Comment: Give a critical estimate of India’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement. (2005, 2006, 20 Marks)
India is remembered as the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the claim is true but incomplete. Under Jawaharlal Nehru India supplied the movement’s ideas, norms and diplomatic method; it could not supply the material power, institutional drive or consistency that would have made that leadership binding. A critical estimate weighs both ledgers: what India gave NAM, and what NAM gave India.
India’s role at its strongest
- Intellectual authorship: Nehru’s broadcast of 7 September 1946, pledging to keep away from the “power politics of groups”, preceded the blocs; Panchsheel (1954) became, via the Bandung Ten Principles, the movement’s normative code.
- Convening habit: the Asian Relations Conference (1947) and the Delhi Conference on Indonesia (January 1949), whose demands fed into Security Council Resolution 67, showed that weak states acting together could move a great-power body.
- Mediatory proof: India chaired the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in Korea (1953) and the Indo-China supervisory commissions (1954), a chair both camps accepted.
- Membership rules: the Cairo criteria of 1961 turned Nehru’s distinction between avoiding bloc quarrels and avoiding the world into admission tests.
- Repair and institutions: after resisting Fidel Castro’s “natural ally” thesis at Havana (1979), Indira Gandhi hosted the New Delhi summit (1983) to heal the split. India chaired NAM until 1986; Rajiv Gandhi launched the AFRICA Fund and the 1988 Action Plan for nuclear disarmament.
- Reinvention: P. V. Narasimha Rao at Jakarta (1992) redefined non-alignment as autonomy and development, not a position between blocs.
The critique
- Author, not builder: the summit form came from Josip Broz Tito; the Arab and African constituency from Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah. Nehru doubted the sense of a third bloc, and at Belgrade his stress on war-avoidance over anti-imperialism set him against Sukarno.
- Selective application: muted criticism over Hungary (1956) against loud condemnation of Suez; abstention on the UN resolution on Afghanistan (January 1980). The 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty made Indian equidistance unbelievable in Washington and Beijing.
- Asymmetric returns: the Colombo powers declined to name China the aggressor in 1962; Indonesia aided Pakistan in 1965; in 1971 the non-aligned majority helped pass Resolution 2793 (104–11) against India’s position.
- Idealism over capability: a realist reading treats 1962 as the price of moral prestige substituted for military power. C. Raja Mohan (2016) adds that the movement was dysfunctional long before 1991, its members’ interests never reconcilable.
- Withdrawn investment: the 1998 tests broke a disarmament plank India had authored; no Prime Minister has attended a full summit since Tehran (2012), and India sent a Minister of State to the Kampala ministerial (2025) and a non-MEA minister to Belgrade (2026).
The defence
- Non-alignment was never neutrality. K. Natwar Singh called it neither dogma nor doctrine but “a state of mind”: a licence to judge issues on their merits, India’s interests included.
- Srinath Raghavan (War and Peace in Modern India, 2010) reads Nehru’s policy as liberal realism, so the bends were prudence, not betrayal. Itty Abraham (2008) shows India steering the South away from a racially framed Afro-Asian bloc towards non-alignment’s universal criteria.
- The doctrine was a floor: India joined no alliance and granted no base through 1962, 1965 and 1971, and drew aid from both blocs, from Bhilai’s steel to PL-480 wheat.
Conclusion
India’s role was foundational but thin: it wrote NAM’s vocabulary, did its best diplomacy and repaired it in crisis, yet bent the doctrine when security demanded and received little solidarity in return. Its enduring legacy is strategic autonomy, practised today through multi-alignment and Southern platforms India itself chairs, more than the movement it led.