The year the doctrine lost its object

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India’s relationship with the Non-Aligned Movement after 1991 is usually told as a story of decline, and the telling is too simple. India did not leave. It has never renounced non-alignment by name, has never missed a summit, and in September 2026 sent a cabinet minister to Belgrade for the movement’s sixty-fifth anniversary. What changed is subtler and more interesting than departure: the movement stopped being an instrument India invested leadership in, and became one it maintains.

The subject here is India’s stake, not the movement’s crisis.
- The movement’s post-Cold War predicament — no bloc to be non-aligned between, no charter, no secretariat, consensus among a membership past a hundred — is background here.
- What matters is what each element of that predicament did to India’s own reasons for being in it.
Three distinct things came apart at different speeds. India’s membership survived intact; India’s use of the platform narrowed to voice and positioning; India’s investment of political capital in it effectively ended.
The test applied throughout is behavioural. Not what Indian governments said about non-alignment, but the level at which they turned up, the vehicles they built instead, and what they asked the movement to do for them.

The syllabus phrase “current role” is answerable only if the three are separated. On membership India’s record is unbroken; on use it is instrumental; on investment it is close to nil. Most of the argument about whether India has abandoned non-alignment is a quarrel between people measuring different things.

India never resigned from the movement. It stopped needing it, and kept paying the subscription.

What 1991 removed, from India’s side

Four shocks arrived within eighteen months of each other, and their combined effect was to dissolve almost every practical reason India had for treating the movement as central. Each is separately familiar; the point is that they were simultaneous, so that no single adjustment could compensate for the others.

The Soviet collapse and the loss of a principal partner

The Soviet Union was not merely a friendly power. It was the structural condition of Indian autonomy: The Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971 had supplied a deterrent against Chinese intervention and a Security Council veto against adverse resolutions, and its disappearance in December 1991 removed both at once.
It was also the arms supplier. By the late 1980s something close to seventy per cent of Indian military equipment was of Soviet origin, and spares, servicing and follow-on contracts abruptly had no counterparty.
The rupee-rouble trade arrangement collapsed with it. Indian exports had been paid for in a non-convertible bilateral clearing currency; when that ended, a substantial export market vanished and the outstanding balances became a protracted negotiation with the Russian Federation.
Non-alignment had been cheap because a patron made it cheap. India could decline formal alliance precisely because it had informal insurance. Removing the insurance did not remove the doctrine, but it removed the doctrine’s affordability.

The balance-of-payments crisis and the reforms

Foreign exchange reserves fell to roughly two weeks of imports by mid-1991, and India pledged gold to the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan to raise emergency finance — a humiliation that made the argument for economic self-reliance politically unsustainable.
The reforms of July 1991 reversed the economic content of non-alignment. Devaluation, delicensing, tariff reduction and the opening to foreign investment repositioned India inside the liberal economic order the movement had spent two decades demanding be replaced.
The New International Economic Order became rhetorically awkward overnight. India could not credibly lead a campaign against a trading system it was now negotiating entry into on that system’s terms.
Capital, technology and markets were now the scarce goods, and none of the three were available from the non-aligned world. They were available from the United States, the European Community, Japan and later the Gulf, which reoriented Indian diplomacy toward states the movement had defined itself against.

The disappearance of the structure the doctrine presupposed

Non-alignment was a relational position. It described where India stood in relation to two blocs, and when one bloc dissolved the position lost its referent — a country cannot be non-aligned between one thing.
The manoeuvring space vanished with the rivalry. The doctrine’s practical value had lain in playing the superpowers’ competition for advantage; with a single pole there was nothing to play, and courtship was replaced by a demand for compliance.
The intermediary role went too. India’s Cold War utility as an interlocutor — Korea, Indo-China, the good offices repeatedly offered — depended on there being two parties who could not talk directly.
What survived was the underlying claim. The insistence on judging each issue independently and refusing exclusive commitment did not require bipolarity; but it no longer required a movement either, and that is the hinge of everything that follows.

The Gulf War as a demonstration

The war of January–February 1991 showed what unconstrained American power looked like, and showed it to an Indian establishment that had assumed the Security Council would remain deadlocked.
The movement failed its own test twice over. It could neither prevent the invasion of one member, Kuwait, by another, Iraq, nor influence the coalition response, and its irrelevance to the largest crisis of the period was visible to every member.
India’s own conduct was revealingly pragmatic. The Chandra Shekhar government permitted American aircraft to refuel at Mumbai in early 1991; the concession was withdrawn under domestic protest, but it had already established that the doctrine would bend to fuel prices and to the position of the roughly one million Indians then in the Gulf.
The lesson drawn in New Delhi was about capability, not principle. A state that wanted autonomy in a unipolar system needed economic weight and usable military power, neither of which a movement could supply.

Shock	What it removed	What India had to substitute
Soviet collapse, Dec 1991	Security guarantee, veto cover, arms pipeline, rupee-rouble trade	Diversified defence procurement; a bilateral Russia relationship rebuilt on cash terms
Payments crisis, mid-1991	The credibility of economic self-reliance and the NIEO demand	Integration into the liberal economic order and the pursuit of capital and technology
End of bipolarity	The doctrine’s referent and India’s manoeuvring space	Engagement with all major powers simultaneously, later named multi-alignment
Gulf War, 1991	The belief that collective non-aligned weight could restrain a superpower	Own capability — economic size first, hard power later

The movement’s own crisis compounded all four, and can be stated briefly. Its founding condition was gone; Yugoslavia, the host of the first summit and the state Tito had built the movement around, was disintegrating; and a membership past a hundred with no secretariat and no enforcement could produce declarations but not decisions.
Its economic campaign had already failed before 1991. The NIEO was dead by the mid-1980s, and the debt crisis had pushed its members into individual bargains with the International Monetary Fund rather than a collective one.
None of this is India’s story. It matters only because it foreclosed the option of repairing the movement rather than working around it.

