NonAlignment 2.0 and India’s Turn to Multi-Alignment

Three ways of putting the question

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Non-alignment as a doctrine outlived the conditions that produced it by about thirty-five years, and its afterlife is more contested than its founding. Between the Belgrade summit of 1961 and the vocabulary of the present day sit two intermediate terms — strategic autonomy and multi-alignment — and the whole argument about contemporary Indian foreign policy turns on what the relationship between those three words is. Most of the dispute is a failure to notice that three separate claims are in play.

• Position one: multi-alignment is non-alignment’s negation. India has done the opposite of what it once promised.
  • It has signed foundational military agreements with the United States, joined a security grouping widely read as anti-China, and become a nuclear-weapon state outside the treaty it demanded be made universal.
  • Its representation at the movement’s own summits has fallen away. The old doctrine forbade what the new one requires.
• Position two: multi-alignment is non-alignment’s fulfilment under different structural conditions. The objective was never bloc-avoidance for its own sake; it was decisional freedom.
  • Bipolarity made that objective attainable by staying out; multipolarity makes it attainable by being in many places at once.
  • The means inverted because the system inverted; the end did not move.
• Position three: both are surface labels for a single constant — the refusal of exclusivity. India has never accepted a commitment obliging it to fight another state’s war or to break a relationship on another state’s instruction.
  • Everything else is nomenclature, adjusted to whichever political inheritance the government of the day is comfortable claiming.

The article that follows takes the question in that order: first the one document that tried to answer it explicitly, then the comparison of the two doctrines that document invited, then the lineage of the vocabulary, then the doctrine that displaced it, then the charge that India has repudiated its own tradition — and finally a return to the three positions with a defended answer.

The document: NonAlignment 2.0, 29 February 2012

In February 2012 a group of scholars, officials and a technologist published a seventy-page report proposing a foreign and strategic policy for India for the following decade. It was the most serious attempt anyone had made since independence to write down an Indian grand strategy in public, and it is the only document in Indian public life that argues explicitly for the continuity between the old doctrine and the new one.

Provenance, authorship and standing

• Released on 29 February 2012 under the auspices of the Centre for Policy Research, in association with the National Defence College, under the full title NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century.
• Eight authors, drawn deliberately from different professional worlds so that the document would not read as the product of a single guild:
  • Sunil Khilnani, historian of the Indian republic, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, political theorist — the conceptual voices.
  • Srinath Raghavan, historian of India’s wars and diplomacy, supplying the strategic-historical judgement.
  • Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary, and Lt Gen (Retd) Prakash Menon, later Military Adviser in the National Security Council Secretariat — the practitioner voices, diplomatic and military.
  • Rajiv Kumar, economist, and Nandan Nilekani, technologist and architect of India’s digital identity system — the growth and technology voices.
  • Siddharth Varadarajan, journalist and then editor of a national daily, supplying the public-argument voice.
• It had no official status of any kind. It was not commissioned by the government, was not adopted by it, and bound nobody — a point its critics made immediately and its defenders never denied.
• It was nonetheless not an outsiders’ document. It was launched at an event attended by the National Security Adviser and senior officials, and its authors included a former Foreign Secretary. The distinction that matters is between influence and authority, and the report had the first without ever claiming the second.
• Its form is unusual for Indian policy writing: it is organised as continuously numbered paragraphs rather than chapters of prose, which allows a recommendation to be cited precisely and makes it read more like a staff paper than an essay.

The stated purpose

The report’s preamble sets out three tasks, and the discipline of that list is what separates it from the genre of Indian foreign-policy commentary it was written against.

• To lay out the opportunities India enjoys in the international sphere — a deliberately positive starting point, in a literature that habitually opens with threats.
• To identify the challenges and threats India is likely to confront, on a stated horizon of roughly a decade rather than an indefinite future.
• To define the broad perspective and approach India should adopt as it works to enhance its strategic autonomy in global circumstances likely to remain volatile and uncertain for some time to come.

