Discuss India’s contribution to the growth and development of the Non-Aligned Movement. (2002)
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) grew from 25 states at Belgrade in 1961 to about a hundred by the New Delhi summit of 1983, and its agenda shifted from Cold War neutrality to decolonisation, development and disarmament. India shaped each stage, though unevenly: decisive in ideas and diplomacy, reluctant in institution-building, and outmatched in material resources.
Genesis: preparing the ground (1946–61)
- Doctrine before movement: Jawaharlal Nehru’s broadcast of 7 September 1946 committed India to stay out of rival power blocs before those blocs had hardened.
- Habit of Asian assembly: the Asian Relations Conference (1947) and the Delhi Conference on Indonesia (1949) taught new states to meet on their own account.
- Normative code: Panchsheel, first set out in the India–China agreement of 29 April 1954, was promoted by Nehru as a general code and restated in Bandung’s Ten Principles (1955).
- Operational credibility: Indian chairmanship of the repatriation commission in Korea (1953) and the Indo-China commissions (1954) showed that non-alignment could do real diplomatic work.
- From identity to conduct: Itty Abraham (2008) shows India steering away from the racially framed Afro-Asian solidarity favoured by China and Indonesia. The Cairo preparatory meeting (June 1961) instead set behavioural criteria, chiefly no membership of great-power pacts, which let Yugoslavia and Cuba in and kept the pact states out.
Expansion of the agenda (1961–89)
- Anti-colonialism and anti-racism: India had broken trade with South Africa in 1946 and later hosted the ANC and backed SWAPO; through the AFRICA Fund (1986–87) it gave the movement an operational instrument for the frontline states.
- Economic turn: through UNCTAD, the G-77 and the General Assembly, India worked for the New International Economic Order (1974), contributing drafting and votes rather than the original demand.
- Disarmament: from Nehru’s 1954 standstill call and the critique of the NPT as discriminatory (1968) to the Six-Nation Five-Continent Initiative (1984) and the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan (1988).
- Consolidation and widening: India resisted Fidel Castro’s “natural ally” thesis at Havana (1979), then hosted the New Delhi summit (1983), which admitted the Bahamas, Barbados, Colombia and Vanuatu and widened NAM into Latin America and the Caribbean; India chaired until 1986.
Adaptation after the Cold War
At Jakarta (1992) P. V. Narasimha Rao helped reorient NAM from bloc politics to development, debt and the reform of international institutions, a self-definition the movement still uses.
Other perspectives
- Rival paternity: the Yugoslav account credits Josip Broz Tito with the summit form and institutional drive that Nehru resisted; the Egyptian account credits Gamal Abdel Nasser and Suez with the Arab-African constituency.
- Structural view: growth reflected the arithmetic of decolonisation: dozens of new UN members needed a caucus, whoever convened it.
- Realist critique: India’s leadership outran its capability; in 1962, 1965 and 1971 non-aligned partners offered little support, and India’s tilts (Hungary 1956, the 1971 Soviet treaty, Afghanistan 1980) dented its even-handedness.
Conclusion
India was NAM’s principal author but not its principal builder. It supplied the vocabulary, criteria, mediatory template and successive agendas through which a caucus of new states became a movement; others supplied the machinery and the mass. Its lasting contribution is the idea of autonomous judgement, which outlived the bipolar order.