'Noise and flutter': India, propaganda, and global conflict, 1942--1963

This dissertation, based on archival research conducted in India, Britain, and the United States, addresses how India served as an ideological battleground in the international contest to win "hearts and minds" during World War II and the Cold War. The dissertation discusses how Americans, Soviets, and Indians manipulated propaganda to achieve diplomatic goals. Considering the strategy and operation foreign propaganda in India, the dissertation also examines how Indians responded to that propaganda and developed their own. Although the connection between propaganda and diplomacy in Indo-U.S. relations receives the most attention, the dissertation attempts to demonstrate how the ideological war over India's role in the world challenges the traditional view of the Cold War as a binary struggle between East and West.;After World War II, adopted a posture of nonalignment, but neither the Americans nor Soviets believed that India could avoid choosing sides in the early Cold War and responded to nonalignment by attempting to "persuade" India to choose sides. Despite India's strategic unimportance compared to Europe and East Asia, India's significance as a propaganda target lay in its neutral posture. Soviet and American policy makers feared the ideological "loss" of India would have represented a considerable symbolic victory for the other side in the Cold War. Propaganda seemed a relatively inexpensive alternative. Meanwhile, the Indian government resented the ideological struggle over propaganda as a direct challenge to the goals of India's foreign policy. Indian policy makers saw nonalignment as the embodiment of an independent foreign policy, and regarded foreign attempts to win Indian opinion as an encroachment upon Indian sovereignty.;The interrelation between the Cold War and decolonization forms a major theme of the dissertation. The Cold War and decolonization had a reciprocal influence of upon one another. The Soviet Union competed with the United States to present alternative ideological models of political economy to the postcolonial world. India used the ideological struggle between the Americans and the Soviets to negotiate foreign assistance and to promote its own vision of the world, nonalignment.