Jakarta 1992 and Narasimha Rao’s reformulation

The 10th summit at Jakarta, 1–6 September 1992, was the movement’s first meeting after the Soviet collapse and the meeting at which it decided whether to exist. About a hundred delegations attended, some sixty at head of state or government level, and the practical question before them — put most sharply by the empty Yugoslav chair — was whether an organisation defined by a rivalry that had ended could define itself by anything else. P.V. Narasimha Rao attended in person, and the Indian contribution was a reformulation rather than a rescue.

The reformulation moved the object from the blocs to the members. Rao’s position was that the movement’s main concern was no longer superpower rivalry but giving voice to and addressing the concerns of third-world countries — a redefinition that made the movement’s survival independent of the structure that had produced it.
Its fuller form separated the principle from its Cold War setting.
- Rao held that non-alignment consists in the espousal of the right of nations to independence and development regardless of the bloc phenomenon.
- Whether there is one bloc or more at a given moment, on his account, the urge of a non-aligned country remains to maintain its independence and to decide by its own light rather than tagging itself in advance to others.
That is a claim about autonomy, not about blocs, and it is the intellectual bridge between Nehruvian non-alignment and everything Indian foreign policy has called itself since — strategic autonomy, multi-alignment, issue-based coalitions.
It also removed the movement’s reason to be one. If non-alignment is the individual right of a state to decide for itself, it can be practised bilaterally, and no collective machinery is required to sustain it. Rao’s formula secured the doctrine at the cost of the organisation.

Jakarta itself turned the movement toward development, debt and reform of the international system, commissioning a panel of economists on debt relief and admitting Brunei, Myanmar, the Philippines and Uzbekistan to take the membership to 108. The reorientation worked in the narrow sense that the movement did not dissolve. It also converted the movement into something India could belong to without leading, since the new agenda was one India would increasingly pursue through the G-77, the World Trade Organization and later its own platforms.

The Indian contribution at Jakarta is genuine, and is routinely understated. The movement’s post-Cold War self-description, repeated in every summit declaration since, is substantially Rao’s.
Its cost was equally real. A movement whose purpose is to voice concerns rather than to restrain powers is a movement whose failure to restrain anything ceases to be a failure, which removes the pressure to reform it.
The reformulation was consistent with India’s domestic turn. A prime minister liberalising the economy could not sustain a foreign-policy platform built on confrontation with the economic order; a platform built on voice and development finance cost him nothing.

Rao saved non-alignment by relocating it from the space between blocs to the interior of the state, where no movement is needed to practise it.

The recalibration of the 1990s

Between 1991 and 1998 India rebuilt every consequential external relationship it had, and each rebuilding weakened the movement’s claim on Indian attention without ever being framed as a departure from it. The pattern is consistent: the doctrine was preserved in language and set aside in allocation of effort.

Look East, from 1991–92

The Look East policy, articulated under Rao from 1991–92, redirected Indian diplomacy toward Southeast and East Asia — economies that had grown while India stagnated, and that India had largely ignored while cultivating the non-aligned world.
India became a sectoral dialogue partner of ASEAN in 1992 and a full dialogue partner in 1995, joining the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1996; the sequence is a deliberate substitution of a regional economic grouping for an ideological one.
The states courted were not chosen for non-alignment. Singapore, Thailand and later Vietnam and Japan were chosen for capital, markets and, later, balance against China — criteria the movement’s membership rules had never used.

Israel, January 1992

Full diplomatic relations with Israel were established in January 1992, forty-two years after India recognised the state and after four decades in which non-recognition had been justified partly by solidarity with the movement’s Palestine position.
The timing was not accidental. The Madrid peace process had begun, the Arab states had lost the Soviet patron that made their displeasure costly, and India’s Gulf equities could be protected while its technology and intelligence relationship with Israel was opened.
India did not alter its declaratory position on Palestine, which remained support for a sovereign Palestinian state, and it has held both positions since. That simultaneity is the practical meaning of judging each issue on its merits — and also the reason critics call the doctrine infinitely elastic.

Russia rebuilt on a bilateral footing

The relationship was reconstructed without ideology. The Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of January 1993 replaced the 1971 treaty and dropped its security consultation clause, converting a quasi-alliance into a normal partnership.
Defence supply became a commercial relationship, priced in convertible currency and negotiated deal by deal, which is why it survived the loss of everything else.
What was retained was a habit, not a doctrine. Continuity with Russia has since been defended in Indian debate as evidence of strategic autonomy, not of non-alignment, and the distinction matters: autonomy is a claim about India’s freedom, non-alignment was a claim about India’s position between others.

The American opening

The opening began under Rao and was slower than the others. Naval exercises resumed in 1992, an Agreed Minute on defence relations followed in 1995, and the relationship survived successive irritants over Kashmir, non-proliferation and market access.
Its logic was economic before it was strategic. American capital, technology and the Indian diaspora’s growing weight in it were the initial drivers; the strategic content came after 1998.
The movement was not consulted, and had nothing to offer. No non-aligned state could supply what India was seeking, which is the plainest statement of why the platform’s value fell.

