India and the Making of the Non-Aligned Movement

The claim, and how to test it

India is routinely described as a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the description is accurate but lazy. Founding a movement is a contested achievement, and the claim becomes interesting only once it is broken into parts that can be checked: who convened the meetings, who wrote the norms, who did the diplomacy that made the norms credible, and who supplied the institutional form. On those four tests India scores very differently.

• Three rival accounts of the movement’s paternity circulate, and each has evidence behind it.
  • The Indian account makes Nehru the intellectual author: he named the position, convened the first Asian assemblies, supplied Panchsheel as its code, and showed through Korea and Indo-China that a non-aligned state could do real diplomatic work.
  • The Yugoslav account makes Tito the organisational author — it was Tito who wanted a standing conference of non-aligned heads of state, who pressed for Belgrade in 1961, and who kept pushing when Nehru was lukewarm about summitry.
  • The Egyptian account makes Nasser the political author: Suez in 1956 gave non-alignment its heroic episode, and Nasser brought an Arab and African constituency neither India nor Yugoslavia could reach.
• A fourth account dispenses with founders altogether, treating the movement as the arithmetic of decolonisation — dozens of new states entering the United Nations between 1955 and 1965, none able to afford an alliance, all needing a caucus. Someone was going to convene them.
• The test applied here is counterfactual and specific: not “was India important”, which is unfalsifiable, but what in the movement would look different, or would not exist, had India behaved otherwise between 1946 and 1961.

Founding input	Principally supplied by	India’s share
The habit of Asian assembly	India — Delhi 1947, Delhi 1949	Decisive; nobody else was convening
The normative code	India — Panchsheel, 1954	Decisive; the Bandung Ten restate it
Proof that neutrality could be operational	India — Korea, Indo-China	Decisive; the only mediator both blocs accepted
A three-continent constituency	Yugoslavia and Egypt	Marginal; India had no European or Arab reach
The summit form and institutional drive	Yugoslavia — Tito	Negative; Nehru resisted a standing conference
The African bloc	Ghana, Guinea, Egypt	Small; India worked through the UN, not Africa

• The period covered here runs from 1946 to 1961, from the building of a foreign-policy machine in the Interim Government to the first summit at Belgrade. Why India chose non-alignment at all is a separate argument about determinants and definitions, assumed here rather than restated.
• The period ends where India’s capacity to lead ends. The Sino-Indian war of October 1962 did not destroy the movement India helped build, but it destroyed the premise on which India had led it — that moral authority could substitute for material strength.

Before the state: the Congress’s foreign policy, 1927–1946

India’s international engagement did not begin with independence. The Indian National Congress ran what amounted to a shadow foreign policy for two decades before 1947, and the assumptions Nehru brought to office in September 1946 were formed in that period rather than improvised afterwards.

Brussels, February 1927, and the League Against Imperialism

• The Congress of Oppressed Nationalities met at the Egmont Palace in Brussels on 10 February 1927, and out of it came the League Against Imperialism.
  • It gathered 175 delegates, of whom 107 came from 37 countries under colonial rule — the first genuinely intercontinental assembly of the colonised rather than a meeting of European sympathisers.
  • Nehru attended as the official representative of the Congress, deputed by the Gauhati session, travelling with the exiled revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya.
  • He sat on the Presidium and became one of five honorary presidents of the League, alongside figures including Albert Einstein — a formal position, not a spectator’s pass.
• What Nehru took from Brussels was a method, not a doctrine. His report of 19 February 1927 urged Indian association with the League because it offered contact with Asian and African movements and a platform for propaganda, while leaving the Congress’s independence intact.
  • He singled out the joint British–Indian–Chinese resolution committing signatories to fight for complete independence and to oppose the use of troops in support of imperial power.
  • He recorded his conviction that whatever became of this particular body, some such international organisation was bound to come.
• Three habits date from Brussels and recur in everything India later convened.
  • Assembly across continents rather than within a region — the instinct that Asians and Africans belonged in the same room.
  • Participation without affiliation, Nehru’s insistence that association must not bind the Congress, which is structurally the same move as non-alignment.
  • Suspicion of Communist organisational control, which grew as the League fell under Comintern direction, and which explains why India later refused to let the movement it built become a Soviet auxiliary.

Congress resolutions of the 1920s and 1930s

• The Madras session of December 1927 resolved against the use of Indian troops in China, Mesopotamia and Persia — the first Congress claim to determine what Indian soldiers were used for, and the ancestor of India’s later refusal to let its forces serve bloc purposes.
• The Calcutta Congress of 1928 created a Foreign Department of the party, with Nehru as its director, to maintain contact with anti-imperialist movements abroad. A party in a colony was building a chancery.
• Through the 1930s the Congress took positions on conflicts in which India had neither stake nor capacity — condemning fascist and Nazi aggression, opposing the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and declaring solidarity with Republican Spain, Abyssinia and China.
  • The medical mission sent to China in 1938, remembered through Dwarkanath Kotnis, was the earliest instance of what became India’s signature contribution — help that is deliberately non-military in somebody else’s war.
• The Tripuri session of 1939 asserted India’s right to have and to direct its own foreign policy, and refused in advance to be committed to a war declared on India’s behalf.

September 1946: a foreign office, and a formula

• The Department of External Affairs was established under the Interim Government in September 1946, with Nehru holding the portfolio alongside the vice-presidency of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. India began conducting foreign policy roughly eleven months before independence.
• Nehru’s broadcast to the nation of 7 September 1946 supplied the formula before the doctrine had a name.

