NonAlignment 2.0 underscores India’s unique aspiration to emerge as a site for an alternative universality. Comment. (2025, 15 Marks)
NonAlignment 2.0 (29 February 2012) was a report by eight analysts and former officials, among them Sunil Khilnani, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Srinath Raghavan and Shyam Saran, issued by the Centre for Policy Research with the National Defence College. It opens by calling strategic autonomy the “defining value and continuous goal” of India’s international policy since the Republic began, and holds that India should be a site for a new and alternative universality: its boldest and least understood claim.
What the claim means
- Not a bloc or an export model. The report seeks “maximum options” for India, a position in which no state can exercise “undue influence” on it. It proposes no coalition and asks no one to imitate India.
- A claim about where universal norms come from. Sovereignty, human rights, market openness and non-proliferation were articulated in the West and are often felt as impositions. A democratic, plural, poor, post-colonial and non-Western state can show that such values belong to no single civilisation and can be reworked from the South.
- Power of example. The mechanism is demonstration: India’s influence is to flow from “the power of its example”, so the chapter on State and Democracy is load-bearing.
- Scholarly kinship. The idea parallels Amitav Acharya‘s call for a Global IR grounded in pluralistic universalism (2014): universality not dictated from one centre.
The case for it
- Legitimacy as a strategic asset. As Western primacy erodes, a rising power that is not feared can rise further before provoking counter-balancing.
- Practice. The African Union’s G20 membership (2023), the Voice of the Global South summits since January 2023 and digital public infrastructure offered as an open alternative to proprietary platforms put the claim to work, as did the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026) on reforming the IMF, World Bank and WTO.
The critiques
- Power, not example, settles norms. Rajesh Rajagopalan (2012) answered the report as a realist: norms between states are set by power, and non-proliferation prevailed because stronger states backed it, not because it was better reasoned.
- The wrong strategy. Ashley J. Tellis (Nonalignment Redux, 2012) accepted much of the diagnosis, including China as the central challenge, but argued for preferential strategic partnerships, above all with the United States, rather than autonomy across the board.
- Untestable and exposed. The phrase sets no criterion for failure, and a claim staked on democracy suffers when V-Dem has classed India an “electoral autocracy” since 2021.
- Overtaken by interest. Later practice kept the autonomy thesis and dropped the universality claim; S. Jaishankar‘s “issue-based arrangements” (2019) are instrumental. The West calls this opportunism, though it has long practised the same.
Conclusion
The strong form, India authoring the next universal order, overreaches. The weak form survives: a plural democracy that keeps partnerships across every fault line has credibility with states that refuse to choose between blocs, and that credibility yields outcomes such as the G20 decision of 2023. The aspiration is real, but it rests on what India becomes at home more than on what it says abroad.