Everything in the document descends from a single conviction stated at the outset: that the success of India’s internal development depends decisively on how well India manages its global opportunities, and that the purpose of external policy is therefore to enlarge domestic options. This is a subordination of foreign policy to development that Nehru would have recognised — but the report reaches it by a different route, and that difference is the whole of what separates 2.0 from 1.0.

The seven chapters

The report runs through seven substantive chapters between an introduction and a conclusion. Each is worth stating in its own terms, because the received summary — “it recommended strategic autonomy” — obscures how specific the document actually is.

• The Asian Theatre. India’s immediate strategic environment, and the chapter that carries the most operational content.
  • On China, the recommendation is asymmetry: hold the line on the land border, where India cannot match Chinese capability directly, and build decisive advantage in the Indian Ocean, where geography favours India.
  • Trade and infrastructure access should be treated as leverage to be traded for political returns, not as a relationship insulated from the strategic one.
  • India should avoid appearing to be an instrument of containment, because a containment posture would forfeit India’s own room for manoeuvre and invite a Chinese response India could not absorb.
  • On Pakistan, the prescription is incremental normalisation using both negative levers — counter-terrorism, diplomatic pressure — and positive ones, trade, energy and movement of people, on the argument that grand reconciliation is not available and small irreversible steps are.
• India and the International Order. How India should position itself in the global economy and in international institutions.
  • Two simultaneous tracks: exploit low-cost service delivery built on human capital, and become a hub for high-end technology rather than staying in the low-value segment.
  • Pursue an open global economic order, since a closed one hurts a late-industrialising exporter most; combine bilateral agreements with multilateral engagement rather than choosing between them.
  • Press for labour mobility as India’s distinctive trade interest, the one factor of production in which it is abundant.
  • Treat international law and institutional membership as instruments — India should be a rule-shaper where it can and a rule-taker only where it must.
• Hard Power. The chapter whose existence refutes the standard charge that the report ignored force.
  • Military capability is a requirement, not an embarrassment — a sharp break with the Nehruvian discomfort about power that the document’s title otherwise invokes.
  • Emphasis on border management and infrastructure asymmetries with China, and on capabilities that impose costs rather than merely defend ground.
  • Structural reform of the defence establishment — integration of civilian and military decision-making, and a defence-industrial base capable of supplying it.
• Internal Security. The proposition that India’s external position is hostage to its internal cohesion.
  • Insurgency, communal violence and the capacity of the police and intelligence services are treated as strategic variables, on the argument that a state which cannot govern its own territory cannot project anything outward.
  • The state’s legitimacy in its own periphery is presented as a security asset in the same register as a weapons system.
• Non-Conventional Security Issues. Energy, the nuclear question and the threats that do not arrive as armies.
  • Energy security through diversification of both sources and routes, with the recognition that India’s import dependence is a structural vulnerability that growth will deepen before it eases.
  • Nuclear policy is treated as both a deterrent question and a diplomatic one, with the report retaining an argument for disarmament that its realist critics found anachronistic.
• Knowledge and Information Foundations. The chapter that most clearly reflects its non-diplomatic authors.
  • Higher education and research capacity as the base of long-run power, on the view that a state that does not produce knowledge will import its technology and with it its dependence.
  • Cyber security and communications infrastructure as sovereign concerns, written in 2012, well before this became a standard heading.
  • Defence-industrial and technological self-reliance as a knowledge problem rather than a procurement one.
• State and Democracy. The concluding substantive chapter, and the one with no analogue in the older doctrine.
  • Domestic growth, social inclusion and functioning democracy are presented as preconditions of external policy, not as its unrelated background.
  • The report is unusually blunt about India’s governance deficits — administrative capacity, the small size of the diplomatic service relative to the country’s ambitions, the quality of public institutions.
  • The claim that follows is the document’s boldest: that India’s international standing rests on its domestic model, so that a failure of inclusion at home is a strategic loss abroad.

The central claims

Four propositions carry the document, and they should be separated because critics have tended to attack one while quoting another.

