In commemorating Dr S Radhakrishnan’s birth anniversary, as Teachers’ Day every year on September 5, we unfold a relatively lesser-known facet of India’s President: a philosopher-statesman who played a stellar role in helping Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru build the non-alignment movement, brick by brick. He was instrumental in verbalizing and communicating the policy to diverse global audiences when he assumed charge as Ambassador of India to the Soviet Union in 1949. Those were challenging years with the world being engulfed in the Cold War.

The United States followed an aggressive policy of stockpiling nuclear weapons, and their diplomatic posturing was calculative and astute. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was suspicious of all nations and leaders who were not demonstrating solidarity with the USSR. Moreover, they denounced non-alignment as a policy of collaboration with British imperialism. It was September 1946 when Jawaharlal Nehru, on joining the Interim Government, publicly made clear that India’s foreign policy would be independent and driven by its own national interests. Nehru’s statements were keenly followed in the global media and reported over the next few years as non-alignment evolved into a policy of independent judgement of world affairs.

Nehru, as S Gopal noted in Volume 2 of ‘Jawaharlal Nehru-A Biography’, “was in no mood to revise his policy. He was determined to develop, at whatever cost, a policy of independent judgement of each issue because that was ethically the right position. When Ambassador KPS Menon assumed charge of the embassy in China in early 1947, Nehru wrote to him: “Our general policy is to avoid entanglement in power politics and not to join any group of powers as against any other group. The two leading groups today are the Russian bloc and the Anglo-American bloc. We must be friendly to both and yet not join either.

Both America and Russia are extraordinarily suspicious of each other as well as of other countries, this makes our path difficult, and we may well be suspected by each of leaning towards the other. This cannot be helped.” In 1949, Dr S Radhakrishnan stepped onto the centre-stage of global diplomacy. Nehru was convinced that Dr Radhakrishnan was a personality who could represent and define Indian values to the world. In 1948-49 relations between the Government of India and the Soviet Union had deteriorated. A major reason was, as Gopal’s biography notes, the Soviet Union was directing the Indian Communist Party to rebellion and condemning Government of India policies.

Nehru was forthright in his........

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