Calcutta, November 1956: An Editorial on Two Invasions
Calcutta, 5 November 1956. The editorial board of an English-language daily has four columns and two cables. The first reports that British and French forces have landed at Port Said after Israel's invasion of Sinai, and that Nasser has blocked the Canal. The second reports that Soviet tanks have entered Budapest and crushed the Hungarian rising. The Prime Minister has condemned both actions, has refused to join SEATO and the Baghdad Pact, and has accepted American wheat under PL-480 and Soviet steel for the Bhilai plant. A reader's letter on the desk says the paper cannot treat a colonial attack and a communist intervention as the same thing, and calls equidistance cowardice. The editor wants an editorial headed 'Principles, Not Blocs'. A rival paper calls non-alignment a posture that takes aid from one side and sermons from the other.
1. Is condemning both interventions consistent, or is it evasive? Argue the editor's case.
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It is consistent, provided the paper names the single principle it is applying: no state may take another state's territory or government by force. On that principle Egypt's nationalisation of the Canal was a legal act and the Anglo-French-Israeli attack was aggression; Soviet troops crushing a government in Budapest were using force across a frontier the Warsaw Pact did not license. Consistency means applying one norm to both, not apportioning equal blame. But the editor should admit the asymmetry of cost. Condemning Britain was comparatively cheap - India was in the Commonwealth and could claim moral leadership. Condemning the Soviet Union was expensive: a Soviet veto mattered on Kashmir and Soviet aid mattered at Bhilai. Naming that cost is what turns the editorial from a sermon into an argument about a policy that actually had a price.
2. How would you distinguish non-alignment from neutrality, using the wheat loan and the Bhilai steel plant?
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Neutrality is a position in a war: not fighting, not supplying. Non-alignment is a position between blocs in peacetime: refusing military pacts and bases while taking sides on particular issues, as India did in condemning the Suez invasion. The two aid examples show the distinction rather than undermining it. Accepting PL-480 wheat and Soviet steel for Bhilai did not put Indian troops under foreign command, grant a base, or bind Indian votes at the United Nations. Critics call it opportunism because aid from both sides looks like being bought twice; the defence is that aid taken without bases or treaty obligations leaves the recipient free, whereas a pact does not. A good answer concedes that this freedom narrows when a donor can threaten supply - dependence can grow even without a treaty.
3. How should the editor answer the reader who says equidistance is cowardice?
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Concede the moral point and defend the legal one. The reader is right that Suez and Budapest are not symmetrical in intention: Britain and France were trying to restore colonial control of a waterway, while the Soviet action was about holding an empire's buffer. But a principle that is applied only to your opponents is not a principle, it is a preference. If the paper condemns aggression when a Western power commits it, it must condemn it when a patron does, or its future criticism is worth nothing. The editor can also add the practical argument: the value of non-alignment to a poor, newly independent country lay precisely in being believed by both sides, and that credit is spent the moment the standard is applied unevenly.