Modi, Nehru, and Riedel’s ‘JFK’s Forgotten Crisis’—A bitter irony
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi marketed Bruce Riedel’s book “JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War” (2015) during his maiden speech in the Lok Sabha in the Budget Session on February 4th 2025, the eve of Delhi Assembly election of 2025. Modi highlighted Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis in response to Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha (LoP) Rahul Gandhi’s speech that criticised the government’s failures in the foreign policy domain.
However, Modi didn’t name the LoP directly. But by referring to Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, Modi wanted to kill two birds with a single stone, although in doing so he also exposed a major foreign policy gaffe—a legacy of the Congress era that he and his cohorts are still defending.
By referring to Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, Modi opened a Pandora’s box, which may cause immense difficulty for him in the future, especially when he advocates for a multipolar world order.
Why did Modi refer to Bruce Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis?
Written by a former CIA official who was a member of the infamous “national security” lobby, the most hawkish body in the US that indulges in intervention, subversion and colonisation throughout the world, JFK’s Forgotten Crisis explores a lesser-known aspect of John F Kennedy’s (JFK) presidency—his handling of the 1962 China-India War and its implications for American foreign policy in South Asia, especially in the context of China-India rivalry.
But the reason Modi referred to the book, which his critics believe he himself has not read so far, is because it has critical notes on India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreign policy and his personal character.
After Modi spoke about Riedel’s book, his Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leaders and social media appartichiks started promoting the book vigorously and quoting sections where Riedel, based on memoirs and second-party accounts, wrote about how Nehru paid excessive attention towards Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy, the wife of JFK, when she visited India in March 1962 for nine days along with her sister Lee Radziwill.
Nehru personally hosted Jackie and made a strong impression, though not in a political sense—rather, as an elder statesman with charm and refinement.
Jackie found Nehru cultured and intellectually engaging, and he reciprocated by treating her with great warmth.
Riedel references how Jackie later recalled her India trip fondly, describing Nehru as “gracious” and “courtly”.
Similarly, there are mentions of how Nehru treated Patricia “Pat” Kennedy Lawford, JFK’s 27-year-old sister, separately from Jackie’s visit.
Riedel highlights in his book how Nehru personally entertained Pat, and there were rumours of a flirtatious friendship, as Nehru was known for his charm.
Nehru was particularly fond of cultural exchanges with foreign guests, especially those from the West, and he treated Pat with special attention, though no serious political impact or diplomatic shift resulted from her visit.
This aspect of Nehru’s personality—his affinity for elegant and intelligent women—is something many historians have commented on, and Riedel touches on it in the context of Indo-US relations in the backdrop of the Cold War.
But for the BJP and the Hindutva camp, the discussion on Nehru’s interactions with women means scope to use them to scandalise him and malign his legacy.
Soon, social media was flooded with propaganda maligning Nehru for his purported flirting with American women by ignoring India’s foreign policy needs, a message that Modi wanted to deliver implicitly by referring to the book.
From BJP leaders, its media managers and propaganda mouthpieces, along with other social media klaxons amplified their concerted propaganda spreading similar content from the book and ignoring other aspects of Riedel’s findings.
In doing so, Modi’s supporters have created a problematic scenario for the prime minister and his administration.
What’s Modi’s problem?
For a change, Modi can take a look into George Herbert’s 1640 collection “Jacula Prudentum”, a collection of proverbs. One of the relevant proverbs in that collection is “Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another”. This is what can be a lesson for Modi and the BJP at a time when they have been trying to intensify their propaganda against Nehru.
Modi and the BJP allege Nehru was in a policy quagmire during the peak of the Cold War. Modi blames Nehru for India’s foreign policy gaffes and the issues with China and Pakistan. While saying so, if he looks into Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, he’d see that the former CIA officer has exposed how Nehru and he have been sailing in the same boat, albeit across two different times.
While the Congress and India’s pro-western liberal elites always try to underscore differences between Nehru, portrayed as a centre-left, progressive and scientific-oriented leader, and Modi, projected as an uncouth rabble-rouser and a far-right Hindutva extremist, in reality, both have been following almost similar foreign policies, despite belonging to different eras.
Nehru, despite dragging the carriage of ‘Non-Alignment’ in a polarised world, relied on the US whenever the need arose while maintaining warm ties with the Soviets, a practice his daughter Indira Gandhi ended to some extent.
While Nehru claimed India would neither side with the US nor the Soviets, his government played second-fiddle to the US during the 1950s.
Riedel shows in his book how to contain communist-ruled China, the US was stoking tensions in Tibet, where Beijing was trying to overthrow the feudal rule of Lamas and the colonial rule of foreign powers of the West.
According to Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, the CIA started arming and training the Tibetan terror groups against China.
From 1956 onward, the CIA trained Tibetan militants in Colorado (US), Saipan (Pacific), and Camp Hale (Rocky Mountains). The trained militants were parachuted into Tibet to engage in subversive violent activities against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The CIA provided covert air support to the Tibetan terror groups. The CIA’s secret airline, Air America, air-dropped supplies and weapons to Tibetan militants throughout the 1950s.
Despite these attempts, this covert war, which aimed to destabilise Mao Zedong-ruled China’s control over Tibet, never posed a serious military threat to Beijing.