• Strategic autonomy is the continuous value. The report’s foundational sentence holds that strategic autonomy has been the defining value of India’s international policy since the Republic’s inception, defined initially in the terminology of non-alignment, and persists in a world transformed since the mid-twentieth century.

“Strategic autonomy has been the defining value and continuous goal of India’s international policy ever since the inception of the Republic. Defined initially in the terminology of NonAlignment, that value … continues to remain at the core of India’s global engagements.”

NonAlignment 2.0

• The aim is strategic space and independent agency. The report is explicit that what India needs is not a position between camps but capacity for independent agency — the ability to act on its own assessment, which in turn maximises the options available for internal development.
• External policy is instrumental to domestic transformation. India’s success depends decisively on how effectively it manages global opportunities to enlarge domestic options; the world is a source of capital, technology, markets and energy, and the point of diplomacy is to secure them.
• The developmental model is the foundation. Competitors will impugn India’s model and put obstacles in its path, but the report insists that “the foundations of India’s success will depend on its developmental model.” This is the claim that leads directly to the report’s most contested proposition.

The claim of an alternative universality

The document’s most quoted and least understood line is that India’s distinctive aspiration is to be a site for a new and alternative universality. It is worth unpacking carefully, because the phrase invites two misreadings that the report itself does not support.

• What it does not mean. It is not a proposal for a bloc, and not a proposal to export an Indian model. The report is not arguing that other states should become like India, and it explicitly rejects the posture of leading a coalition against anybody.
• What it does mean. It is a claim about where universal norms can be generated from. The dominant norms of the international order — sovereignty, human rights, market openness, non-proliferation — were articulated in the West and carry the marks of that origin, which is why much of the world experiences them as impositions.
• India’s claim is that a state which is at once democratic, plural, poor, post-colonial and non-Western can generate norms rather than merely receive them. If a society of that composition sustains constitutional democracy and lifts hundreds of millions out of poverty, it demonstrates that those values are not the property of one civilisation.
• The mechanism is example, not advocacy. The report’s own formulation is that “the fundamental source of India’s power in the world is going to be the power of its example” — an argument that India’s international standing follows from what it succeeds in being at home rather than from what it says abroad.
• The strategic pay-off is legitimacy. A rising power that is not feared can rise further before triggering counter-balancing than one that is. The report treats India’s non-threatening character as an asset unavailable to a rising authoritarian power, and therefore as a strategic resource rather than a sentimental one.

The claim connects the document’s two halves: the chapter on State and Democracy is not an afterthought about domestic politics but the load-bearing element of the foreign-policy argument. If the model fails, the universality claim collapses — and with it the case that India’s rise is different in kind.

Three objections have been made to it, and each has force.

• It is untestable and self-flattering. “Alternative universality” specifies no criterion by which India could be judged to have failed at it, which makes it available as a defence of any policy and a guide to none.
• It mistakes what determines norms. The realist objection, pressed hardest by Rajesh Rajagopalan, is that interstate norms are settled by power rather than by demonstration.
  • Non-proliferation did not prevail because it was morally superior; it prevailed because the strongest states enforced it. A state expecting its example to convert into normative authority will find the conversion does not occur.
• The domestic record is the vulnerability. A claim staked on the quality of India’s democracy and the inclusiveness of its growth is hostage to both.
  • The argument that gives India its distinctive appeal is the one most easily turned against it, and the report’s own authors were candid about the governance deficits involved.

The counter-argument is that the objections attack the strong form and leave the weak form standing. The strong form — India will author the next universal order — is indefensible. The weak form — that India’s plural democratic experiment gives it standing with states that decline to choose between blocs, and that this standing is convertible into diplomatic outcomes — is a claim about credibility, and credibility is a real if unquantifiable asset. India’s ability to speak for the Global South while holding partnerships across every major fault line is that asset in operation.

Why the name was chosen, and why it was a liability

The report’s title was a deliberate choice, defended by its authors, and it was the single largest cause of its poor reception. The two facts are connected.