“We propose, as far as possible, to keep away from the power politics of groups, aligned against one another.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

• The wording repays close reading, because it is more modest than what it later became.
  • “As far as possible” is a qualification, not a pledge; it concedes at the outset that circumstances might compel otherwise.
  • “Groups aligned against one another” makes the object of avoidance bloc antagonism, not power politics as such — India proposed to stay out of the quarrel, not out of the world.
  • The same broadcast committed India to the United Nations, to Asian and African freedom, and to opposition to racial discrimination — the whole later agenda in embryo.
• The significance is one of sequence. The position was announced before independence, before the alliances existed, and before there was any bloc to be non-aligned between — so it was not a reaction to Cold War pressure but a prior commitment the Cold War then tested.

The Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March–April 1947

Five months before independence, with the country facing partition, the government-in-waiting convened the first pan-Asian assembly of the modern era. That it happened at all is the point: a state that did not formally exist yet was already trying to organise a continent.

What India attempted

• The conference met at the Purana Qila in New Delhi from 23 March to 2 April 1947, hosted by Nehru and organised by the Indian Council of World Affairs, with Sarojini Naidu presiding over the organising committee.
  • Delegates came from 28 countries, including the Soviet Central Asian republics whose participation Nehru insisted on, together with eight institutions and observers from the United Nations and the Arab League.
  • India fielded the largest contingent, 52 delegates and 6 observers, out of roughly 400 participants.
  • The form was deliberately non-governmental — a conference of national organisations rather than states, which allowed delegations from territories not yet independent.
• The agenda was developmental and social, not strategic, and that was a choice.
  • Round tables covered the transition to national economies, agricultural reconstruction, industrialisation, the status of women, cultural exchange and the problems of migrant Asian communities.
  • There was no defence discussion and no bloc, because Nehru’s purpose was to establish that Asia could meet on its own account without organising against anyone.

“For too long we, of Asia, have been petitioners in Western courts and chancelleries. That story must now belong to the past. We propose to stand on our own feet.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

The Tibet problem and the Chinese objection

• Tibet sent its own delegation, led by Sampho Tsewang Rigzin and Khenchung Lobsang Wangyal, which flew the Tibetan flag and was seated as a separate participant.
• A large map of Asia mounted behind the platform showed Tibet as distinct from China, and the Nationalist Chinese delegation protested formally.
  • The Chinese representative George Yeh threatened withdrawal unless the map was corrected, and Nehru resolved it by allowing the map to be repainted so that Tibet took China’s colour.
  • The Tibetan delegation kept its seat, but the symbolism had been surrendered.
• The episode is a miniature of the next fifteen years. Offered a choice between a small Himalayan neighbour’s claims and a large Asian power’s goodwill, India preserved the conference and conceded the symbol — the same calculation, at far higher stakes, that produced the 1954 agreement on Tibet.

Why it produced no institution

• The conference created an Asian Relations Organisation, headquartered in Delhi, with a provisional constitution and a plan for a second conference in China.
• It died quietly and was wound up in 1955 for want of work.
  • Most participants did not want it. The fear, entirely reasonable, was that a permanent Asian body based in Delhi would become an instrument through which India or China exerted influence over smaller members.
  • Nehru’s own conception was of a meeting, not a machine, and he invested nothing in the organisation once the conference dispersed.
  • The Chinese civil war, the partition of India, the Indonesian war and the Korean war removed within three years most of the conditions that had made an Asian gathering feel possible.
• The failure was instructive rather than wasted. India learned that Asian states would assemble for a purpose but not for an institution, and everything it convened afterwards — 1949, Colombo, Bogor, Bandung — was single-issue, time-limited and institutionally empty by design.

The Conference on Indonesia, New Delhi, January 1949

If 1947 was a gesture, 1949 was an operation. The second Delhi conference is the more important of the two and is routinely under-weighted, because it is where an Asian caucus first moved a great-power institution.

The provocation

• The Netherlands launched its second “police action” against the Indonesian Republic on 19 December 1948, seizing the republican capital at Yogyakarta and arresting Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta with most of the republican leadership, in defiance of a United Nations truce.
• India’s involvement predated the conference by two years. New Delhi had given the Republic early recognition and material help, and Indian civil aviation — the flights associated with Biju Patnaik — had carried republican leaders in and out of a blockaded archipelago.
• After the first Dutch police action of July 1947, India joined Australia in taking the dispute to the Security Council, the first time a newly decolonised state used the Council against a European power on another colony’s behalf.
• Alongside the 1949 conference India imposed unilateral sanctions, barring Dutch aircraft from Indian airspace and airfields and closing Indian ports to Dutch shipping bound for Indonesia — coercion applied by a state independent for eighteen months.

What India did

• Nehru convened a conference in New Delhi from 20 to 23 January 1949, and nineteen states attended.
  • Participants were Asian, West Asian and Australasian — Afghanistan, Australia, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen — with China, Nepal, New Zealand and Thailand attending as observers.
  • That Australia and New Zealand sat in an Asian caucus convened by India is itself a diplomatic fact of some weight so soon after 1945.
• Nehru framed the issue on two grounds at once — that the freedom of a sister country had been imperilled, and that resolutions of the United Nations had been flouted. The second argument was aimed at the Security Council and was the operative one.
• The conference resolved on specific and demanding terms, not on sentiment.
  • Immediate release of the arrested republican leaders and restoration of the Republican government at Yogyakarta.
  • Withdrawal of Dutch forces from territory seized in the December action.
  • Transfer of sovereignty to a United States of Indonesia by 1 January 1950, with an interim government by 15 March 1949.
  • Reconstitution of the UN Committee of Good Offices with enlarged powers.
• The resolutions were transmitted to the Security Council, arriving as the collective position of nineteen governments rather than the complaint of one.
• The Council adopted Resolution 67 on 28 January 1949, five days after the conference closed.
  • It demanded discontinuation of military operations, release of the political prisoners taken since 17 December 1948, and the return of the republican government to Yogyakarta.
  • It set elections to a constituent assembly by October 1949 and transfer of sovereignty by 1 July 1950.
  • The Committee of Good Offices was reconstituted as the United Nations Commission for Indonesia, with the enlarged authority Delhi had asked for.
• The Dutch ceasefire followed on 7 May 1949, and sovereignty was transferred in December of that year.

