Resisting the Cold War: India and the Cultural Politics of Super Power Propaganda
Eric Pullin, Carthage College
May 28 2014, 5pm, Highfield A01
After winning its independence in 1947, India quickly became a major ideological battleground in the Cold War. To the rival American and Soviet superpowers, propaganda and psychological warfare offered a means of securing the support of nonaligned India. In turn, India employed a number of techniques to avoid being drawn into the ideological conflict between the East and West. Specifically, India's Government led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, engaged in a prolonged and systematic struggle to restrict the scale and the scope of foreign propaganda activity conducted on its soil. Despite presenting their information activities as innocent and benign, both the Soviet Union, through the Communist Party of India, and the United States, through the Central Intelligence Agency, worked covertly to direct propaganda ‘over the heads’ of India’s leaders in the hope that the Indian people would demand changes in their nation’s foreign policy from below. The Soviets’ ideological offensive in India posed an imminent and immanent threat to the country’s domestic stability, but American propaganda posed an even greater long-term challenge to India’s policy of non-alignment. India cared nothing about the superpowers' reasons or justifications for intervention in South Asia. Simply put, governments in New Delhi resented, and, in turn resisted, the staging of a propaganda Cold War in India.
Bio:
Eric D. Pullin, Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at Carthage College, specializes in teaching the history of India and the United States. Pullin received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009.
Pullin’s recent publications include “The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: Covert Operations and Cultural Affairs,” Intelligence History Now and Then, edited by Christopher Moran and Christopher J. Murphy (2013); “Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold: India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951-1958, Intelligence and National Security (2011); “Noise and Flutter: U.S. Propaganda in India during World War II,” Diplomatic History (April 2010); “The Indian Civil Conflict, 1946-1949,” A Guide to Civil Wars of the World, edited by Uk Heo and Karl De Rouen, Jr. (2007).
Pullin is currently completing his first book, “Noise and Flutter”: India, Propaganda, and Global Ideological Conflict, 1942-1964.