South Asia’s political origins are in a little-remembered Summit: a forgetfulness ripened by nomenclatural confusions. This was in the early 1950s. Regions hadn’t yet coalesced into certainties. South Asia was then understood to be part of the broader Southeast Asian region, so the official title was: ‘Southeast Asian Prime Ministers’ Conference’, held in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was called then) from 28 April to 2 May 1954. Less cumbersomely, it was called the Colombo Conference. Although a purist would frown that after spending the first three days in the tropical, coastal heat of Colombo, the participants journeyed inland to the cooler hills of Kandy, from where a final communique was issued. Attended by the premiers of Ceylon, Burma (now Myanmar), Pakistan, India and Indonesia, this Conference strove to lay the basis for periodic regional summits.
1954 was an eventful year for Southeast Asia. Hopes for regional peace were raised by the Geneva Accords on Indochina, which brought to an end, temporarily, the war between the French Indochina empire, backed by the United States, and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, aided by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These hopes nosedived as drastically, however, with the founding of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in Manila, which undermined the agreements reached at Geneva. The testy China-America relationship – or lack thereof – kept the world tethering on a nuclear brink. Amidst this, the ‘Colombo Group’ – a group of independent, democratic countries within the smaller South Asian region – briefly dazzled as the sane voice of moderation in world affairs. This piece focuses on retrieving the discussions that led to the formation of this group.
Colombo Calling
Strange is the life of political ideas. In the 1940s and early 1940s, official references to ‘South Asia’ as a political formation autonomous of the broader region of Southeast Asia are scarce. When they do, such as in the writings and utterances of diplomat-scholar K.M. Panikkar and the Congress President Pattabhi Sitaramayya, South Asia features as a proxy for a larger Indian federation, incorporating Ceylon and Burma. These roused denunciations and accusations about India’s supposed ‘Monroe Doctrine’ from regional leaders. So, perhaps fittingly, it was the chief accuser who emerged as the author of South Asia. Let’s meet, Sir John Kotelawala!
The third Prime Minister of Ceylon was a flamboyant patrician, partial to self-applause. Sometime in the early 1950s, at the annual dinner of the United Nations Association of Ceylon, Kotelawala was in a social conversation with C.C. Desai, the Indian High Commissioner and his friend from Cambridge days. Desai lamented that there was no similar annual gathering for the leaders of the South Asian region to discuss common issues.
Until then, Ceylon had shown no real interest in a ‘South Asian’ policy – its Anglophile leadership was, in Fred Halliday’s apt phrase, ‘a comical-repulsive replica of the English ruling class’ and had tied the country’s foreign policy to British coat-tails. In any case, India – an always threatening neighbour – loomed large and was best avoided. But Desai’s complaint appealed to Kotelawala for three key reasons. First, if Indian hegemony in the region was an issue, the best way to counter it would be to pull India into a joint platform with other smaller South Asian states. Second, Kotelawala had ambitions to play a more global role, in service of which he had once suggested the creation of an Asian Peace Bloc of (predominantly) Buddhist countries, including Ceylon, Burma, Thailand and India. And finally, to give him due credit, he was genuine about creating friendly personal relations among the premiers of the region.
So, in late 1953, Kotelawala floated the idea of a South Asian summit with the premiers of India, Pakistan and Burma. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister, had been a known enthusiast for pan-Asian ideas in the 1940s. But his federationist inclinations had convinced him that small states would, in time, merge into larger federations, including in South Asia. His imagination was therefore focused on efforts towards larger Asian unity. He even organised two famous conferences in Delhi – the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 and an Asian conference against the Dutch invasion of Indonesia in 1949. These were fantastic affairs that doubtlessly catapulted Nehru into a global leadership role. But among the less salubrious experiences of these conferences for him was the fact that they also provided copious scope for militant airing of differences by South and Southeast Asian countries against the perceived hegemony of two regional behemoths, India and China. Nehru’s interest in Asian unity subsequently tapered off; he would never himself organise a similar conference.
Meanwhile, the Cold War, initially confined to Europe, extended to Asia by the early 1950s, with wars in Korea and Indochina. Increasingly, Nehru’s energies were galvanised around the creation of a ‘third area’, i.e. an area of peace committed to non-aggression, rather than any ‘Asian’ schemes. In fact, so opposed was he to efforts seen as bloc-forming of any kind that his area of peace would comprise a series of bilateral non-aggression pacts rather than a multilateral bilateral treaty. When Kotelawala suggested a small conference of neighbours, he stressed that it would be more of a getting-to-know-each-other meeting rather than a policy conference with specific objectives. The premiers would even stay and travel together, allowing for the development of personal friendly ties among them. Nehru agreed with one suggestion. He asked to add an invite to Indonesia, a country that was part of his area of peace vision.
Burma’s premier U Nu, whose political ideas were often closer to Nehru, too, agreed promptly. His interest in the summit came from a keenness for a regional plan for economic development. But before Pakistan could confirm, Nehru threw a spanner in the wheels. Pakistan was about to secure military aid from the United States. Nehru responded vehemently to such reports. To him, Pakistan’s acceptance of U.S. military aid would bring the Cold War to the region, jeopardise India-Pakistan talks on Kashmir (which seemed to be moving towards consensus on a plebiscite) and push India to ramp up its own defence expenditure, diverting precious resources from developmental aims.
