Envoy to Nehru

In this important study of Canada's relations with India by one of our most respected diplomats, who was high commissioner to New Delhi from 1953 to 1957, the author has wisely restrained himself from writing the kind of self-aggrandizing, glib memoir that John Kenneth Galbraith produced after serving as Kennedy's envoy to India (Ambassador's Journal,1969). Instead Escott Reid has knit together sixteen essays - all solid,some brilliant- that argue a strong thesis. In the early years following the withdrawal of the British from South Asia, Canada developed a special relationship with India,an entente that was rooted in a common resistance to the hysteria of American cold-war diplomacy. The trust that grew up between Lester Pearson and Jawaharlal Nehru was largely responsible, in Reid's view, for their crucial contribution in 1953 to the armistice that brought to an end the Korean hostilities. This unusual working rapport was not to survive. It eroded, Reid argues, under the strains caused by American resentment of Indian non-alignment and the subsequent US military aid extended to Pakistan, an intervention that unbalanced the touchy equilibrium between India and Pakistan and so was instrumental in aborting an amicable settlement of the Kashmir question.