1998: the tests and the plank India had championed

The nuclear tests of 11 and 13 May 1998 put India in direct conflict with a movement position India had itself written. Nuclear disarmament was not one non-aligned commitment among many: it was the plank India had supplied, from Nehru’s standstill-agreement call of April 1954 through the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan of June 1988 with its staged elimination of nuclear weapons by 2010. India now became a state the movement’s own declarations would have to deplore.

The condemnation was near-universal and included the movement’s members. Security Council Resolution 1172 of 6 June 1998 condemned the Indian and Pakistani tests and was adopted unanimously, and non-aligned states across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia joined the criticism at the Conference on Disarmament.
The Latin American and Pacific members had the strongest grievance. They had accepted nuclear-weapon-free zones — Tlatelolco and Rarotonga — on the argument that the have-not majority should refuse the weapons and delegitimise them. India had just demonstrated that a leading advocate of that argument would abandon it when its own security required.
India’s defence was internally coherent. Its objection had always been to discrimination rather than to nuclear weapons as such, it had refused the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996 on exactly that ground, and it now argued that universal disarmament remained the goal while unilateral abstention did not.
Vajpayee restated the commitment at the movement’s own summit. At Durban on 3 September 1998 he told the 12th summit that disarmament had been a cornerstone of Indian policy since 1947, that the NPT was discriminatory, and that India would join abolition talks first if the weapon states opened them.

“If the established nuclear weapon states agree to negotiations to abolish nuclear weapons, we will be the first to join.”
Atal Bihari Vajpayee

The coherence does not dissolve the problem.
- A movement whose normative capital rested on the have-nots refusing what the haves possessed lost that capital when its most prominent member crossed the line.
- The argument that discrimination was always the real objection is true, and is also exactly what a state acquiring the weapons would say.
The deeper conflict is structural rather than moral. Non-alignment as an ethos asks a state to accept costs for a collective norm; non-alignment as autonomy licenses a state to refuse costs its own security cannot bear. India had always held both, and 1998 was the year the two could not be held together.
India nonetheless stayed, and was not sanctioned by the movement. No expulsion was contemplated and no membership question arose, which says something about the movement’s capacity as well as about India’s standing in it.

Relationship	State in 1990	State by 2000	Effect on the movement’s value to India
Soviet Union / Russia	Quasi-alliance under the 1971 treaty	Bilateral partnership, commercial arms supply	Removed the cover that made cost-free non-alignment possible
United States	Mutual suspicion, sanctions after 1998	Opening under way, dialogue resumed	Made the platform an obstacle rather than an asset
Israel	No relations	Full relations from January 1992, defence ties growing	Broke a movement solidarity position without breaking membership
Southeast Asia	Marginal	ASEAN dialogue partner, ARF member	Substituted an economic grouping for an ideological one
Nuclear order	Leading advocate of universal disarmament	Declared weapons state outside the NPT	Put India on the wrong side of the plank it had supplied

The 2000s: partnership, and the membership question

The decade in which India’s relationship with the United States was transformed is also the decade in which India attended every non-aligned summit at head-of-government level. Both facts are true, and the tension between them is the substance of the “is India still non-aligned” argument. The transformation is easily summarised.

The 18 July 2005 joint statement committed the United States to work toward full civil nuclear cooperation with India and toward adjusting international regimes to accommodate it.
- The 123 Agreement followed in 2008, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver of 6 September 2008 ended India’s nuclear isolation without India signing the NPT.
- India was granted, uniquely, the benefits of the non-proliferation order without its obligations — an exemption negotiated bilaterally with the state whose hegemony the movement’s declarations deplored.
The strategic content deepened steadily thereafter. Defence procurement from the United States rose from near zero, and the foundational agreements — LEMOA in 2016, COMCASA in 2018, BECA in 2020 — created interoperability between the two militaries.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, revived in 2017 and raised to leader level in 2021, placed India in a standing consultative arrangement widely read as a response to China’s rise.

Can a state with that relationship call itself non-aligned?

The strict answer is no, and it is worth stating without hedging. Non-alignment in its original sense excluded exactly this: a privileged security relationship with one great power, sustained across governments, with military interoperability and a nuclear exemption obtained through it.
The looser answer is that India has refused every step that would make the relationship exclusive. There is no mutual defence obligation, no basing, no obligation to consult before acting, and India has continued to buy Russian equipment and Russian oil through periods when doing so cost it dearly in Washington.
The distinction is between alignment and alliance, and it is not a trick. India is aligned on specific questions and allied on none, which is the difference between an issue-based convergence and a commitment binding on future issues.
What the doctrine has become is a limit rather than a position. It no longer tells India where to stand; it tells India what it will not sign.

The attendance record that complicates the story

India attended every summit of the period at head-of-government level — Vajpayee at Durban in 1998 and Kuala Lumpur in 2003; Manmohan Singh at Havana in 2006, Sharm el-Sheikh in 2009 and Tehran in 2012 — five consecutive summits, spanning two governments of opposed ideological character.
The summits were used, not merely attended. Havana in September 2006 produced the India–Pakistan joint anti-terrorism mechanism agreed with Musharraf on the margins; Sharm el-Sheikh in July 2009 produced the joint statement with Gilani that became a domestic controversy in India.
That is the strongest evidence against the walking-away claim. Through the entire period of the American opening, the nuclear negotiation and the Quad’s first incarnation, Indian prime ministers kept turning up.
It is also evidence about what the platform was for. A summit of a hundred-odd states is an efficient place to hold bilateral meetings, and the marginal value of attendance lay increasingly in the margins.

