successive steps to achieve One World. What were these steps?

The first step, reviving a core element of the Quit India Resolution discussed earlier, was disarmament. ‘No manner of disarmament can make a weak country strong or a non-industrial country the equal of an industrial country. Nor can it make a country which is not scientifically advanced the equal of a country which is. We can, however, lessen the chances of war and the fear of war through disarmament. Ultimately, the entire question is a question of confidence and of lessening the fear of one another[.] Disarmament helps that purpose, although it does not equalize conditions’.Footnote ⁶⁶ This call for disarmament is key because, according to the 1942 Resolution, it was possible only with the establishment of a world federation, whose ultimate goal would be pooled assets and a global defense force.

But even disarmament did not bring about equality, which was clearly something Nehru was after. He explained:

And thus we have it. Independence was necessary for all, as a means of equalizing all people and spaces. But independence did not equal unmitigated state power. This was restrained by various factors, most notably the UN. All of this is of enormous significance. In the context of the full details of this paper, from 1942 up to the mid-1950s, Nehru stuck remarkably consistently to a single playbook. His hope, from the outset, was to create One World, united by basic tenets of fairness, justice and equality (as defined by world consensus), and to advance pragmatically to this end in small, measured steps, from the visionary Quit India Resolution to the idea of the UN Charter, from the making of universal human rights to the drafting of the Indian Constitution and the creation of the post-colonial state. The formation of India, he makes clear, was not the end in itself, but merely part of the means to achieving a greater, more just (in his view) goal.

But, keenly aware that the radical possibilities of 1919 were not realized, Nehru felt an abundance of caution was necessary. If he moved forward too fast, he feared, he would not be able to build a consensus and his entire dream would die on the vine. While the initial climate of the HRC in 1947 was quite positive, by the latter stages the Cold War had made the environment quite acrimonious, as we saw in the last section. Nehru thus held off for a time, until this speech in 1956, when he believed the situation in the world had deteriorated to the point where the Great Powers, fearing a return to horrific World War, might be willing to listen to his alternative. ‘I submit to you that this idea of cold war is essentially and fundamentally wrong. It Is [sic] immoral. It is opposed to all ideas of peace and cooperation. Therefore, let us be clear in our minds as to what the right way is’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The right way was One World.

All of this tantalizingly points towards a major new understanding of Nehru's policy of non-alignment, launched the year before at the Bandung Conference. Rather than simply being a ‘third way’ to the Cold War as is commonly understood, non-alignment in its early stages at least, might (should?) be seen as Nehru's effort to keep everyone talking, to build harmony and consensus, in order to make One World real. Non-alignment, in the protean form practiced in the early UN, simply meant dealing with everyone, despite differences. Ironically, India's delegation to the UN often received the warmest support from the US and the UK, but India nevertheless remained wary of ulterior motives and a continuing fear of Western imperialism. It was often opposed, as we saw by way of example in the HRC discussions, by the Soviet delegations, despite what India perceived as natural and ideological affinity with their worldview.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nehru's speech in 1956, in my view, is in many ways a plea for all players to trust him. The Soviets opposed many of the ideas of the Indian delegation for fear that an international authority would ultimately serve as a capitalist Trojan Horse and undermine the Soviet system (and, we can now say, out of fear that a human rights regime might have some issues with what Stalin had been doing). Nehru's speech, it seems to me, sought to acknowledge and assuage such concerns: ‘I am quite sure that at the moment, as we stand today, all these pacts and military alliances are completely out of place . . . . Why should we be led away by fears apprehensions hatreds and violence [sic] . . .? How are we to face this problem . . .? [I]f we are clear in our aims, we can surely work towards that end’. The ‘alliances’ referred to Cold War blocs, while the ‘clear aim’, again, was One World.Footnote ⁷⁰

Support for this claim may be found in looking at the Bandung Conference and its predecessor, the Asian Relations Conference (ARC). Both the ARC, held in Delhi in 1947, and the successor Bandung, held in Indonesia in 1955, sought to bring together representatives in the first instance from free Asia and in the second from Africa as well to help plot out the future of their region and their relationships.

Inaugurating the ARC, Nehru said, ‘We have arrived at a stage in human affairs when the ideal of that “One World” and some kind of a world federation seems to be essential though there are many dangers and obstacles in the way. We should work for that ideal and not for any grouping which comes in the way of this larger world group. We therefore support the United Nations. . . . But in order to have “One World”, we must also in Asia think of the countries in Asia co-operating together for that larger ideal’.Footnote ⁷¹ India made progress on pushing that ideal through the ARC, as the delegates' positive reactions at the conference illustrated.Footnote ⁷²

Recent work by Itty Abraham extensively analyzing Bandung and the ARC help us to fill in the remaining blanks of the puzzle. The central question that both conferences sought to address was that of migratory peoples and their relationship to territory and sovereignty in the new, emerging post-colonial order. Colonialism had helped scatter populations across the globe, raising particularly thorny issues for ideas of nations and nation-states. To which country did such populations owe their allegiance? From which were they due citizenship? To which could they appeal for protection and justice? Did each question have to be answered only in the singular, or was it possible for there to be multiple options for such populations? ‘External’ Indians and Chinese, especially, gave many of the participants pause, since it raised concerns of smaller states of accidentally running afoul of their larger neighbors, who might act to protect ‘their’ people.