• The name signalled continuity of value, not revival of a movement. The authors’ argument is that India has pursued one thing since 1947 — autonomy of judgement — and that non-alignment was simply the name that thing carried when the system was bipolar.
  • Renaming it would have concealed the continuity they were trying to demonstrate.
• The “2.0” was doing the work the critics ignored. The suffix announces that the content is being rewritten while the purpose is retained; it is a claim of renovation, not of restoration.
• Shyam Saran’s public defence put the point in the form that has survived best: non-alignment was a strategy and not a dogma, no Indian government has actually abandoned it, and the operative principle is that India should hedge its bets, engaging with all at different degrees of proximity and allying with none.

“Non-alignment was a strategy and not a dogma.”

Shyam Saran

• The name was nonetheless read as nostalgia. By 2012 “non-alignment” in Indian public argument denoted a movement — a body of a hundred and twenty states whose summits India’s Prime Ministers were already declining to attend — rather than a policy.
  • A title referring to the policy was therefore received as a proposal about the movement.
• The confusion was not accidental but structural. The two senses of the word had already come apart: the movement had outlived the doctrine’s rationale, and the doctrine had outlived the movement’s usefulness to India. A title using the word could not control which sense the reader supplied, and most readers supplied the wrong one.
• The report was reviewed as an argument it had not made — that India should return to the Non-Aligned Movement — and its actual argument, that autonomy is the continuous objective and requires new instruments, was largely lost.

Reception: the criticisms, and their force

The report provoked a serious argument through 2012 and 2013, which is itself unusual for an Indian policy document. The criticisms are worth separating, because they are not all of the same quality.

• The charge that it neglected hard power is the weakest, and it is repeated most often, since the report devotes a full chapter to military capability and treats force as a requirement rather than an embarrassment.
  • The reasonable version is not that hard power is absent but that it is subordinated to the developmental argument, which realists regard as the wrong ordering.
• The charge that it under-weighted the economy is similarly imprecise. Economics runs through the document; what is missing is a theory of how economic weight converts into strategic leverage, which is the question a country negotiating trade agreements under tariff pressure actually faces.
• The charge with most force is the absence of prioritisation. The report identifies a very large number of things India should do and supplies no ranking, no account of what to sacrifice, and no assessment of available resources.
  • A strategy that does not choose is a wish-list, and this is the criticism its defenders have never satisfactorily answered.
• The charge that it was overtaken by events is the most commonly made and the least analytically interesting. A government that came to power two years later, under Narendra Modi, had no use for a document associated with the intellectual world of its predecessor, and the association was made largely by the title.

The influence it is not credited with

The report failed as a document and succeeded as a vocabulary, and the gap between those two outcomes is the most instructive thing about it.

• Its central proposition became official language. The claim that strategic autonomy is the continuous objective, of which non-alignment was one historical expression, is now the standard official formulation.
  • It was used by the Ministry of External Affairs in defence of Russian energy purchases under tariff pressure, and is routine in the language of successive National Security Advisers and External Affairs Ministers.
• The irony is worth stating plainly. The government that had no use for the report’s title adopted the report’s thesis, and did so while distancing itself from the tradition the title named. The report supplied the bridge between the Nehruvian inheritance and its successors, and the successors crossed it without acknowledging the bridge.
• Its structural insight has been vindicated by practice. The proposition that India’s external policy is instrumental to domestic transformation is precisely how contemporary economic diplomacy is justified — trade agreements defended by reference to jobs and technology access rather than to solidarity or order.
• Two specific judgements have aged well: that China would be the central strategic challenge and that maritime advantage was where India could compete asymmetrically; and that knowledge, data and communications infrastructure would become sovereign concerns, written before either had become a standard heading.
• What did not survive was the report’s normative ambition. The universality claim has no place in current official language, and the disarmament argument has been abandoned entirely.

Non-alignment 1.0 against non-alignment 2.0

The report’s title invites the comparison, and the comparison is the clearest way to see what changed in the doctrine. 1.0 here means the doctrine as practised from 1947 to roughly 1991; 2.0 means the doctrine as the 2012 report reconstructed it, and as it has been carried forward since.

