On shaping the U.N.

A tribute to Indias founding fathers and mothers, who helped create a global organisation that embodied their ideals.

In May, a United Nations panel issued a damning indictment ( Human Rights in India: Status Report 2012) of the Indian states behaviour towards its own citizens. It pointed to persistent and grotesque levels of hunger, maternal and infant mortality, farmer suicides, forced displacement, custodial torture and child trafficking, as well as draconian security laws that lead to widespread human rights violations. The birthplace of the Buddha, the Mahavira and Mahatma Gandhi now even has its own mass graves.

At this dismal juncture, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World offers a bittersweet reminder of a time, not so long ago, when Indians led the world along the moral path. The book details how a handful of idealistic Indians helped shape the U.N. and ensure that it would seek to protect all human beings, wherever in the world they might reside.

In August 1941, during the Second World War, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt obliged United Kingdoms Prime Minister Winston Churchill to accept a set of post-war goals known as the Atlantic Charter. Apart from economic obligations such as free trade, the charter included a pledge of self-government for all and a determination to seek a world free of want and fear. It offered the first hint of the Presidents dream of an international body that would enforce universal norms and otherwise police the peace. Churchill subsequently clarified that in his view the charter applied only to countries occupied by the Axis forces, not to British colonies. In the Quit India resolution of August 1942, however, Jawaharlal Nehru echoed Roosevelts call, speaking of a world federation that would ensure the freedom of its constituent nations, the prevention and exploitation of one nation over another, the protection of national minorities, the advancement of all backward areas and peoples, and the pooling of the worlds resources for the common good of all. Such a goal seemed fanciful, to be sure, but then so did independence. In the days and months that followed, some 10,000 Indians would be killed and 90,000 incarcerated by Indias colonial masters, led by Churchill, for daring to dream of a world free of want and fear.

Compelling figure

Among those imprisoned was Nehrus remarkable younger sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and the most compelling character in Manu Bhagavans book. Following the 1935 Act that granted India partial self-government, she had won the election to become the countrys first female Cabinet Minister. Released from prison in July 1943, she went right away to Bengal, where a famine was raging, to organise relief efforts on behalf of the All-India Womens Conference, of which she was president. She also founded an Indian chapter of Save the Children, which allowed funds raised by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Eleanor Roosevelt and, especially, the Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck to flow into famine relief. The three foreigners contributed a total of $25,000, a considerable sum for the time.

In May 1944, Gandhi was released from prison because of ill health. Kasturba Gandhi had died in February, and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who had also just lost her own spouse, visited the old man for succour. Gandhi was deeply injured, but not defeated. He suggested that she tour the U.S. to present the Indian point of view: British propaganda had turned American public opinion against the Indian cause and needed to be countered. But the British had impounded her passport. Fortunately for India, Wendell Willkie, a Republican statesman who had lost to Roosevelt in the presidential elections, had himself recently undertaken a world tour.

Although denied permission to visit India, Willkie issued a stirring statement calling on his compatriots to guarantee the freedom of colonies, especially India, after the war. The people of the East, he declared, want us to join them in creating a new society, global in scope, free alike of the economic injustices of the West and the political malpractices of the East. Willkie expounded on his ideas in a book, One World, which Nehru eagerly read in prison while writing his own treatise, Discovery of India.

President Roosevelt had been repeatedly, and furiously, rebuffed by Churchill each time he raised the question of Indian independence. But Willkies intervention now pushed Roosevelt to clarify that the Atlantic Charter indeed applied to all peoples. Furthermore, in December 1944, while busy in Bengal with relief efforts, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit received a mysterious invitation and ended up flying to the U.S. on an American Air Force plane.

Bhagavan, an associate professor of history at Hunter College in New York City, relates in enthusiastic prose Vijaya Lakshmi Pandits subsequent triumph. She spoke at numerous venues, lunched with Eleanor Roosevelt, continued raising funds for famine relief, and trounced Churchills protege Robert Boothby in a radio debate.

In February 1945, at the Yalta conference, Roosevelt continued to establish a framework for the U.N., and in particular his trusteeship scheme by which colonised nations would be tutored towards full independence. Churchill refused to subject the U.K. to such a world order. He would not tolerate forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the lifes existence of the British Empire, Churchill protested. Never, never, never!

Unfortunately for colonised peoples everywhere, Roosevelt died that April. As a result, when Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit arrived in San Francisco for the U.N. conference, the rug had been pulled from under her feet. She was not allowed to represent India; instead, a team chosen by the British was.

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit did, however, have a powerful backer: Gandhi himself, who issued a press statement demanding Indian independence. Uncharacteristically, he also called for a world police force as a concession to human weakness. In a subsequent interview, Gandhi clarified that he was indeed calling for a world organisation based predominantly on truth and non-violence. He continued: I claim to be a practical idealist. I believe in compromise so long as it does not involve the sacrifice of principles. I may not get a world government that I want just now but if it is a government that would just touch my idea, I would accept it as a compromise.