Why 1949 mattered more than 1947

	Asian Relations Conference, 1947	Conference on Indonesia, 1949
Character	Non-governmental, cultural, developmental	Intergovernmental, single-issue, political
Participants	28 countries and 8 institutions	19 states, including Australia as a participant and New Zealand as an observer
Object	Asian self-recognition in the abstract	A specific act of colonial reconquest
Output	An organisation nobody wanted	Resolutions transmitted to the Security Council
Effect	Wound up by 1955	Traceable in Resolution 67 within a week
Lesson for India	Assembly for its own sake fails	A focused caucus can move a great-power body

• The demonstration was the point. For the first time a group of newly independent states, holding no permanent seat and possessing no military leverage, produced a common position that a Security Council dominated by European powers substantially adopted.
• It also established India’s convening signature — a conference called at short notice, on one issue, with a resolution drafted to be actionable at the United Nations rather than merely declaratory. The same design reappears at Bogor and, in diluted form, at Bandung.
• The limits were visible too. The conference declined to constitute itself a permanent Asian bloc and explicitly rejected proposals for an anti-Communist Asian grouping — which pleased Nehru and disappointed those who wanted the caucus made durable.

Delhi in 1949 proved that a caucus of the weak could move the Security Council. Nothing India did afterwards proved it twice.

Proof of concept: China, Korea and Indo-China, 1949–1954

Between the Indonesia conference and the Colombo meeting, non-alignment stopped being a posture and became a diplomatic method. The Korean and Indo-Chinese episodes are where India acquired the mediatory reputation that made everything after 1954 possible, and they are the strongest evidence for the claim that India, and not merely decolonisation, produced the movement.

Recognition of the People’s Republic of China

• India recognised the People’s Republic on 30 December 1949, among the first states outside the socialist bloc to do so, and sent K. M. Panikkar as ambassador to Peking in April 1950.
• The decision was taken against explicit American displeasure and before Britain had moved, and it was defended on the ground that recognition acknowledges a government’s existence rather than approves of it.
• It bought India something no other non-Communist state possessed: a channel to Peking that Washington could use and did use, which is precisely what made India’s Korean role possible a year later.
• It also fixed a habit. From 1950 India argued continuously for Chinese representation at the United Nations, and Nehru raised the Chinese seat as a precondition of any Korean settlement — an early instance of India spending its own capital on another state’s status claim.

Korea: the tests of 1950 and 1951

• India’s record in Korea was not neutral and was not meant to be: a sequence of independent judgements that fell on different sides.
• It supported the Security Council resolutions of 25 and 27 June 1950 condemning the North Korean attack, and sent the 60th Parachute Field Ambulance under Lt Col A. G. Rangaraj, which performed some 2,300 field surgeries and treated wounded from both sides.
• It declined to endorse the crossing of the 38th parallel when the General Assembly moved in October 1950 to authorise operations north of it with a view to unifying Korea.
  • India’s argument was that the original mandate was defensive, that crossing converted a police action into a war of conquest, and that it would bring China into the fighting.
  • Panikkar transmitted Chinese warnings to that effect, which Washington discounted as the manoeuvring of an interested party. Chinese forces entered Korea in late October 1950, and India’s warning was retrospectively vindicated.
• It voted against Resolution 498, adopted on 1 February 1951, which branded the People’s Republic an aggressor in Korea.
  • The tally was 44 in favour, 7 against and 9 abstentions, with India and Burma among the seven. It was India’s first open break with the Western majority on a first-order Cold War question, and it cost heavily in Washington.
• The pattern is the substance of non-alignment as a working method: condemn the aggression, refuse the escalation, keep the channel open, and accept the reputational cost on each side in turn.

The Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission

• The armistice talks deadlocked for over a year on a single question: whether prisoners of war who refused repatriation could be compelled to return. The Communist side insisted on automatic repatriation under the Geneva Conventions; the United Nations Command insisted on voluntary repatriation.
• India supplied the formula that broke it. The resolution moved by V. K. Krishna Menon in the General Assembly in November 1952, adopted on 3 December 1952, proposed that prisoners be released to a neutral commission rather than to either belligerent, with no force used either to prevent or to compel return.
  • It was rejected at first by China and North Korea and accepted by everyone else except the Soviet bloc. When the armistice was concluded seven months later, its prisoner-of-war provisions followed the Indian scheme.
• The Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, established with the armistice of 27 July 1953, comprised India, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and Czechoslovakia — two from each side and India in the middle. Lt Gen K. S. Thimayya chaired it, with B. N. Chakravarty as alternate chairman.
  • India was chosen because it was the only member acceptable to both camps, which is as clean a demonstration of the value of non-alignment as the period offers.
  • The Custodian Force India, roughly 6,000 troops under Lt Gen S. P. P. Thorat, took custody of some 22,000 prisoners from September 1953 and held them through the explanation process until the Commission wound up in February 1954.
  • The force was shot at rhetorically by both sides — accused by the United Nations Command of favouring the Communists and by the Communist side of the reverse — and it completed the task without a mass breakdown of order.

