Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Subversive: India, Pakistan and the Cultural Politics of Cold War Intelligence

TY - CHAP

T1 - Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Subversive: India, Pakistan and the Cultural Politics of Cold War Intelligence

AU - McGarr, Paul

PY - 2015

Y1 - 2015

N2 - Having been subject to oppressive covert surveillance and systematic harassment by Britain’s imperial security apparatus in the first half of the twentieth century, leading nationalist figures in South Asia, such as India’s first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, were left with an abiding distaste for, and deep mistrust of, the work performed by intelligence agencies. Nonetheless, as the process of European decolonization coalesced with the onset of the Cold War, Nehru, and his political contemporaries in Pakistan, were complicit in a clandestine intelligence partnership between South Asia’s newly independent nation states, their former British colonial ruler, and London’s foremost ally, the United States. Paradoxically, between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, as interventions undertaken by British and American intelligence services in the internal affairs of countries such as Iran, Guatemala, British Guiana, the Congo and Chile, amongst others, were roundly condemned across the developing world as unacceptable manifestations of neo-colonialism, India and Pakistan quietly consolidated intelligence links with the West. Utilizing recently declassified official records and private papers from Britain, the United States, India, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, a picture is constructed of the struggle waged by Indian and Pakistani leaders to negotiate the seemingly contradictory demands of underwriting national security whilst, at the same time, upholding popular conceptions of state sovereignty. Specifically, critical attention is cast upon strategies adopted by South Asian governments to co-opt the assistance of Western intelligence organisations in containing Cold War threats, whether in the guise of indigenous communist movements, or external pressures from China and the Soviet Union. Moreover, broader consideration is given as to whether intelligence liaison relationships forged between the former colonizer and the former colonized can account, in some measure, for the obsession with conspiracy, intrigue, and subversion embedded in the socio-political fabric of the contemporary Global South.

AB - Having been subject to oppressive covert surveillance and systematic harassment by Britain’s imperial security apparatus in the first half of the twentieth century, leading nationalist figures in South Asia, such as India’s first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, were left with an abiding distaste for, and deep mistrust of, the work performed by intelligence agencies. Nonetheless, as the process of European decolonization coalesced with the onset of the Cold War, Nehru, and his political contemporaries in Pakistan, were complicit in a clandestine intelligence partnership between South Asia’s newly independent nation states, their former British colonial ruler, and London’s foremost ally, the United States. Paradoxically, between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, as interventions undertaken by British and American intelligence services in the internal affairs of countries such as Iran, Guatemala, British Guiana, the Congo and Chile, amongst others, were roundly condemned across the developing world as unacceptable manifestations of neo-colonialism, India and Pakistan quietly consolidated intelligence links with the West. Utilizing recently declassified official records and private papers from Britain, the United States, India, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, a picture is constructed of the struggle waged by Indian and Pakistani leaders to negotiate the seemingly contradictory demands of underwriting national security whilst, at the same time, upholding popular conceptions of state sovereignty. Specifically, critical attention is cast upon strategies adopted by South Asian governments to co-opt the assistance of Western intelligence organisations in containing Cold War threats, whether in the guise of indigenous communist movements, or external pressures from China and the Soviet Union. Moreover, broader consideration is given as to whether intelligence liaison relationships forged between the former colonizer and the former colonized can account, in some measure, for the obsession with conspiracy, intrigue, and subversion embedded in the socio-political fabric of the contemporary Global South.

KW - India

KW - Intelligence

KW - Decolonisation

KW - Cold War

KW - Diplomacy

UR - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/decolonization-and-the-cold-war-9781472571199/#:~:text=The%20Cold%20War%20and%20decolonization,links%20between%20the%20two%20phenomena.

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781472571199

SP - 285

BT - Negotiating Independence: New Directions in the Histories of the Cold War & Decolonization

A2 - Leake, Elizabeth

A2 - James, Leslie

PB - Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

CY - London

ER -