‘If we were more Bharat…': Jaishankar's fresh attack on Nehru's China policy

External affairs minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday once again invoked Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, saying there would have been a 'less rosy' view of India's relationship with China if the country would have been more ‘Bharat’.

“ Regarding the three countries Pakistan, China and US which were actually three debated relationships in our early years...If we had been more 'Bharat', we would have had a less rosy view of our relationship with China. This is not my fantasy. There is a kind of record in form of an exchange of letters between Sardar Patel and Pandit Nehru on China and they had a starkly differing views about it,” Jaishankar said during the launch of his latest book ‘Why Bharat Matters’.

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“If we look at the whole UN Security Council issue, this is not something which today someone is saying. There is a letter written by Nehru to Chief Ministers saying 'First let China take its plays in the security council' even when the 1962 conflict war was taking place,” the minister said.

Jaishankar said Nehru had written to then US president John F Kennedy asking for help during war with China.

“Nehru actually wrote to Kennedy saying look I need your help but am hesitating as how it would be looked. What happens is in a sense there is a certain, I would say, a kind of left-wing ideology which was strong in that period which...in China and similarly there is very ingrained hostility towards the United States,” he added.

On Tuesday, Jaishankar had hit out at India's first prime minister, criticising his ‘romanticism’ in dealing with the Communist nation. “The alternative strain which starts with Nehru's China first policy, which says first let China take the security council seat... from China first policy ends up as Chindia policy,” the minister had said in an interview.