However, driven by a motive to appease the US and the West for capital and technology, Nehru participated in these activities.
India permitted CIA-trained Tibetan militants to be stationed in India, particularly in the Himalayan border regions and Assam. The Special Frontier Force (SFF), an elite unit of Tibetan militants, was secretly trained with the US’s help in India, with Nehru’s consent.
That’s not all. Nehru’s government had allowed the CIA to use Indian airstrips in areas like Charbatia (Odisha) for reconnaissance flights over Tibet. The U-2 spy planes, operated by the CIA, reportedly flew missions from Indian bases to monitor Chinese PLA movements in Tibet.
Indian intelligence agencies, particularly the Intelligence Bureau (IB) under BN Mullick, a colonial-era official, worked closely with the CIA to monitor China’s activities in Tibet. Despite the state’s official policy of non-alignment, the IB closely worked as a pawn of the US in its South Asia scheme.
The Nehru government provided safe havens for Tibetan militants and allowed the US to gather intelligence from within Indian territory.
Today, nearly seven decades later, the Modi government is still pursuing Nehru’s path.
Like Nehru’s ‘Non-Alignment’, which was used as a smokescreen to bargain with the two power blocs in the world—the Americans and the Soviets—by the Congress party’s government, Modi uses his ‘strategic autonomy’ to use India’s strong ties with Russia to bargain with the West for concessions and deals.
Similarly, India remains a member of multipolar organisations like BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), while using its border disputes and standoff with China to bargain with the US.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, Modi managed to secure technology transfer of US jet engines to India, which Washington didn’t even share with its allies like the UK.
Following the US-led West’s ‘China+1’ theory, Modi markets India as a destination for hi-tech manufacturing, especially of semiconductors and is seeking global investments, despite lagging behind China in the technology and manufacturing capacity race.
Though Nehru sought US military aid during the conflict with China and JFK used the situation to woo India into the US-led military bloc, breaking the pattern his predecessors in the White House had adopted, the Indian prime minister turned non-committal to ensure it didn’t sour its relationship with Moscow and miss the opportunities of getting aid and investment from the Soviet Union.
Modi has been quite protective about India’s relationship with Russia, which Washington and its puppet states have criticised and condemned, and his government has defended the bilateral ties despite strengthening the bond with the US.
Like Nehru, who adopted a “forward patrol” policy to bully China in 1961, leading to the 1962 war, Modi adopted an aggressive posture regarding China in 2019, when Beijing took a critical stance regarding India’s abrogation of Jammu & Kashmir’s special status and bifurcation of the former princely state considered as a disputed territory by the United Nations (UN). This resulted in a skirmish between the Indian Army (IA) and PLA at Galwan, eastern Ladakh, in May 2020, which killed 20 Indian soldiers.
Following the skirmish, though India’s bilateral ties with China soured, it had to rely on Chinese imports, exhibiting inherent weakness in manufacturing. Moreover, the standoff that continued between the IA and the PLA continued for over four years, until Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Kazan in October 2024 to break the ice.
While Modi needs Chinese for India’s industry, unlike Nehru in 1962, he remains committed to the anti-China policy that Nehru had formulated. Due to this reason, his government has been closely associated with the QUAD, an anti-China military entente consisting of Australia, India, Japan and the US. The QUAD aims at securing American hegemony in the Indian Ocean-Pacific Ocean region and protecting American neo-colonies like Taiwan.
The Janoos-faced Modi government is exactly copying the methods of Nehru from the 1950s-60s to use in the context of the 2020s while continuing its criticism of India’s first prime minister on all occasions. This displays the hypocrisy of the government.
The issue with women
Even though the BJP finds pleasure in character-assassinating Nehru by alleging he was a womaniser, Modi’s opponents have also raised questions about his character, especially when it comes to dealing with or staring at women.
Modi’s special treatment of some women over others has drawn eyeballs, while his close interactions with Italian far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have become meme materials. Meloni herself called herself and Modi “Melodi” following the social media trend to bracket them.
Optics of Nehru smiling and interacting with foreign women are labelled as flirting and womanising at the cost of India’s foreign policy interests, while Modi doing the same is justified as strengthening India’s ties, which raises questions over the BJP’s double standards.
Moreover, unlike Nehru, Modi’s marital status has been under question for a long due to his denying his marriage to his wife Jasdhodaben Modi. The Congress has reportedly questioned Modi’s role in the alleged case of snooping and stalking a young woman from Gujarat who had to flee the state. A website released his picture with the woman in 2013.
Though the BJP and the Congress continue to fight each other led by a battery of leaders defending their respective icons, both have ensured that India’s domestic and foreign policies remain subservient to the larger interests of the US-led Western imperialistic bloc, which exerts immense influence on Indian political-economy, society and culture.
Despite its claim of reinvigorating cultural nationalism, the Hindutva camp, with Modi at its core, continues to whitewash colonialism, inculcates the spirit of servility towards the white race among Indians and sacrifices national interests for foreign interests in the region.
Being an appendage to the American imperialistic bandwagon was what Nehru did, as Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis mentions, and playing second fiddle to the same American imperialistic bandwagon is what his detractor Modi is doing 70 years later. It’s only a shift in the level of hypocrisy that’s visible, as the rest remains the same.
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