The rows that carry the most weight

• Capability is the row everything else follows from. A state with no leverage can only refuse; a state with leverage can trade.
  • 1.0 was the doctrine of a country with nothing to offer, which is why its instruments were moral and rhetorical; 2.0 is the doctrine of a country with a market, a navy and a technology base, which is why its instruments are material.
• The vehicle row records the largest institutional break. 1.0 required a movement because collective voice was the only leverage available to states that individually had none.
  • 2.0 requires no movement because India can assemble a coalition on a single issue and dissolve it afterwards — the International Solar Alliance and the coalition on disaster-resilient infrastructure are that logic in operation.
• The constituency row records the largest normative break. 1.0 spoke for a collective and accepted the constraint that came with it: India could not easily take a position the third world would not endorse.
  • 2.0 accepts no such constraint, which buys freedom of action and loses the standing that came with representing others.
• The domestic row is 2.0’s genuine innovation. No statement of 1.0 argued that the quality of India’s internal politics was a component of its external strength.
  • 2.0 makes internal cohesion, administrative capacity and the credibility of the developmental model into strategic variables, which is why the report reads as much as a domestic-reform document as a foreign-policy one.
• The authority row explains the report’s fate. 1.0 was doctrine because a Prime Minister who commanded the Congress, the Parliament and international attention said it was; 2.0 was a proposal by people with no power to enact it.
  • The same argument put by Nehru in 1947 and by eight authors in 2012 has entirely different standing, and that is not a comment on its quality.

What the comparison actually shows

The tempting conclusion is that 2.0 revised 1.0’s content. It did not, or not principally. Almost every substantive element of 1.0 survives in 2.0 in some form — the refusal of alliance, the priority of development, the insistence on independent judgement, the preference for a plural order. What moved was the justification.

• 1.0 justified itself normatively. Non-alignment was right because bloc politics was a diseased form of international relations, because colonised peoples had a claim on the order, and because a world of military pacts was more likely to produce war.
  • India’s own interest was served, but the argument was pitched as a claim about what the world ought to be.
• 2.0 justifies itself instrumentally. Autonomy is valuable because it enlarges India’s options; options are valuable because they permit growth; growth is valuable because it lifts Indians out of poverty and, incidentally, makes India consequential.
  • The argument is pitched as a claim about what India needs.
• This relocation makes 2.0 usable by governments with no attachment to Nehru. An instrumental case for autonomy can be adopted by anyone who accepts the premise that India’s interests come first; a normative case requires accepting a particular reading of the twentieth century.
• It is also what 2.0 gives up. A doctrine justified by India’s growth has no claim on anyone else — no reason why Tanzania or Colombia should care, and no constituency beyond India’s own borders.
  • 1.0’s normative content was what made it a movement; 2.0’s instrumentality is why there is nothing to join.
• The alternative-universality claim is the exception, and it is the one element of 2.0 that attempts to restore normative content. That it is also the element with no purchase in official language since is the clearest evidence of which half of the report was actually adopted.

The lineage: non-alignment, strategic autonomy, multi-alignment

Three terms have carried India’s external doctrine across seventy-nine years, and each replacement was made for reasons that were partly analytical and partly political. Tracing why the vocabulary changed shows what each shift gained and what it quietly discarded.

• Non-alignment to strategic autonomy was a substitution of the abstract for the concrete. Non-alignment described a position relative to two identifiable blocs; when the blocs went, the description had no referent. Strategic autonomy names the underlying value directly and is therefore structure-independent.
• The substitution also solved a political problem. Non-alignment is a Nehruvian inheritance, and governments not descended from that tradition prefer a term that carries the same content without the association. The behaviour described is very largely the same.
• Strategic autonomy to multi-alignment substitutes method for value. Autonomy states what India wants; multi-alignment states how it is obtained. The two are not rivals and are routinely used together — autonomy as the objective, multi-alignment as the technique.
• Multi-alignment alone describes genuinely new behaviour. Non-alignment meant not being in; multi-alignment means being in several arrangements that do not require choosing between them.
  • Membership of the Quad alongside the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS is not a version of staying out. It is the opposite manoeuvre performed for the same purpose.
• The term’s own origin is contested and recent. Shashi Tharoor has claimed to have introduced it in the 2000s and presented it at an ambassadors’ conference in 2009, to a cool reception.
  • The analyst Parag Khanna claims to have coined it in 2007, having used it with C. Raja Mohan in earlier work on India’s engagement with major powers. It entered official Indian usage only when the External Affairs Minister adopted it.

