Nationalist leaders in India and Southeast Asia offered pledges of moral support, but these affirmations, though welcome, carried little practical import. Hardly anyone in the major world capitals paid attention in January 1947 when Pandit Nehru, then vice president of the self-declared Indian interim government and its minister for external affairs, publicly appealed to France to “revert to peaceful methods in Indo-China.” Fewer still took note of Burmese nationalist leader Aung San’s declaration, also in January, that it was “necessary for all the states of Asia to assist” the Vietnamese in
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