One Life is Not Enough

by K. Natwar Singh

the Americans moved a resolution in the Security Council condemning India’s liberation of Goa and two other Portuguese enclaves. The British delegate invoked a sixteenth-century Anglo-Portuguese treaty which laid down that an attack on one country would be considered an attack on the other. What surprised us in the Indian delegation was that two great democracies were defending Portuguese colonialism. The Soviet delegate, Z.A. Zorin, vetoed the resolution that was condemning India’s getting rid of Portuguese colonialism. The reaction in the Western world against India was virulent. As B.K. Nehru later wrote: There was hardly any necessity for me to explain our case to the State Department; they knew it well and undoubtedly sympathised with our predicament. I went to the President to give him our point of view. This also was really unnecessary because he knew our case as well as I did. When I said that I hoped he was not annoyed with us, like the rest of the country seemed to be, he said, ‘Not at all. I am not in the least bit annoyed because I understand your case. You have done now what you should have done fourteen years ago. But you spent those fourteen years preaching morality to us and telling us how wrong it is to use force in one’s own interests. Now you have done exactly what any other country would have done and used violence to further your interests. The result is that the country is saying that the minister (preacher) has been caught coming out of the brothel a...