Chapter 129: Coincidence or Conspiracy

Moscow

14 February 1950

The treaty of friendship between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China was signed at the Kremlin on the fourteenth, after two months of hard bargaining. Mao Zedong had come to Moscow at the end of December in a special train, a tall, heavy, slow-spoken man in a high-collared tunic. For the first weeks, Stalin had left him alone at a villa outside the city to think about his place in the world.

On the evening after the signing, Mao and Stalin sat in the small dining room at Kuntsevo, with Molotov and Zhou Enlai in attendance and a roast on the table that nobody had touched. Stalin was in a good humour. He had been generous on the treaty and the loan. He wanted something in return, and the thing he wanted was Mao’s attention.

"I have a complaint from you, Comrade Mao," Stalin said, in his slow, deep Russian, relayed in Chinese by an interpreter. "I would like to hear it spoken, not written."

"It is simple, comrade." Mao’s voice was flat. "The Indians have taken Tibet. They have signed an accession with a boy of fifteen and put Gurkhas on the passes. The Tibetan Government expelled its own ministers rather than listen to our envoy. I have fought for every province of China. I have taken none without a fight, and now the Indian Prime Minister, who has never led an army in the field, takes the roof of the world without firing a shot. My envoy was sent home with a letter."

"A shrewd man," Stalin said.

"A bourgeois nationalist who arms the landlords. His government jails the Indian comrades. His Army crushed Telangana. And you sell him tanks, Comrade Stalin."

Stalin did not answer at once. He lifted a glass and examined the colour of the wine.

"We sell him the tooling and take his jute," he said at last. "It is a trade, not an alliance. You are right that he is a problem. He is also a very capable one, and I do not yet know what sort." He set down the glass. "Comrade Mao, I will be candid. You wish me to be angry on your behalf. I am not yet angry. I am curious."

"Curious?"

"A man who can take Hyderabad in a hundred hours, Kashmir in a winter, Karachi in a month, and now Tibet with a signature, has a temper for success. What does he do when he is pushed? Does he bend, or does he strike? I do not know. I should like to." He turned to Molotov. "Vyacheslav, I want a report. Not what the Indians say about themselves. What they would do if the Chinese border were made uncomfortable. If the Indian Communists made noise. If the Americans did. The temperature of the man."

"The Embassy has a good commercial attaché in Delhi," Molotov said. "Kozlov. He has been there since February."

"Tell Kozlov to watch and listen. He is to give no orders to the Indian party or to anyone. If there is trouble in India, I do not wish it to be ours. I wish to see whose it is." Stalin’s moustache lifted. "A government that is too clever must sometimes be reminded that others can be clever, too. But I will not be reminded of it by an accident that I caused."

"The Chinese party will not wait long," Zhou Enlai said, very softly.

"Then let it not wait with its hands in someone else’s pockets, comrade." Stalin picked up his fork. "Eat. The meat is getting cold."

Mao said nothing. He ate, slowly, with the stolid air of a man who had been told to be patient and intended to remember it.

Whitehall, London

23 February 1950

The meeting at the Foreign Office was held in a small second-floor room, without minutes. It was not, by the usual definition, a meeting at all. A lean, silvering colonel from the Secret Intelligence Service named Hargreaves sat in one armchair before the fire. In the other sat a Commonwealth Relations Office undersecretary who had been told to attend and not to remember.

"The position," Hargreaves said, "is this. We have lost India. We have lost Burma, Ceylon, the islands, the oil. We have paid for it and shall go on paying. The Cabinet has resolved that we pay our debts on time. That is a matter for the Chancellor. It has not resolved that we are required to be grateful."

"The Cabinet has said nothing of the sort."

"The Cabinet has said nothing at all, which is the opening." Hargreaves turned the stem of his glass. "I understand the Indians are about to undertake a very large engineering programme. Dams. Power houses. A quarter of a million families to be moved. The sort of thing that always generates friction."

"And?"