In the Indian parliament, Nehru announced that Kotelawala’s suggestion for a conference had come in the backdrop of the news of military aid. This created the impression that the conference was going to primarily discuss Pakistan’s military aid. Expectedly, Mohammad Ali Bogra, Pakistan’s diplomat-turned-premier, protested strongly. The Ceylon foreign ministry had to quickly issue a statement clarifying that no suggestion about discussing military aid was made.
In the meantime, the invitation to this conference had pushed the Pakistani foreign ministry to do some soul-searching about the objectives of its foreign policy. An internal foreign ministry memo written for the Pakistani cabinet in January 1954 argues that Pakistan, on account of its two wings, was caught between two regions, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The Middle East as a region was joined by a historical, cultural, religious, and topographical unity – there was a sense of naturalness to the region, as well as Pakistan’s affinity for it. In contrast, the only link that connected South Asia or Southeast Asia was colonialism, which was in any case almost over. The regional feelings were thus forced by alleviable circumstances, i.e. colonialism, rather than any natural affinity. Joining any Southeast Asian grouping, including the one envisioned by Kotelawala, offered Pakistan no strategic advantage. The only consideration, indeed, an overwhelming one, was that India was preponderant in this region. Its dominance in the region enhanced India’s value to the United States, which affected how eager America would be to assist Pakistan, militarily and economically. Hence, the ministry’s note counselled Pakistan’s participation in the conference, largely with the aim of undercutting India’s regional dominance.
Advised thus, Bogra assented to participate but hinged Pakistan’s participation on two essential conditions: the meeting was to have no agenda whatsoever (precluding India from setting it) and that he would not discuss U.S. military aid to Pakistan or Nehru’s pet project, ‘third area’.
The only link that connected South Asia or Southeast Asia was colonialism, which was in any case almost over. The regional feelings were thus forced by alleviable circumstances, i.e. colonialism, rather than any natural affinity
Upon Nehru’s urging, the final invitation was sent to Indonesia. Kotelawala first dispatched an informal word through the departing Indonesian Charge d’Affaires to gauge Indonesia’s interest. It is not clear what exactly this official relayed to his government, but the Ceylonese minister in Jakarta, A.E. Goonesinha, cabled to express a frisson of excitement among Asian diplomats as well as within the Indonesian government, including President Sukarno and Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo, about Kotlewala’s alleged proposal for a ‘Great Federation of all Asian countries’!
Alarmed, Kotelawala cabled his official invitation to Ali Sastroamidjojo with a clarification that all he intended was a ‘friendly discussion’ among neighbours without any official agenda. The Indonesian Prime Minister, who was keen to organise a bigger conference of ‘Africo-Asian countries’ (sic.) – and had indeed sounded out Nehru about it, who did not show much enthusiasm – was disappointed with the conference’s plans. He was even heard mocking the proposal for a conference without any idea of what they were going to discuss! In any case, he agreed to participate on the condition that he be allowed to propose a follow-up conference of Asian and African countries.
Geneva. Bogor. Bandung.
By the time the five premiers met in Colombo in late April 1954, the international context had transformed to suddenly put the spotlight on Colombo. This was because it coincided with another conference in Geneva which discussed ways to ending the war in Indochina. It included the U.S., the U.K., France, the USSR and – making a debut in international affairs – the People’s Republic of China, in addition to the local players, Viet Minh, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Despite being at the Geneva conference, the U.S. was unwilling to try honest negotiations. Instead, it floated in parallel the idea of ‘United Action’, i.e. a collective defence treaty among allies against communist aggression. Seeing this as a sure-shot ticket to the next war, Britain sought counsel from the Colombo group, three of whom were also commonwealth members. Importantly, these were all democratic countries, who collectively seemed to speak for postcolonial Asia. Nehru had issued a six-point ceasefire proposal from the Indian parliament. The Colombo Conference suddenly rivalled Geneva because of the anticipated endorsement of Colombo powers to Nehru’s proposals, which they did as a representative of authoritative Asian opinion on Asian problems. This opened a vital way forward towards breaking the deadlock in Geneva.
Eight months later, in the next iteration of this Summit at Bogor, a touch south of Jakarta, the Colombo group took the historic decision of organising an even bigger conference of twenty-nine African and Asian states, called the Asian-African Conference, subsequently organised in the hill town of Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955.
As has been the fate of most good South Asian regional ideas, the group’s demise was as unnoticed as its rise was spectacular. A third conference was never organised. After Bandung, Nehru and U Nu no longer had any enthusiasm for large gatherings that did not have an ideological purpose. The other three leaders, Kotelawala, Bogra and Ali Sastroamidjojo, did not survive politically for long. But in the global context, South Asia was also perhaps never again as important a collective global voice. As early entrants into the decolonial world, the Colombo Five asserted a moral claim to being democratic polities which was elevated by them being, until then, relatively outside of the power bloc politics. Coups, authoritarian governments and military alliances were to plague the region from thereon. South Asia waited for three more decades for another political formation, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), to come up.