The participation record since 2014

This is the evidentiary core of every contemporary judgment about India and the movement, and it is worth setting out exactly, because the argument is conducted almost entirely through it.

Meeting	Date	India represented by	Level
17th summit, Margarita Island, Venezuela	September 2016	Vice President Hamid Ansari	Below head of government, first time in decades
18th summit, Baku, Azerbaijan	25–26 October 2019	Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu	Below head of government
NAM Contact Group virtual summit, “United Against COVID-19”	4 May 2020	Prime Minister Narendra Modi	Head of government
19th summit, Kampala, Uganda	19–20 January 2024	EAM S. Jaishankar	Cabinet minister
19th Mid-Term Ministerial, Kampala	15–16 October 2025	MoS Kirti Vardhan Singh	Minister of state
High-Level Commemorative Meeting, Belgrade	31 August – 1 September 2026	Kiren Rijiju, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs	Cabinet minister, outside the MEA

Margarita 2016 and Baku 2019

Margarita Island in September 2016 was the break. It was the first non-aligned summit in decades that an Indian prime minister did not attend, and the delegation was led by Vice President Hamid Ansari.
The venue made the absence readable. A summit hosted by Venezuela under Maduro, at a moment of domestic collapse there, was an unattractive stage for a prime minister who had spent two years building relationships with the United States, Japan and the Gulf.
Baku in October 2019 confirmed the pattern rather than establishing it. Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu led the delegation to a summit whose theme was upholding the Bandung principles, and Modi’s absence had by then ceased to be a surprise.
Neither absence was announced as a policy. No statement accompanied them, no reason was given, and the government’s position remained that India was a founding member committed to the movement’s principles — which is precisely what makes the record ambiguous.

The virtual summit of 4 May 2020

Modi’s first NAM participation came at the pandemic’s height, at the online summit of the NAM Contact Group convened under Azerbaijan’s chairmanship and titled “United Against COVID-19”.
His argument was for a reformed globalisation, not for the movement. He called for a new template based on fairness, equality and humanity, and stressed that human welfare rather than growth alone should be the measure.
He also made India’s supply record the centrepiece, noting medical supplies sent to over a hundred and twenty-three partner countries, fifty-nine of them non-aligned members, despite India’s own shortages — the first public statement of what became Vaccine Maitri, which from 20 January 2021 delivered vaccines to more than ninety countries.

“NAM has often been the world’s moral voice. To retain this role, NAM must remain inclusive.”
Narendra Modi

Read against the vaccine diplomacy that followed, the attendance looks instrumental rather than doctrinal. India needed a Southern audience for a Southern supply story, and the movement was the largest such audience available at four days’ notice.

Kampala, January 2024

The 19th summit, at Kampala on 19–20 January 2024, was themed “Deepening Cooperation for Shared Global Affluence” and drew roughly thirty heads of state from among the ninety-three member states that took part.
India was led by EAM S. Jaishankar — a further step down, and the first time Indian representation fell below head of state or Vice President.
His argument was economic rather than political. He warned against economic concentrations that treat the rest of the world as markets or resources, pressed for resilient supply chains and regional economic hubs, and set out India’s development partnerships across seventy-eight countries under the Vishwa Mitra framing.

“The voice of the NAM is here to be heard. The voice of the NAM is here to stay and to grow.”
S. Jaishankar

The Kampala Declaration of January 2024 ran to several dozen commitments, and its longest section was Palestine, adopted three months into the Gaza war.
India’s position within it was carefully bounded. It supported a two-state solution and humanitarian relief, and it has continued to fund UNRWA and to send relief consignments, while declining the movement’s sharper language and maintaining its relationship with Israel.

Kampala, October 2025, and Belgrade, September 2026

The 19th Mid-Term Ministerial Meeting, Kampala, 15–16 October 2025, was led for India by Minister of State Kirti Vardhan Singh, the lowest level of Indian representation at a substantive non-aligned meeting.
His speech was a reformed-multilateralism speech. He argued that the global system “remains frozen in the reality of 1945”, and pressed fair and transparent economic practices, resilient supply chains, climate adaptation, protection of the global commons and Security Council reform.
He also carried India’s terrorism agenda into the movement, invoking the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 and warning that any sponsorship, support, justification or cover-up of terrorism would come back to bite those who offered it — a use of the platform for a bilateral grievance.
At the Ministerial Committee on Palestine on the margins, India reaffirmed the two-state position, recording relief of about 135 tonnes of medicines and supplies since October 2023 and an annual contribution of five million dollars to UNRWA’s core budget.
The most recent engagement is Belgrade. The High-Level Commemorative Meeting, 31 August – 1 September 2026, marking sixty-five years since the first summit, was themed “The Legacy of Non-Alignment: Lessons for Today’s World” and drew over thirty countries, four presidents and three prime ministers.
India was led by Kiren Rijiju, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Minority Affairs — a cabinet minister, but one outside the foreign-policy establishment, which is itself a signal about how the meeting was weighted.
The statement he delivered is the clearest summary of India’s current pitch.
- Development partnerships across more than a hundred member states, and the African Union’s admission to the G20 under India’s presidency.
- Medicines and vaccines to over a hundred and fifty countries during the pandemic, and an ethical framework for artificial intelligence.
- Reform of the Security Council and of the international financial institutions.
The Ministry of External Affairs used the familiar formula — India a founding member of a movement of 121 developing countries, committed to its principles and values. The formula has not changed in three decades. What has changed is who is sent to deliver it.
The chair has meanwhile moved on without India. Uganda holds it for 2024–2027, and Uzbekistan is expected to host the 20th summit and chair from 2027 to 2029 — a rotation among middle and small powers that India has not sought to interrupt.

