From Russia with Love: Dissidents, Defectors, and the Politics of Asylum in Cold War India

In June 2012, in an act that garnered global media headlines, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, whose website hosts hundreds of thousands of, chiefly American, classified government documents, sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Subject to a Swedish arrest warrant in connection with alleged sexual misconduct, and under scrutiny from prosecutors in the United States over Wikileaks activities, Assange’s action sparked a diplomatic row between the United Kingdom, United States, Sweden and Ecuador, over the legal process, and wider moral and political imperatives, surrounding asylum applications. More recently, Russia and the United States have fallen out over Moscow’s decision to grant asylum to the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. The Assange and Snowden cases are far from unique. In the latter half of the twentieth century, requests for asylum became a prominent feature of the Cold War. Celebrated defectors, such Kim Philby, John Discoe Smith, József Mindszenty, and Anatoliy Golitsyn were paraded as ideological trophies in the struggle between Communism and the so-called ‘free world’. To date, the significance of political asylum as an instrument of Cold War propaganda and public diplomacy has been examined almost exclusively in terms of a northern hemispheric East-West binary. Utilizing recently declassified official records and private papers from Britain, the United States, India, and the Soviet Union; attention is focused on the important role played by non-aligned nations in the global South, and more specifically that of India, in the Cold War asylum story. Specifically, in reinterpreting international responses to defections and applications for asylum in the Indian subcontinent between the late 1940s and early 1980s, including those of the Dalai Lama, and Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, new light is shed upon internal and external attitudes to Indian non-alignment, and the impact that these had upon New Delhi’s foreign policymaking.