Indian-Romanian Solidarities during the Cold War: Indira Gandhi and Nicolae Ceaușescu

In the years following the fall of state socialism in the Eastern bloc, there have been numerous theoretical attempts at forging a critical discourse about communism by drawing inspiration from other cognate theoretical spheres, most notably the postcolonial one. Studies by theorists such as Bogdan Ștefănescu (2012) and by Cristina Șandru (2012) are examples of this effort of theretical repositioning. This article proposes a comparison between the Romanian communist periodical Scînteia and the post-independence, internationally attuned Indian periodical The Times of India, with a view to examining some of the ways in which the political friendship between Romanian communist president Nicolae Ceaușescu and Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi illustrates a possible theoretical dialogue between postcolonialism and postcommunism. Whilst this alleged political friendship was also fuelled by the motivation behind two very ambitious personal trajectories, the details of the accounts of political encounters between the two leaders, as discussed in the two periodicals, reveal important similarities, but also call for caution with respect to the many faceted historical roles played by Marxist ideologies.