Episode	India’s position	Which side it displeased
June 1950 resolutions	Supported; sent a medical unit	The Soviet bloc
Crossing the 38th parallel, 1950	Opposed; warned of Chinese entry	The United States
Resolution 498, February 1951	Voted against naming China an aggressor	The Western majority
POW repatriation, 1952	Authored the neutral-commission formula	China and North Korea, initially
NNRC, 1953–54	Chaired it and supplied the custodian force	Both, in turn

Geneva 1954 and the Indo-China commissions

• India was not a participant at the Geneva Conference of April to July 1954 on Korea and Indo-China, and this is often mis-stated.
  • Krishna Menon worked the conference from outside it, negotiating in corridors and hotel rooms rather than at the table; the shorthand of the time, that he was Geneva’s unofficial delegate, captures the position exactly.
• Nehru’s call in the Indian Parliament in February 1954 for an immediate ceasefire in Indo-China, and for the belligerents to negotiate directly, was made before any great power had proposed one.
• The Colombo Powers communiqué of 2 May 1954 reached Geneva while the conference sat, carrying an Asian position on a war that Europeans were settling among themselves.
• The settlement made India the chairman of the three International Commissions for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, with Poland and Canada as the other members — the same design as the Korean commission, and again with India in the middle because both sides could tolerate it.
• The Korean and Indo-Chinese commissions together are the practical high point of Nehruvian diplomacy. They also carried the seed of its exhaustion: supervisory work is thankless, unending and structurally incapable of satisfying anybody, and India’s reputation for even-handedness eroded steadily through the years it spent doing it.

The Colombo Powers and the road to Bandung

The conference at Bandung is usually narrated as though it emerged from a general Afro-Asian mood. It did not. It was produced by five governments meeting twice, and the record of those meetings is more revealing about India’s real position than the Bandung communiqué is.

Colombo, 28 April to 2 May 1954

• Five prime ministers met in Ceylon — Nehru of India, U Nu of Burma, Ali Sastroamidjojo of Indonesia, Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon and Mohammed Ali of Pakistan — and became known as the Colombo Powers.
• The immediate agenda was the war in Indo-China, then approaching its climax at Dien Bien Phu, and the communiqué’s call for a ceasefire and for a negotiated settlement was aimed at the Geneva conference sitting at that moment.
• Sastroamidjojo proposed a wider Asian–African conference, and the proposal was accepted in principle without a date, a venue or a list.
• The meeting also produced the first open disagreement about what the grouping was against.
  • Kotelawala moved a resolution condemning international Communism and its “efforts of infiltration and subversion” alongside Western colonialism.
  • Nehru insisted the two be kept apart. Colonialism, he argued, was the physical conquest and occupation of one country by another — a fact; international Communism was an ideology — an idea. The categories could not be merged without emptying the word.
  • Indonesia backed India; Pakistan and Burma backed Ceylon. The deadlock produced an anodyne paragraph and postponed the argument to Bandung.
• Nehru’s own public formulation of the five principles at Colombo in 1954 is the moment Panchsheel stopped being a bilateral preamble and became a general doctrine on offer to Asia.

Bogor, 28 to 29 December 1954

• The same five prime ministers met at Bogor in Indonesia and converted the Colombo agreement in principle into an operation: a date, a venue and an invitation list.
• They agreed to invite twenty-nine states, chose Bandung, fixed April 1955, and settled the purposes — Afro-Asian goodwill, social and economic problems, colonialism, and the position of Asia and Africa in world affairs.
• South Africa was excluded on account of apartheid; Israel was not invited, on Arab insistence and over Indian misgivings; the two Koreas and two Vietnams posed a problem resolved by inviting the Vietnamese states and neither Korea.
• Bogor is where India’s method from 1949 reappears: a short, focused preparatory meeting that fixes the agenda so tightly that the conference itself cannot be captured.

The five sponsors, and what each wanted

Sponsor	What it wanted from an Asian–African conference
India	A zone of peace insulated from the blocs; China domesticated into Asian norms; leadership without an institution
Indonesia	Prestige as convenor; West Irian; recognition as a major Asian state
Burma	Security against Chinese pressure through a public Chinese commitment to coexistence
Ceylon	A forum in which Soviet domination in Europe could be named as colonialism
Pakistan	Cover for its alliances, and a hearing for Kashmir; membership of an Asian caucus without leaving the Western camp

• Pakistan was a co-sponsor, and this single fact complicates any story of India leading an Asian bloc.
  • Pakistan had signed a mutual defence agreement with the United States in May 1954, joined the Manila Pact creating SEATO in September 1954, and would join the Baghdad Pact in 1955.
  • It sat at Colombo and Bogor as an equal convenor while acquiring the alliances Nehru most objected to, and it used the sponsorship to legitimise, not to abandon, that position.
  • The conclusion is uncomfortable and correct: the movement’s own preparatory core included a state that met none of the criteria it would later set for membership.
• India’s leadership at this stage was therefore agenda-setting rather than commanding. Nehru could shape what was discussed; he could not determine what was decided, and he never had the votes to exclude those who disagreed.