"I have no wish to bribe a revolution. We have no such assets and no such need." He spoke mildly. "What we have is something rather older. I have been drawing up a list. Forty-one men in the Indian courts and the Indian Bar who were called at the Inner Temple or Lincoln’s Inn, who sat the same examinations as their English contemporaries, who have corresponded with the same old judges for thirty years.

"Several have letters from Lords of Appeal in their desks. Three sit on the Supreme Court bench. A great many more sit on High Courts or lead the Bar Councils. They were trained to believe that the independence of the judge is the English gift to the world. They are, I think, a little startled to find that their own Government has no particular reverence for it."

"You propose to ask them to resist."

"I propose to ask nothing. I propose that a number of people they respect should write to them, privately, about the principle of the thing." He smiled thinly. "A retired Lord Justice writing to an old friend in Madras to say he is troubled by what he reads. A former member of the Privy Council Judicial Committee mentioning, over a cup of tea, how well the Supreme Court is thought of in London. A lecture at the Temple. A bursary for a promising young advocate who wishes to see the Inns. Nothing the Foreign Secretary need sign."

"And if the Government of India notices?"

"It will notice a collection of elderly English gentlemen being anxious. It cannot arrest anxiety." Hargreaves set down his glass. "There are also, of course, a number of junior advocates of leftist views who have no love for Mr. Gupta and are always in need of printing costs. They are not ours. They are merely useful idiots. If they should happen to receive help from a sympathetic private foundation, I do not wish to know where it comes from. I am told the Americans have a similar interest."

"The Americans?"

"The Americans have their own reasons for disliking the Indian arrangement with Moscow, and their own people on the ground. They are not co-ordinating with us. They would not wish to. But if we happen to be pulling in the same direction, it is a coincidence, not a conspiracy. I find it helpful to be able to say so."

The undersecretary was silent a long time. "Attlee gave very specific instructions."

"To the Treasury, concerning the payment of debts. Not to us." Hargreaves rose. "If the thing goes wrong, no one in this room has heard of it. If it goes right, you will not be required to approve it."

Washington, D.C.

1 March 1950

At the State Department, the mood on India was warm, with an undertone of unease. Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary Webb, and two members of the Policy Planning Staff sat in a half-circle around a low table in the Secretary’s office. A thin report on Indian industrial output lay open between them.

"The President’s position," Acheson said, "is that Mr. Gupta is a friend who delivered when it counted. He gave us the Chinese dossier. He has kept the Assam corridor open. He gave Standard-Vacuum Visakhapatnam. He has not signed a military pact with Moscow, and he has made it plain he will not. I have no quarrel with any of that."

"The quarrel," said a lean Policy Planning man named Kennan’s disciple, Paul Nitze’s junior, "is with the trend line, Mr. Secretary. In three years, India has taken Burma, Ceylon, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, a fistful of islands, and half of Pakistan. She has the largest army in Asia outside China. She has the Soviets building her steel mills, and lord knows what else. She is entirely friendly, and she is going to be very large indeed."

"Large and friendly is not a disaster."

"Not in itself. It is merely a fact that we should be aware of." The man tapped the report. "My concern is that the White House sees a friend, State sees a friend, and nobody sees the distance between them and what India may want in ten years."

"I think the President would say that is a problem for ten years from now."

"I think the President would be right. I think someone should be thinking about it anyway."

Acheson lifted an eyebrow. "And who might that be?"

"I believe the Agency has its own views," the junior man said carefully.

The Agency, in the winter of 1950, was three years old, short of money, and anxious. It had an office in Calcutta that consisted of one vice-consul, an Army colonel, and two secretaries. It had an unpublicised programme, run from a building off Constitution Avenue, to place officers in every capital in Asia before the Communists did. And in the winter of 1950, it had a problem that happened to be an opportunity. Three million Pakistani refugees were on the roads of the Punjab. Relief organisations were being invited into Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and Karachi in a flood. A relief organisation in the Punjab might employ anyone, go anywhere, and ask questions of anyone it liked.