What the record proves, and what it does not

The obvious reading is graduated disengagement, and it is largely correct: head of government, then vice president, then foreign minister, then minister of state, with a single pandemic-era exception. But three qualifications are needed, and an answer that omits them is arguing from half the evidence.

India has never been absent. There is no summit or ministerial at which India was unrepresented, no year in which membership lapsed, and no statement withdrawing support for the movement’s principles.
Head-of-state attendance has fallen across the membership, not just for India. Roughly thirty of a hundred and twenty-odd members sent heads of state to Kampala in 2024; a decline in the level India sends is partly a decline in what the meeting is.
Ministerial representation at a ministerial meeting is the correct level, not a snub. The October 2025 meeting was a mid-term ministerial, and reading a minister’s attendance there as a downgrade confuses the format with the intent.
The 2020 attendance shows the platform retains instrumental value. When India had something it wanted a hundred and twenty states to hear, it used the movement and sent its prime minister to do it.
India has downgraded the movement without demoting it. Effort has been withdrawn; status has been preserved; and the preservation is not sentimental, because a founding membership is a credential India uses when addressing the Global South.

The pattern is not exit. It is a founding member keeping its seat warm while doing its real work elsewhere.

Is the movement’s future contingent on India?

The question is posed as though the answer were obvious in one direction — that a movement abandoned by its largest founder cannot survive. It is worth taking both sides seriously, because each rests on a different account of what the movement’s problem actually is.

The case that it is

India is not one member among a hundred and twenty. It is one of the five founders, the largest by population, the largest economy inside the grouping, and the only member with a plausible claim to convene the rest.
No other member can supply what India withdrew.
- Indonesia has the standing but has invested its diplomacy in ASEAN and the G20.
- Egypt and South Africa have the founding credentials without the weight, and both are absorbed in regional crises.
- Cuba, Venezuela and Iran can supply energy and chairmanships but cannot supply consensus, because their leadership pushes the movement toward the confrontational posture the majority has spent thirty years avoiding.
- China is not a member, only an observer, which is the structural reason it cannot capture the movement even as it captures the constituency.
India has done the job before and knows its price. India chaired the movement from the New Delhi summit of March 1983 to Harare in September 1986 — Indira Gandhi until her assassination in October 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi thereafter. It was the high-water mark of Indian investment in it.
Leadership in a consensus body is a service, not a title. It means drafting, brokering, absorbing the cost of positions others will not take — the work India did between 1983 and 1988 and has not done since.
Political investment is visible, and its absence is contagious. When the founder sends a minister of state, the meeting’s status falls for everyone, and other members calibrate accordingly.

The case that it is not

The movement’s problems are structural and predate India’s withdrawal. No charter, no secretariat, no enforcement, no budget of consequence, and decisions by consensus among a membership more heterogeneous than the General Assembly’s regional groups.
Consensus among 121 states produces the lowest common denominator, which is why summit declarations restate principles rather than resolve disputes. Indian enthusiasm would not change the arithmetic.
The movement could not restrain its own members even at its strongest. It did not prevent Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Iran–Iraq war, or the Yugoslav civil war among its own founders, and Indian leadership was present for the first two of those.
Its founding condition cannot be restored by will. A movement organised around refusing two blocs cannot be revived by a state that would like more members to attend.
The constituency did not disappear; it migrated. Debt, climate finance, vaccine access and institutional reform are live agendas pursued through the G-77, the African Union, the G20 and the Voice of the Global South — the same claims in newer forums with better machinery.

Pant’s version, and the verdict

Harsh V. Pant puts the sharpest form of the counter-case: Modi may well have had ideological reasons for shunning the summits, but his natural inclination in foreign policy is toward pragmatism, and reading the distance as a settled ideological position mistakes the man.
On Pant’s account the government has used every available platform — the movement, SAARC, the G20 — to fill leadership vacuums as they appeared during the pandemic, without any of it signalling a return to non-alignment as a paradigm.

“Modi has nothing to lose by using it instrumentally if it serves India’s immediate needs.”
Harsh V. Pant

Pant’s further claim is that the movement will persist in a mothballed form, because international institutions rarely disappear, and that construing instrumental use as ideological embrace would be a fallacy.
The verdict is a split one. India’s withdrawal is not the cause of the movement’s weakness, which is older and structural.
- It is why the weakness is now permanent, since the one member able to finance a repair has decided the repair is not worth its price.
The movement has a future as a caucus and none as an actor. It will continue to meet, to declare and to confer legitimacy on Southern positions; it will not restrain a great power, settle a dispute, or bind its members. India’s indifference did not produce that outcome but has confirmed it.

The official position, and its ambiguity

No Indian government has renounced non-alignment. No Indian government since 1998 has organised its foreign policy around it either. The official position holds both, and the way it does so is instructive rather than evasive.