Getting China invited

• The decision to invite the People’s Republic of China was Nehru’s, pressed against reluctance from Ceylon and Pakistan and against explicit Western objection — Anthony Eden warned that Chinese attendance would create a bad impression in London and Washington, and Nehru dismissed the warning.
• His reasoning was consistent with everything since 1949: a China inside an Asian normative framework was safer than a China outside it, and Panchsheel was the instrument by which China would be bound.
• The Kashmir Princess, an Air India Constellation chartered to fly Chinese delegates and journalists from Hong Kong to the conference, was destroyed by a bomb on 11 April 1955, killing sixteen of the nineteen aboard. Zhou Enlai, the intended target, had changed his plans and travelled separately.
  • The attack was on an Indian aircraft with an Indian crew, carrying Chinese delegates to a conference India had helped convene — a compressed statement of how much India had staked on the Chinese relationship.
• The cost came later and was heavy. Nehru’s sponsorship gave Zhou a platform on which China performed superbly, and the reputation Zhou earned at Bandung became an asset China deployed across Asia and Africa in competition with India within five years.

India invited China into the Asian conference system in order to bind it, and instead handed it a constituency.

Panchsheel: the code India supplied

Movements need vocabulary before they need institutions, and the vocabulary of non-alignment is Indian. Panchsheel — the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence — is the single most portable thing India contributed, and it is also the episode on which India’s founding record is most vulnerable.

Where the principles actually appear

• They are set out in the preamble to the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India, signed at Peking on 29 April 1954, in force from 3 June 1954 for a term of eight years.
• There is no instrument called a “Panchsheel Treaty”. The five principles are the preambular recital of a narrow, technical, bilateral trade agreement about pilgrim routes, border passes and trade agencies, and their later status as a general code was an act of promotion by Nehru rather than a property of the text.
• The five, as stated:
  • Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
  • Mutual non-aggression.
  • Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.
  • Equality and mutual benefit.
  • Peaceful coexistence.
• The Sanskrit name, taken from a Buddhist formulation of five precepts, was chosen for its resonance across Asia and did real work: it made the code sound older than the Cold War and indigenous to the continent claiming it.

How they travelled

• Colombo, 1954. Nehru articulated the principles publicly as a general basis for relations between Asian states, in the same weeks the Colombo Powers were agreeing to convene a wider conference.
• Bilateral diffusion, 1954. At Nehru’s instigation Burma and China adopted the same formula in June 1954, and Nehru’s visit to Peking in October and Zhou’s to Delhi made the phrase familiar across the region.
• Bandung, 1955. The Ten Principles of the final communiqué restate Panchsheel and extend it. The overlap is close enough that the Ten are best read as Panchsheel with the additions the sponsors needed to bring in states that did not share India’s view of the blocs.
• Belgrade and after. The Ten became the entry test for the movement, and through it Panchsheel entered the normative core of a hundred-odd states’ declared foreign policy.

Panchsheel principle, 1954	Corresponding Bandung principle, 1955
Territorial integrity and sovereignty	Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations
Non-aggression	Refraining from aggression or the threat of force
Non-interference	Non-intervention in the internal affairs of another country
Equality and mutual benefit	Equality of all races and nations, large and small; mutual interests
Peaceful coexistence	Peaceful settlement of all international disputes under the Charter
—	Respect for fundamental human rights and the Charter
—	The right of individual or collective self-defence under the Charter
—	Abstention from collective defence arranged to serve great-power interests
—	Respect for justice and international obligations

• The additions are not decoration, and each has an author.
  • Human rights came in at Western-leaning insistence; collective self-defence was written in by the pact states to protect their alliances; and the clause against collective defence serving great-power interests was the compensating concession to India.
  • The Ten Principles are therefore a negotiated document, and reading them as pure Panchsheel misses where India lost.

Hope and reality

• The criticism has to be made squarely, because the case against Panchsheel is strong.
  • The agreement in which the principles appear accepted Chinese sovereignty over Tibet — India gave up the extraterritorial rights inherited from the British, including its military escorts at Yatung and Gyantse and its control of posts and telegraph — without settling the boundary.
  • The word “Tibet” was replaced by “the Tibet region of China” throughout, which conceded in a preamble the political question India would spend the next decade contesting.
  • The agreement’s eight-year term expired in June 1962, and it was not renewed. The war came four months later.
  • The formula India used to bind China proved to bind nothing: mutual respect for territorial integrity was the very principle the 1962 war violated, and it had been signed by both parties.
• The defence, which is real but partial, runs as follows.
  • Nehru had no military option in Tibet in 1954 and no ally who would have supplied one; what he conceded was largely what he could not hold.
  • The principles were not intended as a security guarantee and no bilateral trade agreement functions as one; treating them as such is a category error that Nehru himself encouraged and later paid for.
  • The normative value is independent of the Chinese case. A code adopted by dozens of states, invoked continuously at the United Nations, and still cited in Indian and Chinese diplomatic language seventy years later has plainly done work, whatever happened on one border.
• The balanced verdict is the one to hold: Panchsheel succeeded as a norm and failed as a guarantee, and the failure was not in the principles but in the belief that a state which needed deterrence could obtain it by declaration.

Panchsheel gave the movement its language and gave India its most expensive illusion. Both statements are true and neither cancels the other.

Bandung, 18–24 April 1955

Bandung is India’s high-water mark of Asian leadership and simultaneously the moment its limits became visible. The two facts are not in tension; they are the same fact seen from the inside and the outside.