Focus on India was one of the key differences between the ARC and Bandung. In the former, policies on ‘external’ Indians received a great deal of attention. But the Bandung attendees did not return to such discussion. Abraham suggests a reason for this change: India simply decided that, provided certain basic rights were guaranteed, ‘external’ populations had to fight their own battles in their ‘adopted’ countries; that is, India gave up all claims on its ‘externals’, and likewise that externals were not automatically owed anything by the Indian state. This position assuaged participants during the ARC. The silence in Bandung simply reflected the fact that the attendees had accepted India's word, and that nothing had taken place in the interim to dissuade them of their belief.Footnote ⁷³

This information provides some crucial context to our analysis of Nehru's interventions in, and hopes for, the UN. We saw that the first issue the Indian delegation raised in the UN, and that became the basis of the principle that a world body could interfere in the affairs of sovereign states, had to do with the ‘external’ Indian population in South Africa. We also noted that Nehru began his directive to Mehta at the opening of the HRC with some scattered thoughts on ‘nationals’ and ‘non-nationals’. And we saw that Nehru in 1956, one year after Bandung, was still pushing for One World, even if achievement meant a series of incremental steps. Adding this all up, I think, suggests that India let the question of external populations go in the ARC and Bandung precisely because they believed their fundamental rights would be protected by the meta-institution of the UN. To Mehta, Nehru had pointed out that ‘[t]he rights of Nationals must necessarily differ from those of Non-nationals. In either event there should be no discrimination i.e. Non-Nationals should be treated alike . . . . The question of nationality is a difficult one, more especially in countries which have so far belonged to the British Empire or Commonwealth Nations . . . . Normally speaking, a person will not have a dual nationality and he will have to choose’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The events of the ARC, held a few weeks after this letter was written, allows us to re-read this troubling line. For Nehru, ‘nationals’ and ‘non-nationals’ were not a reference to the liberal conception of citizenship and modern states. Rather, this was actually admission that the post-colonial future would have to think outside the box defined by the colonial worldview; it could not and would not be defined by the confines and limits of the old nation-state-based apparatus. ‘Non-nationals’, then, is not a reference to ‘second-class citizens’ within a state of ‘nationals’. Rather, ‘non-nationals’ is a reference to the dispersed diaspora. Their different rights, vis-à-vis ‘nationals’, simply meant that there was no immutable link to the land of their ancestors. That is, Nehru got around the problem of global populations, a reality in the post-colonial world, by seeking to overturn the hegemony of a nation-state-driven world order. One World and justiceable, universal human rights would protect people everywhere. Mehta's opening remarks to the second meeting of the first session of the HRC, the first major speech by any of the representatives and part of her effort I think to set the agenda, bear witness to this conclusion. She

The list in the last sentence is key. It unmistakably implies that each unit was bound up with the next, that each, perhaps, owed something to and was in turn owed something back by another unit. The individual existed within the community that existed within the state that existed within the international organization. The Commission, Mehta charged, had to define how each was answerable to, limited by, or greater than any of the others. Her eventual push for the implementation framework, then, illustrates that her view, viz. India's/Nehru's view, was that the state most especially had to be deferential in certain critical ways to international – meta-national – authority.

A speech delivered by K.M. Munshi, one of the framers of the Indian Constitution and a member with Mehta of the Fundamental Rights Subcommittee, should dispel any remaining doubts about these claims. Speaking in Bombay in 1951 to commemorate the anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, Munshi clearly and precisely linked the human rights declaration and the UN with nation-state-busting world government. Titled ‘World Consciousness Before One World’, the speech is worth quoting at length:

This startlingly candid speech thus reinforces the conclusions reached throughout this paper. The founding of the League of Nations was seen as a moment of hope for a new world order, but its failure dashed those dreams. The creation of the UN served as a second chance to achieve the desired outcome, explicitly stated as One World. This one world mentality meant overcoming the blocs of the Cold War, clearly a reference to India's policy of non-alignment. Indeed, it is India that must lead the way to One World through its moral power, obliquely alluding to the successful methods employed to lead India to victory on the South Africa question. And One World itself is definitively defined as world government that will end national exclusiveness; Munshi elsewhere in his speech calls the desired goal ‘super-national government’. The UN is the protean form of world government, and is moving incrementally towards the larger goal. One of these steps is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a point made simply by talking about the UN-as-One World in a speech marking the anniversary of the rights declaration.

A letter from Dr. Lanka Sundaram, one of Mehta's two aides-de-camp, I think, provides one final piece of proof. Writing a few days after the First Session was over, Sundaram provided an insider's account of what had gone on in the HRC to R.N. Banerjee, the Secretary to the Government of India, saying that he had not recorded such detail ‘at New York, for the reason that there might be a leakage of vital information through our secretaries, who are not Indian’. Sundaram's letter, while not marked as such, therefore comes across as secret and confidential. He states:

India wanted to ‘logically expand’ on the policy which had started with South Africa, which, you will recall, Assistant UN Secretary-General Henri Laugier had claimed made ‘national sovereignty’ fall before principles such as human rights. India's hopes of weakening the idea of national sovereignty in favour of global power is seen in Sundaram's reaction to Iran's speech, which can only be seen as ‘shocking’ if one believed that national sovereignty was a ridiculous, anachronistic notion that could not possibly still be taken seriously. Sundaram's conspiracy theories, facilitated he claims elsewhere in the letter by the US State Department's concerns over the fallout from South Africa, ultimately fail to see the equally vociferous challenge coming from the Soviet bloc, and the general resistance from many angles to breaking down the belief in sovereign states. But it is this fear of resistance that keeps India's larger goal under wraps for so long, until 1956 when Nehru believed, perhaps as a result of the ARC and Bandung, and the horrible conflict the world was again seeing, that people might be more ready to consider his idealistic alternative.Footnote ⁷⁸