'A Serious menace to security': British intelligence, V.K. Krishna Menon and the Indian High Commission in London, 1947–52

McGarr, Paul M. (2010) 'A Serious menace to security': British intelligence, V.K. Krishna Menon and the Indian High Commission in London, 1947–52. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38 (3). pp. 441-469. ISSN 0308-6534

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Recently released Security Service (MI5) documents offer new insights into the Indian government's vulnerability to communist subversion after 1947, and the extent to which this threatened British national security. Existing historical works have noted MI5's concern over the links between Indian nationalists and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) during the inter-war period. Absent from the current historiography, however, is an account of the British government's response to V. K. Krishna Menon's appointment as India's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom in 1947. This article examines the nature of Menon's relationship with the CPGB, the risk that communists working for him within India's High Commission posed to British security, and the strategy that MI5 developed to meet it. Taken as a whole, as this article illustrates, the Attlee government's conviction that India, and more particularly, Krishna Menon, represented a weak link in the Commonwealth security chain, opens up new perspectives on Anglo-Indian relations post-1947.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1012866
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Arts > School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2010.503397
Depositing User: Davies, Mrs Sarah
Date Deposited: 17 Apr 2014 11:16
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 20:25
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/2310

Actions (Archive Staff Only)

Edit View Edit View