What India contributed

• Twenty-nine states attended — twenty-three Asian and six African — with roughly 340 delegates and some 650 journalists, representing well over half the world’s population.
• India’s contributions were four, and all of them structural rather than rhetorical.
  • Sponsorship and convening, through Colombo and Bogor, without which there was no conference.
  • The Chinese presence, obtained over objection, which is what made Bandung a world event rather than a regional one.
  • The normative text, since the Ten Principles are built on the Indian formula of the previous year.
  • Procedural management — the insistence on consensus without votes, which held a conference containing SEATO members, Baghdad Pact members, Communist states and neutrals together for a week.
• Nehru’s substantive argument at Bandung was that joining one of the big groups costs a state its identity and its views, not merely its formal independence — alignment is a surrender of judgement.
• He extended it into the claim that mattered strategically: that shrinking the unaligned area itself makes war likelier, because two blocs with no space between them have no mechanism except confrontation.

The argument over colonialism

• Nehru wanted colonialism defined as the physical conquest and occupation of one country by another — a definition that indicted the European empires and left the Soviet position in Eastern Europe outside the term.
• Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon broke the consensus on 22 April 1955, in a speech that had not been cleared with the sponsors.

“Think, for example, of those satellite States under Communist domination in Central and Eastern Europe… Are not these colonies as much as any of the colonial territories in Africa or Asia?”

Sir John Kotelawala

• He was supported in substance by Mohammed Ali of Pakistan and Carlos P. Romulo of the Philippines, and by the delegations of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Thailand and Cambodia, who used the plenary to attack Soviet policy and forced Zhou Enlai to defend the socialist bloc in public.
• Nehru’s reply, delivered with visible irritation, conceded the objection to Soviet conduct while refusing the word.

“However much we may oppose what has happened to countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, it is not colonialism. It may be an objectionable thing, but the use of the word is incorrect.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

• The compromise was negotiated largely by Krishna Menon outside the plenary, and produced the celebrated formula in which the conference declared colonialism in all its manifestations an evil which should speedily be brought to an end.
  • The phrase reads as a triumph of drafting and is usually quoted as one. It was in substance a defeat for Nehru’s preferred framing: he had wanted colonialism narrowed to European empire, and the formula was deliberately wide enough for Kotelawala’s reading.
  • The device that saved the conference was abstraction — no instance was named, so every delegation could go home claiming the phrase meant what it wanted.

The argument over military pacts

• Nehru’s stronger position — that the conference should condemn membership of great-power military pacts outright — was defeated, and this was the more consequential loss.
• The pact states were too numerous and too determined. Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the Philippines and Thailand were not going to be legislated out of their alliances by a conference their own prime ministers had helped convene.
• The communiqué’s settlement was a two-sided formula: it affirmed the right of individual and collective self-defence under the Charter, which is the alliance states’ clause, and simultaneously deprecated collective defence arrangements serving the particular interests of great powers, which is India’s.
• The result was that every delegation left with its existing arrangements intact. Pakistan went home to the Baghdad Pact; the Philippines and Thailand to SEATO; nobody left an alliance because of Bandung.
• The conclusion follows for the movement as well as for the conference: the Afro-Asian platform could not be made into a non-aligned platform, because a large part of Asia was aligned. That recognition is why non-alignment had to be rebuilt on a different basis in 1956 and 1961, with membership criteria rather than geography.

Nehru’s manner, and its cost

• Several delegations found Nehru overbearing. He interrupted, corrected and lectured; he treated the conference as a seminar of which he was the convenor.
• His management of Zhou Enlai — steering, introducing and interpreting him — was widely read as patronising, and Zhou himself later described Nehru as arrogant. The image of Nehru shepherding the Chinese premier around Bandung has stuck to the conference ever since.
• Zhou outperformed him. By adopting a posture of conciliation, offering to negotiate with the United States over Taiwan and settling the overseas-Chinese nationality question with Indonesia, Zhou emerged as the conference’s most successful diplomat.
• Kotelawala’s fate is a warning of a different kind. He returned to Colombo to face a no-confidence motion for disrupting the conference’s unity, and lost the general election the following year — evidence that the Afro-Asian consensus, however thin, had real political force.

The balance sheet

Hope	Reality
An Asian–African zone of peace insulated from the blocs	Six alliance members present; not one alliance renounced
Colonialism narrowly defined as European empire	A formula wide enough to cover Soviet Eastern Europe
Military pacts condemned; India’s stronger draft carried	Collective self-defence affirmed as a Charter right
China bound by Panchsheel into Asian norms	China given a continental platform it later used against India
Nehru as first among Asian leaders	Zhou the conference’s most admired figure; Nehru’s manner resented
A permanent Afro-Asian organisation	None created; the second conference never met

• The credit side is nevertheless substantial, and it is not sentimental.
  • Bandung established that the formerly colonised world was a constituency with its own agenda, and it did so on television and in newsprint across the planet.
  • It supplied the normative vocabulary the movement later adopted wholesale.
  • It legitimised the practice of assembling without the great powers, which is the procedural foundation of everything from the Group of 77 to the Global South summitry of the present.
  • Nehru’s own assessment afterwards was that the significance lay simply in the fact of the meeting — representatives of some fourteen hundred million people in one room, differences and all.

