“India has of late, chosen to debunk non-alignment in its pursuit of multi-alignment.” Comment. (2024, 15 Marks)
Non-alignment, announced by Jawaharlal Nehru in his broadcast of 7 September 1946 as keeping away from “the power politics of groups, aligned against one another”, served India both as grand strategy and as a claim to exceptionalism. Multi-alignment, simultaneous issue-specific partnerships with rival powers, none binding, now dominates official speech. The statement says the second has discredited the first; the verdict turns on what non-alignment is taken to mean.
The case that India has debunked it
- Interoperability with one great power. LEMOA (2016), COMCASA (2018) and BECA (2020) with the United States, and the Quad, are what the old doctrine was meant to prevent.
- The movement downgraded. No Indian Prime Minister has attended a full NAM summit since Tehran (2012). India sent its Vice President to Margarita Island (2016) and Baku (2019), S. Jaishankar to Kampala (2024) and Kiren Rijiju, a minister outside foreign affairs, to the Belgrade anniversary meeting (September 2026).
- Vocabulary retired. Jaishankar called non-alignment “a term of a particular era” (July 2020); Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale told the Raisina Dialogue (January 2019) that India had “moved on from its non-aligned past” and was aligned “based on issues”.
- Normative planks dropped. The 1998 tests ended disarmament leadership, and India joined export-control regimes it once called discriminatory.
The case that it has not
- No alliance. India has no mutual-defence treaty, no foreign bases and no duty to consult; in the same July 2020 remarks Jaishankar said India would never be part of an alliance.
- Autonomy under pressure. India abstained on Ukraine resolutions, most recently in February 2026, and bore a US penalty tariff over Russian crude from August 2025 until the interim understanding of February 2026 without conceding the principle.
- Inconsistent memberships. India sits in the Quad and in the SCO and BRICS, hosting the BRICS summit in September 2026. The formula of Jaishankar’s The India Way (2020), “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play”, is hedging, not alignment.
The definitional problem
Martand Jha (2018) argued that what non-alignment means to India depends on the prism: judged by alliances, its credentials look doubtful; judged as policy autonomy for post-colonial states, the idea still stands, and India needs to explain what it now means by it. The record bears him out: the 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty and the muted response to Afghanistan in 1979 were both defended as non-aligned, so a doctrine never defined could be dropped quietly by ceasing to use the word. Defined as bloc-avoidance, it has been abandoned; defined as decisional freedom, it has not. Western partners call this opportunism, though they practise the same.
Conclusion
India has debunked the movement, the vocabulary and the third-worldist moral programme, but not the doctrine’s core: refusing any obligation to act at another state’s direction. Multi-alignment is that refusal pursued by joining many arrangements rather than staying out of all, so “recast” fits better than “debunk”. It lasts only while partners tolerate it, and the US Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act (September 2026) tests it.