Who owns the vocabulary at home

The change of terms was not only analytical. Each of the three words has a different standing in Indian party politics, and that is a large part of why the vocabulary moved when it did.

• Non-alignment lost its political owner after 1991. The Congress, which had carried it since 1947, retained the language while emptying it of content; the left became its most committed advocate, having previously been among its critics; and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which displaced the Congress in national politics, had never been attached to it.
• The right’s objection was to the inheritance, not to the behaviour. Vajpayee was willing to describe the United States and Israel openly as India’s natural allies, and the phrase about the relationship with Washington having moved beyond “the hesitations of history” belongs to the same register.
• Hence the preference for “strategic autonomy.” A government uncomfortable with a Nehruvian legacy needed a term that described the same refusal without invoking its author, and strategic autonomy does exactly that.
• The underlying idea nonetheless survives in official rhetoric. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2018 Narendra Modi praised Singapore for teaching the world that nations which do not take sides and stand on principles earn respect — a defence of the older posture offered by a government that had retired its name.
• C. Raja Mohan’s judgement sharpens the point. His claim that India was never genuinely non-aligned outside the Nehru years, and that the doctrine had become synonymous with a reflexive anti-Americanism, implies that what changed after 1991 was less the practice than the willingness to keep paying for the label.

Multi-alignment as a doctrine, and its problems

The doctrine has two authoritative Indian statements, both by practitioners rather than scholars, and each formulates it slightly differently.

• Vijay Gokhale’s formulation is the more conservative and the more precise. As a former Foreign Secretary he holds that India remains ideologically non-aligned while being free to seek issue-based alignment, and that this combination gives India flexibility and preserves decisional autonomy.
  • His warning is the important half: hedging is a delicate exercise, whether it takes the form of the non-alignment and strategic autonomy of earlier periods or the multiple engagements of the future — and there is no getting away from it in a multipolar world.
  • The formulation is careful because it separates ideology from alignment: India can align on an issue without aligning as a state, which is exactly the distinction alliance systems refuse to allow.
• S. Jaishankar’s formulation is the more expansive. He describes present policy as issue-based alignment, building strong partnerships with like-minded states on specific subjects, and insists that India must expand the space to pursue its interests nimbly rather than be caught flatfooted by dogma.
  • His operational summary is that this is a time to “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play” — five different relationships each conducted in a different register, which is the doctrine stated as a work programme.
  • He accepts that the arrangement is inherently incomplete: there will be convergence with many but congruence with none, which concedes that no partnership will ever be total and treats that as the design rather than the defect.
  • Against the charge of opportunism he insists that India seeks strategic convergence rather than tactical convenience — a real distinction, but one that cannot be demonstrated from any single decision, only from a pattern held over time.

“There will be convergence with many but congruence with none.”

S. Jaishankar

The objections are the substance of the doctrine’s assessment, and they are not answered by restating it.

