The Information Research Department,British Covert Propaganda,and the Sino-Indian War of 1962: Combating Communism and Courting Failure?

Britain's post-war interventions in former colonial territories remain a controversial area of contemporary history. In the case of India, recent releases of official records in the United Kingdom and South Asia have revealed details of British government anti-communist propaganda activity in the subcontinent during the Cold War period. This article focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). It specifically examines the 1960s: a time between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, when IRD operations peaked. The Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China, but cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain's propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence, and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one focused on Communist China, and declared to the Indian government; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviets. In this context, Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

Obstruction as Power: Rethinking Britain's Caucasus Occupation 1918–20

This article draws on French and British archival sources to rethink the history of Britain's 1918--1920 occupation of the Caucasus. The extant historiography casts London as eager to reinvigorate the region's oil exports in order to buoy its own supplies, but this article suggests that various elements within and close to the British administration sought to obstruct oil exports. Preventing Caucasus oil from reaching global markets seems to have helped parts of the British administration reach their aims during negotiations with the French government and Royal Dutch Shell. It also improved the viability of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company by denying valuable oil supplies to rival firms. Acknowledging the British oil interests that steered state policies during this period allows a richer story to unfold, one that demonstrates how imperial power in the wake of the Great War could be brought to serve the aims of, and even adopt the methods of, transnational oil companies operating in an emerging global fuel market.     

From a Politics of Conviction to a Politics of Interest? The Changing Ontologics of Youth Politics in India and Nicaragua

There exists a longstanding association between youth and revolution, partly due to the assumption that the politics of the former are inherently “prefigurative” in nature. Youth politics can often actually be quite conservative, however, as can be observed in contemporary Nicaragua, where rather than attempting to “change the world” in the way that previous militant youth generations were famously associated with, current Sandinista youth activists engage primarily in forms of neo‐patrimonial clientelism. At the same time, the evolving experience of everyday political action by university educated youth in Uttar Pradesh, India highlights how economic endeavours can, under certain circumstances, become a form of politics, often of a more transformative variety than classic forms of collective mobilization. The comparison of Nicaragua and India thus highlights the critical importance of considering the wider environment within which youth mobilize and take action in order to understand how and why particular political “ontologics” emerge.     

‘Main Bhi to Hindostaan Hoon’: gender and nation-state in India’s Border Roads Organisation*

In this ethnography of India’s border roads, I follow the circular/seasonal journeys of migrant road labourers from Jharkhand to the upper reaches of the Himalayas and back. I pay particular attention to the notions of masculinity and nation-building as they reveal themselves in their travel narratives. These migrants travel every May to work as road construction labour for the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) of India working in the Himalayan frontiers. While the BRO advertises its roles through various road signs claiming to be ‘creating, connecting and caring’ (for) the nation – it is the ambivalent construction of the labourers gendered national subjectivities emerging in the narratives of and about the migrant labour that is of particular interest to this article. One of the central contributions of this article is to show how hierarchical domains of the nation and the hierarchical structures within masculinity intersect and rely upon each other to build gendered national subjects. This research is based on over five years of a very mobile ethnography.