Brioni, 19 July 1956: from Asia to three continents

• Nehru, Tito and Nasser met on the Brioni islands off the Yugoslav coast on 19 July 1956 and issued a joint declaration. About 120 journalists covered it; there was no agenda beyond agreeing that the three saw the world the same way.
• The declaration’s substance was the proposition that peace cannot be achieved through division but only through collective security on a global scale, together with opposition to domination of one nation by another.
• The addition of Yugoslavia is what makes the meeting structurally important, and the reason is geographical rather than ideological.
  • It gave the position a European member, so it could no longer be dismissed as a racial or regional bloc of the formerly colonised.
  • It gave it a socialist member outside the Soviet camp, which made the claim of even-handedness credible in a way an assembly of Asian democracies and monarchies could not.
  • It gave it a leader with a direct quarrel with Moscow — Tito had been expelled from the Cominform in 1948 — which balanced Nehru’s known quarrel with Washington.
• The shift of basis is the real content. Bandung had been organised around who the participants were — Asian and African, formerly colonised. Brioni reorganised it around what the participants did — refusing bloc membership. The second criterion could admit Yugoslavia, Cuba and Cyprus; the first could not.
• The three men brought complementary and non-substitutable assets, which is the strongest available answer to the claim that India alone made the movement.

Founder	What he brought	What he could not supply
Nehru	The doctrine, Panchsheel, the Asian conference habit, mediatory standing	Institutional drive; an Arab, African or European constituency
Tito	European standing, the summit form, organisational persistence	A colonial history or Afro-Asian legitimacy
Nasser	Arab and African reach, and after Suez the movement’s heroic episode	Distance from the Soviet Union; a record of mediation

• Suez, three months later, converted the Brioni understanding into a working alignment: India’s vigorous condemnation of the Anglo-French action ran alongside Nasser’s survival and Tito’s support, and the three-cornered relationship acquired a shared victory.
• Nehru’s role at Brioni was that of a participant rather than an author. Tito had sought the meeting, Tito hosted it, and Tito would spend the next five years pressing for the summit that Nehru saw little need for.

Belgrade, 1–6 September 1961

The movement was founded at Belgrade, not at Bandung, and India’s part in the founding was unusual: it supplied the criteria, resisted the enterprise, and shaped the agenda against the wishes of most participants.

Cairo, June 1961, and the five criteria

• A preparatory meeting in Cairo from 5 to 12 June 1961 did the decisive work: it defined who counted as non-aligned, which is what turned an attitude into a membership.
• The five criteria agreed there are the movement’s constitutive test.
  • The country should have adopted an independent policy based on coexistence between states of different political and social systems, and on non-alignment — or should show a consistent trend toward such a policy.
  • It should consistently support movements for national independence.
  • It should not belong to a multilateral military alliance concluded in the context of great-power conflicts.
  • If it has a bilateral military agreement with a great power, that agreement should not have been concluded in the context of great-power conflicts.
  • If it has conceded military bases to a foreign power, the concession should not have been made in the context of great-power conflicts.
• The criteria are recognisably Indian in construction. They are behavioural rather than geographical, they turn on conduct rather than identity, and the qualifying phrase “in the context of great-power conflicts” is the same distinction Nehru had been drawing since 1946 between staying out of the quarrel and staying out of the world.
• They also did precise political work. They excluded Pakistan and the pact states who had sat as equals at Colombo and Bogor, and they admitted Yugoslavia and Cuba, who had no Afro-Asian claim at all.
  • The movement founded at Belgrade was therefore not the Bandung group; it was a differently constituted body using Bandung’s vocabulary.

Nehru’s resistance

• Cairo split into two camps, and India led the more restrictive one.
  • India, with Yugoslavia and the United Arab Republic, wanted membership kept to states genuinely following a non-aligned policy, and was willing to consider European neutrals and Latin American states on that test.
  • The Casablanca group — with Cuba and Guinea prominent — wanted the meeting oriented toward decolonisation and criticism of the West, and membership defined by anti-colonial credentials rather than bloc distance.
• Nehru’s objection to a wide movement was not snobbery but arithmetic: a body admitting states that were aligned in practice would produce lowest-common-denominator declarations and would forfeit precisely the credibility that made a non-aligned state useful. He had watched exactly this happen at Bandung.
• He was also unenthusiastic about summitry as such, having spent fifteen years arguing that non-alignment was a national policy rather than a collective position, and having seen the Asian Relations Organisation die of institutional ambition.

The argument over emphasis

• Twenty-five states participated, with Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador as observers; over a thousand journalists attended. Latin American participation was thin because of American pressure, and Cuba alone came as a full participant.
• The substantive disagreement at Belgrade was about what the movement was for, and it set Nehru against Sukarno and, in emphasis, against Nkrumah.
  • Sukarno argued that the real division in the world was between the new emergent forces and the old forces of domination, and stated flatly that the ideological conflict of the Cold War was not the main problem of the time.
  • Nehru insisted the opposite: the danger of war between the blocs, sharpened that summer by the Berlin crisis, was the first question, and anti-colonialism, however just, was an agenda for a world that was passing.

“Of course we stand for anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racialism and all that… but the first thing today is this fear of war.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

• Nehru’s stature carried the final declaration, which foregrounded the danger of war and the appeal for peace over the anti-colonial programme. He won the text and lost the room.
  • The victory was costly. Indonesia never forgave the condescension, and within a few years Sukarno was classing India among the old established forces he opposed.
  • It also misjudged where the movement’s energy was. The African membership arriving through the 1960s cared about southern Africa and Portuguese colonies, not about Berlin, and the movement’s centre of gravity moved to their agenda regardless of what Belgrade had declared.