• It reads as opportunism where India intends convergence. A state that takes something from every partner and gives exclusivity to none looks, from each partner’s side, like a free rider.
  • India’s diplomats spend real effort on the denial, which is itself evidence that the perception is costly.
• It depends on a condition India does not control — partner tolerance. Multi-alignment works only while every partner accepts India’s other partnerships. The doctrine is not fully India’s to sustain, and no amount of Indian skill can compel a partner to keep tolerating what it has decided to stop tolerating.
• It has a defined breaking point. The moment any major partner demands exclusivity as the price of the relationship, the doctrine must either yield or fail.
  • The tariff confrontation of 2025–26 is that test in its clearest form: a 25 per cent duty imposed in August 2025 and doubled to 50 per cent on 27 August 2025, the additional half tied explicitly to India’s purchases of Russian crude.
  • India’s response was to refuse the choice, calling the measures unfair, unjustified and unreasonable, and grounding its energy policy in strategic autonomy while continuing to buy.
  • The understanding reached on 3 February 2026, which brought the tariff down to 18 per cent, resolved the confrontation without India having conceded the underlying position — which is a data point for the doctrine, though a single one.
  • What the episode establishes is that exclusivity can be demanded through economic instruments as effectively as through alliance treaties, which is a form of pressure the older doctrine never had to face.
• It is expensive in capability and bandwidth. Running five differently pitched relationships at once requires analytical capacity, negotiating depth and a diplomatic service larger than India’s — roughly a thousand officers for a country of this weight.
  • A doctrine presupposing surplus attention is risky for a state short of it.
• It has no normative content and therefore no constituency. Non-alignment gave other states a reason to follow India; multi-alignment gives them none, being a technique for maximising one country’s options.
  • India’s Global South leadership is consequently a separate project, sustained by different instruments, and not derived from the doctrine.
• It may not be exportable even in principle. If most states practised multi-alignment simultaneously, the partnerships that make it work would themselves dissolve. The doctrine depends on other states behaving less flexibly than India does.

Has India debunked non-alignment?

The charge is that India has repudiated the doctrine it authored. The evidence is genuinely mixed, and setting it out on both sides is the only honest way to reach an answer.

Martand Jha’s charge, and why it is the sharpest tool here

The most useful contribution to this argument is not from either side of it. Martand Jha’s claim is that non-alignment remained a highly ambiguous term because the Indian elite never attempted to explain the substance of the policy — that it functioned simultaneously as India’s grand strategy and as its exceptionalism, and that this double duty was possible only because nobody ever specified what it required.

• The charge is about definition, not about behaviour. It does not say India betrayed non-alignment; it says nobody ever established what would count as betraying it.
• The evidence is the record of departures. India signed a treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971, muted its criticism of Hungary in 1956, and declined to condemn the intervention in Afghanistan in 1979.
  • Each was defended as consistent with non-alignment, on the ground that the doctrine permits judging every issue on its merits. A doctrine permitting all of that permits almost anything.
• The consequence follows directly. A doctrine never defined precisely could be abandoned quietly, because there was no specification against which the abandonment could be measured. India never had to renounce non-alignment; it only had to stop using the word.
• It also explains why the argument recurs. Each side selects a definition that makes its conclusion follow. Define non-alignment as bloc-avoidance and India has abandoned it; define it as decisional freedom and India has not. The disagreement is definitional and cannot be settled by adding evidence.
• The prescription Jha draws is the reasonable one. India should state clearly what the essence of the policy is. If the essence is protection of India’s own national interest, then joining any arrangement that protects that interest does not contradict India’s non-aligned status — and the apparent contradiction dissolves into a question about instruments.

The answer

• India has debunked the movement, not the doctrine. The evidence for abandonment is almost entirely evidence about the movement — summits not attended, a vocabulary retired, a constituency no longer courted as a collective.
• The operative core has never been abandoned, and can be stated as one refusal: India will not accept an obligation to act at another state’s determination. That refusal has held through the Soviet treaty of 1971, the American partnership after 2005, and the tariff confrontation of 2025–26.
• What India has genuinely repudiated is the third-worldist content — the claim to speak for a collective, the demand for a restructured economic order, the moral framing of the state’s external conduct. This is a real loss, and should not be described as a change of vocabulary.
• The honest formulation is asymmetric. India abandoned the word, the movement’s centrality and the normative programme; it retained the objective and the refusal. Whether that counts as “debunking” depends entirely on which of those you took the doctrine to consist of.

Locating multi-alignment among the schools of Indian strategic thought

The standard map of the argument is Kanti Bajpai’s division of Indian strategic thought into three streams. It is used here only to place the doctrine; the substance of the three schools belongs to the general study of Indian foreign policy.