At the conference, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit denounced Indias representatives as British stooges and garnered much sympathy. Nevertheless, the British won that round. The U.Ks foreign office noted that although the principles of the U.N. were lofty indeed, the specific language adopted at San Francisco does not empower the United Nations organisation to intervene in the application of these principles by the powers concerned.

Fortunately, the world was changing. In 1946, Nehru became head of an interim Indian government and briefed Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit on her new task: leading the Indian delegation to the new U.N. As Bhagavan writes, Nehru saw that India could now play a direct and active role in shaping the new organisation and in wresting its control, insofar as possible, from the big powers who were settling into a bitter and alarming new stand-off, the Cold War. The world, in spite of its rivalries and hatreds and inner conflicts, moves inevitably towards closer cooperation and the building up of a world commonwealth, Nehru said optimistically. It is for this One World that free India will work, a world in which there is the free cooperation of free peoples, and no class or group exploits another. Indias very presence at the U.N. ensured that the organisation was imbued with the anti-imperial ambitions of the Atlantic Charter.

Human rights

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandits first task was to fight a South African law known as the Ghetto Act, which deprived Indians in that country of a variety of rights and privileges. Gandhi, who retained an interest in South African affairs, especially wanted to see the Act repealed, but he also wanted to make sure that the Indian delegation followed the route of persuasion. Gandhi counselled [Vijaya Lakshmi] Pandit that the United Nations was not going to be a debating society but rather a place to form international amity, writes Bhagavan. The means were just as important as the ends.

The problem was that a clause in the U.N. charter prohibited the organisation from interfering in the internal affairs of member states. So Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Nehru determined to challenge that very clause, holding it as contrary to the spirit of the charter.

As they saw it, the case was one of the violation of fundamental human rights which formed the basis of all international civilisation, and no state could hide behind domestic jurisdiction to cover it up. So Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit spoke eloquently of the principle of self-determination upheld by the preamble of the U.N. charter, which applied to all peoples alike.

South Africa and its patron, the U.K., fought back vigorously, foreseeing that the Indians were setting a precedent harmful to their interests. But Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit carried the day, for the time being. As Jan Smuts, the South African premier, said to her afterwards, My child... you have won a hollow victory. The Ghetto Act would soon give way to outright Apartheid. Nonetheless, the Indian effort ensured that no state would henceforth be able to conceal abuses of basic rights behind the cloak of internal affairs.

The horrors of Partition greatly damaged Indias image at the U.N. and showed Nehru how difficult a task it is to live up to ones ideals. Since, for instance, India was justifying its annexation of Hyderabad on the grounds that the population was largely Hindu, surely that logic justified Mohammad Ali Jinnahs trying to take Kashmir? Bhagavan alludes to Nehrus emotional attachment to Kashmir, the land of his ancestors, but does not adequately explore the contradictions inherent in his efforts to retain the kingdom for India, given the principle of self-determination to which Nehru also claimed allegiance.

With Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit becoming independent Indias Ambassador, first to the Soviet Union and then to the U.S, another woman now entered the stage: Hansa Mehta, Indias representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Hansa Mehtas main contribution, if it can be called that, was to help separate fear from want. The West held dear so-called negative rights, rights that were civil and political and focussed on the individual, explains Bhagavan. In contrast, the Soviets and many colonised people throughout the world tended to approve more of positive rights, social and economic rights that usually required the active intervention of government. Nehru held both kinds of rights to be important; nevertheless, they were qualitatively different and had to be enforced by different means, he held. Nehru was always careful to recognise the differences in ways of living that humans preferred, writes Bhagavan, and he was adamant that any world system had to allow for such difference, so that each person and community could live according to their genius.

Accordingly, Hansa Mehta argued that the human rights covenant be split into two parts, one for civil and political rights and the other for economic and social rights, as in the Indian Constitution. The first group of rights was enforceable in courts of law, she argued, but the second group was about aspirations and required state action. Hansa Mehta won that round, but at the cost of annoying the Soviet Union, which was committed more to economic rights than to political ones. As Bhagavan makes clear, Indias non-alignment did not mean isolation, but rather an active effort to bridge the gap between the Soviet Union and the U.S. It meant trying to bring about One World, however challenging that might be in the context of the Cold War.

The Peacemakers is a heartfelt tribute to Indias founding fathers and mothers, who helped create a global organisation that embodied their ideals and that could hold the feet of their successors to the fire. India must meet the human rights accountability challenge posed by the contents of its own Constitution and the international human rights instruments it had ratified, notes the recent U.N. report. To meet this enormous challenge, nothing but a radical shift in economic, security and social policy is needed. India is now hoist on the petard these visionaries crafted.

Madhusree Mukerjee is the author of Churchills Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II .