India, reliant on US aid to embark on a London School of Economics-inspired bureaucratic socialist economic model that proved no less stultifying in India than in Britain

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 309.

Relations with India were personalized to an unfortunate degree, chiefly because Prime Minister Nehru thought that his cosmopolitan background uniquely equipped him to act as minister for external affairs. As such he did not deign to consult the cabinet on foreign policy or world affairs, about which (from memory) he had written a remarkable epistolary history while in British captivity in the early 1930s called Glimpses of World History. Here one might learn that the empire of Genghiz Khan was more significant than that of Julius Caesar. Nehru’s colleagues were content to leave world affairs to him since they were much more interested in domestic portfolios, which brought real powers of patronage and self-enrichment. Snobbish attitudes and poses Nehru had acquired from the British also combined with Gandhian moralism to conceal a conventional ambition for India to be recognized as a great power. Every conversation with him felt like a lecture, in which his Fabian socialist self-righteousness grated on American nerves. He fashioned an ideology of non-alignment, based, he claimed, on recognizing what was worth while in the rival Cold War social systems. It was a poor choice to adopt the standard Western leftist’s pose of moral equivalence between the two systems when, in the absence of any alternative, India would be reliant on US aid to embark on a London School of Economics-inspired bureaucratic socialist economic model that proved no less stultifying in India than in Britain and, indeed, anywhere else it was adopted.