S. Jaishankar’s formulation is that non-alignment was a concept of relevance in a specific era and to a particular set of circumstances, and that its passing is a change of era rather than a change of principle.
His second move is the one usually missed. Rejecting non-alignment, he insists, is not a rush to alignment: India will not join an alliance system, because alliance is as much a Cold War concept as non-alignment is.
What is discarded is a vocabulary; what is retained is a limit. India will not accept binding external commitments; it will accept convergences, exercises, technology arrangements and standing consultations that no non-aligned state of 1961 would have contemplated.
C. Raja Mohan’s reading of the same evidence is harder.
- On his account the movement was already in a coma before 1991, and India’s approach to it had always been an empty vessel accommodating whatever New Delhi wished to put in.
- The post-Cold War partnership with the United States, on that view, did not create an irrelevance; it made an old one visible.
NonAlignment 2.0, released in 2012 by a group of scholars and former officials, is the best-known attempt to give the retained content a name and a programme; the document’s arguments belong to the successor-doctrine debate rather than to India’s conduct inside the movement.
The preference for “strategic autonomy” is partly a matter of political inheritance. Non-alignment is a Nehruvian term and carries a partisan charge in Indian debate; strategic autonomy carries the same operational content without the lineage.
Yet the formal position is unchanged in every official text. The Ministry of External Affairs describes India as a founding member of a movement of 121 developing countries, committed to its principles and values, and repeated that formula as recently as the Belgrade meeting.

What was abandoned	What was retained
The vocabulary — non-alignment as India’s self-description	Membership and the founding credential, used when addressing the Global South
The bloc frame — defining India’s position by reference to others	The autonomy claim — no binding commitments, no alliance, decisions issue by issue
The economic programme — the NIEO and the confrontation with the trading order	The reform agenda — Security Council, IMF and World Bank restructuring, development finance
Collective leadership of the South through this movement	The claim to speak for the South, transferred to platforms India convenes
The disarmament plank as a constraint on India	The disarmament argument as a critique of discrimination

The resolution is that India abandoned the vocabulary, not the practice. Reference works that say non-alignment was dropped after 2008 and that India never formally abandoned it are both describing something real, and the two statements are about different objects.
The practice survives in a recognisable form. Refusal to join alliances, refusal to condemn Russia under pressure, simultaneous partnerships with rivals, and insistence on buying and selling where India chooses are all continuous with the doctrine’s core.
What does not survive is the doctrine’s moral content. Nehruvian non-alignment claimed to be good for the world as well as for India; the present version claims only the second, and the difference is why the successor vocabulary is drier.

What India built instead

The most under-argued point in this whole debate is the simplest: every vehicle India has invested in since 2014 is one it leads, co-founded or convenes, and the movement is the one thing it merely belongs to. That distinction explains the pattern of effort far better than indifference does.

The G20 presidency and the African Union

India’s G20 presidency in 2023 was used as a Southern platform rather than a great-power one, and its signature outcome was the admission of the African Union as a permanent member at the New Delhi summit on 9 September 2023.
The admission mattered because it changed a table rather than issuing a declaration: fifty-five African states acquired standing in the body that actually coordinates macroeconomic policy.
It did what the movement had promised and never delivered — converting Southern numbers into representation inside an institution that decides things.

The Voice of the Global South Summits

The first Voice of the Global South Summit, on 12–13 January 2023, was convened virtually by India with 125 countries participating — 47 from Africa, 31 from Asia, 29 from Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 from Oceania and 7 from Europe.
Its stated purpose was consultative, gathering Southern priorities for India to carry into the G20 under the theme “Unity of voice, Unity of purpose”; a second edition followed on 17 November 2023 and a third on 17 August 2024.
The design is the point. India convenes, sets the agenda, hosts virtually at low cost, and reports the result upward into a body where it holds the chair — an arrangement in which India’s leadership is structural rather than contested.
The obvious criticism is equally structural. Participants are invited, not electing; the summit has no standing machinery; and its output is India’s account of what the South wants.

BRICS: successor or rival?

BRICS has expanded from five members to eleven — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia joining the original five — with a further tier of partner countries, and now covers roughly half the world’s population and about forty per cent of global output.
India holds the chair for 2026, its fourth, under the theme Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, with the 18th summit in New Delhi on 12–13 September 2026.
Whether an expanded BRICS is the movement’s successor or its rival is a genuine question.
- As successor: it pursues the same agenda — institutional reform, development finance through the New Development Bank, reduced dependence on Western financial infrastructure — with a budget, a bank and a functioning secretariat.
- As rival: it is small, exclusive and admission-controlled, which is the opposite of a movement that admitted anyone meeting five loose criteria, and its expansion has diluted its coherence in exactly the way the movement’s expansion diluted the movement’s.
- The decisive difference is China. BRICS contains the state whose weight the movement’s members increasingly worry about, which makes it useless as a vehicle for the concerns that would once have gone to a non-aligned summit.
India’s own use of BRICS is defensive as much as programmatic — participating enough to shape it, resisting proposals for a common currency or an explicitly anti-Western posture that would compromise India’s other relationships.

IBSA, and the issue-based institutions

IBSA, the India–Brazil–South Africa Dialogue Forum founded in 2003, is the purest survival of the movement’s logic: three large Southern democracies, no great power among them, coordinating on institutional reform and running a small development fund.
Its irrelevance is instructive. It has met rarely at leader level in recent years and is repeatedly overshadowed by BRICS, which shows that the Southern-solidarity format is not what has lost value — the format without material weight is.
The International Solar Alliance, launched by India and France at Paris in November 2015 and headquartered at Gurugram, now covers over 120 member and signatory countries and is the first treaty-based international organisation with its seat in India.
The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, launched by India in September 2019, does the same for infrastructure adaptation.
Both are issue-based Southern institutions India created rather than joined, with defined mandates, technical secretariats and measurable outputs — everything the movement lacks.