That same afternoon, in a room in the Agency’s building, a heavyset officer named Desmond Fitch listened to the Calcutta report.

"Whitcomb has a good start," Fitch said, drumming his fingers. "A lawyer in Calcutta, two judges in Delhi, a handful of Bengali journalists. All of them have something against the Gupta Government. None of them knows who he works for."

"The foundation is the cut-out?"

"It is as clean as we could make it. It has never been traced to us. The problem is that it takes time, and we are late to this game. The British have been in India for two hundred years, and the Soviets have had a party there for thirty. We have a consulate and a stack of cultural programmes."

"The refugee operation is the opening."

"The refugee operation is the best thing that has happened to us in Asia since Tokyo." Fitch turned a page. "A Pakistani state that is falling apart has three things we want. A population that will talk to anyone who gives it bread. A military that has been betrayed by its own politicians. And a map with the Soviet border at one end and the Chinese at the other. I want a station in Karachi, a station in Peshawar, and a link to whoever is left in the Pakistani Army when the dust settles. I want to be inside before the Indians are."

"And the State Department?"

"The State Department thinks India is a friend. Fine. Let it. A friend is a thing you watch very carefully."

"And the Hirakud business?"

"The Hirakud business is a sideshow with a good deal of value." Fitch shrugged. "It will not stop the dam. It will not topple Gupta. But it teaches him that the Americans can touch his domestic politics, and it teaches us who in his country is willing to be touched. I would call that a good investment."

"You do not mind the British being involved?"

"I would mind if they were running it. They are not. They are a coincidence." He smiled. "I find it helpful to say so."

Calcutta

4 March 1950

Daniel Whitcomb called himself second secretary at the consulate and drew pay as such. He was thirty-four, soft-spoken, with a Harvard degree and a Boston accent, and a small flat on Park Street where he gave dinner parties for Bengali intellectuals.

On the fourth of March, over mutton cutlets and Darjeeling tea, he talked for three hours with a Bengali lawyer named Sudhir Ghosh. Ghosh was a quiet, bespectacled man of fifty who had defended Communists in the 1948 Telangana trials without ever joining the party, and who held a moral conviction about land that had cost him two briefs and a reputation at the Calcutta bar.

"I have read the Orissa survey notices," Whitcomb said mildly. "A hundred thousand people. It is a great many."

"It is the largest forced removal in the history of the subcontinent outside Partition."

"And no court has yet examined it?"

"The Constitution does not permit a court to examine it, Mr. Whitcomb. That is what I find so remarkable. The original draft allowed a property owner to challenge the legality of an acquisition. The final text, rewritten after that business at Nahan, says that the courts may review compensation after the state has taken possession, but may not stay the taking itself. A man’s house is demolished first. His right of appeal arrives afterwards."

"A very efficient system."

"A very unjust one."

Whitcomb looked into his cup. "Forgive an outsider’s impertinence. My government takes an interest in the rights of the individual against the state. It is the foundation of our own system. If a distinguished advocate were to bring a challenge to the Supreme Court on behalf of the people of Orissa, I imagine he would find a good deal of sympathy in America. And, I should add, some practical assistance. Legal costs, printing, travel for witnesses. Such things are always more expensive than one expects."

"You are offering to fund a lawsuit."

"I am saying that private foundations in my country take an interest in such cases. There is a body in New York that supports civil liberties abroad. I could introduce you." Whitcomb smiled. "You would owe them nothing. It is a matter of principle."

Ghosh looked at him for a long moment. He was not a fool, and he did not wholly believe the man across from him. But he had read the Constitution many times, and what Whitcomb said about its text was true, and in his mind’s eye he could see a hundred thousand people on a riverbank with their goods in carts.

"I should like to meet your foundation," he said.

Over the following weeks, Ghosh received eleven thousand dollars through a Swiss bank, and an introduction to a printing firm in Cuttack that would produce legal briefs at cost. None of it struck him as sinister. All of it was quite normal.

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