India aligned with the Soviets

What would be the best POD for this?

If Ghandi is taken out earlier, perhaps a more violent decolonization ends up with a socialist coup.

An earlier POD involving radicalized veterans of WWI?

Anyother ideas out there? What events could stir the Indians out of the non-aligned movement into the Eastern Bloc.
 
Maybe an Indian Nationalist party arose in India, using specifically anti-British and generally anti-NATO propaganda, and quickly gained support. The Soviets, seeing an opportunity to draw another nation into their bloc, made overtures to the Indian Nationalist Party, and as the INP grew in support and power, so India gradually leaned towards the Soviets.
 

Cook

Banned
Sanjay Gandhi takes over from his mother during the Indian Emergency in 1974, suspends the constitution, closes all opposition media and arrests political rivals. His foreign policy takes India closer to her natural partner, the Soviet Union.
 
Sanjay wouldn't overthrow his mother- for one thing, the military, led by Manekshaw, would make their views well-known on that subject. Also, you forget Sanjay's Surge interview of 1973, where he advocated what was in essence Singh/Rao's NEP of the 1990s- a Thatcherization of the Indian economy, and denounced the CPI (M) as champagne socialists, which is rather rich coming from Sanjay- a champagne fascist. His role model, according to his mother's biographer Katherine Frank, was Ferdinand Marcos, who was hardly a Soviet-apologist socialist. I'd suspect Sanjay would try the same things, except without keeping the military as prominent in national life as Marcos did IOTL. Indira kept India within the Soviet bloc, as most NAM countries were Soviet allies or sympathizers in all but name.
 

Cook

Banned
I wasn’t proposing a palace Coup, just greater dual rule.
I was thinking he’d move foreign policy towards the Soviets because they’d be comfortable aiding an Autocrat that made the right noises, and because the U.S. was heavily involved with Pakistan.
 
By 1975, Sanjay was de facto DPM, and in 1980 in all but name. He was able to order the demolition entire parts of Delhi and install his own low-ranking Cabinet ministers. Family planning (aka forced sterilization) was administered by him, not his cipher in Health. The whole Emergency, according to Frank, if not his idea was certainly something which he directed on a daily basis. Had he had his way the 1977 election would never have happened. Ironically had the election been held on schedule in February 1976, when Congress was still popular, much as Marcos' martial law was popular in the mid-70s, she'd have won another landslide. As for Soviets: maybe, but I can see him doing what Rajiv did IOTL- formally aligned with the Soviets but slowly drifting into the American/Commonwealth orbit. Thatcher remarks about this in her memoirs. With Nixon in office, no chance of a realignment, since he for some reason was very keen on Yahya Khan. Even Kissinger, in his memoirs, says it was totally irrational for Nixon to put so much stock in a standard-issue military tinpot like Yahya. Carter doesn't like Marcos and his analogues, but if Reagan wins in '76 he will.
 
May be the US gives Pakistan full backing in the 1965 war, while the Soviets sent aid to India?

I think full alliance with any side in the Cold War is rather hard since India never faced existential threat. Being courted by both is the best position to be in.
 
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