Development partnership and the Africa relationship

India’s concessional finance is the material basis of its Southern claim: over 300 lines of credit worth about US$32 billion across 68 countries, of which 196 lines worth about US$12 billion have gone to 42 African countries.
Capacity-building runs through the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme, in place since 1964 and administered since 2012 by the Development Partnership Administration within the Ministry of External Affairs.
The pandemic supply record is the most cited instance — medicines to dozens of African states, Mission Sagar to the Indian Ocean island states, and vaccine supply that reached over ninety countries before India’s second wave forced a pause.
The Fourth India–Africa Forum Summit, convened for New Delhi on 28–31 May 2026 to end an eleven-year gap since the third, was postponed on 21 May 2026 over the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with new dates still to be fixed.
- The attempt itself is nonetheless the clearest evidence that Africa policy is being run as a bilateral and continental project rather than through a movement.
The standing criticism is delivery, not intent. Indian project execution has been slow relative to Chinese, bureaucratic procedures on both sides delay disbursement, and the scale gap with the Belt and Road is not closable.

Vehicles India leads against a vehicle India belongs to

Platform	India’s position	What it supplies	Why the movement cannot match it
G20 presidency 2023	Chair for a year	Agenda-setting inside a decision-making body	The movement decides nothing
Voice of the Global South	Convenor and host	A Southern consultation India controls	The movement’s agenda is negotiated among 120
BRICS	Founding member, chair in 2026	A bank, a payments agenda, great-power company	No bank, no budget, no leverage
ISA and CDRI	Founder and headquarters state	Treaty organisations with technical mandates	No secretariat, no programme delivery
Lines of credit and ITEC	Sole principal	Direct, attributable, bilateral influence	Confers no benefits on anyone
Non-Aligned Movement	One of 121 members	Legitimacy, a founding credential, an audience	—

The pattern is not indifference to the South. It is a preference for instruments with a steering wheel. Every substitute gives India agenda control, attributable credit and a machinery that produces outputs.
The movement offers one thing the substitutes cannot, which is legitimacy that does not look like self-promotion — the standing of a founding member of the South’s own organisation rather than the convenor of its own summit.
That is why India keeps the membership and sends the minister. The credential is cheap to retain and expensive to reacquire, and it underwrites the claim India makes on every other platform.

The Global South as a replacement vocabulary

Somewhere around 2022 Indian official language stopped saying “the developing world” and “the non-aligned countries” and began saying the Global South. The substitution is not cosmetic, and what it changed is worth setting out precisely.

The vocabulary is developmental rather than strategic. It describes states by their position in the world economy — debt, climate exposure, access to finance and technology — not by their position between blocs.
It requires no bloc to be non-aligned between. That makes it usable in a world where the fault lines are financial and technological rather than military.
It accommodates India’s simultaneous closeness to the West. A state can be a leading voice of the Global South while holding a technology partnership with Washington; it could not have been a leading voice of the non-aligned world while doing so.
It is a claim about representation, not about membership. Nobody joins the Global South, which means nobody can be expelled from it and no criteria constrain who speaks for it.

	The non-aligned world	The Global South
Defined by	Position between two blocs	Position in the world economy
Entry	Formal membership against criteria	None; a descriptive category
Core demand	Autonomy and an end to bloc politics	Finance, technology, representation, climate justice
India’s role	One founder among five, leadership contested	Self-appointed convenor and interlocutor
Compatible with alignment?	No, by definition	Yes, and India’s practice depends on it

The criticism is that this is a self-serving label. India was not elected to represent the Global South, and its claim rests on convening summits it also chairs and reporting the results itself.
Ummu Salma Bava’s version of the critique is that India’s convening power has outrun its material capacity: the development support is modest against the Belt and Road, the democratic credential is not a currency in states that are not democracies, and a category this heterogeneous has no natural single leader.
China makes the competing claim to the same constituency, and makes it with far greater resources — larger finance, deeper infrastructure presence and a longer record of Southern institution-building outside Western structures.
India’s counter is qualitative — demand-driven projects without conditionality, capacity-building rather than asset ownership, and no debt exposure of the kind that has drawn criticism of Chinese lending. It is a real distinction and a small one at current scale.
The deeper problem is that leadership of the South has become a competition between two Southern states seeking great-power status, which is exactly what the movement was founded to make unnecessary.

The Global South is non-alignment’s vocabulary with the geometry removed — solidarity without a bloc to be solidary against.

Whether the doctrine still works: soft balancing in the present

T.V. Paul’s case for the movement’s continuing relevance is the strongest available, and it is not a nostalgic one. It rests on the claim that the conditions which make soft balancing rational for weaker states have returned.

Great-power rivalry is back, and with it an arms race, the militarisation of the oceans and territorial expansion by force.
Weaker states cannot balance such powers militarily, so their instrument is delegitimisation — coalitions, institutional pressure and normative denial that raise the political cost of imperial ventures without confronting them.
On Paul’s argument, if third-world states do not act as a cushioning force, the international order slides toward hot war, because great powers require restraint and no other source of restraint is available.
The revival he calls for is of the Bandung spirit rather than of the institution, and it is a functional case: soft balancing works, the need for it has returned, and the machinery to do it exists.