• Multi-alignment belongs to none of the three, which is why the argument about it is unresolvable in these terms. It borrows the Nehruvian refusal of alliance, the neoliberal conviction that growth is the first purpose of policy, and the hyperrealist insistence that capability is a precondition of anything else.
• Its centre of gravity is neoliberal. Development is the stated purpose, economic instruments are the primary means, and the willingness to deepen a security relationship is justified by the technology and market access it brings.
• From Nehruvianism it takes a limit, not a programme. The refusal of alliance survives; the moral framing, the disarmament advocacy and the claim to speak for others do not.
• From hyperrealism it takes a premise. That capability precedes influence is accepted without argument in current practice, which is the largest single departure from the doctrine of the 1950s.

The assessment: which of the three positions is right

Three framings opened this account. The evidence assembled since is enough to choose between them, and the choice is not the obvious one.

• The negation reading fails on the definition of what was renounced. Every item in its evidence — the foundational agreements, the Quad, the export-control regimes — is an instrument that expands India’s options without obliging it to anything.
  • An agreement to refuel an American warship is not an agreement to fight beside one. Non-alignment forbade commitments, not capabilities.
• The pure-continuity reading fails on the opposite ground. It is true that the refusal of exclusivity has held throughout, but a constant that permits India’s behaviour in 1955 and in 2026 equally, and would have permitted almost any other behaviour too, is not doing explanatory work. It describes a boundary, not a policy.
• The fulfilment reading survives, and the reason it survives is structural rather than rhetorical.

The argument turns on what the value of remaining unclaimed actually depends on, and the answer is the number of states that want to claim you.

• Under bipolarity there were two suitors, and the choice was close to binary. Refusing both was possible but expensive, and India’s leverage came from the fact that each bloc preferred an uncommitted India to an India in the other camp. The margin was real but narrow, which is why the doctrine required constant defence.
• Under unipolarity there was one suitor, and nothing to trade against. The 1990s are precisely when non-alignment looked most redundant, and it looked redundant for a structural reason rather than an ideological one.
  • With one centre of power there is no second offer, and autonomy shrinks to the bare ability to decline, which is a weak form of it.
• Under multipolarity there are several suitors, each of which loses if a rival secures India’s exclusivity. The United States gains from India not being aligned with China, Russia from India not being aligned with the United States, and the European Union, Japan and the Gulf states from India remaining reachable.
  • Every one of them therefore has an interest in tolerating India’s other partnerships, which is what makes the doctrine sustainable.
• Multi-alignment is not non-alignment’s negation but its most favourable operating environment. The value of being unclaimed rises with the number of parties who would like to claim you, and India today has more suitors than at any point in its history.

Two qualifications keep the conclusion from becoming complacent, and both were visible in the confrontation of 2025–26.

• The environment is favourable, not guaranteed. Multi-alignment is sustained by a distribution of power that no Indian decision produced and no Indian decision can preserve.
  • A sharper bipolarity between the United States and China would compress the space India occupies, and a partner willing to pay the cost of forcing a choice can force one.
• The doctrine is a technique, not a purpose. Non-alignment 1.0 told India what kind of world it wanted; multi-alignment tells India only how to operate in the world that exists.
  • The alternative-universality claim was the last serious attempt to supply the missing purpose, and its disappearance from official language is the doctrine’s unfinished business.

The defensible summary is therefore that India has changed its method twice and its objective not at all; that the objective survives because the report of 2012 gave it a name usable by governments with no attachment to its origins; and that what has genuinely been lost is not autonomy but the account of what autonomy is for.

Previous Year Questions

• India has adopted multi-alignment to fulfill its core values and interests in International relations. Discuss. (2026)
• NonAlignment 2.0 underscores India’s unique aspiration to emerge as a site for an alternative universality. Comment. (2025)
• “India has of late, chosen to debunk non-alignment in its pursuit of multi-alignment.” Comment. (2024)
• Compare and contrast Non-alignment 1.0 with Non-alignment 2.0. (2019)