The Soviet test, and the missions that followed

• The Soviet Union resumed atmospheric nuclear testing on 1 September 1961, the day the conference opened, and detonated a series of large devices while it sat.
• The response was muted. The declaration appealed generally for an end to testing and for disarmament; it did not name the Soviet Union, and no participant moved a condemnation.
  • This was the movement’s first test of even-handedness and it failed it, in full view of the Western press, on the day of its birth.
  • The failure had a structural cause that recurs for the next thirty years: a movement operating by consensus among states with different patrons cannot name a great power without losing members.
• The conference’s practical output was a pair of missions to the two capitals — Nehru and Nkrumah to Moscow, Sukarno and Modibo Keïta to Washington — carrying the appeal for negotiation to Khrushchev and to Kennedy in the last week of September.
  • Both delegations were received courteously and neither achieved anything; testing continued and the Berlin crisis ran its own course.
  • The missions nevertheless established the movement’s characteristic instrument: the collective appeal delivered by named leaders, moral pressure applied by states with nothing else to apply.
• India’s own position was compromised by the timing. It had led the world in calling for a halt to nuclear testing since Nehru’s proposal of a standstill agreement in April 1954, and at Belgrade it declined to apply that call to the power that had just broken the moratorium.

Movement, not organisation

• The founders chose against institutionalisation deliberately, and India’s part in the choice was the strongest of any.
  • There is no charter, no secretariat, no headquarters and no permanent budget; the chair rotates with the summit host, and decisions are taken by consensus with no enforcement of any kind.
  • Nehru’s reasons were consistent from 1947: he had seen the Asian Relations Organisation fail because members feared an institution dominated by its largest state, and he believed a body with machinery would acquire interests of its own and would harden into precisely the bloc it existed to avoid.
• The choice had a price the founders accepted knowingly. Without machinery the movement could not implement anything, which is why its record consists of declarations, votes in the General Assembly and moral pressure rather than programmes.
• The one durable institutional creation of the founding period was procedural, not organisational: the membership criteria, which gave a body with no rules the only boundary it has ever had.

What India’s founding contribution actually amounts to

The counterfactual test set at the start can now be applied. Three questions: what would not have existed without India, what India could not supply, and what the leadership cost.

What would not have existed

• The Asian conference habit. No other newly independent state convened anything before 1954. Delhi in 1947 and Delhi in 1949 created the expectation that Asian and African states met on their own account, and Colombo, Bogor, Bandung and Belgrade are downstream of that expectation.
• Panchsheel as a code. The five principles are Indian in authorship and Indian in promotion; the Bandung Ten restate them and the movement adopted the Ten. A movement with no shared vocabulary is a series of meetings, and India supplied the vocabulary.
• The mediatory template. Korea and Indo-China demonstrated that non-alignment was a qualification for work, not merely a refusal of work. Without that demonstration the doctrine would have been a preference; with it, it was an asset that other states could see the point of acquiring.
• The membership criteria. The Cairo tests are Nehru’s distinction between the quarrel and the world, converted into admission rules, and they are the only structure the movement possesses.
• Probably the movement’s Asian half. Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, Cambodia and later Nepal and Afghanistan took up non-alignment in an environment India had made intellectually respectable and diplomatically survivable.

What India did not supply

• The institutional drive. Tito wanted a movement; Nehru wanted a policy. The summit form, the periodic conference and the pressure to convene in 1961 are Yugoslav, and India was a reluctant participant in its own founding.
• The Arab and African constituency. Nasser delivered the Arab world; Nkrumah, Sékou Touré and Modibo Keïta delivered a radical African bloc. India had no comparable reach and its African engagement ran through the United Nations and the Commonwealth rather than through African politics.
• The heroic episode. Movements are founded on grievances that feel shared, and Suez supplied one in a way nothing Indian did. India’s contributions were procedural and normative; Egypt’s was emotional, and emotion recruits faster.
• Any material capacity. India had no aid to distribute, no arms to supply, no market to open. Its leadership rested on prestige, argument and the personal standing of one man, which is a thin and perishable foundation.

What the leadership cost

• Pakistan’s alliances. India’s prominence in Asian diplomacy was among the reasons Pakistan sought Western patronage, and by 1955 Pakistan held membership of SEATO and the Baghdad Pact and a bilateral American agreement. India’s non-alignment did not prevent the Cold War entering South Asia; arguably it accelerated its entry.
• Chinese resentment. India sponsored China at Bandung, argued for its United Nations seat, and conceded on Tibet. What it received was a competitor for Asian and African leadership which, after 1962, could point to India’s defeat as evidence that the Indian model did not work.
• American suspicion. The vote against Resolution 498, the refusal over the 38th parallel, the recognition of Peking and the public criticism of alliances produced a durable belief in Washington that Indian neutrality was pro-Soviet in effect. That belief shaped American policy toward South Asia for decades.
• A role beyond India’s means. By 1961 India was leading a movement of new states while running a low-growth economy, an unresolved Kashmir dispute, an unsettled Himalayan boundary and an army it had deliberately not modernised.
  • The gap between the diplomatic position and the material base was the founding period’s central weakness, and it closed violently in October 1962.

India built the movement out of prestige, and prestige is the one asset that cannot survive a lost war.

The fair summary is that India was the movement’s principal author and not its principal builder. The habits, the code, the method and the admission rules are Indian; the summit, the institutional persistence and the political constituency are not. What India supplied was the part that outlasted the Cold War — a vocabulary of sovereign equality and independent judgement that a hundred and twenty states still use — and what it failed to supply was the power to make that vocabulary bind anyone, including the state it had trusted most.

Previous Year Questions

• Discuss India’s contribution to the growth and development of the Non-Aligned Movement. (2002)
• Comment: India and the Bandung Conference: Hope and Reality. (2001)