Decoding who utters Nehru’s ‘we’ dissolves the image of a unified Third World bloc

Evidence

‘We do not agree with the communist teachings, we do not agree with the anti-communist teachings, because they are both based on wrong principles, Nehru is reported to have said. If we were to read a sentence of this kind in the New-Critical fashion, overvalorizing the verbal surface and detaching the sentence from the system of enunciations and the series of political contexts in which it belongs, it would be perfectly possible to read into it the precise meaning that Said conveys in his sentence about the ‘Orient’, reborn as a Third World, asserting itself against the new configuration of two imperial powers. But who is this ‘we’ in Nehru’s sentence? This needs some decoding, because Nehru was undoubtedly the main luminary at the Conference, but before we make the mistake of having this ‘we’ represent the Conference as such, hence the generality of a ‘Third World’, it is best to recall that Zhou En Lai occupied almost an equal eminence and a statement of that kind (‘communist teachings based on wrong principles’) simply could not have been made on his behalf. And, of course, Nehru had been the first to underline the fact that it was a conference of governments. Nehru’s sentence, in other words, is a governmental sentence. The ‘we’ is, in the first instance, the government of India. In this first instance, it presumes that it speaks on behalf of all of India; government, in other words, claims to be the nation. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1277

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges to my strategic-essentialism research: Ahmad is doing to ‘Third World’ at Bandung what Spivak-era critics do to ‘Orient’ — exposing the pronoun as concealing a specific governmental/historical subject rather than a self-identical collective. — connects to: Fear of nuclear war with the US drove Nehru’s Afro-Asian bloc — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1269
• SEED: A readable essay angle: ‘who speaks for the Third World’ — decoding the grammatical ‘we’ of any collective identity claim, parallel to Nehru’s sentence and Said’s Orient.