The difficulty is that India no longer occupies the position the argument describes. Soft balancing is what a state does when it cannot balance hard, and India’s trajectory since 1998 has been the acquisition of exactly the capabilities that make hard balancing possible.

India is now a subject of great-power rivalry, not an observer of it. It is courted by one side, contested by the other, and its choices are consequential enough that abstention is itself read as a position.
Its instruments are no longer normative. Interoperability agreements, naval exercises, semiconductor and critical-minerals arrangements and defence procurement do the work that declarations once did.
Paul’s own conclusion concedes the point. He holds that neither India nor China will revive the movement, because both are competing for great-power status, and that the onus therefore falls on smaller states.
That is the strongest reason to doubt that an Indian return is likely or desirable. A state pursuing permanent Security Council membership, a leading role in supply chains and strategic parity with China has no use for a doctrine whose premise is that it will not seek those things.
What survives is soft balancing as a supplementary instrument. India still uses normative arguments — sovereign equality, reformed multilateralism, opposition to unilateral coercive measures — but as one tool alongside hard capability, not as a substitute for it.

Three tests of the doctrine in practice

Contemporary cases show better than any definition what the doctrine now does and does not deliver.

Ukraine

India abstained on every substantive Security Council and General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion, declined to name Russia as aggressor, and called consistently for dialogue and diplomacy.
It simultaneously expanded purchases of discounted Russian crude to a scale that made India a major refiner of Russian oil for onward export — a decision defended in terms of energy security for a developing economy.
Modi’s line to Putin at Samarkand in September 2022 — that today’s era is not an era of war — was the exact register of the doctrine: a public rebuke that avoided a condemnation and preserved access to both parties.
The case is the best available evidence that the practice survives. It is also evidence of what the practice costs, since it is the proximate cause of the tariff confrontation described below.

Gaza

The Kampala Declaration of January 2024 gave Palestine its longest section, and India signed a consensus text more critical of Israel than its own diplomacy has been.
India’s own position holds two things together — support for a sovereign Palestinian state and a two-state solution, humanitarian relief and UNRWA funding on one side; a deep defence, technology and intelligence relationship with Israel on the other.
Its voting record reflects the split — abstention on some General Assembly texts, support for others, and a consistent refusal to adopt the movement’s sharpest formulations.
What the case shows is the limit of consensus membership. India can sign a declaration whose language it would not use, because the declaration binds nobody.

The tariff confrontation of 2025–26

The United States imposed a 25 per cent tariff on Indian exports from 1 August 2025, doubled to 50 per cent from 27 August 2025 with the additional levy explicitly tied to India’s purchases of Russian oil.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs called the measures unfair, unjustified and unreasonable, noted that Western economies continued to trade with Russia on their own account, and defended the purchases as a sovereign energy decision.
An understanding of 3 February 2026 cut the rate to 18 per cent, ending the acute phase without resolving the underlying question of whether India’s Russia relationship is negotiable.
The episode put India in need of exactly the language the movement has used for decades — opposition to unilateral coercive economic measures, and insistence that trade not be used as an instrument of political pressure.
It is also the sharpest illustration of the doctrine’s present condition. India defended its autonomy successfully and did so bilaterally, with no Southern coalition invoked and no non-aligned platform used.

What India’s current role actually is

India is a founding member that has kept its membership and withdrawn its leadership. It attends everything, leads nothing, and sends whoever is available.
It uses the platform for positioning rather than for outcomes — Global South credentials, reformed multilateralism, terrorism language, a Palestine position — none of which requires the movement to do anything.
Its real Southern policy runs through institutions it controls: the G20 presidency and its African Union outcome, the Voice of the Global South, BRICS under its 2026 chairmanship, the solar and disaster-resilience alliances, lines of credit, and the India–Africa Forum Summit whose revival was set for May 2026 and postponed.
It retains the movement because the credential is cheap and unrepeatable. No amount of convening buys the standing of having been present at Belgrade in 1961, and that standing underwrites every claim India makes to speak for the South.
The policy is coherent, and should be called coherent rather than drift. Each element follows from a defensible premise: that autonomy is now secured by capability rather than by coalition, that agenda-setting requires control of the platform, and that legitimacy is a separate good obtainable cheaply through membership.
Its incoherence is presentational rather than strategic. India asks the movement’s members to accept its leadership of the South while declining to lead the movement, and that asymmetry is visible to them.
The cost is a slow erosion of the credential itself. Founding membership confers standing only while membership is seen to mean something, and each downgrade in representation spends a little of the capital the membership exists to preserve.
The defensible conclusion is that India’s current role is the deliberate maintenance of a legacy asset. It is neither revival nor exit, it is not indifference in the sense the criticism intends, and it is not sustainable indefinitely — because an asset that is only ever drawn on is eventually exhausted.

Previous Year Questions

Does the Non-Aligned Movement have any future in the wake of India’s growing indifference towards it? (2025)
Comment on India’s contribution to Non-Alignment Movement and its contemporary relevance. (2016)
‘Non-alignment’ has been the basic principle of India’s foreign policy since independence. Discuss its relevance in the contemporary context. (2015)
What were the major determinants of India’s Foreign Policy of Non-alignment? Indicate the changes in India’s Foreign Policy since the 1990’s. (2004)
Critically examine the view that in the post-Cold War era, Indian policy of non-alignment has become irrelevant. (2003)
Has the Non-Aligned Movement lost its relevance in the present-day situation and how has India evolved its foreign policy goals to the changing international scenario? (2001)