Does the Non-Aligned Movement have any future in the wake of India’s growing indifference towards it? (2025, 10 Marks)
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), founded at Belgrade in 1961, gathered newly independent states outside Cold War bloc politics. India, a founder, has moved from leading it to merely attending it. NAM does have a future, but as a caucus of voice and legitimacy rather than an actor, and India’s distance is a symptom of that change more than its cause.
The evidence of Indian indifference
- Falling representation: Vice-Presidents at Margarita Island (2016) and Baku (2019); S. Jaishankar at the Kampala summit (January 2024); a Minister of State at the Kampala ministerial (October 2025); and Kiren Rijiju, from outside the MEA, at the Belgrade 65th-anniversary meeting (1 September 2026).
- Platforms India steers: the 2023 G20 presidency that seated the African Union, the Voice of the Global South summits and the BRICS New Delhi summit (September 2026).
- Instrumental use: Narendra Modi joined only the virtual NAM summit of May 2020, calling NAM the world’s “moral voice”. Harsh V. Pant (2020) read this as pragmatism, not a return to non-alignment, and expected a “mothballed” existence.
Why NAM’s weakness predates India’s drift
- Structural deficits: no charter, secretariat or budget; consensus among some 120 members yields lowest-common-denominator declarations.
- It never restrained its own members: Iran–Iraq, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (1990), Yugoslavia’s break-up.
- C. Raja Mohan (2016) argues that the end of the Cold War did not make NAM irrelevant: it was dysfunctional long before, since so many states’ interests could never be harmonised, and it survives as a triennial ritual.
Why a future remains
- Multipolarity revives hedging: Sino-American rivalry, the Ukraine war and secondary sanctions recreate space for weak states to stay unclaimed. T. V. Paul (Restraining Great Powers, 2018) shows how such coalitions soft-balance by delegitimising coercion.
- A new agenda: debt, climate finance, vaccine equity, the digital divide and unilateral tariffs. The 50 per cent US tariff on India (August 2025) made anti-coercion norms India’s own interest.
- A diversifying order: the dollar’s share of global reserves slipped to 56.7 per cent in mid-2026 (IMF), keeping de-dollarisation and Southern voice on the agenda.
- A credential India still uses: at Kampala (2025) India attacked institutions “frozen in the reality of 1945”; founding membership underwrites its claim to lead the Global South against China, only an observer in NAM.
Conclusion
NAM’s future is that of a forum for voice and normative legitimacy, not a restraint on great powers. India’s indifference reflects those limits more than it causes them. Yet India is spending a credential it still draws on; calibrated re-engagement, carrying NAM’s agenda into BRICS and the G20, would serve both.